I’ve talked many times about how U.S. communists must learn from Haiti’s popular revolution in response to the lumpenization of our society. Haiti shows that you can organize a population which has been largely de-classed, and this is heartening amid our own situation. Mass unemployment has become terminal, while the unionist culture of the 20th century has been replaced by an overwhelming mass of nomadic and unorganized workers. Yet we can see that a path forward exists, even in a society whose collapse is much more advanced than ours. We can’t copy Haiti’s revolutionary model for different conditions, but we can apply a critical lesson from its story: when the circumstances change, so must your means for waging the class war.
All the dogmatic versions of “Marxism” are made irrelevant, even more so than they were already, by the practical realities that we’re facing in the lumpenization era. Capital is on the offensive right now, the revolutionary forces are on the retreat, and the momentum is towards a new level of dispossession for the working masses. In the American hemisphere, the only exception to this retreat is the Haitian front, which represents a prelude to what the inevitable working-class resurgence will look like. In ways that vary for the different countries, this revival will take the form of a hybrid between “conventional” working-class organizing, and projects to organize those who’ve been pushed out of the working class.
This new iteration of the proletarian movement will be utterly incompatible with the economist dogmas that focus on narrow workplace struggles, while forsaking every other aspect of the struggle including basic class solidarity. Those who are part of the working class proper have allies within numerous other strata; this is part of what William Z. Foster conveyed in his calls to organize the unorganized:
The question of organizing the unorganized, especially in the basic industries, must be put in the sense that it is indispensable for liquidating the present crisis as well as for the eventual building of powerful labor organizations. Definite contacts can and must be made with the progressive elements on the basis of organizing the unorganized. The unions must be saturated with movements to draw in the unorganized. Meanwhile the movements for independent organization must be intensified in those industries where the existing unions are too weak or reactionary to serve as the basis for unionizing the workers. Developing wage cuts in various industries will render greater masses ready for organization and struggle. Our aim must be to bring into the mainstream of the labor movement such unions as are organized on an independent basis. The question of organizing the unorganized must be raised to a major issue throughout the labor movement. In connection with it must be emphasized as vitally important the amalgamation and democratization of the unions.
Foster wrote this in 1928, when the U.S. proletariat was still in its phase of ascendancy as an economic element. The ultimate outcome of the depression was that our ruling class decided to lift up the bulk of the workers into the labor aristocracy. When this period of unprecedented capitalist stability inevitably ended, and the incentive became for U.S. corporations to move manufacturing jobs to the Global South, the proletarian positions got replaced by “bullshit jobs”—the office work that used to be the stereotypical American career path. The 2008 collapse forced this model to be replaced by nomadic gigs and retail, and after 2020 the financial centers decided that hiring needed to be forced into a long-term decline.
It’s in this context that we’ve seen the rise of the DSA’s new iteration. During this era, the old Bernie Sanders working-class base has been disregarded, in favor of a politics that centrally appeals towards urban petty-bourgeois professionals. When these well-educated activists mobilized behind Zohran, and thereby became the main faces of the left during this moment, they of course were not equipped to organize the growing lumpenized “precariat.” And their movement is already seeing certain consequences from this weakness; the inevitable split inside DSA isn’t in the future, it started when Zohran came into office and fully showed his reactionary role. This repeat of the disillusionment over Obama provides a critical opportunity for bringing the masses into revolutionary politics; genuine revolutionary politics, where we’re building the independent working-class institutions that petty-bourgeois activists can’t create on their own.
This is not to say the petty-bourgeoisie have no part in the class war. There are many potential class allies among these politically impassioned individuals, we just need to have an organization that understands what roles different class allies should have. We can’t entertain petty-bourgeois “working class” LARPing, and any project to organize the lumpen by people who aren’t lumpen themselves would fail. We have to apply Mao’s logic about finding where our friends are among the different classes, while not letting the organization become something other than proletarian; i.e. organized for the purpose of bringing the productive laborers to power.
Concluded Mao: “our enemies are all those in league with imperialism--the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them. The leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat. Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat and petty bourgeoisie. As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, their right-wing may become our enemy and their left-wing may become our friend but we must be constantly on our guard and not let them create confusion within our ranks.”
Like with Haiti or any other example, we have to translate the foreign model to our own circumstances. We don’t have much of an industrial proletariat anymore, and the destruction of this class has set our cause back. However, we must remember that the industrial proletariat’s numbers were also limited in Russia, China, and the other underdeveloped countries which underwent revolutions. The nature of their capitalist and semi-feudal system made for massive amounts of people who couldn’t become part of this class, yet the communist parties triumphed. Now that the Global South’s conditions are increasingly being replicated inside the United States, we can see a parallel path emerging for us.
Part of what we need to do is free Marxism from the ideological prison that it became confined to when dogmatists misinterpreted it as a fixed belief system, unable to adapt to the processes of history. Those within my own tendency of communism have done well in combating this kind of dogmatism. What we need to strengthen is our practical work. We have to keep ourselves set on rebuilding the institutions our cause lost in the 20th century—including ones dedicated to organizing lumpenized workers, like the unemployed councils. Right now a big obstacle to this is lack of resources, and we will need to rectify this. (Providing such funds is one way that the petty-bourgeoisie in particular can contribute to the struggle.) Though we can only do so much at the present stage, and the DSA’s tendency has a much larger pull than ours for now, we will keep picking up more support if we do the things DSA can’t. On the question of labor leadership, on the question of organizing the unorganized, the reformists are by their nature lacking. We have to prove ourselves as the alternative.
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