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.
When the color revolution was happening in Cuba a few years back and every other “socialist” had to air out their hot take about how Cuba was authoritarian or how Cuba was aktually a revisionist ex-Soviet neocolony, BLM issued a statement condemning the color revolution and calling for an end to the blockade. And this wasn’t a radical BLM branch filled with Black Maoists or Pan-Africanists. This was BLM National, the one most compromised and filled with grifters who misappropriated funds to buy themselves mansions. Even these grifting liberals had a better take than half of the so-called radical left.
This should give you a hint on where the revolutionary class in the US lie.