/lit/ - Literature

>>10524381
>we should have been awash in leftist politics during the Gilded Era

Actually, America, along with the rest of the industrialised world, was awash in leftist politics at that time(late 19th, early 20th century). A very different sort of leftist politics than those you might be familiar with, based on the urban industrial proletariat, a class which has long dwindled to almost nothing.Socialists and syndicalists saw the factory as a mechanism for political organisation, which drilled workers into an organised political mass. On the other hand, current process of production tend to atomise workers. Our politics cannot be but therapeutic: individuals lobby the establishment on their own, instead of joining forces to create a different sort of society.