Constructing Fear: Tradespeople and the Working Class

The working class is misunderstood, the “middle class” is a myth, and tradespeople are scapegoated (also trade unionism exists).

BEFORE PROCEEDING,

Deema is my friend in Ġaza. Please help support her and her family in whatever way, even if it’s just by sharing the GoFundMe.

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fascism is capitalism in decay

You’ve no doubt heard the platitude “you are closer to homelessness than you are to being a billionaire”, or something to that effect.

Class consciousness is the awareness of one’s position within the class hierarchy and ultimately the class struggle, manifested most basically in the understanding of where one relationally stands in society and what that means. Most people, however, are not aware of their position in society. They are not class conscious.

The capitalist system is a class system. That being said, while a capitalist system is always a class system, a class system isn’t always a capitalist one. This fact, though, is not the point of this essay. What is, is the idea of a class hierarchy itself, its constituents, what function said constituents execute, and how and why they are obfuscated. In the least broad sense.

Terms like “lower class”, “middle class”, and “upper class” are familiar. They are also passive and meaningless.

The “lower class” is colloquially applied to people below the poverty line, minimum wage workers (e.g., “pink collar”), blue collar workers, industrial and domestic workers like cleaners, and the unemployed (none of the lists now or moving forward will be exhaustive).

The “middle class” are colloquially white collar workers, the intelligentsia (particularly when employed equal to education level—a grey area arises when otherwise (the ruling class has even made up the term “grey collar” for this, but I’m getting ahead of myself)), high income open collar workers, and a vast, vague nebula of adjacent occupations.

The “upper class” are, colloquially, “the rich”. “The 1%”, or what have you.

My primary reason for the repetition of “colloquially” is to make a point: these are, in fact, colloquial terms to the layperson due to the aforementioned lack of class consciousness. The layperson isn’t likely to grasp the socioeconomic implications and interrelations of a “class”, especially when they themselves are outside of the “upper class”, as most people are. The layperson also relies on fictitious and fragmenting concepts like “[…] collar”, but I’m getting ahead of myself again. Most importantly, the layperson cannot effectively define the term “working class”, and this is by design.

Let us, then, delineate the capitalist system’s class hierarchy in its most basic.

The “lower class” does not exist.

People under the poverty line who still work for extremely low income are workers and thus working class. Minimum wage workers are workers and thus working class. Blue collar workers are manual labour workers and thus working class. Cleaners are workers and thus working class. The unemployed are the “reserve army of labour”¹ which the capitalist (employer) can call on at any moment to join the workers (this process is proletarianisation), and are thus, necessarily,² working class.³

All of these people are reliant on selling their labour for monetary remittance (in the form of wages or salaries) in order to survive.

The “lower class” is the working class, or the proletariat.

The “upper class” is the ruling class, also the capitalist class or the bourgeoisie. They are bosses and the professional managerial class (caution that this is not a separate class, as managers can be working or ruling class depending on their rights to hire and fire; I will generally refrain from using this phrase in earnest, as it is misleading in its wording), wealthy venture capitalists who don’t rely on income from an employer, business owners (small business owners are “petite bourgeoisie” and therefore ruling class—capitalistic class society is not an exclusively, though it is importantly, a hierarchy based on how much money one has/earns), landlords (though some grey area can exist; landlords may often be classed as petite bourgeoisie, as well, and a very complex dilemma arises with The Landlord Worker), the like.

In more technical terms, the ruling class owns the means of production and exerts their cultural hegemony over society.

The working class must sell their labour, their ability to work, to the ruling class that owns the means of production (fixed constant capital, etc.), receiving money in exchange (the ruling class buys the capacity for work, not abstract “work”—the monetised commodity is the worker’s ability) whilst having no access to the means of production themselves. With that money, the worker buys commodities which reproduce their labour, like food. The caveat is that the worker is always paid less than the realised value of what they produced for the capitalist. Workers are therefore placed at the mercy of employment by the capitalist and are under constant threat of replacement by any other worker (e.g., from the reserve army of labour). This necessarily creates a system of coercion and wage slavery.

