Really fucking long post, I apologize.
The USA is an extremely petite bourgeois country. Only about 12% of the population owns a home without a mortgage, but 65.8% of the country owns a home with a mortgage. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a pretty basic definition for being petite bourgeois.* Owning a house or apartment, even if you have to pay a bank, makes a massive difference in how you view the world. And at least according to this definition, the proletariat in the USA is in the minority. (And yes, I know, many homeowners can easily lose their homes if the market contracts.)
65.8% of the country owns a home. About half the population voted in 2020. For the most part, I think these are the normies. These are the people who might shake their heads when a cop kills someone, but who will fly into a rage if rioters burn down a single abandoned building. A lot of these people don't even get their news from places like Facebook or Fox News. They get it from the radio or local TV channels, which is almost nothing but stories like: "a criminal did something bad, but thankfully the cops stopped him."
I can remember, early in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich says something like: imagine if you could excite ordinary people about leftwing politics the way they are excited by sports. And then in Age of Awakening, the Chinese TV show about the founding of the communist party, one of the main characters talks about the urgent need to raise the consciousness of the Chinese people. For a lot of Chinese Marxists in the 1920s, my guess is that it would have looked completely hopeless to talk with illiterate peasants about communism, just as it honestly seems pretty hopeless to discuss the subject with the American petite bourgeoisie today. (The American petite bourgeoisie is literate, but in some ways they might as well be illiterate because most of them don't read much of anything, and if you show them revolutionary literature, it might as well be written in a completely different language.)
We've talked a lot on hexbear about radicalizing normies. We know that American fascists are also extremely interested in this subject. But until now, I think we've completely failed to make much of a dent in the consciousness of the petite bourgeoisie—which I know empathizes much more with people like Jeff Bezos than with workers in the Global South. I don't know that we can just wait for the system to collapse or for the collapsing system to radicalize large numbers of people on its own. Any hope we might have in the generational divide, for instance, is probably misplaced. Once the boomers really fucking start to die off, the millennials who inherit their property are going to become just as shitty as they are, for the most part. Back in the '60s, the boomers were "pretty radical," although few of them seemed to give much of a fuck about the Global South or allying themselves to China or the USSR. (Most of the cool ones died or went into exile a long time ago.) Their beef with the Vietnam War was largely with getting drafted, not with millions of dead Vietnamese people.
I honestly don't know how to radicalize normies. 99% of what I have tried has failed. I only stopped being a normie myself because I started running in elections as a Bernie Democrat and I kept encountering Democrats (especially those in power) who were really hostile to the idea of Medicare for All. But almost nobody in this country has that experience. And lots of Bernie Democrats run in these elections and run into the same problems that I did, but they almost never radicalize, so maybe whatever makes me a communist is actually a lot deeper than just running into shithead Democratic bigwigs.
I was glancing through the wikipedia page on Edward Bernays, and I saw that the CIA hired him to spread doomerism in Guatemala, making the defeat of the revolution there look like a foregone conclusion. If people want to vent here, I'm fine with that, even if some of them may actually be cops. But I think we are running out of time. The planet is going to literally run out of oxygen, and the workers of the world are not uniting. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising comes to mind. Fighting the Nazis on the inside was basically suicide. (Just as it was basically suicide for John Brown to fight the American government almost completely on his own.) If the Nazis had been a little smarter and hadn't declared war on basically everyone at the same time, the Third Reich might still be around today (instead of surviving inside the CIA and the West German government).
In short, the American proletariat probably isn't ever going to unite to overthrow the government. There are just too many barriers. The CIA and the FBI are just too powerful and too good at destroying proletarian movements. Our only hope seems to be in the Global South uniting, strangling the economy of the USA from the outside, and then finding a way to stop the bourgeoisie from launching nuclear missiles. But that process is going to take at least twenty or thirty more years.
I don't know. Before the 2020 Uprising happened, I would have laughed if you had told me something like that could happen. But because there was no revolutionary leadership (because the police will kill or imprison any organizers who present a serious threat), the uprising petered out. It still seems to be continuing now, but in more of a hidden way with American workers refusing to put up with the same old shit from their bosses and landlords.
This is just a bunch of disjointed thoughts born out of my general frustration with things and the fact that for weeks or months I've been thinking to myself that we need a Maoism for the petite bourgeoisie even though I don't know what that actually is or if such a thing is even possible.
- Although I know that in Vietnam and Cuba, the home ownership rate is 90%! I guess it makes a pretty big difference if the proletariat is running your country. I'm not sure about Vietnam, but it also looks like Cubans are not allowed to own more than two homes.
