/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

The classical Marxist schema wherein the industrial proletariat forms the decisive vanguard of socialist revolution must be ruthlessly interrogated and superseded when confronted with the objective reality of advanced settler colonialism, parasitic racist imperialism, and the labor aristocracy that binds large swathes of the so-called "working class" to the reproduction of empire.

The settler working class in America which are predominantly white, but including layers of assimilated non-white labor is not, and cannot be, the leading revolutionary subject in the imperial core. This is not moralism or identity politics; it is materialist analysis rooted in the global division of labor, superprofits extracted from the Third World (and internal colonies), and the bribe of relative privilege that turns potential revolutionary classes into social chauvinists or passive beneficiaries of genocide and plunder.

First, we must consider the structure of imperialism as analyzed through a MLM lens informed by dependency/world-systems insights and the theory of the labor aristocracy. The U.S. is the primary pole of the First World empire, a non-productive, consumption-heavy formation sustained by the superexploitation of the global South and the ongoing primitive accumulation against internal colonies (New Afrika/Black nation, occupied Turtle Island/Indigenous nations, occupied Aztlán, etc.). The "wages" of American workers are not merely the fruit of their labor but a redistributed share of imperialist superprofits via crumbs, cheap commodities, home ownership on stolen land, and the ideological bribe of white supremacy/nationalist chauvinism. This creates a clear labor aristocracy whose immediate material interests align more with preserving the imperialist system than overthrowing it. The "white working class" is not exploited in the classical sense that drives revolutionary consciousness; it is co-opted, bought off, and invested in settler-colonial continuity.

Historical evidence abounds from the 1877 railroad strikes through the New Deal labor accords to the post-WWII suburban boom and deindustrialization's selective pain, white workers have repeatedly sided with empire against colonized peoples (e.g., anti-Black pogroms, support for wars of aggression, rejection of reparations or land return). Even in moments of economic distress, reactionary populism and fascist-adjacent MAGA-ism or its left variants tends to dominate rather than proper proletarian internationalism. The classical vanguard role is foreclosed by this structural reality.

In contrast, the colonized masses; New Afrikans (Black people forged in chattel slavery and ongoing national oppression), Indigenous peoples (facing ongoing genocide and land theft), and other internal colonies all remain the principal revolutionary subjects. Their exploitation is not merely economic but existential, national oppression fused with class domination, where the "wage" is survival under carceral colonial terror, environmental racism, and cultural erasure. For them, the contradiction with imperialism is antagonistic and irreconcilable within the existing order. Land, self-determination, and abolition of the settler state are not reforms but preconditions for any genuine socialism.

This necessitates a non-traditional approach to socialism and production. The path forward is not the seizure of production factories by a mythical industrial proletariat but protracted people's war adapted to settler conditions; building dual power in the internal colonies, encircling the beast from within, and forging alliances on the basis of national liberation as the gateway to proletarian internationalism. Production under socialism here cannot mimic Eurocentric models of communist insurrection; it must draw from communal Indigenous traditions of stewardship, New Afrikan cooperative practices born of survival, and Maoist mass-line experiments in self-reliance all decolonized, decentralized, ecologically grounded, and hostile to European bureaucratic commandism / workerism.

The distributed vanguard emerges from these oppressed nations because their struggle is the sharpest knife against the imperialist beast. It is they who can most readily grasp the mass line, mobilize the broadest united front against settler hegemony, and sustain protracted struggle without the illusions of electoralism or social-contract peace. The white settler "proletariat" may join as allies through concrete anti-imperialist action, repudiating white-skin privilege, and submitting to the leadership of colonized vanguards but never as the leading force. To insist otherwise is to tail economism and social chauvinism, betraying dialectical materialism.

In short the colonized are the grave-diggers of empire precisely because empire rests on their graves. Any socialism worthy of the name in this settler hell must be anti-colonial at its core, led by those who have nothing to lose but their chains and everything to reclaim; land, dignity, and a future beyond parasitic "prosperity." The task is not to "unite" a bought-off labor aristocracy with the oppressed but to encircle, isolate, and dismantle the settler state from its internal peripheries outward.

Serve the people principally the most oppressed. Long live the national liberation struggles within the belly of the beast! From the dialectic arises the new synthesis, the distributed vanguard fights for decolonized communism or nothing. These approaches happen to instill way more fear in America's power structures than traditional euro socialism, and this is for a reason; ask yourself the last time you heard the FBI panic about the workers reading club, and then go ahead and look into about how just the words "turtle island" make them think "terror".