Identifying interests

One factor here is that the arenas of distributional conflict have become ever more remote from popular politics. The national labour markets of the 1970s,with the manifold opportunities they offered for corporatist political mobilization and inter-class coalitions, or the politics of public spending in the 1980s, were not necessarily beyond the grasp or the strategic reach of the ‚man in the street‘. Since then, the battlefields on which the contradictions of democratic capitalism are fought out have become ever more complex, making it exceedingly difficult for anyone outside the political and financial elites to recognize the underlying interests and identify their own.

—Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End?, (London: Verso, 2016), 93. Published in New Left Review 71, September/October 2011.