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 capture high monopoly profits on a global scale, the gradient transfer [1] of industrial structures toward developing nations during capital expansion has created competitors for labor-intensive industries. This has led to the "industrial hollowing out" and "deindustrialization" of manufacturing in developed Western countries, thereby creating a globalized elite class of plutocrats alongside domestically vulnerable economic groups. Particularly after the outbreak of the international financial crisis, the governments of Western countries stood on the same ground as the financial monopoly capital elites; government policy gravitated toward bailing out financial monopoly capital while shifting the bitter fruits of the crisis onto the ordinary populace. People have gradually realized that financial monopoly capitalism is a developmental mode aimed at the seizure of vast wealth by a minority elite class of plutocrats enjoying market power, at the expense of the economic, political, and social rights of the middle and lower classes, and the dignity of the poor. Driven by the interests of distributive injustice, many groups with declining incomes have exhibited various forms of dissatisfaction and resistance toward the elite class. This negative sentiment eventually converged into a surging wave of civic protest, thereby drowning the hypocrisy and lies of capitalism in the torrent of the movement.
I. Explosive Inequality: Background and Causes of Active Radical Left Social Movements in Europe and America
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." They noted that "the strong trample the weak underfoot; a handful of the strong, the capitalists, seize everything, while the great mass of the weak, the poor, can barely eke out a living." Lenin also maintained that with the continuous development of capitalism, "enormous wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small number of capitalists, while the masses of the people are turned into propertyless people." The sharp 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 regional development; consequently, those monopoly oligarchs who own the means of production become the de facto rulers of the national economy, political power, ideology, and social life in capitalist states.
As the bellwether of capitalist nations, the United States maintains a degree of inequality that remains the highest among developed countries; 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 the people at the bottom of society are trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty from which they cannot save themselves. In 2018, the top 20% of the U.S. population accounted for 52% of the national gross income, with an average household income of $233,895; the wealthiest among the rich (the top 5%) received 23% of the national gross income, with an average household income of $416,520; meanwhile, the bottom 20% of earners accounted for only 3.1% of the national gross income, with an average household income of $13,775. 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, 12 American super-billionaires—represented by Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk—saw their valuations grow explosively, with their total net worth increasing by as much as 40%, exceeding $1 trillion in total wealth. This pandemic verified that the "trickle-down effect" [2] preached by neoliberalism is nothing more than empty talk: on one side, the stock prices of super-business giants advance triumphantly; on the other, low-income groups suffer the unemployment, hunger, and death brought by the pandemic. Yet the government turns a blind eye to the chasm between the rich and the poor and remains indifferent to the safety of the people’s lives and their living conditions. This operational mechanism of "capital supreme" and "government absence" inevitably pushes social contradictions accumulated over decades and profound social inequalities to a tipping point, accelerating the society’s move toward political polarization and confrontation.
Furthermore, under the ravages of the pandemic, long-standing issues in American society—such as inequality in life and health, inequality of opportunity, and racial inequality—have become increasingly prominent. Tens of millions of vulnerable people have been forced to face deteriorating health, a dearth of jobs, poor living conditions, and radical racial discrimination, while the super-rich can retreat to private healthcare hospitals, luxury bunkers, and remote vacation homes to enjoy the most abundant resources. Low-income groups and ethnic minorities have been more severely impacted by COVID-19 due to poor underlying health conditions and low insurance coverage; however, the U.S. government took no effective measures to provide relief, causing widespread social dissatisfaction and drawing harsh criticism from public opinion. The role of the bourgeois state is to defend the interests of the entire ruling class, utilizing centralized power and state finances to protect large monopoly enterprises from the impact of crises and suppress the people’s resistance. 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 the fact that the U.S. is actually a suffocatingly and extremely unequal society; in reality, however, this inequality preceded the pandemic and is a long-standing, pervasive phenomenon that exists alongside the structural system of capitalism. The American people, plunged into 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 for them to vent their indignation and seek fairness and justice.
Although the degree of inequality in Europe is significantly lower than in the United States, inequality has also intensified in most European countries 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 earners in Europe grew by 30%–40%, while the income growth rate of the "European middle-income group" was only about 10 percentage points higher than those of the poor. This stands in sharp contrast to the significant surge in the income growth rate of the wealthy: the income of the top 0.1% of European citizens grew by more than 100%, and the income growth rate of the top 0.001% of the super-rich even reached as high as 200%, enjoying living standards roughly three times higher than before. Especially following the international financial crisis and the European debt crisis, European capitalist countries have faced sluggish economic growth, persistently high unemployment rates, frequent refugee crises, and a multitude of social governance problems. Yet, to protect the interests of the monopoly bourgeoisie, governments reduced taxes on large enterprises, cut social welfare spending, and privatized social public services, thereby transferring the costs of the crisis to 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 (23.5% of the EU population) were at risk of poverty or social exclusion, of whom 43 million could not afford a quality meal every other day—a condition referred to as severe material deprivation.
