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:

  1. Weaken US imperialism (e.g. through revolutions in imperial periphery)
  2. US is forced to re-develop it’s own productive capacity
  3. Developed productive capacity results in strong proletariat
  4. (Wait for contradictions to sharpen?)
  5. Revolution

Another (more likely?) could be:

  1. 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.

  • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    24 days ago

    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.

    • Cowbee [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netMEnglish
      8·
      24 days ago

      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.