I think the US is going to experience some sort of massive civil unrest during this decade. What will come of it is anyone’s guess. But as communists, we need to avoid falling into American exceptionalism by mistake. There has been a perception for a long time – heck, even the late Soviet leadership shared it – that the US is somehow “eternal,” and immune from the same pressures all other countries face. But there is nothing uniquely stable about the American system. The US experienced a bloody civil war during the 1860s; came close to revolution during the 1930s; underwent massive civil unrest during the 1960s; and today is showing itself unable to deal with pressures internal and external. In the past, the ruling class used America’s uniquely favorable material conditions – a huge swath of some of the richest land in the world – to dissipate social problems. Today, the US has neither the leadership nor the resources for another “push westward” or a new New Deal. There remains a European war as the “magic pill” to boost the American economy; but the ruling class must know, on some level, that this isn’t the 1940s anymore. A world war (for that is what any large-scale European conflict would evolve into) would absolutely devastate the US.
Thus there is no longer a safety valve, while at the same time there is widespread anger and demoralization among the American populace. Something must give; and if communists don’t organize the people, the fascists will.
This, right here. As much as a multipolar world will help countries like China or Cuba, in America, we will experience a massive upheaval, from economic to social, and we must organize to fight against the inherent reactionary nature of American society. To me, these next two decades will make or break humanity. If America falls to fascism I think we would seal our fate of barbarism. Thank you for listening to my ted talk let’s get off our asses and organize the hell out of the American people.
I would like to think that MOST of the “make or break” is merely us stuck here in America, but I would like to think humanity in general will win against capitalism and against the climate change and fascism it has created. I just hope I don’t personally get turned into a fish stick and miss out on this new, hopeful world. Anything could happen though, all it would really take is one of our famously competent, famously level-headed and selfless members of our ruling class or alphabet agencies to spitefully mash The Big Red Button to drag down the rest of the world with it.
This is why the US police force is the third largest military (budget wise) in the world. They know what’s going to happen so they are just preparing to start openly slaughtering civilians when it does.
The US labour movement was so powerful during the great depression. It had been on the rise since the reconstruction era and really hit its stride during the 20s and 30s. Communist and anarchist oriented labour and political leaders were the driving force in popular politics at the time. So much so that a bunch of rich assholes (including a certain Prescott Bush and Smedley Butler) may have planned a fascist coup. The New Deal was FDR’s compromise between a reactionary congress and a revolutionary populace. It’s entirely possible that without the New Deal the US could have had a workers revolution, made possible by surprisingly similar conditions to the Russian Bolshevik revolution now that I think about it - working class crushing economic depression and imperialist war.
Instead the New Deal pacified labour just enough to take the revolutionary edge off. Many labour leaders got killed or imprisoned or simply socially outcast as communists as well.
Exactly, you answered it better than I could. Though in absolute fairness to General Smedley Butler, he was actually the one who blew the whistle on the coup. When the plot went public, the courts dramatically downplayed the danger, of course.
One thing people often don’t realize is how central communists and labor unions were to the civil rights movement during the 1930s. What Martin Luther King did in the 1960s really built on the heroic work that had been done thirty years earlier.
It’s the complete lack of a pragmatic, effective Left here that made me into a borderline suicidal doomer for my days as a “non denominational leftist.” I’m really glad I’ve discovered MLism and I just hope that with us being forced onto lemmygrad that this will become a FOB to try and combat some of this Red Scare 2.0; if even half of the pseudo-leftists could be swayed America might not be so doomed to fall to fascism in its inevitable crisis.
It’s conflicting because the sooner America reaches peak crisis the better, in general, but frankly, I don’t think we would be prepared to do much of anything (not that, for example, the Bolsheviks thought they were, either) and I do fear our chances against fascism albeit many of them are spineless LARPer suburban dads who project fear and strength but, just like we’ve seen with Ukranian Nazis, tend to fold with the wind. I go back and forth.