Wayne Price in The Value of Radical Theory: An Anarchist Introduction to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy writes:⁴

“Once workers enter the workplace, even their formal equality is gone. Now the capitalists (or their managers) are in charge, giving orders, and the workers become subordinate, following orders. Whether or not workers can vote in government elections every few years, once inside the workplace—for most of their waking lives—they live under despotism. They can be fired at any time for almost any reason. Only the few who belong to unions have some limited rights—and it’s important to remember that unions only exist because workers fought for them, not as a result of any bourgeois interest in equality.”

This is a good time to suggest you, reader, consider unionising. Bleak times are ahead.

So what on earth is the “middle class”?

Just as with my slip up of saying the term “grey collar” is made up by the ruling class, and mine calling concepts like “[…] collar” in general “fictitious and fragmenting”, the modern application of “middle class” is artificial.

This socioeconomic classification arose with industrialisation and the expansion of the labour market to encompass educated professionals, salaried and senior employees, and generally higher income workers. This “middle class” may also own land, such as via paid-off mortgages.

First and foremost, however, the idea of the “middle class” arose to fragment workers; to establish a fabricated stratification of the working class based on income-based economic variability (education-based economic variability is inherently tied to income bar statistically rare individual anomalies⁵); to ostracise higher income workers from lower income workers through the artificially-inoculated aspiration of ruling class proximity (in English: to inspire the middle class to strive towards “upward mobility” and ultimate “upper class” status: embourgeoisement); to obliterate class consciousness.

At its most reductive and nuance-free: if you are not a capitalist, you are a worker; if you are not a bourgeois, you are a proletarian; if you are not ruling class, you are working class.

The “middle class” still has no right to hire and fire (managers are often categorised as “middle class”, but if they’re a manager with hire-fire rights, they are by definition ruling class; attaining the right to hire and fire—to rule the life of the working class like a glorified judge—is embourgeoisement). The “middle class” is still beholden to bosses and must sell their labour for money (money under capitalism = survival). A “middle class” individual can still be replaced at any time by any worker from the reserve army of labour or through transferal of employment. And paying off a mortgage is a lot more complex than “Whoop, now you’re a capitalist pig!”. While home ownership does have an observable conservatising effect on individuals, mortgages are debt, and debt is a powerful disciplinary force and an exertion of social control through which the capitalist keeps the so-called “middle class” in line. It’s that “conservatisation”: the ruling class needs the working class, of which the “middle class” is a part, unconscious.

“The argument was wrong then and is still wrong when it comes to mortgages today. Class is not about whether you buy a few commodities, a car, TV or whatever. Nor is it about to who you pay money in order to have a roof over your head. In capitalist society a small minority of people form the ruling class. They own and control the vast bulk of wealth and property.

They run the companies, control the banks, building societies and finance companies, own the land.

The vast majority of people are not in that position. Even if they own a few possessions or a house, they still have to work. Those ‘home-owners’ who lose their job can quickly find they cannot keep up mortgage payments and be repossessed by the bank or building society. The vast bulk of people in society depend entirely on working in order to survive. They are therefore part of the working class.”⁶

It is the banks that own these homes, but the home owners believe they do.

And the “middle class” still has no access to the means of production.

The “middle class” is the working class.

And the invention of the middle class myth is in large part responsible for the lack of class consciousness in those frequently-aforementioned “laypeople” who are themselves workers by definition.

The ruling class, on the other hand, is very class conscious and very organised. Our disorganisation as workers is what keeps us proletarianised and subjugated, but it is also by design of the ruling class that we find ourselves so. The ruling class requires unemployment as a coercion method for proletarianised workers, it requires unsustainable wages/salaries relative to living conditions, it requires surplus production (which leads to that wage theft), and it requires the middle class mythology.

