The left-wing ideology of the new elites: from luxury beliefs to universal humanism

Abstract

It is substantiated that most of the modern Western left-wing political discourses constitute the ideology of new, “post-bourgeois” elites. This ideology is a mixture of concepts conditioned by the post-materialist values of the “cognitive” elites and the “creative class”. It is noted that a significant part of left-wing progressive ideas (including intersectional Marxism) leads to policies that counter the interests of a significant portion of the poor and socially vulnerable people. It is shown that the hypocrisy of the new elites, for whom leftist ideas have become a way of demonstrating their status (“luxury beliefs”), is not the only reason for this contradiction. The key problem is the unevenness of the movement towards post-capitalism. While classical Marxism assumed the primary importance of meeting the basic needs of everyone without exception, today only a relative minority achieved the state of “existential security”. This elite minority is imbued with communist values, but their anti-bourgeois universal humanism with its’ wide range of goals (from the idea of “open borders” to the protection of the rights and opportunities of “non-human animals”) is often not relevant in the context of the world in which many people still face material need and scarcity.