From a distance, reactionaries can appear to share something with communist analysis—the performative anti-wokeness, the mockery of liberal hypocrisy, what sometimes passes for class reductionism—but this resemblance dissolves the moment we examine what actually organises their politics, which is nothing more than aesthetic grievance and contrarian posturing, a set of cultural reflexes conditioned by algorithm and spectacle rather than any coherent understanding of material forces. They are political opportunists when they are anything at all, and mostly they are just loud, and we can safely ignore them because they constitute a sideshow to the real problem.

The real problem is not the online LARPer but the suburbanite, the one who is decently well-off relative to the median but nowhere near actual ownership of capital in any meaningful sense—the self-professed apolitical type, the socially liberal and fiscally conservative liberal with a capital L, the stemlord, the petit-bourgeois shop owner, the mid-tier businessman, the techbro who mistakes disruption for moral philosophy. These are the people whose politics remain invisible to themselves because their politics are simply the default assumptions of the property-holding strata in a liberal capitalist society: a kind of pseudo-American libertarianism so ambient it functions like atmosphere rather than ideology.

The pipeline from this position to outright reaction is not speculative but historically documented, and the mechanism is proletarianisation. When the economy contracts, when investments collapse, when the comfortable hobby-job that finances minor luxuries disappears overnight, these are the people who experience the sharpest relative decline—not the billionaire who can weather any crisis, not the proletarian who already has nothing, but the person furthest from having nothing to lose but their chains. That is when the mask comes off, and it comes off fast.

We love to point at aristocrats and big capitalists when we discuss the rise of fascism, and certainly those classes played their role, but the core social base of the Nazi party was not the old aristocracy and not big capital (which attached itself later, as it always does) and certainly not the organised proletariat—it was the petit-bourgeoisie, the labour aristocracy, the professional-managerial stratum, the people who had gotten theirs and were terrified of losing it. This is not an analogy we are drawing for rhetorical effect; it is the same class composition reproducing itself under the same structural pressures in every capitalist society that enters crisis.

Anyone who has spent time in those circles—the business networking events with terrible coffee and aggressive talk of synergy, the hackathons sponsored by defence contractors, the suburban barbecues where everyone drives a German SUV—already feels it. Yes, decent individuals exist within the group, people who arrived there by accident or luck, but as a class tendency there is a distinct and unmistakable pattern: these people are reactionary in their material interests and therefore in their politics, even as they profess centrism, rationality, evidence-based thinking, all the aesthetics of the grown-up who has transcended ideology.

The contradiction that defines them is structural rather than psychological: they are established enough to look down on regular workers but precarious enough relative to actual capitalists that they live in permanent anxiety about their position, and this anxiety does not radicalise them leftward because their class location gives them something to defend rather than something to seize. In private—one-on-one, or in small groups where the performance of respectability relaxes—it never takes long before someone probes with a joke about regulation, a sarcastic remark about bureaucracy, and within minutes the whole room is complaining about laws that turn out, on inspection, to be workplace safety rules, wage and hour protections, environmental regulations, anti-discrimination statutes, collective bargaining rights. What they mean by red tape is always, in the final analysis, the legal encoding of minimal limits on exploitation.

Now, Marxists do not invest in the liberal framework of human rights as such—rights are not our analytical category and legalism is not our method—but the practical implication within actually-existing liberal society is straightforward: without these legal constraints enforced by the state apparatus, every business owner will drive labour harder, pay less, discard people faster, and externalise every possible human cost in the pursuit of profit. They already do this with the laws in place; the laws function not as prevention but as price. There is a reason labour is called human resources, and that term is not neutral but confessional—it names the real relation.

When we say Marxists do not care about human rights in the liberal sense, we mean that socialist construction is oriented toward results rather than toward the procedural weaselling that allows exploitation to continue so long as no specific statute was technically violated. The difference is not between cruelty and kindness but between a system that permits exploitation by design and one that eliminates the material basis for it. The historical socialist states were often brutal in enforcing this elimination, and the people who complain loudest about that brutality are almost always the ones whose class position would have made them its target—not because of their ideas but because of what they would have done the moment enforcement relaxed.

The real pipeline is not from the the boards to the streets but from the suburban barbecue to the fascist rally, and it is paved not with ideas or intentions but with material conditions: a retirement account, a mortgage on a house whose value must never fall, and the quiet terror of becoming proletarian in a society that has taught its middle strata to regard the proletariat as something less than human.