Requires it for what?

Sustaining itself.

The bourgeoisie are parasites, if I may; profit is the unpaid wages of the working class. But I digress.

What does any of this have to do with tradespeople?

What’s a “tradesperson”, anyway?

These are the commonly-understood “blue collar” workers within manual-labour-centric occupations: construction, plumbing, electrical, carpentry, etc.

Tradespeople can be tertiary-educated, or educated via internships (meaning they are not university graduates; some may not have even finished highschool). They can often, though this is absolutely not the rule, be extremely well-paid, more so than intelligentsia or other commonly-understood “middle class” workers (a phrase that highlights the absurdity of “middle class” as an idea, might I pipe up). As I said earlier, a class society under capitalism is not an exclusively, though it is importantly, a hierarchy based on how much money one has/earns. Construction workers remain squarely within the working class notwithstanding the potential magnitude of their income. Not only are they still forced to sell their ability to work to the capitalist, but said labour involves some of the most demanding and dangerous work to be done, at oft-inconvenient hours to boot (e.g., night shifts which are highly unhealthy in the long term).

This is a good time to acknowledge that while the “middle class” doesn’t exist theoretically (meaning when dissected with political theory), it does exist socially. It is similar in that way to the Western idea of race—a biologically false concept that has very real material manifestations.

A janitor and a dentist (not a business-owning one who would be ruling class) are both forced to sell their capacity to work, coerced by the labour market into “sucking it up” apropos of undemocratic workplaces,⁷ and lack both hire-fire rights and access to the means of production (two factors that bar them from ruling class status).

But money under capitalism = survival, which means more money = easier survival.

A dentist is able to afford not only luxuries (travel, expensive items, high quality food), but necessities like healthcare, especially emergency (e.g., in cases of motor accidents or unexpected cancer), whilst a janitor often may not be able to even dream of the former, and might be forced to forgo even basic healthcare the negative outcome of which is doubly exacerbated by their inability to, for example, afford high quality food in the first place—a manifestation of “social murder”.⁸

There is, though, something that fundamentally separates this “inter-class stratification”, if you will, from concepts like race in the West or ethnicity worldwide,⁹ and it is that platitude I paraphrased at the start:

I cannot stop being a clockable West Asian where I was born and raised. My father cannot stop being a brown man in the world. I cannot stop being indigenous on my ancestral soil. My mother and I cannot stop being “culturally and linguistically diverse”, as it is euphemistically known, or “ethnically ambiguous” and “you don’t look [X]!”, as we’ve both gotten (me more so, given my father’s very obvious brownness), both in the country we immigrated to and our country of origin. My mother and her mother cannot stop being vaguely Central-Asian-looking in that country (a phenotype that’s very offensively referred to over there as “M****loid”).

A dentist can lose their job at any time, for any reason, and risk poverty if not homelessness. They have a buffer that wouldn’t be available to a janitor should they lose their employment, like savings and potential investments (for the sake of this abstraction, let’s posit neither variables have family or inheritances to fall back on), but they have no employees the unpaid income of whom they could generate profit from, nor do they have access to capital. Once their savings dry up, what’s there to sustain investments with? And with income streams obstructed or lost outright…

A “middle class” person can become “lower class” overnight.

So what’s any of this got to do with anything?

The time has come to discuss the fear of the working class, where it comes from (and why it’s vital to upholding hegemony), how it manifests socially, and what position tradespeople find themselves in as a result (it’s grim).

Most “laypeople” fancy themselves “middle class”. They’re office drones, they’re IT, they’re techs.

The working class, in the modern zeitgeist, is associated with dirty labour, stupidity, laziness, and roughness (the “middle class” identification is also what grants people who find workers ~icky~ an out—“I’m not working class, I’m middle class! I sit in an air-conditioned office typing away for ₺130 an hour! I don’t lug around bricks in the sun!”).

