The Left is back. Well, sort of. Despite exciting new movements for climate justice, despite the surprise emergence of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders as national figures, despite the utter delegitimation of ruling classes the world over, the question of political agency remains unresolved. Who, in other words, will be able to carry out this revitalized left program?

While we had particular types of workers in the twentieth-century labor movement — the autoworker, miner, or docker imagined to stand in for blue-collar workers as a whole — we would struggle to identify any similar reference point today. There are individual inspiring activists and campaigners, and even common symbols like France’s gilet jaune (the high-visibility jacket carried by motorists and worn by construction and warehouse workers). But particular labor disputes have lost their hold over the wider popular consciousness.

The decline of the union movement in most Western countries (along with political forces claiming to represent a specific class interest, such as the Socialist and Communist parties) did, indeed, come along with an ideological offensive playing down the specific importance of class politics. Even on the Left, material battles fought by labor — for shorter working hours, for higher wages, for the public ownership of industry — ceased to be the cohering force around which other demands and movements were organized.