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.
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.