Correspondingly, there is a sense of political loss and existential insecurity. Financial monopoly forces—holding the economic lifeblood—and the corrupt political agents they have bought off have long manipulated the democratic political system; the equal conditions for social mobility that ordinary people once achieved through talent, education, and hard work have vanished. At the same time, the European heartland has increasingly become a site of rampant activity by extremist terrorist organizations; violent terrorist attacks, such as the London July 7 bombings and the Manchester suicide bombing, have brought enormous 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, has pointed out that inequality affects the evolution of the political landscape and social ecosystem to a significant degree, 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). The anger and anxiety of the middle and vulnerable groups are rapidly fermenting and heating up within an extremely unequal survival environment; they strongly desire to fight for fair rights to survival and development, hoping to use various left-wing movements to change the status quo.
II. Surging Waves of Protest: Current Situation and Characteristics of Radical Left Social Movements in Europe and America
Explosive social inequality and the resulting sharp accumulation of 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 entered a dead end from which there is no turning back. The Western Left has put forward slogans such as "Down with Bourgeois Rule," "Kill Capitalism," and "Another World is Possible," and has launched massive substantive protest demonstrations and successive large-scale mass strike movements as a negation of modern financial monopoly capitalism and right-wing populism. Currently, radical left social movements in Europe and America exhibit distinct characteristics: protest activities are massive in momentum, the subjects and demands are diversified, and mobilization methods are networked.
First, radical left social movements in Europe and America break out with high frequency, involve large-scale protests, and have a wide range of radiation. 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, Britain, Spain, and France. Because Trump blatantly advocated white supremacy, xenophobia, racial discrimination, and hyper-masculinity, he provoked an explosive growth of anti-capitalist sentiment and a large-scale outbreak of social resistance movements among oppressed groups such as low-income earners in the labor class and ethnic minorities. They surged onto the streets like a tide 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 United States, protesting the intense misogyny and offensive remarks insulting women revealed by Trump during his campaign, and strongly calling on the government to achieve gender equality, prioritize 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 demand that President Trump release all his tax returns, which he had deliberately concealed from the public. In May 2020, massive protest demonstrations sparked by the violent murder of unarmed African American George Floyd by a white policeman 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 America took to the streets shouting slogans like "I Can't Breathe" and "Black Lives Matter" to seek justice for Floyd and protest against systemic racial discrimination and police violence against people of color in the United States. In August 2020, activities named "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. In addition, the Trump administration's "family separation" immigration policy, new health care reform bills, and "money-first" actions have all led to a succession of protest demonstrations with 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—reflecting the internal interests of the capitalist class—will continue to constitute the state power under financial monopoly capital, and the execution of policies serving the interests of large financial monopoly capital remains unchanged. Therefore, these large-scale mass protests will not disappear; rather, they will become more frequent as the structural crisis of capitalism and the crisis of political trust deepen.
Identical protest movements have also erupted repeatedly 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 European citizens have held strikes and demonstrations to express their dissatisfaction, giving rise to the largest pan-European anti-austerity protest movement to date, including the "Indignados" [3] movement in Spain, the general strikes in the United Kingdom and Italy, and anti-austerity protests in Greece. In 2016 and 2018, France witnessed the "Nuit debout" (Up All Night) movement—triggered by a draft labor law amendment detrimental to workers' rights—and the "Yellow Vests" movement protesting gasoline tax hikes. These protests strongly expressed the economic and political demands of ordinary people for better social justice and a more rational distribution of social wealth, hinting at long-standing major problems and maladies within French society. In 2020, influenced by the George Floyd incident in the United States, protests against police violence and racial discrimination occurred in several European countries, including the UK, Italy, Germany, and France. Numerous protesters gathered around US embassies, holding slogans such as "No Justice, No Peace," "White Supremacy is a Virus," and "White Silence is Violence" to support American demonstrators. Against the backdrop of the worsening COVID-19 pandemic, these anti-discrimination demonstrations escalated continuously, expanding to an unprecedented scale and scope, as the focus shifted from the incident itself toward internal structural racism and broader inequalities.