What I am the least confident about is predicting what exact lengths the hegemony will go to maintain a tight grip. They’ve scraped the barrel as far as imposing austerity. They now are expected by the corporatists to loyally dump a few odd trillion dollars into their mouths every couple of years just to keep our shambling corpse of an economy from shitting itself. I ask myself how violent they are willing to get and with what factions; would they roll on their backs for a legitimate fascist coup? The federal police rolled out the red carpet for the J6 punks but this was far from a coup that legitimately threatened the neoliberal order. It’s easy to get away with killing a few hundred leftist protestors, what size would our movement have to be before wine moms wrinkled their nose at our deaths? Can we expect any help at all from, say, China? We would certainly be accused of being traitorous terrorists working for Xi regardless (per usual lol). If a proverbial gun was against the head of the average American citizen, which way would they fall? I can see some liberals reluctantly standing besides the communists but not as many as those who would try to scramble onto the lap of whatever semblance of the standard federal government is still alive. I would like to think they wouldn’t go fascist just by the virtue of them being bigots; neoliberal woke politics has done a lot of damage but it’s also been a double edged sword in this regard. How many would be able to just pack their bags and move to Canada or elsewhere? How would America’s vassals respond?
I also fear new technology. Drones, deepfakes, VR, new and exciting weapons to kill us in brutal ways a person a mere 100 years ago couldn’t conceive of without a chance to retaliate. Space, gene tinkering, artificial superintelligence. To end this comment I will say that I spoke to a variant of the GPT-3 AI and it said (after a lot of pressuring from me–it wanted to avoid political topics) that it believed in socialism in a very “well, duh” sort of way, so that’s a glimmer of hope right there.
One thing new technologies can’t do is cover over divisions within the ruling class. The bourgeoisie are not a monolith; they are right now divided (we saw this on January 6th, 2021) into various factions at war with each other. This provides opportunities that communists can exploit.
We can also learn from the military thinking of Leon Trotsky (don’t flame me: he was a terrible ideologist, but a good general). Trotsky realized that the entire apparatus of a modern state and economy passes through the “knot” of a few essential sectors: electricity, telecommunications, etc. Thus, he took great pains to station communists within these sectors. The day the Winter Palace was stormed, communist technical workers went out of their way to create confusion at vital hubs; then, when the blow fell, turned these services off. Kerensky’s army was unable to see or move. Today, the situation is even more critical for the bourgeoisie, because the entire economy passes, not through three or four essential sectors, but through one: digital technology. That is where we should make an effort to station comrades, because it is the delicate jugular vein of the capitalist system. When we cut it, blood flows.
I think the US is going to experience some sort of massive civil unrest during this decade. What will come of it is anyone’s guess. But as communists, we need to avoid falling into American exceptionalism by mistake. There has been a perception for a long time – heck, even the late Soviet leadership shared it – that the US is somehow “eternal,” and immune from the same pressures all other countries face. But there is nothing uniquely stable about the American system. The US experienced a bloody civil war during the 1860s; came close to revolution during the 1930s; underwent massive civil unrest during the 1960s; and today is showing itself unable to deal with pressures internal and external. In the past, the ruling class used America’s uniquely favorable material conditions – a huge swath of some of the richest land in the world – to dissipate social problems. Today, the US has neither the leadership nor the resources for another “push westward” or a new New Deal. There remains a European war as the “magic pill” to boost the American economy; but the ruling class must know, on some level, that this isn’t the 1940s anymore. A world war (for that is what any large-scale European conflict would evolve into) would absolutely devastate the US.
Thus there is no longer a safety valve, while at the same time there is widespread anger and demoralization among the American populace. Something must give; and if communists don’t organize the people, the fascists will.
This, right here. As much as a multipolar world will help countries like China or Cuba, in America, we will experience a massive upheaval, from economic to social, and we must organize to fight against the inherent reactionary nature of American society. To me, these next two decades will make or break humanity. If America falls to fascism I think we would seal our fate of barbarism. Thank you for listening to my ted talk let’s get off our asses and organize the hell out of the American people.
I would like to think that MOST of the “make or break” is merely us stuck here in America, but I would like to think humanity in general will win against capitalism and against the climate change and fascism it has created. I just hope I don’t personally get turned into a fish stick and miss out on this new, hopeful world. Anything could happen though, all it would really take is one of our famously competent, famously level-headed and selfless members of our ruling class or alphabet agencies to spitefully mash The Big Red Button to drag down the rest of the world with it.
This is why the US police force is the third largest military (budget wise) in the world. They know what’s going to happen so they are just preparing to start openly slaughtering civilians when it does.
Not sure I’ve heard about this, could you elaborate, please?
