Went to a small regional socialist political conference recently and there was a lot of discussion about this. It has really advanced my worldview, especially having recently read Settlers.
The doctrinaire Marxist analysis of society is that there is a proletariat working class, and there is a capitalist class. The capitalists exploit the proles, and the proles are revolutionary. We are all familiar with this.
However, communists in every country must adapt this analysis to their own actual existing society. This requires answering three questions:
- The history of this region is characterized by ________
- The contradictions of the current moment are primarily ________
- The revolutionary class is _________
In Russia the revolutionary class was the industrial proletariat, and in China the revolutionary class were the peasants. We can’t pretend the US has any similarity to Tsarist Russia. So what are the answers to these questions in our context? I’ll give my own thoughts as a comment.
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Historically and realistically: The Black Working Class
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Historically queers have also been in on it, the IWW had some very interesting stuff going on at one point but that moment has passed and too much has changed in rural workers e.g. loggers and coal miners
Latine immigrants tend to also be very in on it, sans cuban exiles
Indigenous people moreso; I say this mainly because I’ve seen black Americans fall for the trap of “patriotism” for the land and fight in the army.
Haven’t seen that from indigenous people tho.
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There just aren’t very many indigenous people unfortunately. The genocide was very thorough. Ballpark 5 million indigenous people and 50 million black people.
Having that “patriotism” weaponized against them to commit a nation wide cultural and in a lot of cases literal genocide against them probablly made them appropriately suspicious when they heard the same arguments being made about “foreigners” by people who weren’t orig8nally from this country.
- The history of this region is characterized by colonialism, genocide, slavery, and a tacit refusal to pay for any of it in the hundred-fifty years since.
- The contradictions of the current moment are primarily that we’re told slavery is ended despite the existence of school-to-prison pipelines, ‘three strike’ laws (thanks, Genocide Joe), and stop-and-frisk law to provide bodies to the for-profit prison slavery complex.
- The revolutionary class is denigrated subjects-of-empire (Black and Indigenous predominantly) and ex-felons.
My analysis based on the work I do and who I do it with.
My analysis based on the work I do and who I do it with.
Thank you for your service.
in the absence of a conscious working class, there is no revolutionary class in the US. period.
if there’s ever going to be one it will develop in the coming decades of climate collapse, in the favelas and wastelands outside the walls of the massive air-conditioned gated communities where the shrinking comfortable remnant will be sequestered
Kinda looking forward to the American working class entering the stage of history again or for the first time, whichever. Similar feelings about Russia and Germany but it all feels so sclerotic
I’ve been reading Walter Rodney and Frantz Fanon and thinking about how colonialism became neocolonialism and have been thinking that neocolonialism may be transitioning to a new phase of colonization.
Under colonialism, colonized nations were underdeveloped and so there was only a very small proletariat while most people were lumpen proles and landless peasants.
Then colonialism died and was reborn as neocolonialism, colonized nations were still underdeveloped but the proletariat grew as secondary production was offshored from the colonizing nations.
Now I think we’re entering a new phase of colonialism and I think Israel and Ukraine are showing us the future. Underdevelopment isn’t enough to sustain the colonizers anymore, now begins undevelopment. Underdeveloped nations have advanced too far to be easily controlled, hence dedollatization, and so they need to be put back in their place.
Still thinking about what this means within the US itself. Maybe undevelopment will be deployed at home onto internally colonized people, so wages become gigs while infrastructure crumbles and artificially cheap commodities become unaffordable while superprofit is concentrated in the coastal metropols.
idk I need to read more theory
Still thinking about what this means within the US itself. Maybe undevelopment will be deployed at home onto internally colonized people, so wages become gigs while infrastructure crumbles and artificially cheap commodities become unaffordable while superprofit is concentrated in the coastal metropols.
I mean…just look at Mississippi, portions of Georgia, Alabama, Apalachia. These places aren’t exactly rocking a good standard of living just cause they are in America.
Yes, but that’s still just underdevelopment.
My theory about undevelopment would imply that, at some point in the future, Mississippi will be reduced to a lower level of development. Maybe gigifacation of wage labor will destroy all employment and decay of infrastructure will deproletarianize the workers and turn them back into lumpen proles and landless peasants without a consistent material relation to the means of production. The end of wage labor and the end of property ownership of any kind, probably the end of consumption as a meaningful sector of the local economy.
Or maybe Mississippi will be carpet bombed back into the 1800s, achieving the same thing in a much faster timescale.
This undevelopment can’t happen in isolation because it would destroy the markets which capital requires just as much as it requires cheap labor. That’s the central contradiction of capital.
