Declining intermediary bodies left modern societies atomized like Marx’s peasant sack of potatoes

Evidence

The populist turn of the 2010s was no perfect replica of its Russian, US, and Latin American predecessors. Rather, four decades of declining turnout, plummeting party membership, discredited ideologies, and a generally atomized society had considerably changed the coordinates of political activity. Western democracies had endured a slow but steady process of disintermediation: the bodies (parties, unions, churches, clubs, etc.) that used to link the citizens to society declined everywhere, thereby causing the extreme fragmentation and disorganization of the social groups to which the left used to appeal. These developments, coupled with the increasing digitalization of politics, have added considerable complexity to the century-old substantial dilemma. Aggregating disparate interests is a totally different game these days: rather than the 1890s or the 1930s, today’s social landscape looks more like 1848’s “sack of potatoes.” — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 82

Categorization

• XREF: Invokes Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire ‘sack of potatoes’ framing of atomized peasants to characterize contemporary social fracture. — connects to: Disintermediation atomized society into isolated individuals — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 82; De-industrialisation fragmented labour and replaced class struggle with identity politics — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 672
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that digital-era social atomization resembles pre-organizational 1848 rather than the party-organizing 1890s-1930s inverts the usual periodization of the populist left’s terrain.

Broader Connections

• Disintermediation atomized society into isolated individuals #corroborates (0.90) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 82
• De-industrialisation fragmented labour and replaced class struggle with identity politics #expands (0.80) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 672