Office workers are still proletarian for the most part, same with service workers. They all play a part in the production and distribution of commodities for the accumulation of business owners. A helpful way to think about class is to understand the relations to production and distribution, not the specific job.

An artist can be petite bourgeoisie if they own their own tools and self-publish, or they may be proletarian and produce for a company based on wage-labor. This struggle between proletarianization and independence actually colors the class character of artists, and also impacts other fields like engineering. A great example of this can be found in Stalin’s Shoemaker.

The primary problems with the US Empire are that it is a settler-colony, and that the spoils of imperialism are used to provide cheap treats to reduce revolutionary potential. This two-fold problem is why the US Empire has a deeply reactionary labor aristocracy, however at the moment imperialism is in clear decay, causing a cost of living crisis.

You are correct that industrial labor has been exported to the global south, but this is largely a shift towards financial capital over industrial capital, which results in deindustrialization and imperialism. Proletarians in the global south are super-exploited for super-profits, cemented by millitary and financial domination, sanctions, and embargoes.

There’s also unequal exchange, where higher tech and skilled labor is kept monopolized in the global north, allowing for monopoly prices to be charged in north-south trade. They call this part “value add,” but this obscures the predatory monopolistic relationship going on. This is also where China is breaking up imperialism quite well, by facilitating south-south trade and helping end this tech monopoly.

Settler-colonialism, however, remains a huge part of how the US Empire functions, and needs to also be addressed. Decolonizing Turtle Island is an important line of struggle for any Statesian org to focus on. Some orgs do put some focus on it, but it seems more neglected than combatting imperialism. Both are crucial.

If you haven’t already, I do recommend engaging with theories of imperialism, neocolonialism, and neoimperialism. Same with national liberation. All of it is crucial for understanding how to organize in the belly of the beast.

Yes. There is a sizable proletariat in the U.S. The issue is that they are no longer concentrated in the largest cities, with the service, real estate, tech and finance industries taking their place as the primary economic driver in those areas, instead dominating the economics of medium, small, and rural cities and towns.

However, that is also their weakness, as they cannot move towards the cities to take advantage of cheap labor because the upfront real estate costs are too expensive. That is the real predicament of American manufacturing. The solution that they have decided on is, of course, automation, but the issue still remains that you have to be able to attract the engineering talent to these rural areas. It still remains an issue of labor.

However, what that means is that the proletariat in the U.S. is uniquely separated and weak. Which of course was a purposeful, if short-sighted, decision by the neo-liberals. They sacrificed the empire they built to prevent labor from having a say in matters.

Edit: You cannot have a revolution based on race, as race is a flexible social category. There are plenty of Latino men who identify as ‘white’, even if they would never be recognized as such in WASP circles. The reason the Black Panthers specifically were targeted was because they were the only large black radical group that was actively seeking larger, multi-racial, coalition building, of the proletariat.

However, lots of ink has been spilled around revolutions based on nationality and anti-imperialism, and that revolutions for national sovereignity of former colonial holdings are usually progressive forces in history, though nationalism itself is ultimately regressive in the long term.

The vast majority of the US is proletarian. But it is shielded from the (in isolation, correct) predictions about the nature of the proletariat through imperialism, both because imperialism itself brings undue spoils (like a federal government that can fund anything it wants when it chooses to) and because the imperial apparatus itself turns inwards with great intensity, creating, for example, globally powerful propaganda that is applied nowhere more strongly than in the US itself.

Regarding production and the proletariat, one most remember that commodities are very broadly defined. The US has a very large gdp even if you cut out the financial nonsense. It “produces” a lot in capitalist terms even though industrially it is hollowing itself out. Though it’s actually finance and related sectors that actually weaken the US proletariat in the sense of their ability to make material demands based on disrupting production. It’s not because the US doesn’t make anything, it’s because large sectors actually make money through the destruction of industry, from offshoring, from big tech bubbles searching for financialized monopoly.

With that said, if the US proletariat united and acted in concert they could accomplish incredible things. Their limitation is their consciousness, shaped by all these aforementioned relations.

You maybe shouldn’t jump straight to mapping Lenin’s conditions directly onto ours. That isnt historical materialism. What Lenin did, was use HM to determine his own conditions. In Russia there was a weak bourgeoisie, mostly lawyers and doctors, some smaller factories; along side an 80 year old revolutionary movement that, at the time of its writing, had just overthrown the tzar through Soviet power. Lenin had just returned from exile and Bolsheviks were still debating Lenin’s April thesis.

His definitions of things are not static, they are based in his own conditions. He isnt saying “this is how the proletariat is defined for all time” he’s saying what it looks like in Russia, and to some extent other countries such as Germany. Were the Soviets significantly stronger than worker power in our time, in the west? Yes. Was Russian bourgeoisie weaker than the empire of Capital? Undoubtedly. In fact Lenin had only months earlier successfully theorized and identified capitalist empire, as it was in a stage of development that was objectively and materially realized, but not yet hegemonically, totally dominating. That wouldnt happen until after WW2.

You’re asking a lot of good questions. Actually Marx spent the last ten years of his life studying how societies transitioned from one form to another. In his time he saw the word transitioning from feudalism to capital. In his time, all production was being directed by capital, that is the economic base; but in most of the world, the formal power was still in the hands of kings, queens, and noble classes. Revolutionary theory is the theory of changes in the real world.