Secondly, the participants in Western radical left movements are complex, their goals are broad, and their discourse systems are diverse. Since the 1960s, as developed capitalist countries experienced material abundance and domestic political stability, the proportion of the middle class increased. New social movements emerged, focusing on human rights issues such as gender equality, racial equality, ecological protection, religious freedom, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ rights. These movements deviated significantly from the traditional political movement model centered on class struggle; they no longer focused primarily on material issues like economic well-being, nor did they rely on the social base of the working class or the methods of political struggle. Instead, they were non-violent movements formed through the construction of identity politics among diverse participants across different strata, genders, and races. In essence, they were left-wing social movements of the Western middle class 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 distanced themselves from the Soviet bloc, gradually diluted their ideological coloring, and further abandoned the traditional path of working-class political struggle. However, following the structural crisis of capitalism in the early 21st century, the elite class benefited immensely from government bailouts, while many in the middle class went bankrupt, causing their living standards and social status to plummet and their sense of dignity and superiority to vanish. The phenomenon of "re-proletarianization" [4] became increasingly prominent, leading to strong questioning and challenges to the legitimacy of the capitalist economic system, political leadership, and ideology. As the logic of capital permeated all aspects of society, class contradictions and conflicts intensified once again, traditional class consciousness gradually reawakened, and demands for economic welfare returned to the public eye. This does not mean, however, that diverse movements based on identity politics were replaced by class discourse. Instead, identity discourse and class discourse coexist, making the discourse system of Western radical left social movements richer and more diverse. This has formed a left-wing social resistance movement where disadvantaged groups—including industrial workers, feminists, ethnic minorities, and the LGBTQ community—defend their rights and express demands across economic, political, and cultural spheres. For example, the Greek strike movements and the US teachers' strikes primarily use class discourse, while the "Black Lives Matter" and "MeToo" movements primarily use identity politics discourse. Overall, the radical left movements in the 21st-century West can be seen as a close integration of the actual contradictions of neoliberal capitalism with class and identity discourses—a movement where grassroots-led strikes and spontaneous protests from all sectors of society jointly strike against the society of crony capitalism.
Finally, in the era of big data, the trends of networked mobilization and flattened organizational structures in Western radical left movements have become increasingly evident. Traditional socialist movements were initiated and sustained through physical organizations using various assemblies as communication platforms. However, the new media of the internet era have broken the spatial and temporal limitations of the pre-digital age, allowing participants to rapidly share real-time information during mobilization and protests. This has played an important role in strengthening democratic consultation, increasing participation, and expanding the influence of current Western radical left movements. Manuel Castells pointed out that the organizational structure of the internet can be viewed as a unique decentralized, leaderless, and polysemic political platform. it allows marginalized individuals ignored by 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 was a woman posting a video on Facebook expressing anger at the fuel tax hike and government incompetence and corruption. Subsequently, the video spread through social media like a nuclear fission reaction, resonating strongly with millions. Ordinary people from all walks of life expressed their interests on online platforms; discussion groups on related topics and calls for offline activities sprouted up like bamboo shoots after rain. This led to street protests sweeping across France and spreading to other European countries such as Germany, Italy, Belgium, Greece, and the Netherlands, attracting widespread international attention. Notably, unlike previous protests in France organized by various trade unions, this massive wave of "Yellow Vest" protests had neither a fixed mobilization system nor a stable organizational structure, and no clear initiator or national leader. Everything from initiation and assembly to strategy formulation and action coordination was completed on social media discussion pages. There was no obvious hierarchy among participants, and communication remained horizontal. Furthermore, because every ordinary person on social media can be a creator or provider of different events, news, and topics, online platforms serve not only as the initial carrier of the movement but also as a "catalyst" during its development. In May 2020, after the video of the brutal "kneeling kill" of George Floyd by a white American police officer was exposed online, it quickly caused a sensation. Overnight, hashtags related to "Black Lives Matter" flooded major social networking sites, and tens of thousands of protesters gathered in a short time to launch vigorous anti-racism demonstrations. During the protests, participants used digital platforms to update the movement's progress in real-time, conduct intense discussions, adjust struggle strategies, and issue action instructions, posing a strong challenge to systemic racism in the United States.
III. Difficulty in Breaking Through Internal and External Constraints: The Practical Dilemmas of Western Radical Left Social Movements
In an era where neoliberal ideology is fraught with crises, although relatively active Western radical left movements have influenced social sentiment and government policy trends to some extent, their actual political impact and developmental space remain very limited. Due to the constraints of political-economic interest networks in current Western societies and the internal limitations of left-wing organizations, various momentous left-wing resistance movements often fall silent shortly after erupting. Their demands for social equity, justice, and closing the wealth gap have failed to materialize. Facts have proven that if various left-wing social movements do not fundamentally uproot the system of financial monopoly capitalism, but merely "patch up" [5] the riddled fabric of capitalism, it will be difficult to change the long-solidified pattern of interests.