Being a tradesperson is understood as having been “not smart enough” for intelligentsia jobs, or even a “basic” job like in hospitality. Or being “too much of a ruffian”, “not well-spoken or refined enough”, even “ugly” in some instances, although this can be juxtaposed against the sexualisation of working class people, particularly tradespeople and tradesmen, in a similar manner to what I described in my essay on anti-SWANA Orientalism—

“For white women, despite their own oppression under cisheteropatriarchy,¹⁰ desire for non-white men is The Transgression. They are taught to hate and fear the, say, brown man: he is a taboo; his humanity is stripped; he is a stereotype in the Western gaze. To, for example, an Anglo-American white woman though, he becomes a dangerous erotic thrill.”

I mean just look at Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl music video.

By shoe-horning “smart people jobs” (e.g., doctors, scientists, engineers) under “middle class”, the ruling class, which influences societal hegemony, fabricates a self-actualising and self-perpetuating miasma of the aforementioned “uneducatedness”, “stupidity”, “laziness” which vilifies the working class and obfuscates its not only necessity, but intellect.

Allow me to posit something:

They, the ruling class, want you to associate the grandeur of palaces with royalty—the utmost ruler—without cognisance of the workers actually behind its creation. In chorus, by categorising the likes of artisans and engineers as “middle class”, they want you to devalue the labour of the working class through appropriation. “The working class is too stupid to create something so magnificent, it would take someone actually educated for a feat like that!”. Of course, artisans and engineers were foundational to building the Hagía Sophía, say, but there’s an implication there that is hoped to be subliminally communicated to the modern layperson that it were the artisans and engineers themselves, alone, who built these monuments. The workers—welders, builders, carpenters, masons—are sidelined.

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Tradespeople, tradesmen in particular, are also commonly stereotyped as violent, misogynistic, impulsive, and conservative.

People working in trades tend to already be demonised (in all the ways discussed) and aware of it, work incredibly difficult jobs, have a lower level of education (this does remain a factor but is not entirely causative—surgeons, business owners, and tertiary-educated professionals tend to be some of the most conservative members of society as having large amounts of money or capital does mess with your ideology and consciousness (that conservatising effect I mentioned)), see less of the world (in terms of travel) and diversity day-to-day, and be severely overworked and exhausted by the capitalist system (which is how it keeps the working class subjugated).

This drops tradespeople at the claws of populist right-wing pundits who appeal to them—they feel as if these conservatives are about “the workers” (leftists have, in recent years, greatly neglected the working class in favour of students and the intelligentsia in order to reproduce ideology, a tactic quickly decreasing in efficacy as students are being steadily proletarianised and campus life is dead), though it is notable that said “workers” will almost always be majoritarian workers at the expense of the immigrant and minority labour stratum that’s often hyper-exploited. This is an example of how alt-right radicalisation happens. And, as mentioned, conservatisation is one of capitalism’s tools of social discipline.

Trades themselves, through all this, become associated with a lack of intellect and culture, and being this archetypal “tradie”—stupid, rough, bigoted—becomes shorthand for the working class. In other words, “working class” is essentially stratified into a class of tradespeople, and class consciousness is undercut with members of the working class, with their “clean” jobs and tertiary educations, identifying as “middle class” to fabricate distance from the working class (which they, again, identify with “the dirty tradesmen” and likely immigrants (despite migrant workers in many parts of the world hugely being professionals)) and proximity to the ruling class.

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None of this is to say that there are no serious problems within the working class, particularly among working class men, tradesmen included, of violence and bigotry, anti-minority and anti-woman of note. This social phenomenon is very real and attested-to by many of my own partisans: there’s a palpable “bro culture” and Us vs Them mentality within these worksites. Broader, minority social identity is inseparable from labour exploitation and even access to employment for an insurmountable number of people. This exerts an even greater burden on minorities populations; identity- and ability-based oppression is not supplementary to the class struggle, but entrenched into the fabric of capitalist society.

