In the Marxist tradition, for what it is worth, there is no hope held out for the "poor" as you put it, more precisely the "lumpenproletariat" or proletariat-in-rags in Marxist argot, who are generally held to be too far gone in social decay and as such susceptible to fake right-wing populism (this insight goes back 100 years if not further). That is as opposed to the respectable working class of the sort depicted in Pelizzi's painting 'The Fourth Estate' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Estate_(painting) , the sorts of people who would read Henry George on their breaks down the coal mine, as well as a middle-class left-wing intelligentsia who are also resistant to fake right-wing populism for the simple reason that it is dumb.

The trouble is that there is not too much left of the respectable working class these days, while the middle-class left-wing intelligentsia, though they will never vote for Trump, tend, if unmoored from the bread and butter concerns of a respectable working class, to be just as easily distracted in another direction by the latest trend in identity politics, etc, etc, etc, itself probably astroturfed by the right to some degree as in the days when the CIA was funding Gloria Steinem to come up with a variety of feminism different to the stauncho socialist feminists of those days, as it seems (see 'Don't be MsLed', Berkeley Barb, 1975)..

So, basically, there is nothing about our situation that would have come as much of a surprise to a serious old-school Marxist intellectual like Antonio Gramsci. Without a respectable working class to keep everything grounded, things get difficult for the left.