Left strategy must relocate from workplaces to everyday reproductive settings

Evidence

Granting that barriers to sustained, institutionally oriented political participation are indeed higher today, the prospects for any renewal will have to be sought in everyday life—in those circumstances in which people still regularly enter into contact with others, in which common concerns are self-evident. Once these were to be found above all in the great factories and construction sites of the industrial age. The epochal decomposition of this world remains the starting point for left strategy in the twenty-first century. Presupposing its irrelevance, some have looked instead to the sphere of social reproduction or care work. In an era of precarious employment and working from home, many no longer interact with coworkers in person on a daily basis, one still has to drop their children at daycare, attend parent-teacher meetings, or visit their own parents in retirement homes. The average Western European today is more likely to interact with geriatric nurses than workplace union reps. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 254

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s stated purpose: this is Jäger laying groundwork for judging whether escape routes match the hyperpolitics diagnosis (workplaces hollowed, so left turns to everyday life).
• QUESTION: The average-Western-European-compares-geriatric-nurses-to-union-reps claim — is there an actual statistic behind this, or is it rhetorical?