Li Xiaoling: Current Development Trends of Radical Leftist Social Movements in Europe and the United States
Since the 1980s, although neoliberal globalization has enabled the wealthy and the CEOs of giant multinational corporations in developed Western countries to reap high monopoly profits on a global scale, the gradient transfer of industrial structures toward developing countries during capital expansion has created competitors for labor-intensive industries. This has led to the "hollowing out of industry" and "deindustrialization" in developed Western nations, thereby creating a globalized billionaire elite and a domestic class of the economically vulnerable. Particularly after the outbreak of the international financial crisis, the governments of Europe and the United States stood on the same side as the financial monopoly capital elite; government policy tended toward bailing out financial monopoly capital while shifting the bitter fruits of the financial crisis onto the ordinary populace. People gradually realized that financial monopoly capitalism is a development model aimed at the seizure of vast wealth by a minority elite of the privileged class who enjoy market power, at the cost of sacrificing the economic, political, and social rights of the lower and middle classes and the dignity of the poor. Driven by the interests of unjust distribution, many groups with declining incomes have displayed various forms of dissatisfaction and resistance toward the elite class. This negative sentiment eventually converged into a massive wave of civic protest, thereby drowning the hypocrisy and lies of capitalism in a torrent of movement.
I. Explosive Inequality: The Background and Causes of Active Radical Left Social Movements in Europe and the United States
Inequality has always been an incurable and chronic ailment of capitalist society. Marx and Engels once pointed out that in capitalist society, "accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital." [1] "The strong trample the weak underfoot; a handful of the strong, the capitalists, seize everything, while the masses of the weak, the poor, can only barely survive." [2] Lenin also believed that with the continuous development of capitalism, "vast wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few capitalists, while the masses of the people are turned into the dispossessed." [3] The stark contrast between the bourgeoisie’s possession of unlimited wealth and freedom and the proletariat’s suffering of endless poverty and oppression is precisely rooted in the capitalists' uncompensated appropriation of workers' surplus value under the private ownership of the means of production. Economic inequality directly exacerbates inequality in other social spheres, such as politics, education, intergenerational mobility, opportunity, and geography. Consequently, those monopoly oligarchs who own the means of production become the actual rulers of the national economy, political power, ideology, and social life in capitalist countries.
As the bellwether of capitalist countries, the United States continues to lead developed nations in its degree of inequality; Time magazine even referred to this extreme inequality in an article as "American pain." Data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve show that since 1980, absolute income mobility in the U.S. has significantly weakened, wealth inequality has climbed sharply, and social wealth has continuously flowed toward the top social elite, while people at the bottom of society are trapped in a cycle of poverty from which they struggle to save themselves. In 2018, the income of the top 20% of the U.S. population accounted for 52% of the total national income, with an average household income of $233,895; the wealthiest among the rich (the top 5%) obtained 23% of the total national income, with an average household income of $416,520; meanwhile, the lowest 20% accounted for only 3.1% of national income, with an average household income of $13,775. [4] In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated the imbalance in social income and wealth distribution. While tens of millions of unemployed people were applying for unemployment benefits and struggling to survive, twelve American multi-billionaires—represented by Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk—saw their net worth grow explosively, with a total increase of 40% and a total wealth exceeding $1 trillion. This pandemic proved that the "trickle-down effect" preached by neoliberalism is nothing but empty words. On one side, the stock prices of super-business giants are surging ahead; on the other side, low-income groups suffer from the unemployment, hunger, and death brought by the pandemic. However, the government has turned a blind eye to the yawning gap between the rich and the poor, and has remained indifferent to the safety of people's lives and their living conditions. This operational mechanism of "capital supreme, government absent" is bound to push decades of accumulated social contradictions and profound social inequalities to a tipping point, accelerating society's movement toward political polarization and confrontation.
