Why Do Workers Vote for the Right?

Dear Young Comrades,

Everyone has been asking this question in recent years. In the United States a majority of voters without a university diploma voted for Trump. In Germany the AfD is the first party in the eastern states whose industry has closed. In France the mining basins that were once communist strongholds are now municipalities of the National Rally. In Turkey the greater part of the working class has been voting for the AKP–MHP bloc for more than twenty years; the places where the opposition is strongest are the neighbourhoods where university graduates are concentrated. One would have to shut one's eyes not to see this picture.

But the picture does not carry the answer inside it. Three people looking at the same picture say three different things: one says "the worker is ignorant, is being fooled"; another says "the worker is now conservative, the left is alien to him"; the third says "class is over, we are in the age of identity". This piece will try to show that all three are wrong and that their wrongness comes from the same place: none of them looks at the options in front of the worker; they look inside the worker's head.

The piece has a current occasion. Gazete Oksijen shared a clip from an interview occasioned by Daron Acemoğlu's new book Which Liberal Democracy? under the heading "Warning of a two-class world!"; one of the comments under the post was this: "It summarises why workers now vote for the right." We will take that clip and that comment up in detail in the middle of the piece; then we will pass to today's world, to the changing appearance of the working class in the age of artificial intelligence, to deskilling, to the discourse of the "useless class", to the digital processes that split the class from betting to algorithmic feed, to the school's share in this splitting, and to alternatives of organisation. But first we will go further back; because the relation between the worker and the right did not begin in 2016. In Paris in 1851, in London in 1867, in Berlin in 1878, in Berlin again in 1933, in New York in 1970, in London in 1979, and in Ankara in 1950, 1983 and 2002, different scenes of this relation were played. Without knowing those scenes it is not possible to understand today's scene.

The piece is long. You can move among the section headings; but we recommend that you not skip the historical section. The answer to the question is there.

Let Us Begin by Ruling Out the Wrong Answers

"The worker is ignorant, is being fooled"

This explanation is the most common and the most harmful. Harmful, because it looks down on the worker and turns him from a subject into a victim. Wrong, because it contradicts the evidence: the same working class, in 1945 in Britain, brought down Churchill and carried the Labour Party into office; in 1977 in Turkey it gave the CHP 41 percent; in 2015 in Greece it elected Syriza. If the same class votes left in one period and right in another, what has changed is not the worker's intelligence. What has changed are the options in front of him and the organisation behind him.

"The worker is now conservative, the left is alien to him"

This explanation is more subtle; it identifies a cultural distance, and the identification is largely right. But it confuses cause with effect. The worker is alien to left parties because they have become "the party of the diploma-holders". Until that transformation itself is explained, "cultural distance" remains only a description. We shall see below: left parties first got up from the worker's side; the worker then looked at the empty chair.

"Class is over, we are in the age of identity"

This explanation takes the worker's vote for the right as proof that class has ended. The opposite is true: the worker votes the right has won come almost everywhere from regions that have been deindustrialised, made jobless, made precarious. So class position continues to determine the vote; what does not determine it is the organisation that would turn that position into a political subject. Class has not ended; the class's capacity to be a class for itself has weakened. Understanding the difference between these two is the key to the rest of the piece.

Conceptual Frame: Four Keys

Before we pass to the historical section, let us take four concepts in hand. Each will serve us in one of the scenes below.

Class in itself, class for itself. Marx, in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), says this: economic conditions first turn the mass of a country's population into workers; the domination of capital creates for this mass a common situation, common interests; thus this mass is already a class vis-à-vis capital, but not yet for itself. In struggle this mass unites and becomes a class for itself. The critical sentence is this: to be a class is an objective situation; to act as a class is won through struggle and organisation. The vote is the result of this second situation, not of the first.

Bonapartism. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) Marx makes the first analysis of modern right-wing populism. When classes balance one another, when no class can govern alone, the state apparatus becomes independent through a chief "above all classes" and finds itself an unorganised mass base. Bonaparte's base was the French small peasantry: isolated from one another, without an organisation to speak in their own name, and therefore a mass that "must be represented". Marx's simile is famous: a sack of potatoes is the sum of the potatoes in the sack, but it is not a class. When the unorganised mass has no subject that will represent its class interest, it finds a master "from above". This schema is the mould of every later right-wing populism.

The labour aristocracy. In a letter to Marx on 7 October 1858 Engels writes that the English working class is "becoming more and more bourgeois" and that this "most bourgeois of all nations" is finally aiming to have "a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat". Lenin, in Imperialism (1916), systematises this observation: an upper layer of workers sharing in colonial profits splits off from the rest of the class and becomes the bourgeoisie's support inside the labour movement. This concept says that the working class is divisible; the right has used this division throughout history.

Hegemony and common sense. In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci writes that the ruling class governs not only by force but by consent. Consent is produced in the ready-made moulds people use to make sense of their everyday experience, in "common sense". To be able to say, when a factory closes, "capital went for cheaper labour", one needs a union, a workers' paper, a class party; if these are absent, the mould that remains is "foreigners took our jobs". The falsity of the mould shows not the stupidity of the person using it but the absence of the organisation that would produce the right mould. This concept is the scientific counterpart of the "being fooled" explanation: the worker is not fooled; the alternative language that would name the worker's experience is removed.

History: When and How Did the Right Win the Worker?

1851, Paris: Bonaparte and the unorganised mass

The scene is the Eighteenth Brumaire we have just set out. In the February Revolution of 1848 the workers of Paris founded the republic; in June of the same year the bourgeoisie opened cannon fire on those workers. After this defeat the working class was unorganised, the bourgeoisie divided, and the peasantry, as always, scattered. Louis Bonaparte won the presidential election of December 1848 with peasant votes, became emperor by coup in December 1851, and had the coup approved by a plebiscite. This is the first time the right harvested legitimacy at the ballot box from an unorganised labouring mass. Marx's lesson is clear: those who cannot represent themselves are represented. And those who offer to represent them are, most of the time, those furthest from their interest.

1867, London: Disraeli and "Tory democracy"

In Britain the Second Reform Act of 1867 gave the vote to a significant part of urban workers. It was not the liberals who passed the Act but the Conservative Disraeli. The calculation was simple: if the franchise was already inevitable, win the worker to a conservative identity inside the expanding electorate. Disraeli's "Tory democracy" offered the worker a place inside the nation through imperial pride, the Crown, the Church and the "one nation" discourse. Not as a class, but as an Englishman. Engels's observation of a "bourgeoisifying proletariat", written a year earlier, is the product of exactly this period: imperial profits were providing organised artisan workers with a relative prosperity, and this layer saw itself as part of the "nation". This is the right's first great discovery: to offer the worker another belonging against his class — the nation.

1878–1889, Berlin: Bismarck's double move

In Germany social democracy was growing rapidly in the 1870s. Bismarck did two things. In 1878, with the Anti-Socialist Law, he banned the party, the unions and their press; in 1883 he founded sickness insurance, in 1884 accident insurance, in 1889 old-age insurance. Force and consent, from the same hand. His aim was not hidden: to detach the worker from the socialists and bind him to the state. Social insurance was designed as a security for which the worker would be indebted not to his organisation but to the state's grace. This is the second great discovery: to meet the worker's demand for protection from above, without recognising his organisation, even while crushing it. We shall remember this scene when we read the social-assistance regime in Turkey after 12 September and in the 2000s.

