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:

  1. The history of this region is characterized by ________
  2. The contradictions of the current moment are primarily ________
  3. 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.

  • Barx [none/use name]
    ·
    3 months ago

    Scientifically, none is known. The imperial core has never produced socialist revolution and there are many reasons that any class in it may be driven back into liberalism. It is likely that we will need further developments (e.g. the loss of American empire) to answer that question. In the meantime, we should build organizations and politically educate and do experiments to see what works in our local contexts and what does not. Socialists have needed to build their organizations for decades before they had any chance of having any kind of real power and we are at the earliest possible stages under an advanced capitalist system in the imperial core. We should do our best to hit the ground running based on what we can foresee. There will be capitalist boom and bust cycles, for example. What will your org do when there is a recession? There will be racialized policing and poverty. When lightning strikes and there is a moment of agitation, like during BLM, will your org be ready to roll and deal with liberal cooption? Will you be authentically embedded with any black communities? Will you have a coalition to call upon and plan with? This us the work we need right now, the very basic bread and butter organizing and political education, and to develop in a way that does not alienate the many communities in which we should have oresense.