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.
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.
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.
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.
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.