At the same time, capitalism doesn’t want you to interrogate how these ideas—misogyny, racism, homophobia—arise in groups, how capitalism is directly responsible for them. Capitalism, like liberalism, hinges of individualism and personal responsibility only, and orders punishment to be doled out per capita. Capitalism does not merely exploit workers, but stratifies them along identity lines in order to facilitate that exploitation and outsource it to the working class itself.

It is also notable that the ruling class, despite requiring conservatisation of the workers, often co-opts liberatory calls. Think of rainbow capitalism or corporations appropriating feminist iconography and slogans for profit or capitalising on BLM. Women’s and racial issues are often liberal and bourgeoisie-led, ignoring class and, of course, sidestepping class struggle dialectic lest they are accused of being a bloody sovok.¹¹

Liberalism is, ultimately, its own form of conservatism.

Yet these social justice issues are, in chorus, also ignored by the labour movement that tends towards an unfortunate and unhelpful (and just plain wrong) class reductionism.

Racial, gender, disability, etc. justice must be brought into the labour movement, as these identities are intertwined with the working class and are intrinsic to the class struggle.

On the flip side, consider, all the aforediscussed in mind, that the construction and extraction sectors have some of the highest rates of union participation—unions which very often, if not by law, have internal women’s and minority (e.g., indigenous) caucuses. Union participation has the capacity to push people away from deep conservatism as unions possess the potential to cultivate rank-and-file militancy and thus class consciousness, on top of right-wing politics just being bad news for unions (this is conversely why business owners tend to be so conservative—unionising is bad news for exploitative business practices which necessarily benefit businesses and thus capitalism).

This is where I orate about unions

Trade unionism is one of the first steps to organisation of the working class. There was a time in the history of most countries where being in a union was the standard—it was simply the done thing—and those periods saw the working class at its most powerful and liberated.

But unionism by its lonesome will not save us from a capitalist system what is hurtling us all rapidly towards extinction.

Trade unions today are notoriously bureaucratised, top-down, and bought out by liberal if not centre-right (or worse) political parties, as well as, in certain cases, themselves being far from free of coercion, such as was seen with Syria.¹² These days, laws on strikes are stringent, with often severe punishments for industrial action outside of bargaining periods, so unions face obstacles to leveraging internal power, much more so with external power lacking (i.e., unionism beyond the workplace). This is significant because while strikes won’t fundamentally change cultural hegemony, they behave as “revolutionary gymnastics”, or training in militancy, which ultimately brings about a shift in class consciousness. The layperson won’t necessarily notice a strike shutting down a construction site, but they’ll sure as hell notice if all the nurses and bus drivers walk off the job.

Importantly, modern unions operate in a neoliberal climate that favours centrism and generates a hesitation to bring in intersectional concerns that “deviate”, in the union bureaucracy’s eyes, from the immediate interest, thus alienating the social issues intrinsic to class struggle. Historically, even powerful unions did not automatically take on anti-sexist, anti-racist, disability practices. With the capitalist having always sown division in the workers through these bigotries, thus preventing the unity that ultimately magnifies class power, trade unions have, over time, waned in efficacy due to their narrow, class reductionist focus, as no person or entity is immune to capitalist coercion.

Workplace organising is the central lever of the class struggle. Workers seizing the workplace would spell the breakdown of capitalism, as it would mark the seizing of the means of production by the proletariat. However, while unions are pivotal in the fight for proletarian justice, they alone cannot be relied on to vanquish social oppression, and they are ineffective by their passive lonesome within the modern sociopolitical climate. Structural leverage, or workplace disruption narrowly, overlooks the social barriers impacting millions and preventing stable employment and even access to the workplace at all. In that way, workplace organising on its own cannot encompass all which is required for working class emancipation. Always keep in mind the reserve army of labour. How can you organise workers that do not have a workplace?

