I was thinking about it recently, and this is just a random thought I had it’s not well developed, but I was Watching something on the uptick in separatist parties in the UK, and given the massive geographical range of the US I was wondering if separatist movements would be helpful.
This could be any separtist movement, from Chicano and African to Indigenous to Cascadian. I just feel like independence from the US is a lot more feasible in the short term rather than some form of revolution overtaking the whole country all at once. But like I said, it’s an undeveloped thought (although I would prefer answers more than “i love balkanization” and “America is bad so yes.” It’s less a question of “is hurting america good” and more “is this the best way to do it?”)
It’s a really tough subject. Even if I don’t want to seem wishy-washy on this whole thing, I am still researching theory to see what would work, because this step will obviously be very important. I was wondering whether it would be easier to start multiple socialist revolutions that the government would have to separately take care of rather than one big one that would be crushed, but looking historically, the massive lands of Tsarist Russia and Imperial China became Communist in conditions similar to the United States, and small separate revolutions are easier for Capitalism to crush that one big revolution that is united. An advisable way to do things is have cells in Cascadia that can hamper the US war effort by a lot of ways. It doesn’t have to be sabotage of supply lines; it can also be by decreasing the morale of soldiers (which is a big weak point, you just show how little their own government truly cares about them, show how they will have no freedom afterwards, how they won’t be able to afford a home, etc.). The sheer privatization of the military could make it more prone to Marxist dialectic, since people making the materials are more prone to the fluctuations of the market, and a workers’ strike could really cripple not just the US economy, but the entire war effort and cause the victory of a Socialist country like Russia, China, or Mexico. A big problem is that separatist movements could forment a toxic kind of nationalism, like in Serbia or Hungary, where there would be class collaboration within these separate nations, say for instance a Cascadian proletariat becoming enamored with a Cascadian bourgeoise, or Texan plt. and bgs., or New England. Then there is the flipside of a De-United States having the bgs. feiting itself instead of the plt., which could allow Communist movements to take advantage. Overall I am just spitballing. I would say that a United States remaining united would make Communist revolution far more difficult both within and without its borders due to its meit, but there are no solutions without struggle and tactics. I have been reading Lenin’s works on Nations over and over again, but if you have any other theory concerning balkanization and nationhood, that would immensely help both me and Jeanne-Paul Marat.
I think that it would be good for the world if seperatist movements in the USA succeed, but I think that USian communists should focus on creating a communist USA. The Soviets also didn’t break up Russia, but instead made a socialist state that respected regional differences. I’m not against these seperatist movements, but it’s not us communists who should lead them. For example, I would support a capitalist Texas leaving the USA, since it would weaken the position of the USA.
Seperatist parties actually exist, like Alaskan Independence Party (conservative, libertarian), California National Party (socdem), Texas Nationalist Movement (conservative), and you have the Cascadia movement which is more left wing, but has some conservatives supporting it. I support these movements critically, but not over a bigger socialist USA.
KRUPSKAYA MENTIONED I LOVE SELF STUDY AND TRYING TO FURTHER ONE’S POLITICAL EDUCATION
(I’m going to use the word “African American” a lot because these organisations use it, even though I find “Black Americans” a more correct term.)
Obviously no such thing as true emancipation of some without full emancipation of all and all that, but you probably want more meaningful answers than slogans.
Black Nationalism movements had to struggle with this question before, with middling results. Nation of Islam itself used to promote the formation of a sovereign African-American nation-state somewhere in the South, and Malcolm X’s views developed from separation to nationalism as he split from them. The so-called “New Black Panther Party” (not to be confused with the now-called “Black Lion Party”) is one of the few organisations that proposes such a thing.
Racial separation has many issues as a central proposition from a theoretical standpoint. First off, going by Stalin’s definition of a “nation”, racial groups in the USA as it stands today lack the key aspect of common territory, and so are in shaky ground as a “nation”. While creating such a territory as an after-fact might sound like it corrects the issue, it actually makes the settler contradiction quite clear.