Furthermore, under the ravages of the pandemic, long-standing problems in American society such as inequality in health and life expectancy, inequality of opportunity, and racial inequality have become increasingly prominent. Tens of millions of vulnerable people have been forced to face deteriorating health conditions, a lack of jobs, poor living conditions, and radical racial discrimination, while the super-rich can retreat to private healthcare facilities, luxury bunkers, and remote vacation homes to enjoy the most abundant resources. Low-income groups and ethnic minorities have been hit harder by COVID-19 due to poor underlying health conditions and low insurance coverage. Yet, the U.S. government took no effective measures to provide relief, leading to widespread social dissatisfaction and harsh criticism from public opinion. The role of the bourgeois state is to defend the interests of the ruling class as a whole, using centralized power and state finances to protect large monopoly enterprises from the impact of crises and suppress the resistance of the people. Reality has shown the masses more clearly that those states which claimed to have "no resources" to meet the basic needs of the people indeed have unlimited resources to "save" big business and expand the massive military-industrial complex, regardless of whether the current government calls itself "left" or "right." Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies, pointed out that the COVID-19 pandemic completely exposed that the United States is actually a suffocatingly and extremely unequal society, but in reality, this inequality predated the pandemic and is a long-standing, pervasive phenomenon that coexists with the structural system of capitalism. [5] The American people, mired in deep suffering, have accumulated a great deal of anger and resentment through years of neoliberal privatization and deregulation policies; various left-wing movements are an expression of their venting of indignation and hatred and their search for fairness and justice.
Although the degree of inequality in Europe is significantly lower than in the United States, inequality in most European countries is also increasing with the spread of neoliberalism. A report released by the World Inequality Database in 2019 showed that between 1980 and 2017, the average income of the poorest 50% of low-income groups in Europe grew by 30% to 40%; the income growth rate of the "European middle-income group" was only about 10 percentage points higher than these poor groups. In sharp contrast, the income growth rate of the wealthy groups soared significantly: the income of the top 0.1% of European citizens grew by more than 100%, and the income of the top 0.001% of the ultra-wealthy grew by as much as 200%, enjoying a standard of living roughly three times higher than before. [6] Especially after the international financial crisis and the European debt crisis, the economic growth of European capitalist countries has been sluggish, unemployment rates have continued to climb, refugee crises have frequently occurred, and social governance problems have proliferated. To protect the interests of the monopoly bourgeoisie, governments have lowered taxes on large enterprises, cut social welfare spending, and privatized social public services, thereby shifting the costs of the crisis onto the middle and working classes. A large number of "losers of globalization" have successively fallen into existential hardship. As of 2018, 180 million citizens in EU countries alone (accounting for 23.5% of the EU population) faced the risk of poverty or social exclusion; among them, 43 million people could not afford a quality meal every other day, which is known as severe material deprivation.
Correspondingly, there is a sense of political loss and existential insecurity. Financial monopoly forces that hold the economic lifeblood and the corrupt political agents they have bought have long manipulated the democratic political system, and the equal conditions for social mobility through talent, education, and hard work for ordinary people have vanished. At the same time, the European heartland has increasingly become a site of rampant activity for extremist terrorist organizations; violent terrorist attacks such as the London "7/7 bombings" and the Manchester suicide bombing have brought huge threats and losses to the lives and property of the European people. Staffan I. Lindberg, a professor of political science at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, pointed out that inequality significantly affects the evolution of the political landscape and social ecology, shrinking democratic space, undermining the degree of democracy (for example, in Croatia, Hungary, and Macedonia), and provoking the continuous development of protest activities and populist movements (for example, in Austria, France, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Sweden). [7] The anger and anxiety of the vulnerable and middle-income groups are precisely what have rapidly fermented and heated up in an extremely unequal environment for survival. They strongly desire to strive for fair rights to survival and development, hoping to change the status quo with the help of various left-wing movements.