Now, one might speculate that the US market could collapse as long as an external one takes its place. Ideally that would have been China, whose middle class has been growing exponentially. It could have been India, which right now is more pro-west under Modi. But that isn’t going as expected either.
I would look more at Europe. Right now the EU is all in on Slava Amerikani and is divesting from Russia and China. All of those markets are orienting toward the US, which is great for the US capitalists but probably will shrink the overall economy.
Could events such as the Jackson water crisis be viewed as this process of undevelopment? What are your thoughts. Though not related to gigification of labor, like you said, there is a process of infrastructure failure that just becomes the new norm.
And I do think there is something to this idea of undevelopment, and it’s interesting to think about what it means for any proletariat in the US. Especially once the surplus from the empire dwindles
Looking at Jackson’s ongoing situation they’re now in a permanently lower state of water quality and it’ll never be fixed without massive federal intervention (so, never). That does look like undevelopment. It looks like they’re still “working” to fix it, though, and I think undevelopment will feature an abandonment of that rhetorical device. They won’t even pretend to try anymore, they’ll just abandon these places and leave them to fend for themselves.
Given the possibly violent tension that’s developing, it is very much possible we might have war-like undevelopment. But you are forgetting that leaving climate change and natural disasters do the dirty work for them and then force on them a shock doctrine of neoliberalization and poor reconstruction efforts has been the playbook since Katrina.
A couple years back I watched this seminar on decline/collapse, and one major point that was mentioned is that a lot of the boom-era infrastructure that has a 75-100 year lifespan is now hitting 75+ years since construction. Argument being that resource scarcity and/or neoliberal hegemony will prevent said infrastructure from being replaced or upgraded.
I could easily see that disproportionately affecting the hinterlands of the imperial core. Undevelopment in the form of inaction in the face of decay.
Interesting way of putting it cde
The party line of the Panthers was that the lumpenproles could serve as a revolutionary base in the imperial core, leading them to organize in prisons among other places.
Legit starting to believe this more and more. I’ve seen more revolutionary spirit and awareness among homeless addicts, Juggalos, convicts, and struggling sex workers than even the most “radical” suburban angsty teen. For whatever it is worth these groups of the marginalized in our society are growing. I think there is more potential in starting a food program in your city (which the Panthers did) than any other type of organizing. I think the hardest part in organizing is that it is a slow grind. It is a lot of planting seeds without seeing many of them grow.
To be more specific, there are professional-class “joiners” that you might get in your org. They might participate a lot and eagerly engage with theory, but many of them will still have both feet firmly planted back with their more-affluent family and school career, and the life path constructed around them.
TRUE. I have seen this first hand. And boy do they flip when the rubber hits the road on a big issue like police abolition or something.
When the color revolution was happening in Cuba a few years back and every other “socialist” had to air out their hot take about how Cuba was authoritarian or how Cuba was aktually a revisionist ex-Soviet neocolony, BLM issued a statement condemning the color revolution and calling for an end to the blockade. And this wasn’t a radical BLM branch filled with Black Maoists or Pan-Africanists. This was BLM National, the one most compromised and filled with grifters who misappropriated funds to buy themselves mansions. Even these grifting liberals had a better take than half of the so-called radical left.
This should give you a hint on where the revolutionary class in the US lie.
My thoughts:
- The history of the US is characterized by the annexation of land by white settlers, mass importation of revolutionary proles through slavery, global exploitation through imperialism, non-revolutionary settler trade unionism, and slow proletarianization of the white settler class through neoliberalism.
- The contradictions of the current moment are the decline of imperial hegemony, worsening living conditions due to neoliberalism, and the inability of the capitalist system to address climate change.
- The revolutionary class is not yet consolidated in the US.
There are a few candidates for the revolutionary class. The genocide against indigenous people was unfortunately so successful that they do not form a critical enough component of the economy to seize power (this is similar to the situation in Palestine, contrasted with South Africa). Black workers are an obvious candidate. However, nascent organizing of black workers in the 60s was crushed with extreme violence supported by the white settler class. Undocumented & temporary foreign workers are another possibility, but they are very marginalized through an intense & bipartisan focus on border security and are despised by the white settler class.
I believe a revolutionary class in the US will not be formed until imperial decline, neoliberal decay, and climate change force a full proletarianization of the white middle class and they accept solidarity with black workers & undocumented/temporary foreign workers.
prisoners are a huge portion of the population relative to other examples, and since the US also uses them as slave labor i think there’s more potential there than a traditional view that would view them as ‘lumpen’ or whatever. a standing prediction for direct cause of the overthrow of the US is prisons expanding (even more) beyond their capacity and they’ll be spread too thin to stop uprisings.