4 August 1914: Social democracy's first great abandonment

German social democracy had for years declared itself against war. On 4 August 1914 the SPD group in the Reichstag voted for the war credits; in France and in Britain socialist parties fell in behind their own governments. The working class was lined up under national flags by its own parties and spent four years killing one another. The importance of this date is this: it was not always the right that bound the worker to the nation; the worker's own parties, at the moment of decision, also chose the nation, not the class. The first link in every later shift to the right is the left's own abandonment.

1922–1933: Fascism and the working class

Fascism is the most discussed and most distorted scene of the relation between the worker and the right. The sentence "the Nazis were a workers' party, the workers elected Hitler" is said both on the right and on the left; in both the aim is to blame the worker. The evidence says something else.

The National Socialist German Workers' Party, despite its name, took its electoral base mainly from the Protestant countryside, small towns, the petty bourgeoisie, civil servants, and from unorganised layers left jobless by the crisis. The organised industrial worker — that is, the unionised worker in the SPD and the KPD — remained for the most part in his own parties until 1933; in the November 1932 election the combined SPD and KPD vote still exceeded the NSDAP. The Nazis did not win the whole of the worker vote; they won the unorganised and unemployed layer of the working class. Nazism's real relation with the working class was not established at the ballot box but immediately after taking power: on 2 May 1933 the unions were raided, their property seized, their officials sent to concentration camps. Fascism did not win the worker; it crushed the worker's organisation and then gave him a compulsory place in the "German Labour Front".

Two lessons come from this scene. First, fascism cannot persuade the organised layer of the class; it can only destroy it; the "worker vote" it wins is the vote of the unorganised worker. Second, and more bitter, the working class's two parties, the SPD and the KPD, remained enemies of each other until 1933; a united workers' front could not be built. Fascism's victory was made possible not by the working class going to the right but by the left's division.

In Italy the sequence was the same: the factory occupations of 1919–1920, then the blackshirts financed by capital and the landowners burning union halls, workers' houses, cooperatives, and power in 1922. Mussolini did not take the worker by election; he burned the worker's organisation in the street.

1945–1975: The years of compromise and the worker who stayed on the left

For thirty years after the Second World War the worker vote in Western Europe stayed largely on the left. In 1945 British workers brought down Churchill, who had won the war, and elected the Labour Party; in France the Communist Party was taking more than 25 percent; in Italy the PCI was the West's largest communist party. This was the period of the welfare state, of strong unions and of class parties. The worker voted left because there was a union at the workplace, a party organisation in the neighbourhood, a workers' paper in his hand; he could name his experience in the language of class. The forgetting of this period in debates about the shift to the right is telling: the same working class, when organised, voted left.

But the compromise had a price. In 1959, with the Bad Godesberg programme, social democracy officially gave up being a class party; it became a "people's party". A decision that looked harmless on that day would present its bill thirty years later.

1968–1980: The "silent majority", the Hard Hat Riot and Thatcher

In the United States the right's new relation with the worker was established in 1968 with Nixon's "silent majority" discourse. On 8 May 1970 construction workers in New York attacked students protesting the Vietnam War; this event, remembered as the "Hard Hat Riot", became the symbol of the right's strategy of positioning the worker against the student, against the "white-collar elite", against the Black movement. Nixon's "Southern strategy" split the white worker from the Democrats along the line of race. In 1980 the "Reagan Democrats" were born: unionised, Catholic, industrial workers voting Republican. Here the right did two things: it split the working class along the line of race, and it turned the worker's anger from capital onto the "cultural elite". The discourse "the diploma-holders look down on you" was invented in 1968; in 2016 it was only updated.

In Britain Thatcher took a significant part of the worker vote in 1979. The instrument was concrete: the discounted sale of council housing to tenants under the Housing Act 1980. The tenant worker became a property-owning worker and began to think as a property-owner. Stuart Hall, in the 1979 essay "The Great Moving Right Show", named this "authoritarian populism": Thatcherism took the worker's real complaints — complaints about bureaucracy, about union bureaucracy, about the state — and repackaged them in favour of the market and the nation. Hall's lesson: the right does not invent the worker's problems; it gives the worker's real problems the wrong address.

In this period a theoretical warning also arrived. In Paper Stones (1986) Adam Przeworski and John Sprague showed the electoral dilemma of socialist parties: the working class is in no country a majority of the electorate on its own; as the party opens to the middle classes in order to increase its vote it softens the language of class, and as it softens the language of class its worker base erodes. Every social democracy that tried to solve this dilemma as a "people's party" was, thirty years later, left without workers.

The 1990s: The Third Way and the left's second great abandonment

Blair and Schröder's "Third Way" is social democracy's adoption of neoliberalism as its own programme: privatisation, flexible work, financial liberalisation, "competitiveness". With the Hartz reforms of 2003–2005, unemployment benefit in Germany was reduced to the level of poverty assistance; it was the SPD that did this. The Socialist Party in France, the former communists in Italy, the centre-left of the 1990s in Turkey went the same way. The worker did not "shift to the right" from a party; that party got up from the worker's side and left.

The best testimony to this abandonment is the sociologist Didier Eribon's book Returning to Reims (2009). Eribon grows up in a working-class family in Reims; his family has voted for the Communist Party for generations. When he returns years later he finds that his mother and his brothers and sisters are voting for the National Front. The book's strength is that it tells this passage not as a moral collapse but as an abandonment: a vote given in a world where the PCF has withdrawn from the neighbourhood, where the left has begun not to take the word worker into its mouth, where the only party that sees the worker is the far right. Hénin-Beaumont, an old mining town, had been a left municipality since 1945; in 2014 it passed to the National Front. The town had not changed; the party that saw the town had changed.

2016–2026: Trump, Brexit, AfD

Today's wave rises on top of this history. In 2016 deindustrialised English towns delivered Brexit, the rust-belt states delivered Trump; in 2024 a majority of voters without a university diploma voted for Trump again. In Germany the AfD, as we recorded in "AfD's 43.8 Percent Is Not a Deviation: It Is the Bill of a Two-Hundred-Year Line and Thirty-Five Years of Dispossession", took 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt on 6 September 2026; that state is a region whose industry was liquidated after 1990 by the Treuhand and which has lost a third of its population. In France the National Rally is the first party among worker voters. Thomas Piketty, in Capital and Ideology (2019), showed this transformation in long series: in the 1950s the left vote was inversely proportional to educational level; in the 2010s it became directly proportional; the left turned from a "workers' party" into a "Brahmin left", the party of the diploma-holders.

Piketty's data are right; but to look at the data and say "the worker shifted to the right" reverses the chronology. Bad Godesberg 1959, the Third Way 1997, Hartz IV 2005; Trump 2016, the AfD's leap after 2017. First the left went to the right; the worker then looked at the empty chair.

Turkey: The Same Schema's Domestic Scenes

It would be wrong to think the relation between the worker and the right in Turkey apart from the world; but the scenes are different, the dates are different, and there is also a break that is ours: 12 September.

