A brief sketch of US class consciousness: 2011–2019

Note: I actually wrote this back in late January, early February of 2020. For whatever reason I never got around to publishing it. But I was thinking about it while trying to write a separate post and it seemed like the write time to publish this in order to reference it and skip a bunch of explanation.

About 10 months later, this all basically holds true.

Socialism is finally a legitimate political contender in the US. It isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. The bourgeoisie has allowed Bernie Sanders to become the most popular politician in the US. As explained in my last post, I think that this has to do with a few main causes:

• The bourgeoisie successfully stunted the development of socialist politics in the US working class via Slavery, Jim Crow, McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, Third Way politics, etc.
• As a consequence, they have successfully prevented the development of a workers party to give the working class a sense of its own needs and set its own agenda.
• These two under-developments stopped the US working class from developing a class-conscious strategy and perspective for leveraging electoral politics (i.e. petitions, referenda, partisan and non-partisan seats, etc.). Effectively discarding one of three major tools for class struggle (the other two being protest and study).
• This specific under-development allowed the Democratic Party to become complacent in its success as the “graveyard of social movements” because they never had radicals to contend with: we had ceded that fight to the liberals.
• The Democrats’ complacency left them unprepared when their own Third Way politics created the crisis that produced Trump, Bernie, and mass polarization. After disappointing their base for decades, especially via Obama, the Democrat’s base was done with The Democratic Party, per se. (There are limits to this, in that a two party system forces a choice between the two.)

For me, this helps explain the dynamics that caused The Democrats to become the unintentional vehicle for the rebirth of US socialism. However, it still doesn’t answer why the masses rallied to Bernie specifically. Why not some non-socialist? Or a repeat of Occupy? Or a larger funneling to the far-right?

I think we’ve been watching the working class develop collective lessons. Obviously, there are various layers to any class, and some layers are more politically conscious than others. But in the main, the working class has been retaining collective lessons since 2011.

Occupy — 2011

Frustration at the lack of any meaningful action to stop the Great Recession, particularly with Obama as president, spilled over into the Occupy movement.

With Occupy the lessons were:

• Classes exist — The notion that “everyone is middle class” gave way to the animosity of the “99%” against the oligarchic “1%”.
• Protest is legitimate — There had been protest movements before. But these were sustained, widespread protests that had mass support and centered the collective grievances at the ruling class for creating the recession.
• Police are class enemies — The abuse that police unleashed on Occupy activists also began to alter public consciousness about the police.

Occupy was so thoroughly in the mass consciousness that Time magazine named “The Protestor” as 2011’s person of the year.

Black Lives Matter — 2013

The acquittal of George Zimmerman for the racist murder of Trayvon Martin set off the BLM movement. This mass and sustained movement introduced Race into the mass consciousness at a time when large sections of the working class had interpreted the Obama presidency as the end of racism.

This was a major step forward in a country where racism has been the key to stunting working class consciousness. BLM also represented a continuation from Occupy in that it deepened three lessons:

• Discuss class
• Identify the police as racist agents of the 1%
• Keep protesting

It took the lessons further by

• Combining race with class
• Explicitly adding in more layers of intersectionality
• Recognizing that movements have to build organizations to last

However, the lessons of BLM are a bit more complex. Our racist society segregates people politically and geographically. BLM had a major effect on the US working class. But the racism of our society also siloed certain lessons to the vanguard of the Black community. This created a situation in which the next lessons the US working class would learn would only partially benefit from the experience of BLM.

Bernie Sanders — 2016

By 2016, the US working class had begun to acquire an explicit class consciousness. It had also begun to absorb greater understandings of racism, sexism, transphobia, etc. Imperfect understandings, but far greater than before. However, the years of protest mobilizations had not created material changes. The protests felt particularly massive and constant around BLM. But we hadn’t done away with the 1%, not even with police violence. The working class was aware of this.

Bernie stepped into this context. A working class that was disillusioned with the official leaders of both parties and burnt out on protests that hadn’t changed the world, now saw an electoral candidate that was calling himself a socialist and speaking on a national stage to their instinctual class grievances. Giving himself the tag of socialist distinguished him from the Democratic officialdom. The way that The Democrats openly sabotaged him after he created a real challenge for Hillary was embedded in the collective consciousness.

The two main lessons from the popularity of the Bernie campaign were:

• That socialism was finally politically acceptable
• That elections were a tool worth using

Democratic Socialists of America — 2016

With the popularity of the Bernie campaign, the DSA became flooded with members. DSA’s leadership was weak and stale. The new blood ousted the original leadership and replaced it with new socialists. The majority of the new socialists joined without any prior conceptions of what socialism meant, without any orthodoxy to enforce. The DSA ran with the lessons from the Bernie campaign and began engaging in electoralism more broadly (i.e. they ran candidates for offices, but also engaged in canvassing for petitions and referenda).

The successes of getting candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Julia Salazaar into office led to a greater emboldening, such as the successful push to get 6 socialists elected to city council in Chicago.

The primary lessons for DSA have been that:

• We need to continue the lesson of using elections
• Canvassing is a critical tool
• It can be used for petitions, referenda, and to win political offices

However, as mentioned before: there were certain lessons that haven’t carried over. BLM’s focus on intersectionality, with a focus on combining race with class, has been unevenly absorbed throughout DSA. In spite of that, the bulk of the working class has absorbed this lesson. The main evidence for this being the way that the Democratic Party has tried to lean on identity as a mask for their pro-capitalist policies. They wouldn’t rely on identity if it wasn’t clear that major sections of the working class are cognizant of it.

This is a brief sketch. I don’t have the time or interest in doing a full political survey of 2011 — present. But in the broad sense, these have been the overarching lessons that the working class has been learning. Most acutely, these lessons have been absorbed by its vanguard, which is currently concentrated in the DSA.

But again, due to our racist society, there are sections of Workers of Color that have stayed outside the DSA because it has been largely “color-blind” in its politics. This is something that the DSA can correct. It is also possible that Workers of Color will find other collective, yet siloed, ways of forming alternatives to the DSA.

The purpose of this brief sketch is to keep in mind that the working class is in a constant process of self-realization. It is becoming aware of itself after having its class consciousness consistently diluted or erased by various strategies and tactics of the bourgeoisie, since the 1970s.

The deliberate political blinders that US workers have suffered are now fragile and falling off. Rather than stunting, the bourgeoisie is now in a process of enraging our fellow workers. The rage is building and combining with the lessons that it has been accumulating since 2011. It is into this context that we need revolutionary voices to participate in learning and shaping the collective lessons.

It is into this context that we need to build a revolutionary strategy for electoralism (i.e. petitions, referenda, and partisan/non-partisan offices). This is a fluid situation and if we don’t contribute revolutionary perspectives then we won’t be able to help shape the next set of lessons absorbed by the working class.