I DON’T THINK THIS IS HOW THE PANDEMIC WAS MEANT TO TURN OUT: Joel Kotkin: A new dawn for the working class. Workers have more power than any time since the 1950s.

The labouring masses are restless, as evidenced by the Canadian trucker strike, union drives in Amazon warehouses in the US and in demonstrations throughout the developing world. More revealing still may be the turmoil in the labour markets, where workers are changing jobs, creating their own and, overall, refusing to return to the structures of the pre-pandemic order.

Once working-class protests were often organised by leftists or even Communists, but many of today’s working-class radical movements take on a different, more populist and distinctly anti-statist character. One can question the positions adopted by protesters, particularly on vaccines, but also recognise that the new wave of working-class unrest, whether in Canada or among the gilets jaunes in France, reflects a deep-seated frustration with diktats issued from above by an increasingly authoritarian state.

Generally, these movements are not embraced but are largely met with disdain and even horror by gentry progressives and their media allies. As Edwin Aponte notes on the Bellows, a widely read Marxist blog, this ‘betrays the left’s allergy to the varied social character of the working class as it actually exists in 2022’.

So true. Plus:

The people who kept society functioning as the ‘laptop classes’ stayed behind their screens are demanding some well-deserved respect as well as greater compensation. Politicians like President Biden talk about having to ‘learn to code’ to fit into the ‘new economy’. But in the real world, the biggest demand is not for coders, but for skilled, dependable workers, like drivers, machine-tool operators and welders.

Related: Truckers are starting a working-class revolution — and the left hates it.