II. Surging Waves of Protest: Current Status and Characteristics of Radical Left Social Movements in Europe and the United States
Explosive social inequality and the resulting continuous accumulation of sharp social class contradictions signal that capitalism is mired in a crisis of legitimacy, a crisis of national governance, a crisis of values, and a crisis of faith, and that it has reached an irreversible dead end. The slogans raised by the Western left, such as "Down with Bourgeois Rule," "Kill Capitalism," and "Another World is Possible," as well as the surging large-scale substantive protest demonstrations and the successive large-scale mass strike movements, are a negation of modern financial monopoly capitalism and right-wing populism. Currently, radical left social movements in Europe and the United States exhibit distinctive characteristics: frequent and powerful protest activities, diversified subjects and demands, and stylized online mobilization methods.
First, radical left social movements in Europe and the United States occur with high frequency, on a large scale, and with a wide range of influence. Inspired by the "Arab Spring" in Tunisia, the "Occupy Wall Street" movement against the polarization of wealth broke out in the United States in 2011 and quickly spread to other countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, and France. Because Trump vigorously touted white supremacy, xenophobia, racial discrimination, and hyper-patriarchy, he provoked an explosive growth of anti-capitalist sentiment and large-scale social resistance movements among oppressed groups such as low-income groups and ethnic minorities within the labor class. They flooded the streets to protest the neo-fascist characteristics of the Trump administration. In January 2017, tens of thousands of people participated in women's protest marches in Washington, Los Angeles, New York, and other places in the U.S., protesting the strong misogyny and offensive remarks insulting women revealed by Trump during the campaign, urgently calling on the government to achieve gender equality, emphasize women's rights, stop ethnic division, and resolve social injustice. In April of the same year, the "Tax March" broke out in the United States; tens of thousands of protesters gathered in front of Capitol Hill in Washington on Tax Day to hold a protest march, demanding that President Trump release to the public all the tax returns he had deliberately concealed. In May 2020, massive protest demonstrations sparked by the violent murder of unarmed African-American George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis intensified in the United States. The protest locations quickly spread from Minneapolis to multiple cities such as New York, Detroit, and Los Angeles, eventually evolving into a nationwide resistance movement. Protesters in at least 140 cities across the U.S. rushed into the streets shouting slogans such as "I can't breathe" and "Black Lives Matter" to seek justice for Floyd and protest against institutionalized racial discrimination and police brutality against people of color in the United States. In August 2020, an activity called "March for the Dead" broke out in several U.S. cities, directly targeting the current federal government's ineffective response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the Trump administration's "family separation" immigration policy, new healthcare reform bills, and money-centered actions have all led to a succession of protest demonstrations that show no signs of weakening or subsiding. Today, although Joe Biden, who won the 2020 U.S. election, has replaced Trump in the White House, his neoliberal-neofascist alliance—which reflects the internal interests of the capitalist class—will continue to constitute state power under financial monopoly capital and will still execute policies that serve the interests of large financial monopoly capital. [8]
Therefore, these large-scale mass protests will not vanish into thin air; rather, they will become increasingly frequent as the structural crisis of capitalism and the crisis of political trust deepen.
Similar movements of demonstrations and marches have repeatedly erupted across the European continent. Since the international financial crisis and the European debt crisis, the implementation of fiscal austerity policies in many European countries has exacerbated public anxiety and poverty. Hard-pressed Europeans have held strikes and demonstrations to express their dissatisfaction, triggering the largest Pan-European anti-austerity movement to date, which included the Spanish "Indignados" movement, the UK general strikes, the Italian general strikes, and the Greek anti-austerity protests. In 2016 and 2018, France saw the eruption of the "Nuit debout" (Up All Night) movement—sparked by a draft labor law amendment detrimental to workers' rights—and the "Yellow Vests" movement protesting the French government's fuel tax hikes. These protests strongly articulated the economic and political demands of ordinary people for better social justice and a more rational distribution of social wealth; underlying them were long-standing major problems and maladies within French society. In 2020, influenced by the George Floyd incident in the United States, several European countries including the UK, Italy, Germany, and France experienced protests against police brutality and racial discrimination. Numerous protesters gathered around US embassies holding placards such as "No Justice, No Peace," "White Supremacy is a Virus," and "White Silence is Violence" in solidarity with American demonstrators. Against the backdrop of the worsening COVID-19 pandemic, these anti-discrimination protests continued to escalate, expanding to an unprecedented scope and scale. The focus of the protests also shifted from the incident itself toward their own internal structural racism and inequality in a broader sense.
