Somebody: Well, description is not identical with prescription. It may well be that the situation is pretty hopeless, but that even desperate odds of awakening mass resistance amongst American workers are worth pursuing.
Having said that, personally, I do not see the hopes of mankind as resting entirely upon the feeble shoulders of the working class and poor. The main means of improving humanities condition is through technological progress. Under decades-long right-wing dictatorships like Suharto, Chaing Kai-shek, and Franco, life in fact improved enormously for most of the people. Not because of the regimes, but in spite of them, simply because the productive forces were expanded, bringing improved living standards, and raising the condition of the rural masses. If Stalin had lived a hundred years, life in the Soviet Union would have improved as it did under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, because the country was industrialized. This doesn't mean politics are irrelevant; far from it. But, they're just less central than the left likes to imagine. Life for a middle class worker in Shanghai, amongst the most developed of cities in the People's Republic of China, is not so
different than life for their counterpart in the democratic Republic of China across the straits. The Taiwanese worker can vote, has universal access to health care, and a safety net. The Shanghai worker, without these things, is still probably more like his Taiwanese friend, in health, living standards, and consumerist outlook, than he is like the peasant farmer in Yunnan province in his own country.