This Swedish Marxist gets it. The Left now plays the same role as liberals in the 19th century, i.e. the party of the rising upper middle class against the entrenched ruling class. Back then, liberals were the party of the industrial revolution and capitalist class against the royalists, aristocrats, and clerics. Today, the Left is the party of the digital revolution and the professional-managerial class against the traditional bourgeoisie. The upper middle class, digitial revolution Left subsequently dismisses the actual class struggle, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialist Left as form of neo-fascism.

There is, as happens so often these days, a spectre haunting the imagination of the western left. That spectre is most commonly dubbed “Strasserism,” though it has other names, such as “red-brownism,” “nazbolism,” or more unwieldy names such as “Angela Nagle leftism.” When I came into the left at the beginning of the last decade, these terms did not exist in any meaningful way. As far as I and the people I knew were concerned, “Strasserite” was an incredibly obscure term used exclusively by online neo-Nazis in their petty, internecine conflicts. None of us paid them or their silly ideological totems any heed.