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america is perpetually haunted by two historical archetypes: the fordist factory worker and the yeoman farmer. each has been overcome by historical development, but live on as political/cultural signifiers even when the conditions that created them are gone and never coming back
these roughly track to left and right political imaginations, but only as a backward-looking nostalgia for a social world lost to time. conservatives may be content to put on garb and cosplay being cowboys, but the left should seriously interrogate contemporary class composition
the problem is that the current class structure is relatively unique and defies easy analogy to 1873 or 1917 or 1968. there are no more first becomings: the proletariat has been generalized across the globe while at the same time disintegrated from the formations of the 20th cent
without a centralized industrial working class disciplined by production in the core there no longer appears to be a hegemonic collective worker who can pull all segments of the class towards it in political/social struggle. these are the facts and we can't wish them away
yet everywhere the viscous struggle between classes remains and the line remains drawn between those who toil and those who profit. any recomposition of the communist movement will require a reexamination of how the working class is reshaped and exactly where our power lies today