Suppose the NBPP manages to somehow acquire and defend some territory in Louisiana. Not all African Americans live in that region, it’s not common territory to anybody but the (black) people who live there. So now you have to develop a system in which black people from the whole of the (possibly quite hostile) USA can migrate there, but even then, these “foreign” African Americans will not have the same historical connection to that specific region. No matter how much legislation is passed and proclamations are made, it’ll take a reasonably long time for these “foreign” African Americans to integrate, and in reality they’ll be immigrants in everything but name. Besides that, many African Americans for many reasons might not be able to – or might not want to – immigrate, and for those people this new state presents no solution to the systemic racism in the (possibly quite hostile) USA. In effect, it proposes that the only salvation for African Americans is to flee their homes, their lands, their neighbourhoods, their history, to some isolated Garden of Eden. It invalidates African Americans outside this new state, similarly to what Israel does to non-Israeli jews, and gives an excuse for persecution abroad.
Now, this state doesn’t exist inside the USA political system. It’s gonna need its own army, its own diplomatic organisation, its own intelligence agencies and so on. If the relationship with the USA is adversarial, they’ll be forced into concessions or risk being invaded. It does not solve racial conflict, it merely simplifies it to the stage of state diplomacy and dislocates the people from the equation.
Obviously this deals mainly with black people in the US, who don’t have specific “legal” historical claims to its territory like other groups like Chicanos, Indigenous people and such, but it shouldn’t matter. By not having control of their lands, they’ve all been dispersed all throughout the USA and abroad. Achieving nominal independence might be a temporary benefit, but so long as the original US is still allowed to exist and to exert its own racism within its borders, it’ll do all it can to control this new country. And they’ll probably have an easier time using it as a pressure valve.
This is why Black Nationalism rejects the idealistic notion of a Black nation-state as the solution to racism, but the key word here is “solution”. Separatism can be a tool, which may be used in the struggle for broader political goals. The Land Back movement commonly ends up in just petit bourgeois land transfer, but it has also provided some experiences of popular self-government and wealth redistribution to more radical organisations (Nick Estes talks a lot about his). If the NBPP was primarily socialist like the old BPP and came to the conclusion that separation was the correct tactic for the emancipation of black workers, that’d be interesting. However, they in principle focus on cultural/racial separation first, and a lot of their non-Marxist positions follow from that. It’s why they do militias first, free breakfast programs second, and barely any union work.
Since you mention the UK, separatism there is also mostly more successful as a tactic than a strategy. There’s massive rejection to Westminster’s fixation with austerity in general – and New Labour in specific – in Scotland, and it’s growing in Wales and NI. They also have an advantage over the US due to the common territory issue. The SNP and Plaid Cymru notably lost votes to Labour during the Corbyn years (though he really fumbled in Scotland with Brexit), and regained their popularity now with Sir Kid Starver. The Alba Party is a good case study for failing by trying to use Nationalism and Independence, but having no clear coherent proposals that require that independence in the first place. NI is a whole can of worms.
That’s all to say, secession in the USA could be an useful tactic for “unpermitted” policy but is a bad strategy, and Lenin himself probably has some text about that. AFAIK it’s unlikely as I don’t know of any regions with strong enough political movements outside the permissible spectrum, so some fringe progressive groups get shock headlines about calling for independence and nothing else, and thrash meaningless online polls sometimes get huge margins, but it’s not going to actually happen unless they seek something that’s impossible while staying in the US and have the local support for it. Despite all the fear-mongering, the USA is not nearly geographically polarised enough. There’s no “Yellow State” that is dominated by a local party that can’t possibly the win National Elections like in Scotland. A “PSL Independent Illinois” would be an interesting development, I guess.
I would say the closest historical precedent we can examine is the October Revolution and Russian Civil War period that saw the dissolution of the Tsarist empire, the break-away of sections of it that went on to form bourgeois nations, and the efforts the Bolsheviks of all the nationalities contained within the prison house of nations conducted in building socialist governments that went on to federalise into a union of Soviet socialist republics.
At this point in time they aren’t viable.
From the perspective of bringing socialism to North America there’s no benefit to our cause and it might actually hinder it.
Domestically U.S. secession movements are typically far-right.
From the lens of anti-imperialism while secession might weaken the empire it will destabilize the whole continent and likely result in wars, genocides, and dictatorships.
In short: nation-wide revolution is not only preferable but objectively better.
From the lens of anti-imperialism while secession might weaken the empire it will destabilize the whole continent and likely result in wars, genocides, and dictatorships.
