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.
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