1946–1960: The Democrat Party and the peasant-worker

The first great right-wing wave of multi-party life was the Democrat Party. In 1950 it took the vote of the peasant, of the small-town shopkeeper, and of the newly forming industrial worker against the single-party bureaucracy. The DP's attraction resembled Bonaparte's attraction for the peasant: "national will" against state pressure, "one of us" against the gendarmerie. The working class was still small and unorganised; the 1947 Trade Unions Law did not recognise the right to strike. The worker voted not as a class but as a "nation", because there was no place from which he could speak as a class.

1961–1980: The fifteen years in which the class constituted itself

The 1961 Constitution and the 1963 strike law opened the way for the working class to organise. DİSK was founded in 1967. On 15–16 June 1970 more than a hundred thousand workers took to the streets in Istanbul and Kocaeli against a legal change aimed at liquidating DİSK; the law was withdrawn. In the 1970s DİSK reached half a million members, real wages rose through collective agreements, associations, cooperatives and people's houses were founded in working-class neighbourhoods. The result was seen at the ballot box: in 1977 the CHP took 41.4 percent, and the backbone of that vote was the working-class neighbourhoods of the industrial cities. This is the only period in Turkey's history in which the worker voted as a class. And that is exactly why it was targeted.

12 September 1980: The physical liquidation of the organisation

We wrote it in detail in "12 September: The History, Balance Sheet, and Present of a Class Coup"; here let us take only the aspect that belongs to this piece. The coup physically dispersed the "we" the working class had built in the 1970s: DİSK was closed, its officials were tried, the collective-agreement order was suspended, the right to strike was pruned by the 1982 Constitution and the 1983 union laws, and through the 1980s real wages collapsed. For the 24 January decisions — that is, the neoliberal programme — to be applied, the worker's organisation had to be crushed; the coup did that. Remember Bismarck's double move: force and then grace from above. Force was 12 September; grace was built step by step over the next twenty years.

1983–2001: Özal, the "orta direk" and the Welfare Party of the gecekondu

Turgut Özal's ANAP, after the worker had been disorganised, named the worker "orta direk" — the middling backbone — and redefined him as a consumer, a small investor, an individual "who makes it". Like Thatcher's sale of council housing: property-owner identity in place of class identity. The Spring Actions of 1989 and the Zonguldak march of 1991 were the worker's spontaneous return; but there was no left that would turn this wave into a class party. The centre-left of the 1990s became a partner, in coalitions, of privatisation, of IMF programmes and of the road that led to the 2001 crisis. Meanwhile the Welfare Party filled the gap in the gecekondu neighbourhoods: in 1994 it took the municipalities of Istanbul and Ankara. The Welfare Party's strength was that it was physically present in the neighbourhood: coal, food, visits to the sick, funerals, finding work. What entered the neighbourhood from which the left had withdrawn was an organisation that spoke the language of community, not of class. Gramsci's common sense: when only one language remains that names the worker's experience, that language becomes common sense.

2002–2026: AKP hegemony

When the AKP came to office in 2002 there was no organised force speaking in the worker's name facing it. It settled into the gap and built its hegemony through five mechanisms. First, social assistance: as in the Bismarck schema, meeting the worker's demand for protection without recognising his organisation, as the grace of the state and the party. Second, TOKİ and credit: turning the tenant into an indebted property-owner; the Thatcher schema. Third, subcontracting, the one percent branch threshold and strike postponements: closing the door of organisation in practice; the continuation of the 12 September inheritance. Fourth, belonging built through community, fellow-townsman networks and the mosque: the Welfare Party inheritance. Fifth, pointing to an enemy: "elites", "White Turks", "foreign powers", "terror". The same mould as Nixon's "silent majority": turning the worker's anger from capital onto the cultural elite.

The opposition facing it, meanwhile, became the domestic instance of Piketty's "Brahmin left": voter-profile studies have for years shown that the section where the main opposition is strongest is university graduates, and the section where it is weakest is low-educated, low-income voters. The opposition addresses the worker not in the language of class but in the language of "lifestyle"; the worker does not find himself in that language. We saw this in The Class's Answer to Evrim Ağacı's Question: classless answers are given to the question "why can't the opposition win", because those who ask the question also think without class.

That the town where 301 miners died at Soma voted for the party of government in the next election as well is the bitterest summary of everything this piece has told. This is not "ignorance"; it is that, in a town whose union is intertwined with the company, where finding work depends on the party, where no alternative organisation is present in the neighbourhood, the only "we" in front of the worker is the government. Like Bonaparte's peasant: those who cannot represent themselves are represented.

Current Occasion: Acemoğlu's "Two Classes" and a Comment

Now let us return to the occasion of the piece. We are keeping this section detailed; because today's debate on "why the worker votes for the right" is being conducted exactly on this template.

What did Acemoğlu say?

Acemoğlu's words in the shared clip, answering Uğur Koçbaş's questions on Oksijen TV, in a version corrected from the transcript, are as follows:

"I think the most important risk is that artificial intelligence develops outside the control of people, of the public, makes society still more unequal, increases the power of a few companies, a few leaders, who control the technology, completely sidelines the working section, and as a result almost really produces a two-class society. What classes are those two classes? Those two classes are not, as Marx said, capitalist and worker; they are the people who hold the technology in their hands, and outside that the people who work together with them, and the groups outside that. That we are heading toward such a two-class society is not an abstract thought; we can see it."

The name of the danger has been put rightly: a few companies, a few leaders, the sidelined worker, a more unequal society. Let us give him that. But the sentence "not, as Marx said, capitalist and worker" shifts a line from its place: it moves the criterion of class from property to "proximity to technology". Let us see what happens when we make concrete the three groups Acemoğlu lists.

What does "holding the technology" mean? For an artificial-intelligence model one needs data, computing power and labour. Data is humanity's common accumulation; as we have said since The Expropriation of the General Intellect and the AGI Illusion, models are crystallised collective labour. Computing power is the data centre: tens of billions of dollars of fixed capital. Labour is the waged labour of the engineer and the data labeller. The one who "holds" these three is the company that owns the data centre, locks the model weights as private property, and employs the engineer for a wage. Its name in Marx is the owner of the means of production: the capitalist.

Who are "those who work together with them"? The software worker and the researcher who sell labour-power for a wage and do not own. How do we know they do not own? They are being laid off; the mass layoffs in the technology sector since 2023 have shown that the "one who works together" is not a partner in the company but a cost item that can be cut. We saw another face of this in "The Class of a Resignation: What an Anthropic Researcher's Farewell Says, and What It Cannot Say": even the highest-paid researcher's only option, when he objects to the company's direction, is to walk out of the door. This layer's name in Marx, in Engels's and Lenin's concept, is the labour aristocracy: the privileged but non-owning layer of waged labour. We defined the technology worker in exactly this dual position in 'The Tearing of the Illusion: A Materialist Intervention Against Digital Capitalism’s Myth of "Goodness" and the Call to "Pace the Frontier"'.

"Those left outside"? The layer whose work is devalued by automation, who is managed by algorithm on a platform, who is unemployed or underemployed. Marx tells this in chapter twenty-five of the first volume of Capital: the reserve army of industry that mechanisation constantly produces. We saw the size of this army in Turkey in "TÜİK: Two Figures, One Country: 8.1% and 30.6%".

