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.
We can point to how the majority of the American economy and political formation happened around (stolen) land acquisition and speculation, which is tied up in the American Dream.
We can also analyze how the relations of capital versus labor have become more opaque in the past half century; a large fraction of workers are not in a position where they can see each other and see where they sit in relation to what's being produced/sold. The FIRE sector and the security sector can be written off, but even in goods and services, much of it is atomized and elastic. For example, one of the biggest employers near me makes car parts. They don't make the whole car, they put the parts to be whizzed around the world in containerized logistics. They could not easily seize the means of making cars, nor could they make a real impact on the industry with a strike without organizing on the level of that whole industry (horizontal integration but for unions).
With the financialization of the economy it makes a bit more sense to update the bourgeois/proletarian dichotomy with the lens of debt that rules everything. There are people who make capital gains, and people on the other end who feed money in (renters, debtors, etc).
63% of people own a deed to their home but only 11% of people have it without debt. Close to 20% of the workforce is small business owners, way too large of a portion for them to all be winners in the credit vs. debt game.
I'm not sure whether there is any demographically definable revolutionary class in the US. If there is, I would say it is made up of the people who cannot (or never could) afford to be winners of the American Dream casino. The people who may or may not have a 401k, but they pay far more in rent and mortgages and student loans and car payments and medical debt than they'll ever make back in the stock market.
For this to become "a class for itself" is far beyond my ability to plan out. But I suspect that it will find allies amongst people with a substantial sense of precarity, especially among minorities but also extending along the lines of people who make moral stances (geopolitical and ecological) around living a good life.
My analysis is that our agency is going to be less oriented around the ability to stop work on the factory floor and on the portside (note their fixed positions which are easily defended by the security sector mentioned above), and more around the ability to defect from the economy at large. The former strategy, they can fight or buy off or give concessions to. But there is nothing they can do about people who come together to circumvent the need for the economy, and assemble the means of their own existence.