Also, to answer your question, I feel that the U.S. working-class needs a dialectically and historical materialist analysis.

There is just no study of the American class structure and the “best” we’ve got is Settlers which dumbs things down a lot.

There are a lot of great labor history books recently, though, but nothing too comprehensive.

Philip Foner comes close, I’ve heard, but is outdated, like Sakai and his/her own text.

For example: what to make of the many human-trafficked residents in the United States? The prison population (we call them legal slaves, for example, but we don’t really see how they fit within the system). The rural inhabitants? We call them Trump-supporters off-handedly, but many of the poorer stratum seem uninterested in electoral politics and have a growing Latinx population (though, knowing my own Latinx family, they can also be pretty reactionary).

How is class allocated with your job, for example. Retail workers have it rough, no kidding, and it’s where the low-paid and abusive work takes place. But IT workers may have it better off, but be less unionized, though also have frequent periods of burnout. There’s a mass chemical plant industry in the United States, despite de-industrialization, so there are factory or plant operators and workers, though they often get ignored (America is wrongfully called a “service economy” even though its more of a logistics, finance, and transport economy and even then it doesn’t quite sum it up completely).

They say that both the Democratic and Republican parties have their own factions and they sometimes interlap or oppose each other. How do they cater to their respective industries? What are their respective industries? Who is mostly like to side with semiconductor companies? Old companies? Silicon Valley? Venture capitalists and hedge fund managers? Retail companies? How do these factions align? Never mind the Chamber of Commerce and the extra-political factions of the United States.

Basically, we need to know the political economy of the United States and how the class structure is formed, what it looks like.

Great idea for a subcom!

As I heard a friend say:

Dialectical and historical materialism are easy to understand… but hard to master and use.

You can’t just off-handedly use it; you have to study something with it.

The application of it to raise living standards for billions across China, and continuing to raise them. Greatest achievement in the history of forever so far.