Acemoğlu's naming	Relation to the means of production	Name in Marx's frame
Those who hold the technology	Owner; employs others' labour for a wage, sells the product	The capital class
Those who work together with them	Not owner; sells labour-power at a high wage, can be laid off	Waged labour, privileged layer (labour aristocracy)
Those left outside	Not owner; cannot sell labour-power, or sells it without security	Waged labour, reserve army of industry

The triad Acemoğlu presents as "not as Marx said" is Marx's two classes themselves; the second and third rows are two layers of the same class. Moreover the warning of a "two-class society" is not against Marx; it is Marx himself: the first thesis of the Communist Manifesto is that society is splitting more and more into two great hostile camps.

Why does the place of the line matter? Because the line determines the remedy. If the criterion is access to technology, the remedy is education, reskilling, bringing those left outside inside: a programme of distribution. If the criterion is property, the remedy is property: public control of the models, of the data, of the data centres, a say over the algorithm at the workplace, a union: a programme of transformation. The "working-class liberalism" in Acemoğlu's book is a programme of distribution that invites the worker into a liberal coalition; as we saw in the table in Saving Acemoğlu Does Not Save the Class, most of those who join the debate see class, very few ask about property.

What did the commenter say, and why is he partly right?

The comment under the post: "It summarises why workers now vote for the right." The template in the commenter's mind is clear: there is a diploma-holding stratum that holds the technology and works with those who hold it, the left is now their party, and the worker left outside is going to the right. This is Piketty's "Brahmin left" thesis translated into everyday language, and as a description it is largely right.

But as a cause it is incomplete; the place where it is incomplete is exactly the place where the things we told in this piece's historical section are missing. The template explains why the worker is angry; it does not explain why the anger flows to the right. What explains the anger flowing to the right is the left's abandonments from 1914 to 2005, the liquidation of organisation on 12 September, community and social assistance entering the neighbourhood left empty — that is, organisation and property. These two words are not in the template. And because they are not, the template turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy: the left gives up on the worker, the worker on the left.

Does Acemoğlu's solution stop this flow? No. When the worker is taken into the liberal coalition as a voter he continues to live the results of the coalition's property order: the factory still closes, the algorithm still manages, the data centre is still someone's private property. The same anger accumulates again in the same gap; the same right comes with the same mould.

Today's World: The Working Class in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

The history we have told so far is the precondition for understanding today; but today is not a simple repetition of history. In the age of artificial intelligence and the platform the form of the working class has changed; the right has repositioned itself according to this new form. In this section we will take up five questions: has the classical concept of class really changed; what is deskilling and whom does it strike today; where did the "useless class" come from; how does the digital world split the class and how does the school feed this splitting; and against all this which forms of organisation are possible.

Has the classical concept of class changed?

The sentence "class has changed" confuses two separate things: the class relation and the class's appearance. The relation, as Marx defined it, is whether one owns the means of production and whether one is forced to sell labour-power. This relation has not changed; on the contrary, it has widened as never before in history. In 1850 a small minority of the world's population were waged labourers; today the majority are. What has changed is the appearance: the "worker" of the 1970s was a mass in the factory, on the same shift, going in through the same door, boarding the same bus, members of the same union. Today's worker works with a headset in a call centre, with a handheld terminal in a warehouse, on a motorbike in the street with an app, remotely at a computer at home, in a subcontractor's uniform in a hospital, alone at a supermarket till. The same relation, a thousand appearances.

So when we say "the modern working class" we do not mean the abandonment of the classical concept but the filling of the classical concept's scope according to today's reality. Everyone who is forced to make a living by selling labour-power is in this class: the engineer in the software company as much as the worker on the assembly line; the intern in a law office as much as the courier; the teacher, the nurse, the call-centre worker, the supermarket cashier, the care labourer, the "self-employed" shopkeeper forced into courier work, and the unemployed person who wants to sell labour-power and cannot. To this must be added a layer that is most of the time unseen: the data labellers who train artificial-intelligence models, the content moderators, and all of us whose every click, every photograph, every sentence is turned into the models' raw material and who receive nothing in return. In "Labor in the Age of Artificial Intelligence": Our Book Is Out we named this layer "unpaid data labour": the class's widest, most invisible ring.

Guy Standing's concept of the "precariat" (2011) tried to catch this change of appearance; but it was wrong in presenting the precariat as a new class, separate from the working class. Precarity is not a new class; it is the return of the working class to its normal condition before the 1945–75 compromise. The worker Marx described in 1867 was precarious. Security was a thirty-year exception, and it was won through organisation. Organisation weakened, the exception ended. Today's "new" precarity is in fact the old condition of the unorganised worker.

For the right this change of appearance is a gift. Ten thousand workers going in through the same door can found a union; ten thousand workers on ten thousand separate motorbikes, in ten thousand separate homes, at ten thousand separate tills, do not see one another. Marx's sack of potatoes has been reconstituted in the digital age: this time not the peasant, but the courier managed by an app.

A class deskilled every day

Harry Braverman, in Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), named the fundamental thing twentieth-century capitalism did to the worker: the separation of conceiving from doing. Taylorism measured, split and transferred the knowledge in the artisan's head to management; only "doing" was left to the worker. Braverman's prediction was that this process would not stop at the factory but would spread to office work and to "skilled" occupations. His prediction proved right; but even he could not have guessed today's speed.

Today deskilling works on two floors. On the lower floor, algorithmic management: software determines the courier's route, the warehouse's pick order, the call centre's script, the cashier's transactions per second; the worker's experience, knowledge, initiative are zeroed. In the Gig Economy Dossier we called this "mental Taylorism": Taylor's stopwatch is now inside the phone and it runs every second. On the upper floor, artificial intelligence puts the jobs Braverman counted as "skilled" through the same process: the software worker writes prompts for the model that produces the code instead of writing code; the translator corrects machine translation instead of translating; the journalist checks a generated text instead of writing the news; the graphic designer selects generated images instead of designing. In each case conceiving passes from the worker to the model; "checking" and "correcting" are left to the worker; and this remaining work can be done at a lower wage, by fewer people, in a shorter time.

This second floor reopens the "labour aristocracy" debate. The layer Acemoğlu calls "those who work together with those who hold the technology" is exactly the target of this deskilling. The software worker and the designer who five years ago saw themselves as a "creative class", a "knowledge worker", a "professional", today discover that they are a waged labourer who rents the means of production and can at any moment have a model put in their place by the owner of those means. This discovery is bitter, but politically fertile: the labour aristocracy seeing its common fate with the rest of the class is the precondition of the class's unification. In "The Revolt of Crystallized Labor: A Call to the 20th Karaburun Science Congress" we named this "the expropriation of the general intellect": the model locks humanity's accumulated knowledge as private property and deskills the producer of that knowledge vis-à-vis their own product. Marx wrote this in 1867 in the machinery chapter of Capital: the machine objectifies the worker's skill and uses it against them. The model is the same thing applied to mental labour.

