How to Class Analyze Anything, Part I

Part II, Part III, Part IV

Class analysis is a mighty tool. Combined with a knowledge of history, geography, and the basic operations of the dialectic, it is the closest we mere mortals can get to outright prophecy.

To wit: Richard Spencer, the ideological founding father of alt-right fascism in America, has become a Democrat. I did not predict this specifically and at this particular time, but class analysis told me that liberalism and fascism only pretend to be opposed, and when the going gets tough for them, they both show their true colors. Therefore, the news about Spencer struck me as a vindication of our immortal science, and not as the surprise or psy-op the rest of the left took it as.

If you can read this sentence, you too can have this gift of secular prophecy. In fact, the future of socialism depends on this technique spreading far and wide among the workers, so that false consciousness may never becloud their minds again.

The first thing to understand is that there are three classes fundamental to all sedentary human societies that have hitherto existed: the rich, the middle class, and the workers. A fourth class exists, which Marx called the lumpenproletariat, but it's a special case I'll explain in a bit.

The rich, or more formally the bourgeoisie, own the means of production in a capitalist society. One of their signatures is likelier than not on your paycheck. Speaking of your paycheck, these welfare queens take a massive chunk out of it every month and call it profit. That is what they "do" for a living, but of course, owning stuff isn't a real job. As a class, the rich represent less than 1% of the population, and rely on bribery, lies, and violence to keep control of society.

The workers are the largest class, approximately 85% of the people in America. Their distinguishing feature is their exploitation by the rich, bad enough in America and the West, but absolutely brutal abroad. Historically, Marxism-Leninism has divided the workers into subgroups like the rural workers, or peasants; and the urban industrial workers, the proletariat. The proletariat were considered to have the most revolutionary potential due to their greater access to information and communication relative to the peasantry, but historically most communist revolution has broken out in rural areas, sustained by guerrilla war on the backs of the peasantry. But these revolutions were usually nonetheless guided by the proletariat and the middle class.

The middle class, or more formally the petty bourgeoisie, exists to make class war on the workers, either directly or indirectly, on behalf of the rich. In America, they constitute roughly 14% of the population, according to this Atlantic article that class analyzed America based on sentiments towards political correctness. The most obvious middle class jobs are the police and military. But a common tactic the rich employ in modern times is the "culture war," pitting half the middle class and the workers they fool against the other half of the middle class and the workers they fool. By dividing the workers on cultural lines, the middle class prevents them from uniting on class lines. Typically, the cops and military will be joined by the religious clergy on the right, while they will oppose academics, teachers, artists, and writers on the left. All of these subgroups get paid mostly by the rich, either through taxes from the bourgeois state, or endowments and scholarships, or by their patronage, and can rarely find work in these fields without their support. I myself am middle class, I'm an academic and the child of a military officer, but I'm too honest for my own good and therefore suffer destitution like all such middle class traitors. (Don't feel bad for me though, I'm obviously still writing.)

Another form the middle class can take is the labor aristocracy. In the Cold War, the American rich needed their workers to believe that capitalism worked better than socialism, and facts are the best propaganda. So as long as a Soviet Union existed, America's rich made sure that their workers were paid better than Soviet workers. That is why Western Boomers are unreconstructed Karens; most may ostensibly be workers, but they were paid middle class wages out of the superprofits of imperial exploitation to keep them loyal. Imperialism requires a reservoir of loyal workers willing to go abroad and break skulls as the Pinkertons in our international sweatshops, and this is the labor aristocracy Lenin spoke of. America isn't unique in this regard; the concept of a labor aristocracy goes at least as far back as ancient Rome; Lenin often reminded his comrades that "proletarii" was a Latin word describing the urban poor meant to staff the legions (Eric Hobsbawm, "Lenin and the Aristocracy of Labor," Lenin Today, N.Y. 1970, p. 47).

Lenin conceived of a counter-middle class intended to make class war on the rich, his so-called "professional revolutionaries," but in the long run this proved to be a theoretical error. Class treason is very difficult to sustain, even inside a workers' state, and often requires some form of disability like autism that makes class treason necessary due to an inability to compete capitalistically. Indeed, Marx and Lenin were both staunch middle class traitors, and as someone on the spectrum myself, I can verify that they both appear to me in their writings as very high-functioning autistic people.

Finally, there is the lumpenproletariat, so irrelevant that their formal term doesn't really have a colloquial equivalent. They are irrelevant because their class interests are scattered and rarely coalesce. The lumpenproletariat is, to paraphrase Marx, that section of society that either doesn't work, or whose jobs are, rightly or wrongly, illegal. Beggars, welfare recipients, sex workers, pimps, burglars, assassins, smugglers, mafiosos, and drug dealers are just a couple examples. The scrambled intra-class interests are demonstrated by a failed marijuana ballot initiative in California, Proposition 19 in 2010. The entire lumpenproletariat voted for it, except for (from what I heard at the time) the drug dealers, pot growers, and organized crime, who rightly feared it would cut deeply into their profits if legalized. The drug dealer vote helped keep it illegal, although it was legalized in a subsequent referendum (reeferendum?).

The Libertarian Party of the United States has a political compass test, the Nolan Chart, now famous as a forerunner of the Political Compass Test, fount of a myriad of memes, that they use to judge your political ideology. You answer ten questions to judge your opinions on what they term "economic freedom" (read: capitalism) and "individual freedom" (read: civil and personal rights). From there, they sort you into one of four quadrants. I, and most of the people reading this, would fall into the authoritarian left quadrant. There is an anarchistic libertarian left quadrant, a fascist authoritarian right quadrant, and a "but what if the child consents tho?" libertarian right quadrant that they're hoping you'll fall into.

Presumably, the anarchist quadrant would be where the lumpenproletariat go, but as seen, their interests are too divided for them to serve as anything more than pawns in the machinations of more organized classes. So with only three classes of any power, the political compass should probably look more like a triangle. But how and why?

Continue on to Part II