this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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askchapo

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Who is the revolutionary class in the US? (hexbear.net)
submitted 5 months ago by hypercracker@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net
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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:

  1. The history of this region is characterized by ________
  2. The contradictions of the current moment are primarily ________
  3. 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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[–] hypercracker@hexbear.net 27 points 5 months ago

My thoughts:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.