Would a prison revolt necessarily be socialist in nature? Their immediate form of exploitation is essentially slavery as such, not wage slavery which would instill in workers a specifically anti-bourgeois consciousness.
If a revolution started from inside prisons, why wouldn’t they simply stop once they have liberated themselves from slave labor or perhaps even gained their liberty from prison? What would compel them to go the whole way and abolish capitalism?
I’m not opposed to the idea that lumpenproletariat would be revolutionary, but I picture it being primarily people outside of prison, nominally free yet practically rejected by society, unhoused and unable to find work.
prison forced labor is not of ‘precapitalist’ form, it is capitalist with escalated forms of discipline & surveilance. they work for token wages in real remuneration or “privileges” (basic rights & necessities), it’s rare now that someone would get physically beaten into performing labor, they make the conditions unlivable without working—just like wage slavery but in a contained space that cuts out all the options proles have on the outside to organize or leverage competition
so yes, the conditions are capitalist and the organizations prisoners have made–prisoner unions–function within a capitalist mode of production. going a step further, prison abolitionism, what is needed for actually gaining liberty from prisons is explicitly socialist, so unless a big riot happened and the US somehow acceded to & then immediately captured a prison trade union AFL-CIO style, it’s hard to imagine an uprising not being of socialist character. and the people who’d support them outside would all be socialists
One interesting class I heard named at the conference was “graduates without a future”. This class was the engine of the 2011 occupy protests, for example. Usually you’d think university education puts someone solidly outside of the revolutionary class, but perhaps student debt + shit job prospects would be enough to build solidarity.
Plenty of revolutionaries have come from the privileged classes, ever since the beginning. They just need to be committed enough (or to have made a substantial break with their former world) to orient their life around revolutionary purposes.
Is it possible to say specifically? The problem of traditional definitions being distorted in the US is mostly a product of there being a strong middle class built on the benefits of US imperialism. Many of these people are of course technically proletarian but there interests align with the bourgeoisie. As time goes on we’ll continue to see fewer people benefiting from US imperialism, the middle class will collapse, class consciousness will develop out of poor and predominantly urban communities as it has generally tended to in other countries.
I’m not sure why the US can’t be compared to Russia because workers are exploited in service economies not just industrial ones, except it raises the problem that Russia (and China’s) revolutions were to some extent dependant on the collapse brought about by war. Which leads in to the idea that many Western communists have that a) the US will not merely decline but collapse independently of revolution and b) that somehow communism is any position to take advantage of that. and both those beliefs seem doubtful to me.
I think the unique characteristic of the US is that, barring some unknowable post-apocalyptic scenario, any revolution will probably have a distinctly liberal and multicultural nature driven by a range of different causes, which is why intersectionality is so important, and making people understand that problems like climate change are fundamentally economic problems.
Of course the petit-bourgeois and elites will pursue fascism, but the culture and diversity of the US makes it hard to see how any kind of traditional fascism would succeed domestically. Tsarist Russia is closer to the US than Weimar Germany.I think there will be petit-bourgeois inter-class struggle, based on their relationship to racial privilege and national chauvinism vs global integration. The success of the internationalist, multicultural bourgeois will depend on cooperation with the working class and building a popular front with the left, including communists, in the way that success of the union over the Confederacy relied on support from radical abolitionists and freed slaves. At the point of internationalist bourgeois victory, our future will be decided based on the discipline of the communist movement and our ability/willingness to continue the class struggle, or else we will face recuperation and reactionary measures to suppress us (same as it ever was). Obviously, if the fascists win, we get free helicopter rides, so I’m on board with a temporary popular front when the going gets tough
The history of the region is that of settler-colonialism and the associated frontier mentality.
The contradiction is that the region ran out of frontier long ago but the collective mentality is that the frontier is still out there, still “virginal” territory to be settled. Thus a political economy fueled by pseudo-frontiers, artifices, capital built out of sleight of hand.
The revolutionary class is, unclear. There’s plenty of disaffected working class in America but there’s also a deep cultural reflex that unrest and instability is something that only happens elsewhere and that those things coming here will mean Very, Very Bad Things will happen. Now I do hold some optimism compared to most leftists in that I think that’s born more out of fear than privilege, that the working class will be the first to be sacrificed in the name of restabilizing (it is what happens whenever there’s an economic crisis).
I think we won’t see clearly what the revolutionary class will be until the climate change fueled resource crunch fractures the nation and the new lines, both geopolitical and class-based, emerge in the wake.
