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 think there will be petit-bourgeois inter-class struggle, based on their relationship to racial privilege and national chauvinism vs global integration. The success of the internationalist, multicultural bourgeois will depend on cooperation with the working class and building a popular front with the left, including communists, in the way that success of the union over the Confederacy relied on support from radical abolitionists and freed slaves. At the point of internationalist bourgeois victory, our future will be decided based on the discipline of the communist movement and our ability/willingness to continue the class struggle, or else we will face recuperation and reactionary measures to suppress us (same as it ever was). Obviously, if the fascists win, we get free helicopter rides, so I’m on board with a temporary popular front when the going gets tough