You’ve probably noticed that a lot of anger seems to get misdirected at the most vulnerable, disadvantaged people, instead of the people actually in charge of our system.

This is because capitalism has pulled off the ultimate switcheroo: The people most actively protesting are often the ones with the most cultural capital, while the most precarious are too busy struggling for basic dignity to stage a meaningful uprising.

The statistics show how bad it is. In Australia, the top 20% of households now own 92 times as much wealth as the bottom 20%, who own a statistically invisible 1%.

This is the symptom of a “demobilised class society”, where class divides are raging, yet the collective political institutions of the working class has been systematically undermined and degraded. Where we are too exhausted by survival and paying the rent to band together and fight back.

This explains why a struggling tradie might be more angry at a dole bludger, queue jumping immigrant or a disruptive climate protester than a CEO who steals millions in wages or charges fees to dead people. The CEO is distant, abstract, and untouchable. But the “rule breaker” down the street? They are a visible insult to the sacrifices the tradie makes every day to keep their head above water.

Workers — the wage worker and petit bourgeois shopkeeper or tradie — have their politics defined by a reactive sense of injustice. They believe in an implicit social contract: if I work hard, I should be safe. If I follow the rules, I should be respected.

When that contract is broken, by inflation, by housing crises, by stagnating wages, the reaction is to furiously police the rules against anyone else who seems to be breaking them.

This is a major part of what Dan Evans describes in his book A Nation of Shopkeepers: about the petit bourgeoisie who fear that in a neoliberal world, the safety net has been cut so drastically that falling into the working class feels like a death sentence. Academic Klaus Dörre’s also argues that the formation of a permanent underclass has become a powerful tool of social control, especially the stigmatisation of welfare recipients who have fallen below the line of “social respectability”.

The result of this fear is a “demobilised” society. We are too busy clinging to the ledge to look up at who is stomping on our fingers, and we’re too busy stomping on the fingers below us out of fear they’re trying to drag us down.

As German sociologists Linus Westheuser and Linda Beck argue, poverty doesn’t always lead to revolution or supporting left. In a “demobilised class society,” it leads to moral disapproval against violated expectations.

People are mad, yes, but because of economic precarity, we lack collective agency and often retreat into a defensive position, railing against both the “higher-ups” and the “takers” below us.

In this understanding of contemporary politics, shame becomes as a weapon used by the ruling fraction to exercise control without excessive violence. The process of the oligarchs extracting wealth from everyone else has become so systemic and obscured that its victims struggle to identify the perpetrators.

If we look at who is engaged in social protest, primarily in Australia, but also in other Anglophone countries like the UK, we can see that it is deeply divided along these class lines.

The culturally rich professionals, the downwardly mobile “new petit bourgeoisie” (educated professionals or Piketty’s “Brahmin Left”), have the time, vocabulary, and educational bandwidth to articulate “post-material” concerns like peace, climate action, and other social issues are able to oppose. As Dan Evans points out, their cultural capital acts as a mobilising resource, as well as being signifiers of their social standing.

Meanwhile, old petit bourgeoisie, the traditional working class and the underclass find themselves trapped. Their deeply felt sense of injustice manifests as “moral disapproval”. They feel perpetually violated by broken promises of recognition and redistribution. Their moral economy is precarious but strongly held, rooted in individualism, thrift, and hard work, which they view as violated by people perceived as not hardworking like them.

Because traditional organisations that supported these classes (unions, social democracy) are weak, they lack the collective power to channel this anger upward. A classic case of false consciousness reinforced by systemic shame.

The ultimate achievement of the oligarchs is to exploit the fear of symbolic devaluation. This means that workers and the petit bourgeoisie are fearful of falling below the “social respectability” threshold and are therefore disciplined into policing “deservingness” against each other.

Those who work end up directing their anger not at the obscenely rich, but at the “unworthy beneficiaries,” like welfare recipients, people with a disability, students or immigrants.

The anger is real, but the target is wrong.

What is useful about the Dan Evans/Westheuser and Beck/Dörre framework is that it helps us make better sense of the current situation.

Higher income and cultural capital of the new petit bourgeoisie means increased ability and willingness to protest and hold socially progressive views. In late capitalism, having the intellectual tools (critical consciousness) and the stability (income) to engage in sustained critique is now more important to enable political activism than raw economic suffering.

The political consciousness of the demobilised working class and old petit bourgeoisie is defined by a nostalgic desire for a return to the implicit social contract of the mid-century welfare state. This backward-looking attitude makes these social classes politically passive and vulnerable to jingoistic political appeals from conservative political forces, like One Nation, Reform UK and Trump/MAGA (Piketty’s “Merchant Right”). The fearful “tradie” is acting rationally within their constrained environment (protecting their precarious social and economic status against the predations of global capital).

What is so dangerous about this is that exploited, subordinate classes discipline themselves. The knowledge and fear that they could fall into the stigmatised, welfare-dependent underclass compels workers (whether proletarians or petit bourgeoisie) to accept precarious conditions, low wages and no say over social and economic decisions.

(It’s worth acknowledging of course the broad social base making up major protests around the world, like the anti-ICE resistance in the US or anti-austerity protests in Argentina.)

We need to stop dismissing the “moral disapproval” of the working class and petit bourgeoisie as “backward or racist”. The anger is real. The sense of being ripped off is correct. The problem is just the target.

Similarly, we need to understand the power of symbolic devaluation. When we (you, the reader are likely in the new petit bourgeoisie or even the professional managerial classes) project inferiority towards workers or the petit bourgeois, that reinforces the internalised shame that cuts them off from us.

For progressive people involved in policy, we need to understand that poverty is not a failure of poverty, but rather a feature of control. A permanent, stigmatised underclass is essential for the neoliberal economic system to discipline the working class. If the safety net is too comfortable, the threat of firing loses its potency.

Instead, we need to reject the consensus trap and instead clearly point out the common enemy. Let’s direct the “moral disapproval” toward the “higher-ups”. We need a politics that doesn’t demand that we “be nice”, we need to accept that politics is conflict. The working class and petit bourgeoisie is right to hate “freeloaders.”

We need to reject the failure of means-tested welfare, which encourages policing of “deservingness” and instead promote universal public goods and universal public services like free childcare, and public housing. If everyone gets it, the resentment toward “queue jumpers” diminishes.

And we need to continually remind them that the biggest freeloaders aren’t the ones cashing a Centrelink cheque, they are the multinational gas companies, the Big Banks, the commercial landlords, and the Silicon Valley tech executives.

We don’t need to teach the working class and petit bourgeoisie how to speak correctly. We need to show them who actually broke the rules.

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