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.
prisoners are a huge portion of the population relative to other examples, and since the US also uses them as slave labor i think there's more potential there than a traditional view that would view them as 'lumpen' or whatever. a standing prediction for direct cause of the overthrow of the US is prisons expanding (even more) beyond their capacity and they'll be spread too thin to stop uprisings.
Would a prison revolt necessarily be socialist in nature? Their immediate form of exploitation is essentially slavery as such, not wage slavery which would instill in workers a specifically anti-bourgeois consciousness.
If a revolution started from inside prisons, why wouldn’t they simply stop once they have liberated themselves from slave labor or perhaps even gained their liberty from prison? What would compel them to go the whole way and abolish capitalism?
I’m not opposed to the idea that lumpenproletariat would be revolutionary, but I picture it being primarily people outside of prison, nominally free yet practically rejected by society, unhoused and unable to find work.
prison forced labor is not of 'precapitalist' form, it is capitalist with escalated forms of discipline & surveilance. they work for token wages in real remuneration or "privileges" (basic rights & necessities), it's rare now that someone would get physically beaten into performing labor, they make the conditions unlivable without working---just like wage slavery but in a contained space that cuts out all the options proles have on the outside to organize or leverage competition
so yes, the conditions are capitalist and the organizations prisoners have made--prisoner unions--function within a capitalist mode of production. going a step further, prison abolitionism, what is needed for actually gaining liberty from prisons is explicitly socialist, so unless a big riot happened and the US somehow acceded to & then immediately captured a prison trade union AFL-CIO style, it's hard to imagine an uprising not being of socialist character. and the people who'd support them outside would all be socialists