Secondly, the participating subjects of Western radical left-wing movements are complex, their goals and demands are broad, and their discourse systems are diverse. Since the 1960s, developed capitalist countries have experienced material abundance and domestic political stability. As the proportion of the middle class in society increased, "New Social Movements" emerged, focusing on human rights issues such as gender equality, racial equality, ecological protection, religious freedom, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ (sexual minority) rights. This movement significantly deviated from the traditional political movement model centered on class struggle; it no longer focused primarily on material issues such as economic well-being, nor did it rely on the social base of the working class or the methods of political struggle. Instead, it was a non-violent movement formed through the construction of identity politics among diverse participating groups of different strata, genders, and races. In essence, it consisted of movements by the Western middle class and left-wing social movements challenging the capitalist system.
After the drastic changes in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Western left-wing parties drew a clear line between themselves and the Soviet bloc, gradually diluting their left-wing ideological color and further abandoning the traditional path of working-class political struggle. However, following the structural crisis of capitalism in the early 21st century, the elite class received support from government bailout policies and reaped enormous profits, while large numbers of the middle class went bankrupt. This caused their living standards and social status to plummet, and their sense of dignity and superiority to vanish. The phenomenon of "re-proletarianization" has become increasingly prominent, leading to intense questioning and challenges to the legitimacy of the capitalist economic system, political leadership, and ideology. As the logic of capital penetrates all aspects of society, class contradictions and conflicts have intensified and escalated once again; traditional class consciousness is gradually awakening, and demands for economic welfare have returned to the public eye.
However, this does not mean that diverse movement demands based on identity politics have been replaced by class discourse. Rather, identity discourse and class discourse coexist, making the discourse system of Western radical left-wing social movements richer and more diverse. This has formed a left-wing social resistance movement where vulnerable groups who suffer from discrimination or unjust treatment—including industrial workers, feminists, ethnic minorities, and the LGBTQ community—defend their own rights and express demands across economic, political, and cultural fields. For example, the Greek strikes and the US teachers' strikes primarily utilize class discourse, while the "Black Lives Matter" and "#MeToo" movements primarily utilize identity politics discourse. Generally speaking, the radical left-wing movements in the West in the 21st century can be seen as a close combination of the actual contradictions of neoliberal capitalism with class and identity discourses. They are movements where grassroots-led strikes and spontaneously formed protests from all walks of life jointly impact a society of "crony capitalism" [9].
Finally, in the era of Big Data, the mobilization methods of Western radical left-wing social movements have become increasingly networked, and their organizational structures more flattened. Traditional socialist movements were initiated and maintained through physical organizations using various rallies as platforms for communication. However, new communication media in the internet age have broken the spatio-temporal constraints that hindered the development of social movements in the pre-digital era, allowing participants to rapidly share real-time information during mobilization and protest activities. This has played a vital role in strengthening democratic consultation, increasing participation, and enhancing the influence of current Western radical left-wing social movements. Manuel Castells pointed out that the organizational structure of the internet can be viewed as a specific kind of decentralized, leaderless, and polysemic political platform. It allows marginalized individuals, ignored in mainstream politics, to express their experiences and needs within this structure and then freely form online alliances with like-minded people.