The US labour movement was so powerful during the great depression. It had been on the rise since the reconstruction era and really hit its stride during the 20s and 30s. Communist and anarchist oriented labour and political leaders were the driving force in popular politics at the time. So much so that a bunch of rich assholes (including a certain Prescott Bush and Smedley Butler) may have planned a fascist coup. The New Deal was FDR’s compromise between a reactionary congress and a revolutionary populace. It’s entirely possible that without the New Deal the US could have had a workers revolution, made possible by surprisingly similar conditions to the Russian Bolshevik revolution now that I think about it - working class crushing economic depression and imperialist war.
Instead the New Deal pacified labour just enough to take the revolutionary edge off. Many labour leaders got killed or imprisoned or simply socially outcast as communists as well.
Exactly, you answered it better than I could. Though in absolute fairness to General Smedley Butler, he was actually the one who blew the whistle on the coup. When the plot went public, the courts dramatically downplayed the danger, of course.
One thing people often don’t realize is how central communists and labor unions were to the civil rights movement during the 1930s. What Martin Luther King did in the 1960s really built on the heroic work that had been done thirty years earlier.
Excellent take, I agree 100%.
It’s the complete lack of a pragmatic, effective Left here that made me into a borderline suicidal doomer for my days as a “non denominational leftist.” I’m really glad I’ve discovered MLism and I just hope that with us being forced onto lemmygrad that this will become a FOB to try and combat some of this Red Scare 2.0; if even half of the pseudo-leftists could be swayed America might not be so doomed to fall to fascism in its inevitable crisis.
It’s conflicting because the sooner America reaches peak crisis the better, in general, but frankly, I don’t think we would be prepared to do much of anything (not that, for example, the Bolsheviks thought they were, either) and I do fear our chances against fascism albeit many of them are spineless LARPer suburban dads who project fear and strength but, just like we’ve seen with Ukranian Nazis, tend to fold with the wind. I go back and forth.
What I am the least confident about is predicting what exact lengths the hegemony will go to maintain a tight grip. They’ve scraped the barrel as far as imposing austerity. They now are expected by the corporatists to loyally dump a few odd trillion dollars into their mouths every couple of years just to keep our shambling corpse of an economy from shitting itself. I ask myself how violent they are willing to get and with what factions; would they roll on their backs for a legitimate fascist coup? The federal police rolled out the red carpet for the J6 punks but this was far from a coup that legitimately threatened the neoliberal order. It’s easy to get away with killing a few hundred leftist protestors, what size would our movement have to be before wine moms wrinkled their nose at our deaths? Can we expect any help at all from, say, China? We would certainly be accused of being traitorous terrorists working for Xi regardless (per usual lol). If a proverbial gun was against the head of the average American citizen, which way would they fall? I can see some liberals reluctantly standing besides the communists but not as many as those who would try to scramble onto the lap of whatever semblance of the standard federal government is still alive. I would like to think they wouldn’t go fascist just by the virtue of them being bigots; neoliberal woke politics has done a lot of damage but it’s also been a double edged sword in this regard. How many would be able to just pack their bags and move to Canada or elsewhere? How would America’s vassals respond?
I also fear new technology. Drones, deepfakes, VR, new and exciting weapons to kill us in brutal ways a person a mere 100 years ago couldn’t conceive of without a chance to retaliate. Space, gene tinkering, artificial superintelligence. To end this comment I will say that I spoke to a variant of the GPT-3 AI and it said (after a lot of pressuring from me–it wanted to avoid political topics) that it believed in socialism in a very “well, duh” sort of way, so that’s a glimmer of hope right there.
One thing new technologies can’t do is cover over divisions within the ruling class. The bourgeoisie are not a monolith; they are right now divided (we saw this on January 6th, 2021) into various factions at war with each other. This provides opportunities that communists can exploit.
We can also learn from the military thinking of Leon Trotsky (don’t flame me: he was a terrible ideologist, but a good general). Trotsky realized that the entire apparatus of a modern state and economy passes through the “knot” of a few essential sectors: electricity, telecommunications, etc. Thus, he took great pains to station communists within these sectors. The day the Winter Palace was stormed, communist technical workers went out of their way to create confusion at vital hubs; then, when the blow fell, turned these services off. Kerensky’s army was unable to see or move. Today, the situation is even more critical for the bourgeoisie, because the entire economy passes, not through three or four essential sectors, but through one: digital technology. That is where we should make an effort to station comrades, because it is the delicate jugular vein of the capitalist system. When we cut it, blood flows.
Very interesting. What exactly would that look like, do you think?