The only path forward for the class struggle is one where we confront the war that finance capital is waging against our social structures, especially the ones in the rural areas. It’s this civilizational collapse that the MAGA base was responding to when it voted for Trump; the desire was to restore America’s economic strength and social stability, which have been taken away by a global corporate and banking scheme.
Now, almost a year into Trump 2.0, the bulk of MAGA has realized that Trump will not rescue America from this assault. The subjective awareness of the masses, particularly the rural masses who gravitated to Trump, is catching up with the objective reality we’re facing. And if communists want to earn a position of leadership over the working class, we will need to fully confront this reality; we’ll have to reckon with the whole scope of the crisis our ruling class has engineered, which goes beyond merely widening society’s inequality.
The unique crisis of rural America, & our society’s “south Korea-fication”
What we must know about this inequality is that it looks different for the rural than it does for the metropole. The countryside is in itself being left behind, and thereby made to die out, in a way that the cities are not. This is the nature of the contradiction between urban and rural, which has existed since the start of agricultural civilization but is now being magnified to unprecedented effect. What’s happening in the 21st century, when capitalism has reached its new phase of techno-social upheaval, is that the rural is getting hollowed out at the expense of humanity’s capacity for biological reproduction.
South Korea is the logical conclusion of this problem; it’s the country where the “youth drain” phenomenon, in which working-age people get incentived to concentrate within the metropole, has become most advanced. And because the country’s capital city has been turned into a maximally efficient machine for exploiting workers, the outcome is that almost nobody is starting families anymore. Capital has gotten to the point where it’s making entire countries on track to “go extinct.”
America is absolutely being “south Korea-fied,” and the only reason why I don’t expect America to go extinct is because of the prevalence of its religious communities. Outside those communities, the post-Covid generation fundamentally lacks the social structures that a person requires in order to have children. And this problem, in which those who came of age during Covid aren’t even coming into contact with potential mates, is the very worst within the rural. Because the rural young people of the 2020s have less and less incentive to stay rooted within their hometowns, and those of them who can move are increasingly migrating to the metropole.
This is an important piece of context behind how the rural masses joined MAGA, then had to reckon with the betrayals from Trump himself. The primary MAGA age demographics are decidedly older than Gen Z; the supposed youth migration to MAGA has been greatly overblown, with most of the post-Covid generation being far to the left. Amid the rural “youth drain,” and the accelerating economic collapse that will accelerate this trend, these demographics mean that rural America will need to overcome a new set of obstacles. Obstacles in which even though large parts of rural Gen X have been getting radicalized by MAGA’s betrayal, much of these Americans are getting divided from their children in a geographic sense, and many others aren’t getting grandchildren. This is part of how our ruling class is trying to weaken the rural’s political power: by robbing these countryside communities of their will to physically reproduce, and to thereby maintain their social cohesion.
This birthrate/youth drain angle isn’t everything there is to today’s rural conditions, but such issues are vital to account for when we think about the rural question. Any working-class organizer must study problems like this, the same way that past communists have undergone a learning process about the rural conditions within their countries. Mao described how the Communist Party of China needed to make up for a gap in its collective knowledge about what the needs of the countryside’s masses are:
At first, our Party wasn't successful in its work among the peasants. The intellectuals had a certain air about them, an intellectual air. Therefore, they were unwilling to go to the countryside, which they looked down on. The peasants, for their part, looked askance at the intellectuals. Besides, our Party had not yet found the way to understand the countryside. Later when we went there again, we found the way, analysed the various classes in the rural areas and came to understand the peasants' revolutionary demands. During the first period, we didn't have clear ideas about the countryside. Under the Right opportunist line of Chen Tu-hsiu, the peasants, our chief ally, were abandoned. Many of our comrades looked on the countryside as a plane rather than a solid, that is to say, they did not know how to look at the countryside from the class viewpoint. It was only after they had some grasp of Marxism that they began to adopt the class viewpoint in looking at the countryside.
The countryside turned out to be not a plane, but stratified into the rich, the poor and the very poor, into farm labourers, poor peasants, middle peasants, rich peasants and landlords. During this period I made a study of the countryside and opened peasant movement institutes which ran for several terms. Though I knew some Marxism, my understanding of the countryside was not deep. During the second period, we had to thank our good teacher, Chiang Kai-shek. He drove us to the countryside. This was a long period, a period of ten years of civil war, in which we fought against him, and thus we were obliged to make a study of the countryside.
