on the occasion of the NYU grad student strike, i offer:

why, now and historically, have socialist movements had particularly strong bases in the so-called "pmc," the layer between the working class and the ruling class?

because people take political action when they feel their social position is changing, or changeable.

There is of course always a certain level of political activity; the ruling class always trying to secure their position, the working class always trying to improve theirs. But big upswings of activity happen when class position is in question.

In the US, the working class has been pretty firmly locked into a weak position since the 1970s at least; seeing no credible openings for improving that position on a population scale, every standard indicator of working class activity fell dramatically

The ruling class has been pretty firmly on the upswing in that time, and while there’s more inequality now than forty years ago, it’s basically the same Reaganite GOP program that’s been at work; the one-sided class war decried by the UAW in 1978 is ongoing

what’s been unstable — particularly since around 2008 — has been the position of the lower stratum of “professionals.” K-12 educators are a great example of this. The financial crisis tanked state-level K-12 funding, and in some places it still hasn’t recovered.

also, college graduates. It’s a truism at this point to say a college degree is now equivalent to a high school diploma, but the student debt crisis is absolutely staggering

so the people who’ve seen, in their living memory and personal life, a drastic decline or improvement in their position isn’t the working class, or the most oppressed people in the US, who’ve been getting fucked since the mid-70s, or the rich who’ve been on the upswing.

It’s the people whose parents are better off than them by an order of magnitude. That’s adjuncts whose immediate predecessors were tenure track; K-12 whose immediate predecessors had pensions; college grads whose immediate predecessors paid 1/1,000th what current grads will pay.

This is almost always the case in wealthy nations that see a political crisis. The crisis in living memory usually is most acute for those who had some status and lost it, or who had no status and gained a little bit. That’s who takes the next step.

so today, NYU grad students are taking that step, in response to a social position that has been pretty radically downgraded in living memory. and that might feel somehow in tension with the project of focusing on the heartland industrial base we think of as labor's protagonist

but for whatever way it runs against socialist *theory* it's perfectly in harmony with socialist *strategy* which orients to the real-life people and situations that are in some kind of political motion. fights breed fighters, not the other way around!