The Reawakening of the Working Class

A presentation by Kosmos Samaras, assistant state secretary of the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party, to the 2017 Annual General Meeting of the Isocracy Network

Kos is a very well known and astute electoral analyst and spoke on the global phenomenon that is the re-awakening of the working class - whether it is from the populist right such as Donald Trump or the populist left such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Cobryn - but with particular attention to Victoria and the change of industry and electoral politics.

The Reawakening of the Working Class (3.3mb, PDF)

"[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers - themselves desperately afraid of being downsized - are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for - someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots."

-Richard Rorty, 'Achieving Our Country', 1998