The further the ruling financiers advance their schemes, the more the proletariat’s potential class allies are brought together. We’re seeing this with the proletarianization of the intelligentsia, which parallels the dispossession that America’s rural masses experienced after 2008.
When the usurer class destroyed the foundations for the American economy, this pushed the rural Republicans who’d voted for Bush towards pursuing radical new forms of politics, embodied within the revolutionary aesthetic of MAGA. This was only an aesthetic, since Trump would end up completely betraying MAGA’s ideals; but the desire for a new American revolution has only strengthened among the MAGA base itself. The primary sources of dismissal towards MAGA’s revolutionary potential have come from the “progressive” or “socialist” intelligentsia; yet now, with the U.S. empire’s effort to dismantle this same intellectual professional class, the ranks of the intelligentsia are undergoing an upheaval which mirrors the consciousness shift of the rural landowners who voted Trump.
Both of these classes are petty-bourgeois; partly because of this, their initial reactions towards being dispossessed have been colored with many confused ideas. Yet as the MAGA movement has gotten older, its members have been progressively turning against ruling-class narratives like the pro-Israel psyop, and the disgruntled intelligentsia will undergo a similar process. We’re already seeing hints of this in how the anti-data center movement, which petty-bourgeois professionals have a personal interest in supporting, is something that’s largely focused on defending the farmers. Which has led these metropolitan progressives to start giving up their previous attitudes of hostility towards the rural masses.
You could interpret this development through a totally cynical lens, and conclude that these left-wing individuals will only betray the rural masses. But this would actually be undialectical; because the class character of the intelligentsia is not the same as that of the opportunistic bourgeois politicians who tailor their rhetoric to win rural votes. Increasingly, the intelligentsia are being cut off from the career opportunities that used to be available to them, which puts them in a decidedly fluid position when it comes to what role they might play in America’s workers revolution.
Mao talked about how many communists have a tendency to underrate the importance of the intelligentsia, who are not a monolith:
Our Party and our army have made considerable efforts to recruit intellectuals during the last three years, and many revolutionary intellectuals have been absorbed into the Party, the army, the organs of government, the cultural movement and the mass movement, thus broadening the united front; this is a major achievement. But many of the army cadres are not yet alive to the importance of the intellectuals, they still regard them with some apprehension and are even inclined to discriminate against them or shut them out. Many of our training institutes are still hesitant about enrolling young students in large numbers. Many of our local Party branches are still reluctant to let intellectuals join.
All this is due to failure to understand the importance of the intellectuals for the revolutionary cause, the difference between intellectuals in colonial and semi-colonial countries and those in capitalist countries and the difference between intellectuals who serve the landlords and the bourgeoisie and those who serve the working class and the peasantry, as well as the seriousness of the situation in which the bourgeois political parties are desperately contending with us for the intellectuals and in which the Japanese imperialists are also trying in every possible way to buy over Chinese intellectuals or corrupt their minds; in particular, it is due to the failure to understand the favourable factor that our Party and our army have already developed a hard core of well-tested cadres and are thus capable of leading the intellectuals.
Does this analysis not apply within the United States when here we’re dealing with intellectuals in a capitalist country rather than a colonial country? What we are finding out from the developments of these last few years is that when it comes to the intellectuals, the question isn’t so simple. Right now, we’re seeing the breakdown of the old reality that kept this professional strata a mere appendage of the U.S. ruling class. Now that graduates can no longer inherit the generations-old system of patronage which is imperialist academia, they no longer have a clear grounding, like the formerly secure Republicans no longer had a clear grounding after 2008. The collapse just took longer to reach the intelligentsia, who thought they had a handle on how to respond towards the 21st century’s crises until these crises began actually impacting their lives.
The direction of these events is for the intelligentsia to unify with the disenfranchised rural petty-bourgeoisie, like we’re seeing in the anti-data center movement. This newfound overlap between the two classes does represent progress; but to turn it into victory over the usurers, we will need to lead the shared anti-systemic backlash of these classes away from idealist misconceptions. Because history has shown us many times that alienation on its own doesn’t bring a movement to victory. Petty-bourgeois tendencies especially are vulnerable to idealism, whether this takes the form of following a ruling-class opportunist leader, seeking to rehabilitate capitalism, or (particularly in our present situation) treating professional elites as the only source of revolutionary potential.
Though the intelligentsia are realizing the necessity of defending the farmers and the rural workers, right now there’s a strong political current that believes revolution can only come from the intellectual elites. This is the position of the DSA, both ideologically and practically; its mode of politics is designed to exclusively win office within the big cities, meaning its followers are going to have a disconnect from the rural until they resolve this contradiction in their own thinking. The college-educated activists who want to defend the rural from big tech have not yet gained the dialectical know-how required for actually going into the rural masses.
This problem will become more apparent as time goes on, and the DSA continues failing to act as a vehicle for working-class struggle. The thing that can offer such a vehicle is communism, which DSA aesthetically imitates but can only show itself to be inferior towards. The movement that embodies the ideals which these activist professionals strive towards will be one that’s built from the bottom-up within our class hierarchy, and has accounted for the rural masses before it’s accounted for the disillusioned metropolitan liberals. Both are important, as Mao helped clarify, but like in China the workers party’s foundation is within the broader mass elements.
We will be able to find elements of the professional strata who come to realize this; our movement already has PhD holders who take this position, and are actively helping promote it to others in the intellectual category. Through ideological struggle within the intelligentsia, and popular organizing among the broader masses, we’ll overcome the remaining obstacles to revolutionary victory.
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