askchapo

Historically and realistically: The Black Working Class

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

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

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

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Eagles fans the month after they lose the Superbowl

Right-wing psycho-fascists like Musk, Desantis, etc. They're the only ones who are well-off enough and are also unhinged enough to have a desire to change the country drastically. Everyone else is fucking terrified of actually changing anything, and yes this includes most of the homeless, the poor, etc.

All marginalised working class people.

IE. Everyone who is not cishetero straight white, excluding those who are rich.

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization has a section of their Program dedicated to exploring the classes and revolutionary potential:

https://frso.org/main-documents/class-in-the-us-and-strategy-for-revolution/