Taking the French "Yellow Vests" movement as an example, the starting point of the incident was a video posted on Facebook by a woman expressing anger at the fuel tax hike and government incompetence and corruption. Subsequently, this video achieved "nuclear fission-style" [10] spread on social media and resonated strongly with millions of people. Ordinary people from all walks of life expressed their interests and demands on online platforms; discussion groups on related topics and calls for offline activities "sprang up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain" [11]. This led to street protests and demonstrations sweeping across France and spreading to other European countries such as Germany, Italy, Belgium, Greece, and the Netherlands, attracting widespread international attention. Notably, unlike the protests organized by various trade unions common in France in the past, this massive wave of "Yellow Vests" protests had neither a fixed mobilization system and stable organizational structure, nor a clear initiator or national leader. Everything from the initiation and gathering of the movement to strategy formulation and action coordination was completed on social media discussion pages; there was no obvious hierarchical distinction among participants, and communication was more horizontal. Additionally, since every ordinary person on social media can become a creator or provider of different events, news, and topics, the network platform acts not only as the initial carrier of the entire affair but also as a "catalyst" during its development. In May 2020, after the video of the brutal "kneeling murder" of the African-American man George Floyd by a white American police officer was exposed on online platforms, it also quickly caused an uproar. Overnight, topics with the hashtag "Black Lives Matter" flooded major social networking sites, and within a short period, tens of thousands of protesters united and launched a vigorous anti-racial discrimination demonstration. During the protests, participants used the broad platform of digital technology to update the progress of the movement in a timely manner, conduct intense discussions, adjust struggle strategies, and issue action instructions, posing a strong challenge to institutional racism in the United States.
III. Difficulty in Breaking Through Internal and External Constraints: The Practical Dilemmas of Western Radical Left-wing Social Movements
In an era where neoliberal ideology is fraught with crises, although the relatively active Western radical left-wing movements have to some extent influenced social sentiment and government policy tendencies, their actual political achievements and room for development remain very limited. Due to the constraints of political and economic interest networks in current Western societies and the internal limitations of left-wing organizations, various powerful left-wing resistance movements often fall into silence shortly after erupting. Their demands for social fairness, justice, and narrowing the gap between rich and poor have failed to be realized. Facts have proven that without fundamentally eradicating the system of financial monopoly capitalism, various left-wing social movements that merely "mend and patch" [12] a riddled capitalism will find it difficult to change the already solidified interest patterns.
Firstly, as the structural crisis of capitalism further deepens, Western radical left-wing social movements have shown higher levels of activity, but they are simultaneously marginalized and suppressed by powerful far-right forces. Currently, the majority of Western countries are governed by right-wing populists, and the number of countries ruled by left-wing parties is near an all-time low. This is evidenced by the remarkable achievements of European right-wing parties in domestic and European Parliament elections in recent years. In the 2019 UK general election, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party who had long adhered to a left-wing political line and radical left positions, suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Conservative leader Boris Johnson. Upon taking office, Johnson immediately set about forming the most right-wing British cabinet since the Margaret Thatcher era, purging key figures from the previous government of Theresa May. In the same year's Greek general election, the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) led by Alexis Tsipras was ousted by the center-right New Democracy party. In the second Spanish general election of 2019, the Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) failed to win an absolute majority and had to seek allies to form a coalition government; the vote share of the "Podemos" party, led by Marxist scholar Pablo Iglesias, dropped to 12.8%, its worst result in a European election since its founding. Meanwhile, emerging far-right parties have grown in strength; the Vox party, which holds political views similar to those of Trump and Le Pen, won 52 seats in one go, leaping to become the third-largest party in parliament. Besides this, right-wing forces are also rising rapidly in other European countries such as Hungary, Austria, Estonia, and Finland. Even in the 2020 US Democratic presidential nomination process, the radical left-wing figure Bernie Sanders was unable to maintain the strong momentum of four years prior; instead, he was "jointly strangled" by the Democratic establishment and swept out, dejectedly ending his presidential campaign. Simultaneously, many urban and educated voters in Western countries with proportional representation have successively abandoned the social-democratic movements of the Green or Liberal parties.
