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.

  • Greenleaf [he/him]
    ·
    4 months ago

    Volume 2 of Capital often gets overlooked, but one of the topics I have a tremendous amount of appreciation for is Marx’s discussion of how it is only in the sphere of production where value is created; everything else must be “paid for” out of surplus value. Nearly all commodity production for goods consumed in the US is produced offshore. That means the value is created offshore, but the surplus value is appropriated by US capital. Take Apple, for example. Some of the R&D work is done in the US and that would add to the value of a phone, as well as the transportation costs… but all the labor used to create the phone is in China. So that is where the value is created but all that surplus value is appropriated by Apple and used to pay shareholders, executives, tech support in the US, etc. The entire US industrial economy now more closely resembles a merchant capitalist economy - we do not produce surplus value, we simply appropriate it. And from a societal standpoint, so much of the US standard of living is based on the appropriation of this surplus value.

    So (and this is where I get into very speculative ideas and could very well be wrong) to me, you can almost view the current situation in the US is that ALL Americans are “capitalists” now in that we benefit from the surplus value extracted from labor in the Global South. Of course it’s disproportionate - a typical warehouse worker benefits far less from this arrangement than an Amazon shareholder, for example - but it means that nearly everyone in the US benefits from the current system. Which means it’s hard to see how there can be any revolutionary class in the US as things stand.

    That is why my theory is that the revolutionary potential of the US worker is moot until we can break the current system of exploiting labor outside of the US. Eliminate US hegemony and you will break the extraction of surplus value from the Global South, which will break the ability to pay off the working class with a cut of the surplus value. Where we go from there… I don’t know. That’s truly terra incognita. Maybe the US goes back to the beginning and has to rebuild domestic production, and then a re-emergence of an actual proletariat.

    Note that I am only talking about the sphere of industrial capital and not finance capital - which of course makes this analysis incomplete but I am fully admitting that it’s not supposed to be a complete analysis. I also struggle with correctly incorporating both finance and industrial capital simultaneously, but that’s an area I’m trying to educate myself better in (hoping to get through Volume 3 before the end of the year).