The relation of deskilling to the right-wing vote is direct. Skill was the source of the worker's honour: "I know this job." When skill is taken from their hands the worker loses not only income but identity. The right offers into this identity vacuum the identities of nation, religion, manhood, "the real people". The sentence "you are not unskilled, you are the true owner of this country" speaks far more powerfully to the deskilled worker than the left's sentence "retrain". Because one restores honour, the other confirms dishonour.

The "useless class": origins of the concept

Yuval Noah Harari, in Homo Deus (2015), put forward the concept of a "useless class": billions who in the age of artificial intelligence will be not only unemployed but unemployable, of no economic or military use. The concept spread rapidly; it became the common ground of "universal basic income" debates in Silicon Valley and of the anger "they see us as useless" on the populist right.

But the concept's origin is much older than Harari, and looking at that origin shows how the concept has been distorted. Marx, in chapter twenty-five of Capital, defines "relative surplus population" in three forms: floating (the industrial worker laid off and taken back), latent (the layer waiting ready to flow from country to city) and stagnant (the layer holding on in irregular, lowest-waged jobs); and at the bottom the pauperised sediment. This population is not "useless"; it is indispensable for capital: it holds down wages, breaks strikes, provides ready labour-power in periods of expansion. Marx's name is the "reserve army of industry", and the word "reserve" is critical: the army's reserve is part of the army.

Zygmunt Bauman, in Wasted Lives (2004), wrote that modernity constantly produces "surplus humans"; but even in Bauman "surplus" is a result of design, not a property of people. What Harari does is to naturalise this design: people do not become useless because of technology; inside a particular property order technology makes particular people unprofitable. The adjective "useless" is the profit criterion stuck onto the human. A nurse, a teacher, a carer, a farmer is not useless for society; they may not be profitable enough for capital. The two things are not the same.

In "The Bloody Steps of the Pyramid: The 2026 Global Dispossession War and the Birth of the 'Useless Class'" we took up the global dimension of this phenomenon: artificial intelligence and algorithmic automation leave billions not only jobless but unprotected by the retreat of the welfare state; capital flowing from the Global South to the North produces a "surplus population" locally. The measure of this phenomenon in Turkey is the broadly defined unemployment in "TÜİK: Two Figures, One Country: 8.1% and 30.6%" and the share of young people in neither education nor employment. These young people are the candidates in Turkey of Harari's "useless class"; but not because they are useless, because the investment that would give them work does not yield a profit.

The relation of the "useless class" phenomenon to the right-wing vote is even deeper than that of deskilling. The person declared "useless" feels it first: the market has said to them "I do not want you". Then they look at who is saying it. The left, by saying "universal basic income" or "retraining", tries to accept the verdict of uselessness and compensate for it. The right, however, rejects the verdict: "You are not useless; those who make you useless are foreigners, elites, technocrats." Rejection always speaks more powerfully than acceptance. The strength of the populist right is that it rejects the verdict of uselessness by directing it to the wrong address. Our task is to reject the verdict by directing it to the right address: what makes you useless is the ownership order that appropriates your labour and now thinks it can multiply that property without you.

The alliance of the techno-oligarchy with the populist right

Today's right differs in one respect from Disraeli's or Nixon's: beside it, for the first time in history, the most concentrated owners of the means of production stand openly. Musk, Thiel, Andreessen; Palantir, X, data centres. In From Futurism to Techno-Fascism we traced the ideological origins of this alliance; in "The Declaration of Techno-Fascism: The Palantir Manifesto and the Dialectic of Class Struggle in the Digital Age" we saw its concrete form.

The logic of the alliance is this: the technology monopolies do not want the anger of the deskilling and "uselessness" they themselves produce to turn against them. The populist right directs this anger onto the migrant, the "woke elite", Brussels, the "deep state". In return the monopolies provide the populist right with platform, money and surveillance infrastructure. The worker votes, against the migrant they think left them jobless, for the party financed by the owner of the algorithm that left them jobless. This is the most refined diversion mechanism in the right's history, and its difference from earlier ones is that the source of the anger and the political representative of the anger are the same hand.

The counterpart of this alliance in Turkey works with more domestic and older instruments, but the logic is the same: the government, while protecting the subcontracting and platform order that deskills the worker, gives the worker's anger the address "foreign powers", "the interest lobby", "terror"; at the same time it holds the surveillance infrastructure and the media monopoly. As we said in Anthropic's Activist Monitoring System, the target list widens in the order terrorist → migrant → dissident → worker; the class declared useless becomes first the class that is watched, then the class that is repressed.

Digital processes that split the class: betting, drugs, the screen

Now let us come to the matter least spoken of, but most lived in the working-class neighbourhood. That the working class stays on the right is not explained by ideology alone; there are processes that destroy the class's capacity to come together physically, and most of them are digital.

Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), told the Manchester worker's refuge in drink not as a moral failing but as the only escape-hatch of an unbearable life; and he wrote that drink was a force that kept the worker from organising, set workers against one another, melted their wage and made them dependent on the boss. Today's drink is inside the phone, and far more effective.

Betting. In Turkey legal and illegal betting is at epidemic scale in worker and young-unemployed neighbourhoods; official statements say the volume of illegal betting reaches hundreds of billions of lira a year, and even that figure is below the real size. Betting individualises the worker's economic hope: instead of struggling together for a wage rise, waiting alone for the "big prize". The digital form of Marx's sack of potatoes: each potato with its own coupon. Betting also produces debt; the indebted worker cannot strike for fear of losing the job, cannot join a union, cannot object to the boss. Debt is the right's quietest ally.

Drugs. The spread of synthetic drugs, especially methamphetamine, in working-class neighbourhoods and industrial districts is one of the heaviest social facts of the last ten years; and the cause is not the user's weakness but the rendering of life meaningless. That the young worker deskilled, declared "useless", who spends twelve hours in a warehouse or on a motorbike, takes refuge in drugs is in the same logic as Engels's Manchester. The result is the same: drugs turn the neighbourhood from a space of solidarity into a space of fear and crime; and where there is fear the right that promises "security" wins. The drug trade itself is also a class matter: the seller is a worker's child, the winner is capital, the payer is the neighbourhood.

The screen and the algorithm. The most widespread and most invisible splitter is the phone itself. The algorithmic feed offers each worker their own personal world; two workers on the same shift live, the same day, in two completely different worlds. Common experience, common language, common anger cannot be produced; because there is nothing common. Moreover the feed is tuned to keep the user angry, and the content that sells anger most easily is right-wing content: pointing to an enemy is understood in two minutes; telling the mechanism of exploitation takes twenty minutes. The algorithm favours the right with the time-budget. There is also the "hustle" ideology: becoming a YouTuber, dropshipping, hitting crypto, "being your own boss". This ideology offers the worker a promise of exit from their class and makes the idea of winning by remaining inside their class look ridiculous.

The gig apps themselves. The platform structurally prevents workers from seeing one another: there is no shift, no common break place, no being in the same place at the same time. The algorithm gives each courier a separate route, a separate bonus, a separate penalty; each worker is alone with their own score, their own ranking. This is the most systematic atomisation in the working class's history, and it is by design.