The rapid rise of right-wing populism has squeezed the living space and popular base of socialist and left-wing forces, with large numbers of working-class voters shifting from left-wing parties to the far-right camp. After the drastic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, under the dual impact of New Social Movements and neoliberalism, Tony Blair’s "New Labour" movement in the UK accepted the "Third Way" proposed by Anthony Giddens to "go beyond left and right," thereby leading the trend of Western left-wing parties moving to the right. Western left-wing parties have largely abandoned class politics, choosing to distance themselves from the needs of labor groups and the grassroots level, and have continuously moved toward post-materialist values to attract middle-class votes. For example, in the political realignment after 1968, the US Democratic Party had already moved away from the white working class, forming a value consensus and organizational alliance with the middle class. Consequently, the lower strata of the working class lost their traditional political spokespeople. Meanwhile, to win blue-collar votes and shed their status as marginal minor parties, Western right-wing populist parties actively adjusted their political mobilization strategies. They mixed national issues with class issues, packaging them into a new "national-populist" issue that could mobilize both the labor class and the "people" of the nation. This mobilization has a very broad scope and has attracted the votes of the majority of bottom-level workers. As it stands, capitalism still occupies a dominant position in the world system; the pattern of "strong capital and weak socialism" [13] is difficult to fundamentally reverse in the short term. Any left-wing movement that challenges the existing economic order or power system will be strongly suppressed and divided by right-wing forces.
Secondly, the difficulty in bridgeable internal divisions is a major constraint on the development and growth of radical Left forces in Europe and the United States. While broad participation from different classes, ethnicities, and sectors has gathered social strength for Western radical Left movements, the complex and diverse social backgrounds, pluralistic values and ideologies, and wide-ranging interest demands of their members also carry the hidden danger of organizational disintegration. On the one hand, these movements are not social resistance movements guided by Marxism; rather, they are social movements criticizing the demerits of capitalism that encompass diverse ideologies such as democratic socialism, Trotskyism, and Eurocommunism. The views and positions of participants on key political issues contain contradictions or are even diametrically opposed. On the other hand, the frequently erupting protests, demonstrations, and strikes are not based on specific class interests tied to the transformation of economic relations, but are merely aimed at seeking corresponding adjustments and reforms of certain government policies within the capitalist framework. These include both welfare demands calling for the narrowing of the wealth gap and the improvement of social security, as well as cultural demands emphasizing environmental protection, pacifism, women's rights, and the rights of ethnic minorities. The characteristic of decentralized struggle themes is very evident. The lack of unity in ideological positions and objective demands inevitably leads to divergences in value goals regarding action strategies, and may even lead to antagonism and division within the same protest group. This lack of internal cohesion has greatly weakened the overall strength of radical Left movements.
Lastly, loose and disordered organization, weak methods of struggle, and a lack of constructive programs are obvious obstacles to the vigorous development of radical Left social movements in Europe and the United States. In the era of internet technological innovation, although various social networking sites and social media have become important bridges and links for participants in radical Left movements to share information, formulate plans, and coordinate actions, the close integration of virtual networks and social movements also brings many drawbacks. These include a lack of fixed mobilization systems, stable organizational structures, loyal members, and strong national leadership within radical Left organizations and movements. Furthermore, various Left-wing movements and protest demonstrations all adopt non-violent forms of resistance within the scope of legal struggle under capitalism. No matter how radical the participants' attitudes may be, they have not taken powerful actions to fundamentally subvert the capitalist system. This is completely different from the working-class political movements that depend on physical organizational links, possess unified charters and programs, adopt the methods of violent and bloody revolution, and maintain a high degree of organization and discipline. More importantly, while the radical Left vigorously condemns the logic of capital monopoly, political hegemonic control, and ideological penetration of neoliberal capitalism, it has failed to propose a constructive alternative social model. For example, some Left-wing scholars have proposed the "Another World is Possible" program, yet their political definition of this "new world" is vague, their conceptualization of the blueprint for an ideal society is too simplistic, and most of their practical schemes for transcending neoliberalism remain at a metaphysical level. Generally speaking, today's radical Left social movements in Europe and the United States direct the spearhead of their struggle in practice toward the various ills of capitalism. However, due to the internal looseness of Left-wing organizations, participation groups—after being forcibly evicted or suppressed by the police and military—quickly disperse like "vagrants." Therefore, what appears to be a surging wave of protest is actually a pile of loose sand [14] that cannot withstand the wind and rain; it has failed to coalesce a consensus in the midst of hardship to form an unstoppable revolutionary political force.
