ABSTRACT
This chapter situates anti-elite attitudes in the collective experience of workers. Drawing from interview-based research and theoretical approaches from Critical Psychology, it argues that critique of elites is based in the fundamental socio-economic inequality of capitalist societies and, thus, on the structurally subaltern position of workers. The way in which workers locate themselves in these social relationships and their sense of their own societal agency are central for their critique of elites. These take very different forms: A progressive-intervening elite critique must be distinguished from a regressive-restrictive position. The former aims at the critique of capitalist hierarchisation and inequality, the latter manifests it; their political implications are radically different. In recent years, many workers’ senses of having an ability to shape the social have been broken by the primacy of ever new competitive optimisation (including the corresponding withdrawal of social and political rights) and the overriding need to secure one’s own position. This provides a background for populist mobilisation, but equally importantly, it often results in a retreat into the private sphere and the resigned abandonment of (earlier) ideas of intervening and shaping action.