Further, in an extremely globalised economy, internationalism is essential to the labour struggle. Multinational corporations are not bound by geopolitical borders, so modern workers’ strategies and consciousness must extend beyond home turf.

Informal and precarious work makes up 61% of global employment, reaching 80% in countries like India. This expansion of the informal economy—manifested in many parts of the world through “urbanisation without industrialisation”—has not only limited the worker’s access to social protection and labour rights, but fractured class interest, and significantly increased the difficulty of organising, especially by traditional modes. An additional angle arises in countries of the Global South where reliance on resource extraction is driven by colonialism and imperialism, such as in Congo-Kinshasa. Extraction of raw materials and agricultural products without reinvestment into the communities results in workers in these countries rallying around not traditional workplace organising, but land rights, environmental justice, and resistance to imperialism. Here, workers contend with exploitation by not only the local capitalist, but the global imperialist. Casualisation and subcontracting has also exacerbated the fragmentation of the working class, particularly in the Global North, with unions failing to maintain a consistent membership base compared to historically.

Successful unions throughout history were so through their ability to rally workers around broader struggles, such as exposing all the ways in which workers’ rights intertwine with environmental and social justice.

Community unionism, then, links workplace issues (which trade unionism in the modern day fatally hinges on) to broader community concerns like welfare, housing, healthcare, and environmental and social justice, building solidarity across societal sectors and broader to the international working class. At the same time, welfare organising etc. will go nowhere without the labour movement, with its structural capacity for a workers’ revolution existing and functioning in ways it isn’t elsewhere, taking on intersectional interests. These are mutually-dependent tactics towards emancipation within the class struggle.

The revolutionary potential of the trade union is not annihilated!

The strategy of the revolutionary socialist is to organise specifically on a political level whilst seeding their political dialectic on the mass [social] level,¹³ trade unions being a vital wing of it, in what is dubbed “social insertion”,¹⁴ encouraging federalism, militancy, internationalism, and sociocultural awareness in the rank-and-file through which will be cultivated the consciousness and power of the global working class to ultimately undermine the capitalist, statist, parliamentarian, chauvinistic, nationalist, idealist, conservatising programming the ruling class exerts to keep the workers fragmented and at constant odds with one another.¹⁵

“What results from this understanding of the political and social levels is the practice of ‘organisational dualism’. Specifically anarchist groups (hence the term ‘specifism’) with well defined positions of principle and operating under conditions of political unity at the political level intervene, participate within or seek to build popular movements at the social level. The objective of this intervention is not to ‘capture’ or establish anarchist fronts but to create the correct conditions, by arguing for anarchist methods and ideas, for the flourishing of working class autonomy. It is this autonomy that is the basis for working class counter-power and revolutionary change.” (Collective Action, 2025)

Truth be told, though…

Even I’m guilty of this fear of what the capitalist system has artificially designated as the working class: tradespeople.

Being a female-bodied individual who veils in public, thus carrying a constant cultural signifier on my person along with an ethnic ambiguity, one exacerbated should I talk and reveal my accent (doubly so if I slip up in code-switching), I’m not exactly a stranger to feeling too uncomfortable to pass near construction sites, or tensing up when seeing a clustering of tradesmen, or even being cat-called from a passing ute. These are all very real concerns that should not be diminished, especially when seeing the worldwide femicide rates and being cognisant of the constant threat of anti-queer, anti-immigrant, anti-minority hate crimes now rising all the more rapidly with the global shift towards outright fascism.

The simultaneous reality, though, is that most people have not actually ever spoken to a tradesperson.

Tradespeople being one of the most active demographics in unionism is not something that eludes you when you’re organising politically in the material world as I do. A good portion of my political organisation’s branch is tradespeople. Dare I say, they tend to be some of the most staunch—their knowledge is grounded, their consciousness is lived, and their dialectic is watertight.

Not just that, but they are simply good people. They are simply people.