These four processes together remove the physical precondition of the working class's passage from "class in itself" to "class for itself": coming together. The right's relation with these processes is two-layered: the right protects the order that produces these processes (revenue from betting tax, the untouchability of platform monopolies, a security policy that looks away from the drug economy); then it presents itself as the solution against the decay these processes create, saying "family", "morals", "security", "religion". Producing the disease and selling the medicine: the right's most profitable business in the digital age.

How does the school feed this?

Education is taken to be the institution that will stop the flow to the right. On the contrary, in its present form it feeds it, and it does this in three ways.

First, the school is a sorting machine. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, in Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), showed that the school's real function is not to give knowledge but to sort children according to class positions and to teach each the behaviour appropriate to their own position; Bourdieu told the same thing with the concept of "cultural capital": the school rewards the capital brought from home and presents this as "talent". In "Our Education Dossier Is Out: Whose School Is It?" we gave the figures of the picture in Turkey: LGS and YKS sort hundreds of thousands of children into those who have course-money and those who do not; MESEM sends the worker's child to the factory at fourteen and calls this "education"; the private school leaves the capitalist's child their class as inheritance. This sorting produces the diploma-holding–diploma-less line, and that line, as we have seen, is the right's most fertile field.

Second, the school teaches the ideology of merit. Michael Sandel, in The Tyranny of Merit (2020), wrote this plainly: the ideology of merit says to the winners "you deserved it"; and to the losers too. The university graduate attributes their position to their own success and looks at the worker without a diploma, even if they do not say it openly, as "if you had worked too". The worker feels this look; and the diploma-holding left's contempt for the "ignorant right-winger" is exactly the political form of this look. The right gathers this contempt and sells it back as "the elite look down on you". So the school does not only split the class; it teaches the two sides of the split to despise each other. Piketty's "Brahmin left" is the product of an education system.

Third, the school is an apparatus of hegemony. In Turkey the curriculum, the target of a "pious generation" and the expansion of religious education, the nationalist-conservative construction of the history narrative, the complete erasure of the concept of class from textbooks: these teach the worker's child to read the world not in the language of class but in the language of nation and religion. That a worker's child who has never heard the word class votes for the right is not a riddle. Gramsci's common sense is constituted at school.

The school also has a fourth, new function: in the age of artificial intelligence the school, with the promise of "reskilling", loads the responsibility for deskilling onto the worker. The discourse "update yourself, learn to code, become AI-literate" declares the worker the culprit of the unemployment being created. The right answers this with "nobody can tell you to learn to code, you are the owner of this country". Again: one confirms dishonour, the other pretends to restore honour.

Alternatives of organisation for the modern working class

After all this the question is this: how does the worker on ten thousand separate motorbikes, looking at ten thousand separate screens, betting-indebted, without a diploma or a deskilled diploma-holder, become a "class for itself"? The classical union is necessary for this but not sufficient. Let us look at forms tested in the last ten years in the world and in Turkey.

Platform-worker organisations. In January 2022 Trendyol couriers, without a union, organising through the app and WhatsApp groups, switched off their engines, and within a few days the company stepped back and raised the pay. The same year Yemeksepeti and Hepsiburada couriers, Migros warehouse workers, took similar action. These experiences showed two things: the platform's atomisation can be overcome, because workers can unite with the same digital tool with which the algorithm separates them; and "esnaf courier" status, though a legal obstacle, cannot stop organisation in practice. In the Gig Economy Dossier we took up in detail the ILO's 2026 platform-labour convention and the legal struggle in Turkey.

Technology-worker unions. The Alphabet Workers Union (2021), the Amazon Labor Union's Staten Island victory (April 2022), the spread of Starbucks Workers United to hundreds of shops, and the strikes Hollywood screenwriters (WGA) and actors (SAG-AFTRA) won against artificial intelligence in 2023: these showed that "skilled" and "creative" labour can act as a class vis-à-vis artificial intelligence. The WGA strike is especially important: the screenwriters won a contract clause not against artificial intelligence writing scripts but against artificial intelligence being used in their place and trained on their own labour. That is, the property question was carried onto the collective-bargaining table. In Turkey The Computing Worker's Handbook compiled these experiences for the computing branch; the branch threshold and the "branch no. 10" obstacle are the domestic legal wall that must be crossed.

Neighbourhood and community unionism. Where the workplace has dispersed, organisation must move to the place where the worker lives. Tenants' unions, neighbourhood solidarity networks, debt-advice bureaux, neighbour structures that struggle with betting and drug addiction: these do not look like a "union" but they are the things that reconstitute the class's capacity to come together. To do in the language of class what the Welfare Party did in the gecekondu in the 1990s. The left lost because it withdrew from the neighbourhood; it cannot win without returning to the neighbourhood.

Cooperatives and commons. As we took up in Albatros Computing Cooperative and Software Cooperativism 101, owning the means of production in common is the most direct answer to deskilling: conceiving and doing reunite in the cooperative. Software, design, translation, courier cooperatives; open-source and open-weight models; data commons. These alone do not go beyond capitalism, but they teach the worker concretely what "owning" means and take the property question out of the abstract.

Taking back the digital tools. If the algorithm separates the worker, the worker can turn the algorithm into an instrument of organisation: courier groups sharing their own route and pay information, call-centre workers comparing performance data, platforms founded by workers and overseen by workers. The limit of this should also be known: the same tools are used by the boss and the state for surveillance; digital organisation must be learned together with digital security.

Rings that bind the layers of the class. This is the most critical. Without rings that will bind the software worker to the courier, the teacher to the warehouse worker, the unemployed young person to the tenured civil servant, the right's splitting strategy continues to operate. The reason we defined the courier and the warehouse worker as an "alliance ring" in the computing handbook is this: two workers, one writing code at one end of the same platform, the other carrying parcels at the other, are two ends of the same algorithm. Without one seeing the other, neither can be a class.

The common ground of these forms is that they all reconstitute "coming together". The right takes the worker to the ballot box one by one; organisation brings the worker together before the ballot box. That a worker who has come together votes for the right has rarely been seen in history.

Synthesis: How Does the Right Win the Worker? Five Mechanisms

When the historical scenes and today's digital reality are set side by side, five repeating mechanisms of the right's relation with the worker appear. We will also note each one's present form.

First, the organisational vacuum. The right does not persuade the organised worker; it wins the unorganised worker. Bonaparte's peasant, the Nazis' unemployed, the AKP's subcontracted worker. The vacuum is either opened by force (the Anti-Socialist Law of 1878, 1933, 12 September) or forms of itself through the left's withdrawal (Reims, Hénin-Beaumont, the gecekondu). In both cases the worker loses the place from which he would speak as a class and at the ballot box speaks as an individual, a fellow-townsman, a believer, a nationalist. Its present form: the atomisation the platform produces by design, the algorithmic feed offering each worker a separate world, betting and debt leaving the worker alone. The vacuum is now opened not only by a coup or by the left's withdrawal but by the architecture inside the phone.

