Language of the Left: Worker
Class, Myth, and the Obsolescence We Must Design
“Worker” has been a rallying point and a mythic role. But its durability is both a strength and a trap. If the Left is to move forward, we must use the term strategically—while refusing to treat it as permanent. The worker must remain historically specific, ideologically provisional, and ultimately, replaceable.
The word worker carries a lot of weight. It evokes exploitation, solidarity, class consciousness, dignity, struggle. It calls back to miners, machinists, domestic laborers, union organizers, and precarious service staff. It has anchored the identity of the Left for generations.
And yet, for all its power, worker is a category we must learn to wear lightly. Because as much as it’s been a tool of resistance, it’s also become a conceptual enclosure—a role that subtly dictates what kinds of agency, solidarity, and futures we are allowed to imagine. Left unexamined, it becomes what we might call a teleological trap: the idea that the worker is not just a political subject but the inevitable political subject. That history will unfold toward worker power, and that the shape of that power is already understood.
This assumption has consequences. It constrains the language we use to describe emerging forms of labor, care, and value. It orients the imagination of justice around wage labor and production. It discourages rethinking what social roles we want to preserve or transcend.
From the point of view of the Communitarium Project, this is a problem. Because our aim isn’t to build a better worker-led society—it’s to build the conditions under which people are no longer defined by their function within a labor regime at all.
Capitalism Needs the Worker Too
It’s easy to forget that “worker” is not just a revolutionary identity—it’s a capitalist one. The worker is the unit of labor. A cost center. A human resource. Even in heroic leftist formulations, the figure of the worker often remains within this same structural role: the one who produces value, and who therefore deserves more of it.
But what if production isn’t always the horizon of value? What if the fixation on the worker prevents us from recognizing other roles and relationships—caregiver, sharer, sustainer, thinker, neighbor, co-inhabitant—as equally central?
The Mirror Myth: Worker vs. Entrepreneur
One reason “worker” remains so sticky is because it is rhetorically useful. It lets the Left anchor its identity in opposition to the myth of the entrepreneur: the self-made, risk-taking capitalist ideal. But as long as this binary holds, both roles reinforce each other. Each needs the other to stay coherent. One becomes the moral hero of collective labor; the other, the moral hero of individual ambition.
And both risk flattening lived complexity into a role: are you the exploited or the self-starter? Are you a cog or a visionary?
In reality, people are neither. Or rather: they are much more than either.
Synchronic Utility, Diachronic Obsolescence
We don’t have to throw the word away. In immediate struggles—against wage theft, for labor protections, in organizing campaigns—it remains indispensable. But if we care about what comes next, we have to hold it differently.
The distinction here is between synchronic and diachronic commitments. In the now, “worker” can rally solidarity and clarify antagonism. But across time, we must recognize it as a historically situated term, bound to particular modes of production and particular visions of the social order.
If we reject historical inevitabilism, we must also reject the permanence of our categories. “Worker” is useful, not sacred. It is temporary, not timeless. Its strategic value depends on our ability to eventually let it go.
Designing Its Obsolescence
To take this seriously means actively planning for its obsolescence. Not its erasure, but its dissolution into richer and more nuanced terms—terms that reflect a world not organized around jobs, employers, wage labor, or linear productivity.
That requires infrastructure: new languages, new institutions, new forms of collective identity that don’t just reward “hard work,” but support people in living well, together, beyond the metrics of employment. This is part of what the Communitarium Project seeks to prototype: spaces where people coordinate, create, and metabolize complexity without being defined primarily by what they produce.
This is not the end of class struggle. It’s the effort to outgrow the categories that capitalism made necessary in the first place.
Refusing the Final Vocabulary
The Left needs to be capable of strategy without orthodoxy, solidarity without role lock-in. The figure of the worker has done important work, but it cannot be our final vocabulary. If we want a future beyond capitalism, we need terms that don’t just resist its logics but refuse to reproduce them in reverse.
We need to stop imagining the worker as our endgame. And start building the conditions in which the worker, too, can rest.