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.
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.