[PEN-L:29477] Re: Following Proyect & Yoshie: Who Make the revolution?

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hari Kumar wrote:
>
> . The students in biology & medicine that I teach
> now - sure as hell don't come from any manual working class family that
> I have recognised. With ONE exception - the Punjabi immigrants whose
> parents are farmers.
> So - who makes the revolution?

"Manual working class families" is only a part of "working class
families." Somewhere between 80% and 90% of the U.S. population are
working class. What sectors of that class might enter into a mass
movement -- and revolutionary movements are sub-divisions of mass
movements -- is determined in practice, not by abstract theory. Class is
a social relation, not a box one sorts marbles in.

Your citation from Lenin is extremely important for other reasons, but
not as a comment on class in early 21st century U.S. The vast majority
of students, even graduate students, are themselves working class. And
attempting to guess in advance the exact composition of a uniting class
is pure crystal-ball gazing. We do know, incidentally, that
revolutionary movements have never constituted much more than 15%-30% of
the total population. Only _after_ the seizure of power does it become
possible (not necessarily probable: that is why revolutions fail so
often in the future as in the past) to gain the active adherence of
larger and larger sectors of the revolutionary class.

Under present conditions in the U.S. the primary function of radicals,
marxist or otherwise, must be to fight against the two primary forces
which (until smashed) permanently unfit the class for struggle: white
supremacy and male supremacy. The active sectors of the class will
emerge in the course of such struggles.

Carrol

> Hari Kumar