For the last 70+ years, American leftism has been dominated by the "New Left," which was shaped by writers like C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse. They believed that the traditional working class had been bribed into complacency by postwar material abundance, and there was no hope of them ever leading a revolution on their own. Therefore, the socialist vanguard must be driven by an alliance of student intelligentsia and marginalized minority groups like the Black Power movement.
To what extent was this a) true at the time, b) still true or NOT now, and c) should or how can we move past this?
>>2486865read a fucking history book retard faggot.
communism gets its literal name from the Paris Commune, you know from the fucking french revolution, because it is a direct fucking development of the french revolution's ideas and theory
you know what also came from the french revolution
LEFT WING AND RIGHT WING TERMINOLOGY
because the monarchists sat on the right side of french parliament/whateverthefuck it was called, and the republicans (in the sense of being for a democratic republic, not in the sense of american conservatism) sat on the left.
SO YES, COMMUNISM IS VERY MUCH FUCKING 'leftist' BECAUSE IT IS ANTI-MONARCHY
YOU STUPID PIECE OF SHIT
I reject this notion of an unwinnable working class because they have it too good.
The most militant wing of the SPD in the pre-socdem-betrayal era were diamond cutters and other extremely well paid workers.
It is not an absolute obstacle.
Furthermore, this analysis is dead in the water in its organisational claims. You cannot create a vanguard party made up of just the intelligentsia and most oppressed minorities, emphasis on their numerical minority. That is by definition not a vanguard, and you cannot have a communist revolution with just a small minority of the working class. Even aside from my rejection of it, if I concede the point that the american working class was paid off, it would only mean that it is not possible to build a vanguard, and it is not possible to drive towards open class conflict, and your focus would ought to be to unite all the intelligentia into a party with the purpose of self-education, preservation, research and material and logistical support to those in countries where the working class is organizable.
To understand what really was the problem, we need to look to Lenin. A revolutionary situation is one where the proletariat is unwilling to go on, but also, where the bourgeoisie is unable to go on within it's system. It requires both the subjective organization and conciousness of the working class, which as history has shown us is not inversely proportional to how bad people have it, but it also requires a fundamental systemic crisis which the bourgoiesie is unable to solve within its own structures, leading to open bourgoies conflict with each other.
The problem with the USA is that, as with all imperial core countries, the >bourgoiesie< has it too good, they have too much power, there is more than enough room for expansion. They have all the money in the world to spend on extensive anti-communist programs, to sabotage the left. It is precisely because of that, that Lenin points out socialism is more likely in the periphery. There, the bourgeois powers have far less money, wealth, room for growth. There, they come into conflict with each other far more. This leads to weaker central power and room for the working class to organize.
It was exactly the fact that the democrats and republicans have been essentially the same party for decades, that has allowed the US state to suppress communists. When were US communists strongest? When the USA was in deep financial crisis during the great depression, and the bourgeoisie was fighting each other trying to take control in a new way to their own benefit.
We now see the unified front of the US weakening, first after occupy, when the social democrats started to ween off, now in the past decade we see the open conflict between the neoliberal conglomorate shareholder clique under the democrats and the fascistic, more nationally oriented clique supported mainly by owners of industry concerned with competition with other blocks or the need for hard resource aquisition. Oil firms, Tesla with its need for lithium, emergent big tech competing with Chinese competitors, they clash with corporations and shareholders of corporations which already have a global foothold and benefit more from the neoliberal world order, clashing over the best way forward in their geopolitical maneuvering. It is intensifying now that China is putting on more pressure, India is becoming a capitalist power of its own, and Europe is slowly forming more cohesion within the EU than between the EU and the USA.
This is the reason we have more room now, more opportunities to mavouvre, more people willing to listen to what we have to say. It is not that their standard of living is dropping that causes more interest in communism, the US system itself is in a systemic crisis it cannot solve, and as a consequence, it is becoming politically divided, and as a consequence, the hegemonic ideological control weakens as the central authority of the bourgoiesie weakens. Standards of living dropping is just another consequence of the systemic crisis. US standards of living have been dropping ever since Reagan in the 70s. Did this increasingly lead to more radical communist politics? No! In fact, the 70s and 90s are notorious for its pro-capitalist zeitgeist. Because the bourgoiesie was feasting as never before. When did this zeitgeist stop? When the bourgoiesie itself faced a systemic crisis in 2007, and this crisis has only compounded.
>>2486841That's out of date
Since 2012 we've recognized that the American vanguard is autistic political theory nerds and trans women.