Anyway, Marx produced two cubic meters of handwritten notes about, among other things, how Russian peasant communes, called the Mir, might have evolved into socialism. basically working to disprove the social democratic ideal associated with Marx, that socialism could only evolve from capitalism. Considering the Russian “Soviet” was a worker council-led union, organized like a German or English union by people basically raised in the Mir, Marx was eerily accurate in his area of focus.

This was exactly the point that Lenin was making in State and Rev. The Bolsheviks wanted a bourgeois revolution, let capitalists develop the MoP and then overthrow them, and Lenin is trying to convince (and by August/September he has largely accomplished this, in no small part due to the publishing of S&R) the Bolsheviks that the Proletariat is revolutionary now and must overthrow both the Bourg and the monarchy, and create a worker state. By this point it is clear that the bourg are going to give power back to king Nick in the form of a parliamentary constitutional monarchy. That is why the Bolsheviks were the only faction in Russia that could have seized power. The bourg was too weak and stupid, and they needed the old state bureaucracy, itself deeply monarchist in character, in order to seize state power; which meant concessions to Nick, which meant continued war, slaughter and martial law via Kornilov, and death sentences for fleeing soldiers.

At this point, the challenge the Bolsheviks were having was keeping the revolution from happening too early, or not in a coordinated way. In fact many prominent Bolsheviks wanted it delayed even further, and were even moderate on the question of a proletarian vs a bourgeois revolution. But the Bolsheviks were a very well disciplined party, capable of communicating clear and accurate information across all different strata of the toiling classes. For example, if the rural semi-peasantry wants to pop off a revolt and the urban conditions aren’t yet present, revolution fails.

The Bolsheviks worked for decades organizing in factories, in the cities and countryside, through conditions of brutal repression, exile, and illegalism; educating and developing the workers, individually, materially and organizationally as a class. This was how they managed to build trust and deep roots in every layer of the working classes, as well as much of the peasantry, against intense slander and resistance, not to mention repression, from the crown and bourgeoisie.

Compare this to Germany, the most industrially developed country with the most developed social democratic bourgeoisie in the world. The Spartacist faction of Luxemburg and Liebknecht did not develop a strongly disciplined, broad, and deeply connected party like the Bolsheviks. The revolutionary Marxists in Germany was not prepared in 1914 when the SPD voted to support WW1, even though Luxemburg had already written extensively about the Social Democratic elite; and they were not ready in 1917 when the communists and militants began to break away and condemn the SPD. Because they lacked deep roots and strong discipline in the working class, the German revolutionary movement was plagued by putsches and infiltrators, like the Vorwarts siege that led to the capture and murder of Rosa and Karl by fascist cops. These uncoordinated revolutionary upsurges persisted for years, and by 1924 the proletariat and the bourgeoisie had effectively defeated each other, creating another condition for the rise of fascism in Germany.

The revolutionary conditions are always present, as the central contradiction is between the bourgeois and the working class. This means that when the bourgeoisie divides the class in some ways, it unites it in others. Capitalism is not capable of producing a stable middle class, which it needs in order to mitigate this very class antagonism. Which means the conditions of the workers, the ways we are divided and united, are dynamic and dependent on historic conditions. We use Marxism to develop the existing revolutionary potential of the workers over capitalism, not to apply old models of history to our current conditions. What we need is the party capable of building deep roots, communicating effectively across various strata correct information about real conditions affecting peoples lives, empowering people to see our power and seize it for not just our class benefit, but for the liberation of humanity.

In terms of what to organize? For now, the answer is yourself. From there, the answer will be different for everyone. But on a larger scale we need the party. For now you are at the very beginning of a journey, and our task is to take it as revolutionaries and scientists. Be very careful with abstraction itself, like “what routes can be taken to revolution outside of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism” might be a moot point, because for us, nothing but the total domination of capital exists.

Your example about racism as a revolutionary impetus is a good question which needs much discussion. Class antagonisms are experienced along lines of race, as well as gender, ethnicity, etc., but are not the central contradiction itself. Racism is a condition in which we organize but is not the fundamental contradiction. Where that leaves us is understanding and educating, as a basis for campaigning and fighting for change, and the best mechanism to accomplish this is still the revolutionary worker party.

Our challenges and conditions are different than Lenin’s in many ways, but not all. The tasks are largely the same, but the conditions are of a much different character, not just from time to time but from place to place as well. So it can be very confusing comparing different times and conditions for similarities. In order to understand concrete similarity we need to also understand concrete difference. Not just what is the same but also what is different. You will likely read State and Rev again and again, you will take and teach classes about it, you will quote it in your political statements. Each time you do, you will be changed, a little further along on your journey and yet somehow back where you started. As you change, you will continually create change in your environment until you can no longer return to that place at the start, one way or the other. This is true for the individual and for the class.

The only thing capable of administering this individual and class development is a mass revolutionary party made up of individuals of all working classes, which make up the international revolutionary working class, fighting for the interests of the whole class on the basis of a revolutionary shift away from capitalism towards socialism. We are in a phase of sectarianism where this may not be immediately obvious, but diversions from any part of this formula this are bound to be ultraleft, opportunist, reformist, or worse. It becomes more clear the more you understand the structures that actually create these conditions we struggle with.