First, as the structural crisis of capitalism deepens, Western radical left social movements show higher activity, but they are simultaneously squeezed and suppressed by powerful far-right forces. Currently, in most Western countries, right-wing populists hold power, and the number of countries ruled by left-wing parties is near historical lows. The remarkable achievements of European right-wing parties in recent domestic and European Parliament elections are evidence of this. In the 2019 UK general election, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party who long adhered to a left-wing political line and radical left positions, suffered a crushing defeat to Conservative leader Boris Johnson. After taking office, Johnson immediately formed the most right-wing British cabinet since the Margaret Thatcher era, purging key figures from the government of former Prime Minister Theresa May. In the same year's Greek elections, the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) led by Alexis Tsipras was ousted by the center-right New Democracy party. In the 2019 Spanish second general election, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party failed to secure 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 stronger; the Vox party, which shares political views similar to Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, won 52 seats, leaping to become the third-largest party in parliament. In addition, right-wing forces are rising rapidly in other European countries such as Hungary, Austria, Estonia, and Finland. Even in the 2020 US Democratic presidential nomination process, radical left figure Bernie Sanders failed to maintain his high momentum from four years prior; instead, he was collectively "strangled" by the Democratic establishment, swept out and forced to gloomily end his presidential campaign. Simultaneously, many urban and educated voters in Western proportional representation countries have abandoned the social-democratic movements of Green or Liberal parties.
The rapid rise of right-wing populism has squeezed the survival space and mass base of socialist and left-wing forces, with many 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," leading a trend of rightward shifts among Western left-wing parties. Western left-wing parties successively abandoned class politics, choosing to focus away from the needs of labor groups and the grassroots, and continuously aligned with post-materialist values to attract middle-class votes. For example, as early as the political realignment after 1968, the US Democratic Party left the white working class to reach a value consensus and organizational alliance with the middle class. Consequently, the social bottom of the working class lost its traditional political spokesperson. At the same time, to win blue-collar votes and shed their status as marginal minor parties, Western right-wing populist parties have actively adjusted their political mobilization strategies. They mix national and class issues, packaging them into new national-populist issues that can mobilize both the labor class and the nation's people. Their mobilization range is very wide, attracting the votes of most bottom-level workers. At present, capitalism still dominates the world system, and the pattern of "strong capital, weak socialism" is difficult to fundamentally reverse in the short term. Any left-wing movement that challenges the existing economic order and power system will be strongly suppressed and divided by right-wing forces.
Secondly, the difficulty of bridging internal divisions serves as a major constraint on the growth and strengthening of radical Left forces in Europe and the United States. While the broad participation of different classes, ethnicities, and sectors has gathered social strength for radical Left social movements, the complex and diverse social backgrounds, pluralistic values and ideologies, and wide-ranging interest demands of the movement members also harbor hidden dangers of fragmentation for radical Left organizations. On one hand, these movements are not social resistance movements guided by Marxism; rather, they are social movements critiquing the ills of capitalism that encompass diverse ideologies such as democratic socialism, Trotskyism, and Eurocommunism. Participants hold conflicting or even diametrically opposed views and positions on key political issues. On the other hand, the frequently erupting protests, demonstrations, and strikes are often not based on specific class interests tied to the transformation of economic relations. Instead, they merely seek adjustments and reforms of certain government policies within the capitalist framework. These include welfare demands calling for the narrowing of the gap between rich and poor 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 highly evident. The lack of unity in ideological positions and objective demands inevitably leads to divergences in value goals regarding action strategies, and may even cause antagonism and splits within the same protest group. This lack of internal cohesion has greatly weakened the overall strength of the radical Left movement.
Finally, loose and disorderly organization, weak methods of struggle, and a lack of constructive programs are clear obstacles to the flourishing of radical Left social movements in Europe and the United States. In the era of technological innovation and the internet, while major 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 radical Left organizations and movements lacking fixed mobilization systems, stable organizational structures, loyal members, and strong national leaders. Furthermore, various types of Leftist movements and protests are conducted through non-violent means of resistance within the scope of legal capitalist struggle. No matter how radical the participants' attitudes may be, they have not taken powerful actions to fundamentally subvert the capitalist system. This is entirely different from the working-class political movements that rely on physical organizations, possess unified charters and programs, employ violent and bloody revolutionary methods, and exhibit a high degree of organization and discipline. More importantly, although the radical Left vigorously condemns the logic of capital monopoly, political hegemonic control, and ideological infiltration of neoliberal capitalism, it has failed to propose a constructive alternative social model. For example, some Leftist scholars have proposed the "Another World is Possible" [6] scheme, yet the political definition of this "new world" remains blurry, the blueprint for an ideal society is overly simplistic, and practical solutions to transcend neoliberalism mostly remain at the metaphysical level. In general, today's radical Left social movements in Europe and the United States direct their spearhead of struggle at various defects of capitalism in practice. However, due to the loose internal organization of Leftist groups, the participating masses often scatter like "vagrants" [7] shortly after being forcibly evicted and suppressed by the police and military. Therefore, what appears to be a surging tide of protest is actually a tray of loose sand [8] that cannot withstand the wind and rain, failing to forge a consensus in the face of hardship to form an unstoppable revolutionary political force.