IV. The Pan-Left United Front: Developmental Trends in Radical Left Social Movements in Europe and the United States
As things currently stand, Left-wing movements confined to trivial issues or those irrelevant to the transformation of the political and economic order are clearly in a weak position. If Left-wing movements remain only at the level of theoretical criticism or street protests, acting only as isolated and decentralized protest forces without seeking socialism or relying on the integral struggle of the working class, it will be difficult for them to achieve much in the struggle to change the existing order.
Therefore, the only strategy capable of overcoming the rule of extreme power at present is to maximize the unity of all classes and progressive social forces whose interests run counter to those of the transnational opposition. This means forming a pan-Left united front against the capitalist system and order, led by the working class and joined by various progressive forces, to jointly carry out organized struggle, reform, or revolution.
In recent years, the ruling classes in most European and American countries have heavily funded right-wing think tanks and far-right political movements, and brought religious fundamentalists into the electoral field to consolidate the position of the big monopoly bourgeoisie. They have vigorously incited racism and sexism to divide the working class and deprive it of its capacity for struggle, and have wantonly played up a cultural atmosphere of cynicism and fatalism to weaken the class consciousness and fighting spirit of the working class. Although the labor movements in European and American countries face an extremely difficult legal and institutional environment, in order to break free from the heavy shackles of capitalism, they must unite to build consensus and unify their diverse working-class base. In the modern sense, the working class refers to the vast group of wage laborers existing in contemporary capitalist society. After the structural crisis of capitalism in the early 21st century, the phenomenon of the "re-proletarianization of the middle class" has become prominent within European and American capitalist countries, leading to a rapid rise in the number of the proletarian group. According to different classification standards, it can be divided into skilled and unskilled workers; white-collar and blue-collar workers; employed, underemployed, and unemployed workers; organized and unorganized workers; and workers of different genders and age stages. They all belong to the group of wage laborers who do not own the means of production and make a living by selling their labor power. At the same time, we must see that under conditions where the economic, social, and class structures of capitalism have undergone complex changes, the composition of the working class has also undergone complex and profound changes. The working class is not the kind of uniform, interest-aligned, and completely homogenized social group understood through a one-sided or superficial lens, but a vast social group with complex membership, internal stratification, and complex or even conflicting specific individual interests.
This means that only when the working class replaces individualistic values with collectivist values and forms a unified sense of class identity and a clear class consciousness can it aggregate a powerful class force to carry out effective struggle. Class consciousness and class identity arise from the miserable living conditions caused by capitalist exploitation and oppression; they also sprout from the theoretical education on the proletarian struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat actively carried out by socialists; however, most importantly, they are formed in the practice of the labor movement. This shows that labor movements such as strikes, demonstrations, product boycotts, and lobbying for labor legislation play an extremely important role in raising the awareness of the working class and awakening its class consciousness. Only when a complete class consciousness and socialist consciousness are established can the working class, as the main force for transforming society, most thoroughly fulfill its revolutionary role.