This is a good point and my mind goes to a similar place. One area I was thinking about was nukes and whose hands they may fall into. The US has some real unhinged elements to it and the last thing the world needs is some far-right death cult faction getting their hands on one and deciding it’s worth it to fire it off at god knows who because the US is falling apart.
As a point of contrast: as unhinged as Trump talks, his behavior still seems to fit fairly predictably within the realm of gangster empire lashing out in its decline, i.e. brutal and disorientingly mask off but not interested in destroying himself in the process. Some of the Christo-Fascist fanatical elements OTOH, the true believers in rapture style thinking, I’m not so sure about their survival instincts.
That said, nukes are probably more so me going to worst case scenario thinking. The more immediate concern, I think, would be a resurgence of violent, vigilante style racism and individual reactionary states doubling down on racist and otherwise repressive policies without the federal process to slow down their devolvement back toward civil war era confederacy thinking. Liberalism has shown time and time again how feckless it is in opposing the far right elements of the US, and liberal administrators wouldn’t magically become more leftist all of a sudden if a bunch of states seceded. So it would probably result in a lot of people outright fleeing states believed to be more “conservative” or picking sides in a way that hastens on a kind of reenactment of the civil war but on more religious-like grounds of differing bougie interpretations of the constitution than anything else.
Though this is also assuming any kind of broad scale secession. A single state trying it without broader agreement in doing so may not go much of anywhere.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit as well. It seems like the most likely way that any kind of revolutionary movement would come to fruition in the US, as a countrywide revolution seems many levels more difficult.
Seeing CHAZ in Seattle during the BLM protests planted the seed in my head, specifically in the case of a Cascadia-type state. It would be a difficult split though to be sure, the USA would have a lot to lose to a breakaway state and I’m sure would put up a fight against it. If US imperialism is weakened enough and spread thin in conflicts elsewhere in the world, it could be a moment of opportunity for such a movement if proper organization is in place.
I also wonder if as US empire declines, and turns inward, if capitalist infighting will lead to some level of balkanization anyway.
At some point there will have to be a reckoning. There are major areas of the country that don’t want to live in Christofascism and these hogs will continue to push.
Unfortunately the split is more urban/rural than state based so chaos is a lot more likely than a clean split in my view. Still, I could definitely see wa/or/ca taking their ball and going home, especially if they continue to be subjected to retaliatory punitive policy. Not any time soon but in 20ish years or so
I would not be surprised if some kind of secession caused by capitalist infighting happens before all is said and done, but I don’t think it’s advisable for communists to be pushing for it as a strategy.
The reason why is the same reason why AES states can survive but pockets of anarchist communes don’t. The more divided you are, the harder it is to fight back against repression and reaction, the harder it is to organize anything logistically or do any kind of central planning, and you became a sitting duck for remaining imperial/capitalist forces to come in and destroy you.
Just because the US is big doesn’t mean it can’t be organized on a federal level. The US federal model proved that many times over. Yeah, it’s been organized toward awful purposes so far, but point is, it has been done, logistically. And for another point of comparison, if China can manage to govern by vanguard a place that has over a billion people, USians can figure out how to do a third of that.
When it comes to an issue like indigenous, I see that as an entirely separate point. I would not expect indigenous nations to want to merge into a hypothetical ML state in the region. I would expect they’d want to retain autonomy and that the ML state would have it as a priority to give them support and room to flourish; gradually working to give back stewardship over the land where the numbers are there for them to do it, helping them with having the resources to grow and heal from the horrible situation colonialism put them in, things like that.
Yes and yes, but not by communists, unless and until there is a real demand for it from a significant portion of the population. It’s a question of strategic timing. If communists push for something for which the conditions do not yet exist, it would be counter-productive. Communists have to devote their time and effort to that which is most likely to advance the cause, and right now that is not separatism (except in occupied Hawaii and Puerto Rico).
I think it depends on the movement, the class basis of the ones supporting it, a d the practical advantages/capabilities that a secession movement has afforded to it.
For example, Hawaii should unquestionably push for independence due to the damage the US tourism industry continues to do to the indigenous Hawaiian community.
