"If anything defines the middle class, it is its (im)possible existence. It is an aspirational impulse that never solidifies, a transition that is always incomplete and unsatisfied, a class that is always half-formed. Since its existence is never fully proven, it requires constant demonstration and verification: a constant staging, an eternal class performance to renew its status and prove that it belongs to it."

For decades, the middle class has been the political and cultural protagonist of societies: a symbol of integration that promised prosperity for the working class and embodied the legitimate aspirations for upward social mobility of a vast majority. Today, however, the middle class is perceived more as a broken promise, incapable of reliably leading us toward a better future. Its decline has awakened a deep unease whose ultimate consequences we still do not know. It is a social wound from which a new reactionary politics is emerging with force: a struggle to regain status and return to an idealized past that erases the feeling of abandonment.

The key question this essay poses is: what do we do with the middle class if we aspire to a project of social transformation? To answer it, it explores the experience of downward mobility and the class's capacity for action, as well as the emotions, desires, and contradictions that permeate it—from the SEAT 600 to Cuéntame cómo pasó, from the dream of consumption to the disenchantment of low-cost society—in order to imagine new alliances and forms of shared future.

Antonio Gómez Villar is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona (UB) and co-director of the Barcelona Pensa philosophy festival. He is the author of the books Transformar no es cambiar (Verso, 2024), Los olvidados. Ficción de un proletariado reacciónrio (Bellaterra, 2022), and E. Laclau y Ch. Mouffe: hegemonía y populismo (Gedisa, 2021); and editor of the books Maradona, un mito plebeyo (Ned, 2021) and Working Dead. Escenarios del postrabajo (La Virreina, 2019).