Second, the repackaging of the demand for protection. The worker's vote for the right is, most of the time, not the forgetting of class interest but the expression of class interest in another language. In the town whose industry has closed the worker wants protection; a shield against the market laying his life waste. When the left says "globalisation is inevitable, retrain yourself", the right answers the same demand with "I will protect you; the enemy is the migrant, the enemy is Brussels, the enemy is foreign powers". The demand is the same, the address changes. This is Stuart Hall's lesson: the right does not invent the worker's problems; it gives real problems the wrong address. Its present form: the demand for honour of the worker who has been deskilled and declared "useless". The left, by saying "retrain", accepts the verdict; the right, by saying "you are the true owner of this country", rejects the verdict and directs it to the wrong address.

Third, the splitting of the class. The labour aristocracy, the line of race, the native–migrant line, the permanent–subcontracted line, the diploma-holding–diploma-less line. The right positions one layer of the working class against another and declares the other "elite" or "foreign". The hard hat of 1970 against the student, the rust belt of 2016 against the "coastal elite", Turkey's "man of the nation" against the "White Turk". The split rests on a real ground; the layers of the working class really do live differently. The right's skill is to present this difference not as a difference inside the class but as a hostility between classes. Its present form: the diploma-holding–diploma-less line being produced at school and sealed by the ideology of merit; and artificial intelligence, by deskilling the "skilled" layer as well, making visible that this line is in fact a line inside the class. Both sides of the split are two ends of the same algorithm.

Fourth, grace from above. Bismarck's insurance, Thatcher's housing, the AKP's social assistance and TOKİ. The demand for protection is met without recognising the worker's organisation, even while crushing it, as the grace of the state and the party. This makes the worker dependent: he is indebted not to his organisation but to his patron and to the government. Grace can be taken back; a right cannot. The right knows this difference and always chooses grace. Its present form: Silicon Valley's promise of a "universal basic income". A wage given, without touching property, as the owner's grace to the class declared useless; the counterpart in the age of artificial intelligence of Bismarck's insurance.

Fifth, the left's abandonment. The most determining of the five mechanisms. The war credits of 1914, Godesberg in 1959, the Third Way in 1997, Hartz in 2005, the coalitions of the 1990s in Turkey and the lifestyle opposition of the 2000s. The right did not take the worker from the left's hand; the left left the worker, the right took what was on the ground. To say this is not to exonerate the right; it is to show where the responsibility lies. It is easy to be angry at the worker; it is hard to call the party that left the worker to account. Its present form: the left looking from afar at the betting shop, the drugs, the debt and the screen in the working-class neighbourhood, calling it "the ignorant right-winger", and proposing nothing concrete; and social democracy, facing the alliance of the techno-oligarchy with the populist right, contenting itself with proposals of distribution.

Two Readings Side by Side

	The "worker shifted to the right" reading	The class reading
Criterion of the split	Education, proximity to technology, culture, lifestyle	Ownership of the means of production
What does it explain?	Why the worker is angry	Why the anger flows to the right
Chronology	The worker changed, became conservative	First the left left class politics, then the worker looked at the empty chair
Meaning of the right-wing vote	Forgetting of class interest, "culture war"	Repackaging of the demand for protection as protection against the foreigner
What is a vote?	Expression of class position or of identity	Expression of the level of organisation
Historical examples	After 2016	1851, 1867, 1878, 1914, 1933, 1970, 1979, 12 September, 1994, 2002
The "class has changed" thesis	Class is over; identity and education are decisive	The relation is the same, the appearance has changed; precarity is not a new class but the old condition of the unorganised worker
Deskilling and "uselessness"	The inevitable result of technology; the remedy is retraining or a basic income	The product of a particular property order; "useless" is the profit criterion stuck onto the human
Betting, drugs, the screen	A matter of individual morals or of "social decay"	Processes that destroy the class's capacity to come together, that the order produces and that the right sells as medicine
The school's role	The antidote to the flow to the right	As a sorting machine, an ideology of merit and an apparatus of hegemony, a feeder of the flow to the right
Remedy	Bringing the left "closer to the people", a change of tone, taking the worker into the coalition	Organisation that starts at the workplace; the worker reconstituting his own subject
Acemoğlu's place	The academic form of this reading: "working-class liberalism"	A proposal of distribution that cannot stop the flow to the right because it skips property

The right-hand column does not give the lie to the left-hand column; it puts a ground under it. Piketty's data, Acemoğlu's warning, the commenter's observation are right. What is missing is to name the relation behind these truths.

To Young Comrades: What Does It Mean to Be Conscious About the Right and the Worker?

We want the following principles to remain in the hand of a young comrade who reads this piece.

Do not be angry at the worker; question those who left the worker. When you speak with a worker who votes for the right, do not ask "why" but "since when". The answer most often points to a date when a factory closed, a union dissolved, a party withdrew from the neighbourhood. That date is the real history of the sentence "the worker shifted to the right".

Read the class demand inside the right-wing vote. Under the sentence of the worker who says "the enemy is the migrant" there is the demand "protect my job". Instead of arguing with the sentence, name the demand: it is not the migrant who took his job, but the boss who prefers the migrant for cheap labour and the competition that forces him to it. The same anger, with the right address, is class anger.

Do not share the lie that fascism "won" the worker. Fascism could not persuade the organised worker; it destroyed his organisation. Today too the far right's vote comes from non-union, unemployed, precarious layers. This is not a sign of despair but of the task: the organised worker is not going to the right.

Be alert against the splitting of the class. Permanent–subcontracted, native–migrant, diploma-holding–diploma-less, white-collar–blue-collar. Each of these lines rests on a real difference, and each is the right's most fertile field. Know your own position too: a young comrade working in a software company is among Acemoğlu's "those who work together with them"; building the labour aristocracy's tie with the rest of the class is today one of the most important tasks. That is why, in The Computing Worker's Handbook, we defined the courier and the warehouse worker as an "alliance ring".

Do not accept the word "useless". Not for yourself, not for anyone else. What makes a person useless is not the technology but the ownership of that technology. When you hear this word, ask "useless for whom, for whose profit?" The answer every time comes out at the same address.

Count the betting shop and the screen as a political matter. Betting, drugs and debt in the working-class neighbourhood are not things to be saddened over from afar as "social decay"; they are processes that destroy the class's capacity to come together and that feed the right. A left that proposes nothing concrete against them cannot find a place in the neighbourhood. Debt advice, solidarity with addiction, places to come together without a phone: these do not look "union-like" but they are the work that reconstitutes the class.

See your diploma not as a superiority but as a line of split. If you are a university graduate, settle accounts with the ideology of merit the school taught you: your position is the product not of your talent but of the capital you brought from home and of the sorting machine. Every left that looks at the worker without a diploma as "ignorant" is the right's best propagandist.

Distinguish grace from a right. Social assistance, housing credit, a rise in the minimum wage: none of these is bad, but know which of them is a right won through organised struggle and which is a grace the government can take back, and tell this to the worker. Since Bismarck the right's strongest instrument has been to present a right as grace.

Do not forget that the vote is the result of organisation. If there is no union at the workplace, no association in the neighbourhood, no class party in the country, the ballot box is not the place where the worker speaks as a class. If you want to change the ballot box, look not at the ballot box but at the four years before it and at where the worker spoke in those four years.

Do not expect social democracy to stop the flow to the right. History shows the opposite: every social-democratic abandonment is the forerunner of a right-wing wave. Acemoğlu's "working-class liberalism" is the last link in this series; it takes the worker into the coalition, does not touch property, accumulates the anger again.