I’ll speak more thoroughly on California, as it’s my home state:
I think it’s too early to tell here, and through struggle we will be able to see whether or not independence is preferable. The biggest issues we face that would need to be solved in order to obtain independence is firstly the issue of water. We’d need to build desalination plants along with taking control over our agriculture industry and restructuring in for sustainable development and water usage. It would also help to convince other states to come along with us, like Oregon, Washington, and Nevada, so if those states are staunchly against separation then our own independence is less feasible.
The other issue would he power generation. We recieve a substantial amount of power from.the Hoover Dam in Nevada, so again we’d need to need to massively build up our energy sector. This issue is frankly less troublesome than the water, as California is a prime location for Solar, and Berkeley is one if the best Nuclear Science institutions in the world (even if our nuclear sector is Germanh levels of delusional). There’s also a lot of opportunity for wind turbines.
Next up would probably be the Californian economy. It’s no secret that Silicon Valley, the financial sector, and residential speculation dominate our politics however, our agriculture and manufacturing aren’t irrelevant by any means. California is also famous for our engineers for obvious reason, as our UC, Calstate, and Community College systems are generally quite good compared to other states. Our infrastructure is entirely too car dependent, but a lot of people want better public transit, which we have the capacity to provide if the state wanted. Economically speaking, California is capable of being self sufficient if we seized control of the bloated non-real economic drivers, and then directed production of our actually productive sectors.
Demographically, California has a Hispanic plurality, followed by whites, which makes up three quarters of our population. Next is East Asian people at 15% and Black people at a 20th, and from there it splinters further. To put it another way, the whites have been genocided (based). On a serious note, this ethnic diversity definitely positions a lot of us against the white hedgomonic culture that the larger US tends to have. This doesn’t mention the large undocumented population we have, who are the backbone of our construction and agriculture industry. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the majority of Californians know, or have known, an undocumented person whether through their work, community organization, school, etc. It would also not be an exaggeration to say that most Californians, particularly in cities at least, see these people as core members in our community, and hostility to them is akin to hostility to the community as a whole.
Calls for Californian independence wil be more likely to come about the more that our vulnerable communities are targeted, as if US federal policy is to brutalized our neighbors, then your average Californian will be radicalized against federal policy.
I’d say that calls for independence are going to get more common the more that ICE reigns terror on the US population.
However there’s another aspect of Californian identity that makes this less likely. Californians have a bit of a chip on their shoulder. Due to our large population and surface level economic prosperity, (it’s not uncommon to here the fact we are the “5th largest economy in the world” get thrown around) Californians often feel inbittered by our lackluster representation and influence over national politics. Californians, both in our advanced bourgeoisie (Silicon Valley techno-fascists) and our working class feel snubbed by the fact that federal US policy is set up in a way that disempowers us.
The Tech Cartel, as the new capitalists on the block, believe they deserve a much larger share of control in the dictatorship of capital compared to the legacy capitalists that still occupy a lot of that space. The working class, sees how, congress and the senate especially, are proportionally unbalanced against our favor. Us Californians generally think we are positioned to be a much larger guider of US federal policy, however are purposefully kept out of power.
From this perspective, independence becomes in some ways attractive as a kinda of "fine I’ll make my own country with black jack and population based electoral systems!’ But it’s not the only perspective, as others want to continue trying to use our leverage to seize more control over federal policy.
Personally I see the latter as a more effective strategy. The things that disempower California in the US electoral system disempower the margilized and socialists as a whole federally as well. Also California provides quite a bit economically, whether through agriculture, our ports, or our universities, to the rest of the US. As socialists we should be agitating towards seizing control of these economic organs already, and when we’re successful in this goal, it would allow is to pressure larger US policy without much issue.
I don’t think its a possibility. A secessionist movement needs to be backed by the local bourgeoisie or it is just a revolution. Cascadia can’t happen unless a majority of the silicone valley tech billionaires decide they can give up on their investments in the rest of the states. Same goes with other potential break away areas, all the bougies are too invested in the rest of the usa for them to want to break away.
Even if a secessionist movement did happen the rest of the states would immediately go for civil war.
Who gains control the underpopulated areas with the nuclear weapons silos? An independent Calorewash would be under constant threat from nuclear Montana and Idaho. And then there is water, who has access to/control of the Colorado River? Canada and Mexico would probably have a say in how things develop, especially if they had expansionist ideas. Balkanization would not happen peacefully.