The main reasons why tradies lean conservative is because the right exploits how much they are beaten down and exhausted by [capitalist] society, regardless of how much money they might earn for their trouble, and frames its exclusionary policy-making as “looking out for our workers” whilst radicalising the majority against the minority (on an institutional level—in some countries, tradespeople within select professions are primarily ethnic minorities and immigrants).

And yet, that same disenchantment and jadedness with the system is just as fecund for the cultivation of revolutionary leftist ideology should one just open their eyes to the reality of capitalistic declension. That it is not the immigrants, or the Jews, or the gays, or the “transgenders”, or the “modern independent women” keeping the rank-and-file down, but the bourgeoisie, The Man, the ruling class, the capitalist that sows discontent within the workers and divides them arbitrarily for his and only his gain at the expense of all, including Earth itself.

The fear of the working class is only one such tactic of the capitalist, and it must be resisted by whatever means necessary.

A grandpa Errico quote to send you off.

~Sfar~Ⓐ🧿֎⨳

1. Marx, K. (1867). Capital (Vol. 1). Verlag von Otto Meisner.
Author’s note:
I dislike Marx as a guy. That doesn’t diminish the worth of his theories.

2. Just for context moving forward (and looking back on my older texts), I will almost always use the term “necessarily” in the way it is deployed in philosophy as opposed to regular conversation or anything like that.

3. I suggest you look into NAIRU, or the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment. It is basically an economic calculation of the rate of unemployment required to prevent wage growth and interest rate rises. It’s quite sickening—a radicalising moment for many.

4. Price, W. (2013). Value of Radical Theory: An Anarchist Introduction to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. Ak Press.

5. These specifically are not official economic terms, they’re just my own jargon.

6. McGarr, P. (2003, January 18). Does a mortgage make you part of the system? Socialist Worker. https://socialistworker.co.uk/in-depth/does-a-mortgage-make-you-part-of-the-system/

7. “Once one knows with whom it is important to check before a decision is made, and whose approval is the stamp of acceptance, one knows who is running things.”

Freeman, J. (1972). The Tyranny of Structurelessness.

8. Engels, F., & Mclellan, D. (1993). The condition of the working class in England. Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1845)

9. Author’s note:
Ethnicity is a biological reality, though, just so we’re clear (then again, not all “ethnic groups” are always different by DNA but instead by culture and/or language despite still being classified as “ethnic groups”, like for example Lazis, Pontic Greeks, Black Sea Turks, and Hamshentsis; or Kurds and Êzidîs—that’s too far of an aside here).

10. Author’s note:
I don’t really stand by the liberal use of the term “patriarchy” anymore, as it is lousy class analysis. At the same time, though, I’m not entirely for the abolition of that term, as I do see its uses within revolutionary socialist class analysis (it’s way too much to discuss here so I won’t also I don’t want to).

11. Author’s note:
The USSR is not my boy, just so we’re clear again. I could write a whole essay about my mega nuanced, based, educated, СНГ-born-and-raised, correct opinion on the Soviet Union but I simply don’t feel like it.

12. Daher, J. (2023). Syria’s Trade Unions Under the Scope; History, Instrumentalization, and Labour Dissents. In Library of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/beirut/20484.pdf

13. Collective Action. (2025). Specifism Explained: The Social and Political Level, Organisational Dualism and the Anarchist Organisation. The Anarchist Library. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/collective-action-specifism-explained

14. Stroud, C. E. (2023). Social insertion vs. (political) entryism. The Anarchist Library. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/carl-eugene-stroud-social-insertion-vs-political-entryism
Author’s note:
“Social insertion” as a term way be disputed in certain circles:

Weaver, A. (2021, October 17). Especifismo: The anarchist praxis of building popular movements and revolutionary organization in South America. The Anarchist Library. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/adam-weaver-especifismo

15. Makhno, N., Malatesta, E., Linsky, Arshinov, P., Valevsky, & Dielo Truda. (2022). The Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists. Radical Reprints.