IV. The Pan-Left United Front: The Development Trend of Radical Left Social Movements in Europe and the United States
Judging from the current situation, Leftist movements confined to trivial issues or unrelated to the transformation of the political and economic order are clearly in a weak position. If the Leftist movement remains only at the level of theoretical critique or street protest, acting only as isolated and scattered protest forces without seeking socialism or relying on the integral struggle of the working class, it will be difficult for it to achieve much in the struggle to change the existing order. Therefore, the only strategy capable of defeating the rule of extreme power today is to maximize the unity of all classes and progressive social forces whose interests run counter to those of the transnational opposition, forming a Pan-Left United Front [9] led by the working class. This front, joined by various progressive forces, would oppose the capitalist system and order while jointly carrying 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, as well as brought religious fundamentalists into the electoral field to consolidate the position of the big monopoly bourgeoisie. They vigorously incite racism and sexism to divide the working class and render it incapable of struggle, while aggressively promoting a cultural atmosphere of cynicism and fatalism to weaken the class consciousness and fighting spirit of the working class. Although the labor movements in Europe and the United States face an extremely difficult legal and institutional environment, in order to break free from the heavy shackles of capitalism, it is essential for them to unite, build consensus, and unify their diverse working-class base. The working class in the modern sense refers to the vast group of wage laborers existing in contemporary capitalist society. Following 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 increase in the number of the proletarian group. According to different definition criteria, it can be divided into skilled and unskilled workers, white-collar and blue-collar workers, employed, underemployed, and unemployed workers, and organized and unorganized workers of different genders and ages. 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 recognize that under the complex changes in the capitalist economic, social, and class structures, the composition of the working class has also undergone complex and profound changes. The working class is not a monolithic, uniform, or completely homogenized social group with identical interests as understood through one-sided or superficial interpretations. Rather, it is a vast social group with complex membership, internal stratification, and intricate or even conflicting individual interests. This means that only when the working class replaces individualist values with collectivist values and forms a unified class identity and 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 germinate from the theoretical education on the Marxist theory of proletarian struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat actively carried out by socialists. However, most importantly, they are formed through 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 primary force for transforming society, fully exert its revolutionary role.
The working class itself needs to unite, but it cannot be the sole force of struggle in the Pan-Left alliance. Since the capitalist ruling class possesses immense economic, political, and military power and imposes highly controlled extortion and oppression on its own people—and given that unions or labor movements cannot meet all the critical needs of workers—the working class needs to form alliances with other progressive social movement forces to promote each other and jointly form a powerful check on capitalism. Lower-level forms of Leftist movement, such as street protests, "occupying" squares, and demonstrations, can only be transformed into a material force for the thorough transformation of society if they are closely combined with the labor movement and coalesce the protesting masses 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 based on extreme discrimination and over-exploitation formed by race, nationality, gender, or age. Women, ethnic minorities, the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities, and the mentally ill all face one or more forms of oppression. This universal experience of being oppressed provides a broad mass basis for building 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 both the expansion of Pan-Left organizations and the improvement of the revolutionary nature and cohesion of their ranks are destined to require a long and arduous process of exploration, the general historical trend of socialism replacing capitalism will not change.
Overall, the universal inequality of neoliberalism is a form of organized plunder by the ruling elites; it has become a form of organized state violence, sowing the seeds of ethnic cleansing, white supremacy, militarism, and a culture of cruelty. Universal inequality also fosters a political premise that some people are disposable, that their lives are not valued, and that their existence is a burden—particularly for those racist elites driven by the motives of profit-seeking and capital accumulation. Consequently, 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 class division, ethnic cleansing, mass incarceration, and mechanisms of extreme exclusion in a society filled with an atmosphere of death. Amidst the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exacerbated social inequalities, protesters of different identities have clearly realized the hypocrisy of neoliberal capitalist society and the necessity of uniting for thoroughgoing change.