The working class itself needs to unite, but it cannot be the sole force of struggle within the pan-Left alliance. Because the capitalist ruling class possesses enormous economic, political, and military power and implements highly controlled extortion and oppression against its own people—coupled with the fact that trade unions or labor movements cannot satisfy all the critical needs of workers—the working class needs to form alliances and join hands with other progressive social movement forces to promote each other and jointly form a powerful check on capitalism. Lower-level Left-wing movements such as street protests, "occupations" of squares, and demonstrations can only be transformed into a material force that thoroughly transforms society if they are closely integrated with the labor movement and coalesce the protesting crowds around high-level political goals. The most important allies of the working class are those groups that suffer special oppression due to capitalism. This special oppression is mainly extreme discrimination and excessive exploitation formed on the basis of race, nationality, gender, or age. Groups such as women, ethnic minorities, the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities, and the mentally ill all face one or even multiple forms of oppression. This universal experience of being oppressed lays a broad mass foundation for establishing a unified pan-Left alliance. Within the ranks of this massive pan-Left alliance, the working class must also continuously strengthen its political, organizational, and ideological building to form a solid and stable alliance of the main socialist forces. Although the expansion of the scale of pan-Left organizations, as well as the enhancement of the revolutionary nature and cohesion of their ranks, is destined to require a long-term and arduous process of exploration, the general historical trend of socialism replacing capitalism will not change.
Overall, the pervasive inequality of neoliberalism is an organized plunder carried out by the ruling elite. It has become a form of organized state violence, germinating the seeds of ethnic cleansing, white supremacy, militarism, and a culture of cruelty. Pervasive inequality also fosters a political premise that some people are disposable, their lives are not valued, and their existence is a burden—particularly for those racist elites driven by the motives of profit-seeking and capital accumulation. Therefore, vulnerable groups such as the elderly, the disabled, undocumented immigrants, and people of color have become objects of extreme contempt for the financial capital that promotes mechanisms of class division, ethnic cleansing, mass incarceration, and extreme exclusion in a society permeated by an atmosphere of death. Amidst the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exacerbated social inequality, protesters of various identities have clearly realized the hypocrisy of neoliberal capitalist society and the necessity of uniting for thoroughgoing change.
Since the start of the New Era, the rapid advancement of the digital revolution and information technology has provided new media platforms and mobilization tools for radical Left social movements in Europe and the United States. However, these movements still face the deep-seated dilemma of how to bridge the gap between "online mobilization" and "offline political efficacy." While the Internet has lowered the threshold for collective action, it has also led to a fragmentation of movement demands and a lack of centralized organizational leadership. In the face of the complex evolution of the international political landscape, the radical Left must continue to uphold the fundamentals and break new ground [15] by integrating the core tenets of historical materialism with the specific realities of contemporary Western capitalism.
The development of these movements reflects the intensifying internal contradictions of the global capitalist system. In recent years, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, the erosion of the middle class, and the alienation of labor under the digital economy have provided the objective conditions for a resurgence of radicalism. Yet, without a scientific theoretical guide and a disciplined organizational form, these movements often struggle to transcend the limits of "spontaneity" to become a conscious force for systemic transformation. As scholars at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) have noted, the future of the Western Left depends on whether it can effectively integrate the interests of the traditional working class with those of the "new" precarious classes emerging from the digital age [16].
Faced with the rise of right-wing populism and the restructuring of the global productive forces, the radical Left in Europe and the Unites States is seeking a new path toward Chinese-path modernization [17]—not by duplicating China's model, but by drawing inspiration from China's success in balancing economic development with social stability. As the anti-corruption struggle and self-revolution [18] of the Communist Party of China demonstrate, the vitality of a political movement lies in its ability to maintain its original aspiration and founding mission while undergoing constant internal renewal. Only by overcoming the "Four Winds" of Western democratic decay—paralytic bureaucracy and elite detachment—can radical movements truly represent the people and contribute to the building of a community with a shared future for humanity.