Socialist thought, if it is to be effective, must be based on empirical, evolving insights into the actually existing conditions of state capitalist society. The central task of socialist actions has always been to act upon these insights in creating a new, classless society.
But socialist thought, like all systems of thought, is not immune from stagnation, dogma, empirical error, distortions, and bias. The two primary distorting myths of socialist thought in the twenty-first century include: first, the privileging of formalized workers engaged in (traditionally conceived) areas of structural significance in the class struggle (i.e., the industrialized proletariat myth), and second, the assumption that formalized wage-labor is the normal form of labor undertaken by the working class in capitalist societies (i.e., the formalized proletariat myth).
Both myths entail the erasure of the reality of state-capitalism throughout the Global South and among the poorest segments of the working-class the world over; they also imply colonial, gendered, and racialized notions of who is a worker and who is not.
Indeed, for many socialist thinkers and practitioners, conceptions of “the working class” have remained stubbornly outdated and beholden to analyses stemming from the era of classic industrial capitalism. These conceptions, even if unconsciously, are Euro- and North-centric
From the misuse and myriad definitions of the usually derogatory term “lumpen,” to the analytically lazy and often ahistorical application of concepts such as “the precariat,” “the reserve army of labor,” or “surplus humanity,” there remains a stubborn assumption among antisocial leftists which identifies those who hold formal jobs as working-class and those who survive in the informal economy as a non-class “subaltern”; as lumpen populations or, at the very least, as marginal or powerless subsets of the working-class.
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