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.
Historically and realistically: The Black Working Class
Which is why the police in this country are so quick to kill them
Historically queers have also been in on it, the IWW had some very interesting stuff going on at one point but that moment has passed and too much has changed in rural workers e.g. loggers and coal miners
Latine immigrants tend to also be very in on it, sans cuban exiles
Indigenous people moreso; I say this mainly because I’ve seen black Americans fall for the trap of “patriotism” for the land and fight in the army.
Haven’t seen that from indigenous people tho.
https://www.nicoa.org/american-indian-veterans-have-highest-record-of-military-service/
There just aren’t very many indigenous people unfortunately. The genocide was very thorough. Ballpark 5 million indigenous people and 50 million black people.
Having that “patriotism” weaponized against them to commit a nation wide cultural and in a lot of cases literal genocide against them probablly made them appropriately suspicious when they heard the same arguments being made about “foreigners” by people who weren’t orig8nally from this country.