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.
This undevelopment can’t happen in isolation because it would destroy the markets which capital requires just as much as it requires cheap labor. That’s the central contradiction of capital.
Now, one might speculate that the US market could collapse as long as an external one takes its place. Ideally that would have been China, whose middle class has been growing exponentially. It could have been India, which right now is more pro-west under Modi. But that isn’t going as expected either.
I would look more at Europe. Right now the EU is all in on Slava Amerikani and is divesting from Russia and China. All of those markets are orienting toward the US, which is great for the US capitalists but probably will shrink the overall economy.