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.
One interesting class I heard named at the conference was “graduates without a future”. This class was the engine of the 2011 occupy protests, for example. Usually you’d think university education puts someone solidly outside of the revolutionary class, but perhaps student debt + shit job prospects would be enough to build solidarity.
Plenty of revolutionaries have come from the privileged classes, ever since the beginning. They just need to be committed enough (or to have made a substantial break with their former world) to orient their life around revolutionary purposes.