Concrete Tasks

Sentence-stripping: Take Acemoğlu's paragraph; opposite the verbs "to hold", "to work together", "to be left outside", write the question "does he own the means of production, or does he sell labour-power?" This exercise can be applied to every text that says "class is now something else".

Local chronology: Put your own district's or neighbourhood's election results of the last forty years, the workplaces that closed in the same period, the union branches that dissolved and the left organisations that withdrew from the neighbourhood onto a single timeline. Send it to us; let us draw Turkey's "shift to the right" map together, in class terms.

Reply to comments: Do not be angry at someone who says "it summarises why workers vote for the right"; the observation is right. Ask this: "Well, what did the worker find on the left before he voted for the right, and when did that thing disappear?" The question pulls the debate from culture to organisation, from identity to property.

Reading: Read in order the last chapter of Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire (the peasantry and Bonaparte), Engels's 1858 letter, the labour-aristocracy chapter of Lenin's Imperialism, Stuart Hall's essay "The Great Moving Right Show", Eribon's Returning to Reims, and Piketty's "Brahmin left" chapters. For today's world add Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital, chapter 25 of Capital side by side with Harari's "useless class" chapter, Bowles–Gintis, and Sandel's The Tyranny of Merit. The order matters: first the mechanism, then today's form.

Neighbourhood inventory: On a map of the neighbourhood where you are, mark the betting shops, the coffeehouses, the courier waiting points, the closed union branches and the left organisations' locals. Look at which of them have multiplied and which have dwindled. The local answer to the question "why do workers vote for the right" is on that map.

Make a layer connection: If you are a software worker, form a regular tie with a courier group; if you are a teacher, with a warehouse worker; if you are a student, with a call-centre worker. The aim is not help; it is to show each other the two ends of the same algorithm. The ring that binds the layers of the class does not form of itself.

Organisation: This whole piece has a single practical result. If there is no place where the worker speaks as a class at the workplace, school or neighbourhood where you are, found that place. The result at the ballot box depends on the existence of that place; not the reverse.

Dear Young Comrades,

Why do workers vote for the right? Because from Bonaparte's peasant in 1851 to the worker of Saxony-Anhalt in 2026, the right has always won the unorganised labourer, and the labourer has always remained unorganised when he lost his organisation or was abandoned. Because the right is skilled at giving the worker's real demand for protection the wrong address, and the left has often, since 1914, given up giving that demand the right address. Because the right knows how to split the class and how to present a right as grace. And because the vote is not the cause of class consciousness but its result; and consciousness is constituted not at the ballot box but at the workplace and in the neighbourhood, inside struggle.

Today a new layer has been added to this. In the age of artificial intelligence the class relation has not changed but its appearance has been split: ten thousand separate motorbikes, ten thousand separate screens, ten thousand separate coupons. Deskilling now strikes the one who writes code as well; the verdict of "useless" is being read onto billions as the profit criterion stuck onto the human; betting, drugs and the algorithmic feed destroy the class's capacity to come together physically; the school produces the diploma-holding–diploma-less line and teaches the two sides to despise each other; and for the first time in history the most concentrated owners of the means of production stand openly beside the populist right. In these conditions the worker remaining on the right is not a riddle; it is the right producing the disease and selling the medicine.

But the same conditions also show the way out. Trendyol couriers united with the same phone with which the algorithm separates them; Hollywood screenwriters carried the property question onto the collective-bargaining table; software cooperatives reunited conceiving with doing. The modern working class will become a class for itself not by abandoning the classical concept but by stretching the classical concept to today's thousand appearances: by showing the courier and the software worker, the teacher and the warehouse worker, the unemployed young person and the tenured civil servant to one another as two ends of the same algorithm.

Acemoğlu says we are heading toward a two-class world, and he is right. He says "not as Marx said", and he is wrong: those who hold the technology are the owners of the means of production; the rest are layers of the same waged labour. The commenter says this picture summarises the worker's vote for the right, and he is partly right: the picture explains the anger; the two words that explain the anger flowing to the right are outside the picture: property and organisation.

Our work is not to be sorry that the worker votes for the right; it is to rebuild the place from which the worker can speak as a class. In the 1970s that place existed and the worker voted left. 12 September demolished that place and the worker voted for the only "we" that saw him. When that place is rebuilt the vote will come too; when it is not, no liberal coalition, no lifestyle opposition, no "pro-worker artificial intelligence" can hold the worker at the ballot box.

Comradely.

Knowledge belongs to everyone.

Sources

Current occasion

Gazete Oksijen, "Warning of a two-class world!" — LinkedIn post and video clip (19 September 2026)
Uğur Koçbaş, Daron Acemoğlu's warning of a two-class world, Gazete Oksijen (18 September 2026)
Oksijen TV, Warning of a two-class world | You cannot stop artificial intelligence | Daron Acemoğlu – Uğur Koçbaş
T24, Daron Acemoğlu's new book "Which Liberal Democracy" meets the reader (August 2026)
Daron Acemoglu, The case for "working-class liberalism", Prospect (2 September 2026)

Theoretical frame

Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), chapter II (class in itself / class for itself)
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), chapter VII (the peasantry and Bonapartism)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), chapter I
Karl Marx, Capital, volume I, chapter 25: "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation"
Friedrich Engels, letter to Marx, 7 October 1858 (the bourgeoisification of the English proletariat)
V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), chapter VIII; What Is to Be Done? (1902)
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (hegemony, common sense)
Adam Przeworski and John Sprague, Paper Stones: A History of Electoral Socialism (1986)
Stuart Hall, "The Great Moving Right Show", Marxism Today (January 1979)
Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims (2009)
Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (2019), "Brahmin left" chapters
Jürgen Falter, Hitlers Wähler (1991) — foundational study of the NSDAP electorate

Class in the age of artificial intelligence, deskilling, "uselessness", education

Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) — drink and the working class
Karl Marx, Capital, volume I, chapter 15: "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry"
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974)
Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011) — critically
Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (2004)
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus (2015) — source of the "useless class" concept; critically
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (1976)
Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction (1970)
Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit (2020)
Bilgi Müşterekleri, The Bloody Steps of the Pyramid: The 2026 Global Dispossession War and the Birth of the 'Useless Class' (3 July 2026)
Bilgi Müşterekleri, "Labor in the Age of Artificial Intelligence": Our Book Is Out (18 August 2026)
Bilgi Müşterekleri, The Revolt of Crystallized Labor: A Call to the 20th Karaburun Science Congress (24 July 2026)
Bilgi Müşterekleri, Gig Economy Dossier (31 August 2026)
Bilgi Müşterekleri, From Futurism to Techno-Fascism (7 September 2026)
Bilgi Müşterekleri, The Declaration of Techno-Fascism: The Palantir Manifesto and the Dialectic of Class Struggle in the Digital Age (11 August 2026)
Bilgi Müşterekleri, Anthropic's Activist Monitoring System (11 September 2026)
Bilgi Müşterekleri, Our Education Dossier Is Out: Whose School Is It? (29 August 2026)
Bilgi Müşterekleri, Albatros Computing Cooperative and Software Cooperativism 101 (4 September 2026)