Los olvidados

In an era marked by frustrated attempts at social transformation, and from an affection of despair and cancellation of the future, discourses proliferate that accuse the left of having abandoned the working class and neglected the politicization of the social question. Class struggle, economic problems and material concerns would have been replaced by identity politics and struggles for recognition. A complicity between the so-called "cultural left" and neoliberalism is pointed out. And those who have been excluded from this progressive alliance are called the forgotten ones, the losers of globalization, those left on the margins in Detroit's deindustrialized America, peripheral France, empty Spain, or rural England. This essay aims to address the reactionary alibi that hides behind these approaches. The forgotten ones are presented as an image in which a certain purity and proletarian evidence still seems to live. But it is a surface for the inscription of hatred and resentment. Contrary to this sensitive conservatism, we need to trace new imaginaries that account for the identity fragility of our societies after the long journey that the workers' defeat of the last century bequeathed us, and its latent threads yet to be discovered.