I’ve felt the need to explain the “youth drain” problem at such length, and to connect it with this past rural class struggle experience, because the workers movement will only be able to truly progress when it’s accounted for all of the primary problems the working masses are facing. And this is a primary issue, one that’s been overlooked within both general discourse as well as our social movements. Which is understandable, because this crisis has crept up on our society without us having had the time to process or anticipate it. But to fight back against the war our ruling elites are waging against America’s people, we are going to need to have our reckoning with this crisis.
Mastering the art of dialectics
We will have to wage the class war in a way that’s attuned to the world as it exists today, as opposed to the world which used to exist. We’ll have to account for just how deeply capital’s new technological destabilizations have damaged the social fabric, and how much of the post-Covid generation has been cut off from the most basic economic opportunities and relationships. And to truly grasp this crisis, we must truly understand the conflict between city and country. This is a conflict that comes from how our ruling class has been sacrificing the rural most of all, so that neither the rural nor urban workers can mount an effective resistance against capital.
Our task is to bridge this gap, and unify the workers throughout the country’s different areas. Part of this has to do with carrying out our own investigation into the needs of the rural, like China’s revolutionaries were impelled to do. Part of this means struggling against the versions of “communism” that are stuck in a bygone era, and aren’t interested in applying Marxism to the conditions of today. This conflict within the workers movement certainly involves a generational divide; the boomers were brought up in a fundamentally different reality than the one the post-Covid generation has needed to navigate, and the movement can’t progress without being informed by this new generation’s experiences. The most important part of how we have to respond to these realities, though, is where we learn the skill of strategic adaptation.
This is something that anyone of any age can learn: the ability to not be blindsided by new information, but instead constantly update your strategy as developments unfold. Though Americans—especially the ones who grew up prior to the 21st century’s crises—were blindsided about the collapse that’s now befallen younger people, they did respond to the 2008 crisis by radically changing their worldviews. The MAGA movement was a reaction to the failures of our institutions, and those who came to form its core base had undergone an epiphany of historical importance; a decisive part of Trump’s voters had voted Obama in 2008, showing the zig-zags that can happen when an individual or a society are forced to process events which weren’t supposed to happen. The post-2008 depression wasn’t supposed to last for years and years, but it did, so many responded by adopting a proto-revolutionary mindset.
This process that Americans have been undergoing in these last couple decades is a first step in a much bigger evolutionary shift. One where we’ve come to collectively master the art of dialectics; which is to say gain the versatility to discard ideas and practices which do not work, while incorporating our existing wisdom into efforts at solving problems. It’s how a society escapes stagnation, and China has come very far along in this. It’s evolved out of feudal-capitalist rule, and truly embodied the meaning of socialism—which in practice looks like a society that’s figured out how to continuously re-invent itself. China’s development, its technology, its ability to utilize this technology in a way that enriches its people; all this is the product of having tried a series of social systems which hadn’t worked, and then applying the lessons from these past failures.
Mao concluded that correct ideas come from testing different social practices, which his party needed to do in order to make an ally of the rural masses. We must take the same kind of leap, and find out the interests of rural America. As Mao said, this means recognizing that the rural is not a monolith, but has different classes within it; and it’s in this nuance that we can find how to overcome the obstacles towards organizing our cause’s class allies throughout the countryside.
These obstacles include drug addiction, they include lumpenization, they include the danger of fascist radicalization; these are among the dark paths that the remaining rural young people are especially at risk of falling into, because it’s these people who are “left-behinds” in multiple ways at once. They’re not just lacking in spaces to meet others organically, but are increasingly isolated from their peers, who haven’t had a reason to stay in their hometowns. This is a reality about our conditions that we’re going to keep facing until these forsaken places get re-industrialized, and have economic life poured back into them.
In its pre-revolutionary phase, our movement cannot stop the “youth drain,” or reverse the birth rate crisis that this drain has been instrumental in creating. What our movement can do is construct collective organizations that truly act in accordance with these conditions, and face them with full honesty. If this is the reality we must confront, then the workers movement will have no choice but to reinvent itself; and history shows which factors lead to such a transformation. The state’s violent crackdowns within the cities are going to expose the weaknesses of the metropolitan-centered “socialist” orgs, and the workers movement will have to go into the rural masses like Mao did. The question is which routes it will then need to take in order to prevail within America’s protracted class war.
That is to be answered elsewhere, but we know that among our main tasks is to win the battle for the “hinterland”; to organize these masses who’ve been most neglected and isolated. The ideology of intellectual-class arrogance says we should leave these people behind, and the system is set up to make rural mass work harder in many ways; yet there’s absolutely no way around it. And the more we put into this work, the more we’ll find ourselves getting out of it, to the effect that our fortunes within the class war will start to turn.
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