I assume this has been covered already (I’m new), and I welcome recommendations of existing material! (E.g. Imperialism by Lenin seems like it’d be relevant)
I’m reading State and Revolution, and am trying to map it to the conditions in the US.
From chapter 2 (emphasis mine):
The overthrow of bourgeois rule can be accomplished only by the proletariat, the particular class whose economic conditions of existence prepare it for this task and provide it with the possibility and the power to perform it. While the bourgeoisie break up and disintegrate the peasantry and all the petty-bourgeois groups, they weld together, unite and organize the proletariat. Only the proletariat — by virtue of the economic role it plays in large-scale production — is capable of being the leader of all the working and exploited people, whom the bourgeoisie exploit, oppress and crush, often not less but more than they do the proletarians, but who are incapable of waging an independent struggle for their emancipation.
My understanding is that large-scale production has largely been moved outside of the US. I imagine this is also true of most imperial core countries.
If that’s true, doesn’t it follow that the US has a small, relatively weak proletariat?
And if THAT’S true, what’s the path to revolution in the US? Without a powerful proletariat, there can’t be a proletarian revolution, right?
I could see one answer being:
- Weaken US imperialism (e.g. through revolutions in imperial periphery)
- US is forced to re-develop it’s own productive capacity
- Developed productive capacity results in strong proletariat
- (Wait for contradictions to sharpen?)
- Revolution
Another (more likely?) could be:
- Get conquered
In both of those cases, the immediate work is to weaken the power of the US as a whole, right?
What are the main tools the US uses to project power, and how could orgs weaken them from within? Organize, obviously, but organize to do what? Mutual aid and unions seem clear, anything else?
I’d also be curious about any work on other paths to revolution in the imperial core. This might be straying outside of Marxist-Leninism, but has there been any theory around a revolution lead by a different class?
E.g. perhaps a deeply racist country could have a revolution based on race? …though the majority of people in the US are white. E.g. the black panthers were threatening enough that the state infiltrated and killed them.
Anyway. Interested in y’all’s thoughts - sorry if these are basic questions.
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.
I will mildly disagree, just in terms of how I personally tend to frame these things. Agreed for all the settler colonial aspects however.
This isn’t a strict reading of Marx, Engels or Lenin, but I have found it useful in terms of understanding things and organizing them appropriately only in so far as office and service workers are the tertiary proletariat, with the industrial proletariat being secondary proletarians, and agricultural/construction being primary proletarians.
We are at a point in time where the majority of our proletarians are tertiary, however, that doesn’t mean there aren’t a bunch of people in the primary and secondary tiers. However, there are more people in the primary and secondary tiers, both absolutely and by percentage of their populations in the neo-colonies.
These are ordered abit more liberally, based more into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the needs of historical and modern industrial capacity. Indeed, much of China’s organizational and administrative work appears to be around these models of priority. However, they have to work in concert to be effective, so it is like saying the heart is secondary to the lungs. A useful model only if you are in triage, which is how I view the left in the U.S.
You can sometimes convince an office worker of their worth, but getting them to organize in a way that is truly effective is far more difficult.
Edit: And organizing the construction/agricultural sector comes with its own sets of difficulties, in particular, the overwhelming precarious and seasonal nature of the employment.
There’s definitely unique circumstances for each subsection of the proletariat, but I would not categorize them as distinct classes. That’s the important bit that I am trying to get across, the US Empire does indeed have a huge proletariat, but this proletariat has its own unique characteristics that color how we have to organize.
the way i heard it described is with the term strata, i.e they arent distinct classes but different strata of the same (working) class, like the managerial strata
edit: i remembered where i heard this, it was Catherine Liu who wrote the Virtue Hoarders book on the stratum thats the managerial class
Yep! That’s an excellent way of putting it.
Absolutely fair.
Thank you! I knew I needed a deeper understanding of imperialism, will add the rest to the list. I already have Settlers on my shelf - are there others you’d recommend?
New question: who isn’t proletarian? Or maybe more broadly: what are the definitions/characteristics of the different classes? I’ve heard of lumpenproletariat, peasantry, proletariat, working-class, labor aristocracy, middle-class, petit-bourgeoisie, bourgeoisie, capitalist, and maybe more. I’m sure some of them are synonyms. I know this isn’t new ground and I’ll google around myself, but if you know good resources off the top of your head I’d appreciate it!
Does the sector one works in affect one’s class? It seems like no, and e.g. tech/finance bros are proletariat bc their wage-labor produces capital for business owners.
Settlers is good! I’d personally start with Lenin’s Imperialism, the Current Highest Stage of Capitalism, then explore Nkrumah’s Neocolonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism and then Cheng Enfu’s Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism. All of these help trace how late stage capitalism has dealt with its own existence in decay, as international plunder morphing over time.
As for what defines a proletarian, it’s someone who sells their labor power to a capitalist to produce commodities. An example of a proletarian engineer is one who works for a firm, and is paid in wages, while a petite bourgeois engineer would be a small business owner that takes their pay in profits. The peasantry typically pay rent in kind, ie they give up a portion of what they produce and keep the rest, bartering it or selling it on the market for what they don’t produce. Sectors do have impact, but not as a different class, but different strata of the same class.
Others to recommend : Imperialism: the highest stage of Capitalism by Lenin also Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon for analysis of the national struggle under neo colonialism, racism, etc.,
Who isnt proletarian? The bourgeoisie. Middle classes are synthetic classes that are unstable under capitalism, their character differs from time to time, place to place. Practically, the concrete interests of petite bourg and middle classes must be split, dragging along a significant portion. This is where politics and organizing is very important.
Lumpen is more of a class character than an actual class, it only exists as an indirect relation to the reserve army of capital, but Marx’s analysis of the Lumpen population in the 18th Brumaire is extremely relevant to us in many ways.
The sector reflects industrial class interests, there are parts of a sector that have different class character than others. The idea is to organize a whole industry rather than smaller craft unions, like where teachers, admin, and service workers all have different unions and contracts in the same building. That is related to labor and union organizing which also often involves resistance to entrenched bureaucracies, creating democratic reform caucuses etc.,
Edit: figuring out exactly what your local conditions are, what their class characteristics are, and organizing on that basis is what we need to be focused on in our day to day. This looks more like talking with people, power mapping and list work than trying to fit people into the categories.
Getting out of the habit of making categories out of everything is an essential step in the process of radicalizing. Marxism isnt a new way of making categories it is a way of determining our actual conditions. Name the actual problem you and others in your network face, and help others name the problem, do not start with the names of problems and build abstractions from them.