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Volume 2 of Capital often gets overlooked, but one of the topics I have a tremendous amount of appreciation for is Marx’s discussion of how it is only in the sphere of production where value is created; everything else must be “paid for” out of surplus value. Nearly all commodity production for goods consumed in the US is produced offshore. That means the value is created offshore, but the surplus value is appropriated by US capital. Take Apple, for example. Some of the R&D work is done in the US and that would add to the value of a phone, as well as the transportation costs… but all the labor used to create the phone is in China. So that is where the value is created but all that surplus value is appropriated by Apple and used to pay shareholders, executives, tech support in the US, etc. The entire US industrial economy now more closely resembles a merchant capitalist economy - we do not produce surplus value, we simply appropriate it. And from a societal standpoint, so much of the US standard of living is based on the appropriation of this surplus value.
So (and this is where I get into very speculative ideas and could very well be wrong) to me, you can almost view the current situation in the US is that ALL Americans are “capitalists” now in that we benefit from the surplus value extracted from labor in the Global South. Of course it’s disproportionate - a typical warehouse worker benefits far less from this arrangement than an Amazon shareholder, for example - but it means that nearly everyone in the US benefits from the current system. Which means it’s hard to see how there can be any revolutionary class in the US as things stand.
That is why my theory is that the revolutionary potential of the US worker is moot until we can break the current system of exploiting labor outside of the US. Eliminate US hegemony and you will break the extraction of surplus value from the Global South, which will break the ability to pay off the working class with a cut of the surplus value. Where we go from there… I don’t know. That’s truly terra incognita. Maybe the US goes back to the beginning and has to rebuild domestic production, and then a re-emergence of an actual proletariat.
Note that I am only talking about the sphere of industrial capital and not finance capital - which of course makes this analysis incomplete but I am fully admitting that it’s not supposed to be a complete analysis. I also struggle with correctly incorporating both finance and industrial capital simultaneously, but that’s an area I’m trying to educate myself better in (hoping to get through Volume 3 before the end of the year).
Lovely post, thanks for the effort.
Scientifically, none is known. The imperial core has never produced socialist revolution and there are many reasons that any class in it may be driven back into liberalism. It is likely that we will need further developments (e.g. the loss of American empire) to answer that question. In the meantime, we should build organizations and politically educate and do experiments to see what works in our local contexts and what does not. Socialists have needed to build their organizations for decades before they had any chance of having any kind of real power and we are at the earliest possible stages under an advanced capitalist system in the imperial core. We should do our best to hit the ground running based on what we can foresee. There will be capitalist boom and bust cycles, for example. What will your org do when there is a recession? There will be racialized policing and poverty. When lightning strikes and there is a moment of agitation, like during BLM, will your org be ready to roll and deal with liberal cooption? Will you be authentically embedded with any black communities? Will you have a coalition to call upon and plan with? This us the work we need right now, the very basic bread and butter organizing and political education, and to develop in a way that does not alienate the many communities in which we should have oresense.
That’s the fun part: there isn’t one!
We can point to how the majority of the American economy and political formation happened around (stolen) land acquisition and speculation, which is tied up in the American Dream.
We can also analyze how the relations of capital versus labor have become more opaque in the past half century; a large fraction of workers are not in a position where they can see each other and see where they sit in relation to what’s being produced/sold. The FIRE sector and the security sector can be written off, but even in goods and services, much of it is atomized and elastic. For example, one of the biggest employers near me makes car parts. They don’t make the whole car, they put the parts to be whizzed around the world in containerized logistics. They could not easily seize the means of making cars, nor could they make a real impact on the industry with a strike without organizing on the level of that whole industry (horizontal integration but for unions).
With the financialization of the economy it makes a bit more sense to update the bourgeois/proletarian dichotomy with the lens of debt that rules everything. There are people who make capital gains, and people on the other end who feed money in (renters, debtors, etc).
63% of people own a deed to their home but only 11% of people have it without debt. Close to 20% of the workforce is small business owners, way too large of a portion for them to all be winners in the credit vs. debt game.
I’m not sure whether there is any demographically definable revolutionary class in the US. If there is, I would say it is made up of the people who cannot (or never could) afford to be winners of the American Dream casino. The people who may or may not have a 401k, but they pay far more in rent and mortgages and student loans and car payments and medical debt than they’ll ever make back in the stock market.
For this to become “a class for itself” is far beyond my ability to plan out. But I suspect that it will find allies amongst people with a substantial sense of precarity, especially among minorities but also extending along the lines of people who make moral stances (geopolitical and ecological) around living a good life.
My analysis is that our agency is going to be less oriented around the ability to stop work on the factory floor and on the portside (note their fixed positions which are easily defended by the security sector mentioned above), and more around the ability to defect from the economy at large. The former strategy, they can fight or buy off or give concessions to. But there is nothing they can do about people who come together to circumvent the need for the economy, and assemble the means of their own existence.
