Fernando Rugitsky in Phenomenal World:
It is still too soon to fully understand the conditions that enabled the worldwide ascent of the far right over the past decade. But deepening material divisions within the working classes seem to have played a key role, unraveling historic solidarities that were once the basis of left politics. While capital’s relentless drive to accumulate “division and difference within the working class” is nothing new, neoliberalism seems to have intensified it. Dylan Riley recently suggested that, in the case of rich countries, the problem “is not so much that workers as a whole are turning to the right as that the class is fundamentally fractured by the material interests deriving from the market position of its component parts:” a fracture that has been seized upon by the MAGA movement.
The tradition of critical political economy in Latin America has much to say about this dynamic of division among the working classes. In the 1970s, one of the high points of critical thought in the region, a central concern was to grasp how the sectoral characteristics of capital accumulation affected the class structure, and how shifts in the latter conditioned the politics of development in turn. The changing stratification of the labor force was at the heart of efforts to investigate the transformation of the economic structure and its political implications.
Few took this line of inquiry further than the Chilean economist Aníbal Pinto.
More here.
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