The Naomi Kanakia essay you posted really drives home the underacknowledged fact that most of the right vs. left conflict is really an inter-bourgeois conflict rather than the bougies vs. proles conflict people want to pretend it is. Specifically nobility vs. intelligentsia with clergy as the \u201cneutral\u201d side.
"}Okay so first, to be an insufferable pedant, neither the intelligentsia nor the aristocracy are bourgeois, traditionally. One usually consists of professional and functionaries, the other landlords and rentiers and military elites.
But also, I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you, but ‘the left-right conflict is actually just a power struggle between centralizing officials and professionals against the traditional gentry and patrician elite’ is probably one of the oldest takes out there. Like, circa 1793.
Which is a bit awkward, because that is absolute a major (sometimes the major) and recurring conflict you see across the globe and with the centralizing officials professing basically every ideology under the sun to justify themselves, but if you try to apply that consistently you end up saying that the hardliners and technicos in Brazil’s late military dictatorship were secretly leftists all along, which is something they would literally shoot you for. Like they did all the other leftists they got their hands on.
So a useful lens to analyze conflicts, certainly, but if you try to use 'left’ and 'right’ to describe it you’ll be a bit confused at the political valence of wildcat strikes and peasant revolts on one hand, and international capital and the military-industrial complex on the other.
Anyway mass politics are almost always organized by and mediating institutions that are (to varying degrees) basically invariably dominated by the middle and upper classes - creating a mass organization of the peasantry or working class is hard, operating an effective organization without its own class of functionaries or notables is something like impossible. This is why there are anarchists.