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.
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.
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