The question of class composition and the application of the mass line has always been central to revolutionary strategy. To speak of the masses is not enough; one must understand their internal divisions, their social positions, and the shifting ways they are bound together by the forces of capital, imperialism, and the state. To speak of leadership is also not enough; it must be leadership forged through struggle, listening, and collective transformation. For those of us in the Global South, where histories of colonialism, racial domination, and dependency intertwine with capitalist exploitation, the study of class composition and the practice of the mass line are not simply academic—they are matters of survival and liberation.

Class Composition: Beyond Abstract Categories

Class composition refers to the concrete makeup of the working class in a given time and place—the social layers, occupations, relations, and struggles that define its existence. It asks: who are the workers? What kinds of labor do they perform? Under what conditions are they exploited? How do they resist?

In Marx’s time, the core of industrial capitalism was the factory worker, concentrated in cities and disciplined by machinery. But today, especially in the Global South, the working class cannot be reduced to that single figure. We see sprawling urban informal economies, precarious day labor, landless peasants, migrant workers, garment factory workers, gig workers, teachers, nurses, and even tech workers whose “modern” jobs are nonetheless governed by imperialist hierarchies.

In Latin America, for example, class composition includes millions of urban street vendors, waste-pickers, and domestic workers, alongside industrial miners and farmworkers. In South Asia, the garment worker in Dhaka or Karachi is part of the same proletariat as the rickshaw puller, the software coder outsourced by Western firms, and the migrant construction worker in Dubai. In Africa, farmers displaced by climate change become part of swelling urban working-class populations, where they find themselves selling goods in informal markets or working in precarious logistics chains.

The Global South proletariat is fragmented, stretched between formal and informal sectors, between rural and urban spaces, between waged work and unwaged survival. To recognize this composition is to recognize that the “class struggle” cannot be limited to unions in large factories; it must be rooted in the actual structure of labor as it exists today.

Class Composition in the United States

Even in the United States—the heart of imperialism—class composition reveals deep divisions that mirror global realities. Black, Indigenous, and immigrant workers disproportionately occupy the lowest-paid, most precarious jobs: agricultural labor, warehousing, delivery services, and care work. These workers are part of the same global proletariat, connected by supply chains and by shared exploitation.

Consider Amazon warehouse workers in the U.S.: their labor is directly tied to the garment worker in Bangladesh or the electronics assembler in Mexico. Both are subject to just-in-time logistics, brutal speedups, and surveillance regimes. Likewise, the U.S. gig economy driver or fast-food worker is bound to the global proletariat through capital’s restructuring of labor—fragmenting, precarizing, and isolating workers everywhere.

The struggles of U.S. workers, then, cannot be separated from struggles in the Global South. When workers in Sri Lanka block highways in protest of IMF austerity, or when South African miners strike for better wages, these are not isolated “foreign” events. They represent different fronts in the same global class war.

The Mass Line: From the Masses, To the Masses

Understanding class composition is the first step, but strategy requires more. The mass line, developed most famously by Mao Zedong, is the method by which revolutionary leadership connects theory and practice with the lived struggles of the people. It is summarized as: “From the masses, to the masses.”

This does not mean uncritically tailing whatever people already think, nor does it mean imposing ideas from above. Rather, it is a dialectical process: revolutionaries immerse themselves in the struggles of the masses, listen to their grievances and aspirations, distill these into a coherent political program, and then bring that program back to the people in a form they can recognize as their own.

The mass line insists that leadership must be both humble and scientific. It requires investigation into the actual lives of the people: how they work, how they survive, what they fear, and what they hope for. It requires patience, because transformation is not immediate. And it requires struggle, because reactionary and reformist ideas inevitably compete for hegemony within the masses.

Mass Line in Practice: Lessons from the Global South

History offers rich examples of the mass line in practice. In China, the Communist Party’s ability to connect with peasants—through land reform, mutual aid, and cultural work—was decisive. The revolution succeeded not because leaders imposed abstract slogans, but because they integrated peasant demands for land and dignity into a broader revolutionary program.

In Vietnam, the national liberation struggle succeeded in part because revolutionaries listened to and elevated the voices of peasants and workers who wanted both independence and land redistribution. The program was not handed down; it was crafted from the lived experience of a colonized and exploited people.

In Latin America, movements like the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil embody the mass line by organizing land occupations, schools, and cooperatives that address immediate needs while building revolutionary consciousness. Their strength comes from listening to and organizing the rural poor—not as passive victims but as active agents of change.

In South Africa, during the anti-apartheid struggle, organizations like the United Democratic Front and the trade union movement used mass line approaches to connect local grievances (housing, wages, repression) to national liberation. The slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all” captured both solidarity and political clarity born from mass struggle.

U.S. Context and the Mass Line

Even in the imperial core, the mass line remains necessary. When organizers in Black communities in the U.S. raise demands for community control of the police, or when immigrant workers demand protections against deportation and wage theft, these are expressions of lived conditions. The role of revolutionaries is to listen, synthesize, and link these struggles to a broader vision of systemic transformation.

Movements like the Black Panther Party exemplified this in practice. Their Free Breakfast Programs, community health clinics, and demands for self-determination were not abstract utopian visions. They arose from listening to the people and organizing around concrete needs. In doing so, they turned localized demands into revolutionary politics.

Today, lessons can be drawn from Amazon worker organizing, tenant unions, and community defense groups. Each reflects the need to move beyond narrow economic struggles toward collective power and revolutionary consciousness—something possible only by practicing the mass line.

Class Composition, Mass Line, and Revolutionary Strategy

Why does all this matter? Because without understanding class composition, we risk misidentifying who the revolutionary subjects are. Without practicing the mass line, we risk alienating ourselves from the very people we seek to liberate.

In the Global South, class composition reveals that the revolutionary subject is not only the factory worker, but also the informal worker, the peasant, the migrant, the care worker, the unemployed youth. The task of revolutionaries is to unite these layers into a common struggle against imperialism and capitalism.

In the United States, class composition shows how Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and working-class communities occupy a strategic position at the intersection of exploitation and resistance. Practicing the mass line means building programs and strategies that arise from these communities’ real struggles, rather than imposing abstract dogma.

Ultimately, class composition and the mass line are inseparable. One provides the map of the terrain, the other the method of walking it. Together, they allow revolutionaries to build movements that are both rooted and transformative, capable of confronting the immense power of capital and imperialism.

Conclusion: Toward a Revolutionary Synthesis

For those of us in the Global South, and for comrades in the North who are serious about liberation, the lesson is clear: we must take the masses seriously—not as passive recipients of ideology, but as the makers of history. To understand class composition is to recognize their diversity and contradictions. To practice the mass line is to transform their struggles into revolutionary politics.

This synthesis requires humility, patience, and determination. It requires us to immerse ourselves in the life of the people, to learn from their creativity, to respect their knowledge, and to sharpen it into collective power. In a world ravaged by imperialist wars, climate catastrophe, and deepening inequality, nothing less will suffice.

The future belongs to the masses. The task of revolutionaries is to help them recognize it, seize it, and build