Somebody: I hear this a lot, with the implication that the class struggle continues in the oppressed global South. But, it's not true. The left is almost completely absent from industrializing East Asia for instance. This is a remarkable fact that is not fully appreciated. Imagine if Europe in it's period of transition from agrarian to industrial society had been as quiescent as China and South-east Asia are today. Actually, scratch that, it's impossible to imagine. All we can do is rip out the pages of the history books dealing with the German SPD, Lenin, Swedish Social Democracy, World War II, France in 68 and Italian Eurocommunism. Of course, this demonstrates conclusively that history determines consciousness more than material conditions - the failure of Mao, perceived or otherwise, outweighs the massive joining of workers in factories and urban centers and of peasants being pulled into wage labor.
Across the world, the the new proletariat of the emerging nations is far and away less active and self-conscious than the original European working class was. Wojtek is right to be so definitive, the class struggle is over, full stop. Maybe it'll reemerge someday, but you'd have to be generous to even say there's a glimmer of that day arriving. The most we see are workers leading rear-guard defensive struggles, and precious little even of that. As for the Latin American left, it's amounted to very little in retrospect - and it's clearly in decline right now, which the left broadly recognizes given the steep drop in discussion devoted to those countries in the past few years. Anyway, it's obvious that people like the late Nestor Kirchner and even Evo Morales would have been considered very middle-of-the-road in the heyday of the class struggle in the 20th century. Meanwhile, Cuba's about to hold it's next party congress to announce the liquidation of
socialism in that last bastion of a dying faith. Well, not dying, it's dead.