Imagine if it were America…all the insanity would finally stop. The whole world would follow suit. In a mere half century the whole world would have developed mutually into what would seem like relative utopia to us now. Imagine how far we would have come without America stomping on every ember.
Too bad we’re, like, the literal least likely country for that.
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.
came close to revolution during the 1930s;
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?
The thing is we are too politically and physically divided. Do you think it’s possible for a region of the US to break off, instead of the whole country, and if so where?
If I absolutely had to pick somewhere, I would guess the West coast / Pacific northwest. Yes, they have some of the loudest pseudo left capitalist lib cringe shit, but they also have a big socdem/demsoc population (Bernie people ripe for radicalization, at least moreso than most other types of Americans) and a not-nonexistent communist population. It would be feasible to pull off as they have a HUGE economy, manufacturing, tech etc. so independence from America wouldn’t fail overnight. They also have a large population of fascists that would be a huge thorn in their side–the “state” of Jefferson could bleed California dry (literally, lots of California water passes through their territory) before they had a chance to retaliate.
This is just going off of what I know, and now. There’s also several major cities that have huge potential and I could see an actually-based actually-effective pragmatic CHAZ type deal developing in one, even if it didn’t last (all depends too on how powerful the American federal state is at said point).
The more interesting variable I am looking towards is our lumpenproles. We have written them off as all irredeemably fascist and certainly terminally anticommunist but I don’t see this as necessarily set in stone, it would be amazing if we could reach the disaffected rural Americans with an explicitly communist program and this would flip the entire situation on its head. I have lots of experience talking to “salt-of-the-earth” Americans and many of them are more confused and misled than dedicated to a self replicating ideology of fascism or capitalism or anti communism. I have found many will even espouse communist and egalitarian talking points (stripped of buzzwords, of course) with little rhyme or rhythm–in between capitalist, fascist, and bigoted talking points of various degrees. There is definitely a hunger for something they don’t realize that only communism can provide, a hunger for meritocracy and rationale decision making and an end to corruption and exploitation. They are bitter and resigned to “the way things are” in many ways and trillions of dollars of Red Scare has disfigured their perspective, but man oh man, if that levee were to break even for a second…America would wash red in months. Both in a good way and a bad way. I definitely don’t think our ruling class would relinquish without a nasty fight, not that I don’t wish to be wrong.
I’m really talking out of my ass here but some of this is based on harder evidence, e.g. Google Bernie donations you will find a huge chunk in California–it’s not an end-all be-all but what am I going to do, find a heat map of genuine communists in America? Good luck…
I also want to see how foreign interference might work. If USA got weakened enough, would China drop its policy of playing nice with the capitalist world hegemony and try and push some resources towards a revolution in America? Or something similar? Would the capitalists flee, if so where? Could they establish a new, desperate, last attempt of an America on some other lands?
Yeah, I feel like California would be a good place to consolidate our MLs in America. It has lots of Bernie supporters, Worsening conditions for the poor (price of houses, car centric, huge race disparity, etc) a discontent with the current government. But also geographically strategic, it’s huge, the rockies act as a buffer from the rest of the US, far away from Washington, and would be close enough to get aid from China. Economically it would be a huge dent in the American bourgeoisie, and it could be swing to the back of the legs for the eventual demise of the Empire.
Being in a red state, I also agree our country folk have good values just misinformed. I have an idea to make an ML party, but it’s ambiguous in its iconography as not to scare off the public. All we need to do is gain their trust with actions, and describe our mission without the “scary” words then we can rope them in to Socialism.
YES! I definitely think we should have both very blatant and blunt and honest attempts to win people over and very careful, sugar-coated attempts that avoid the buzzwords and water from poisoned wells.
The realist in me says Greece. The optimist in me says Brazil. Em frente, camaradas!
How Greece?
it has an excellent communist party
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well shit. But I was talking about how large and active it was, and its mostly not revisionist. I didn’t know they were stupid about LGBTQ though, that fucking sucks
I wish it was Brazil. A socialist Brazil would be the end of imperialism in Latin America and potentially the world.
Bro ngl, I think it’s very possible really really soon.
Maybe I am blinded by optimism? Maybe. But even though I don’t think it will be easy, I still think it is possible.
Recently I have seen more and more people around me sharing left leaning views, even if they are not communists. I’m talking about ex-bolsonaro supporters. Could it be just my personal bubble? Maybe. But people are disappointed with Bolsonaro’s government and I’ve heard that UJC is growing in numbers too, though I don’t have any data, only rumors :(
Still, this year we have elections and I think PCB decision to have it’s own candidate - Sofia Manzano - not with the intention to win (though it would be great), but to introduce communist views in the mainstream society is a very good decision. If this works out as intended, we could see a rise in the Brazilian radical left, specially because Lula’s class-conciliation politics are low key doomed to fail. I don’t think he will be able to repeat what he did back then. By having the criticism made by the communists, coupled with the population not really liking the far-right shift we took in the last few years (Temer was extremely impopular and and Bolsonaro has a significant rejection) it could mean gathering more and more support for an eventual Brazilian Revolution.
Also Jones is running for local governor in Pernambuco and I’ve never been so excited. I really want him to win. Can you imagine the improvements in Pernambucanos life conditions with policies supporting family agriculture and housing? Or the absolute terror libs would feel all over the country if he confronts bus enterprises and reverts back privatizations like he wants to? It would be the most insane shit ever and if it works out would also mean more support for our cause. The sheer optimism he shows in videos like this one is really inspiring, specially when you consider the absolute hell we are going through. I think we need that.
Like I said, maybe I’m a bit too optimistic, but even though our struggle will be hard and painful, I still think we can do it. Maybe in 20 years?
Out of the loop on Brazil - seen it mentioned here more and more lately. What’s the importance of it? (Besides being a country with millions of people in it)
Largest South American economy by far, it’s top 10 world. Brazil is extremely rich, it just seems poor because of their ridiculous wealth inequality
They’re extremely natural resource rich. Tons of wood (Amazon rainforest being the most famous example) and they have by far the most freshwater reserves
Large landmass also means lots of ports on the East coast too. Brazil has most of the East Coast of South America and they have the warmest longitudes too
Places with actual communist parties most likely. So greece and india. Russia maybe but it seems that would be in the next 20ish years
I think Greece is somewhat likely, their communist party seems quite active. India as well, but their communist party is more regional
Don’t know how well it’s going, but a communist revolution in India would be incredible
the east can be red once more!
The Marxist party is quite popular in Kerala, but elsewhere they’ve got little to no support. Socialism still has a long way to go in India, there is way too much religious fanaticism and ethnic tension in the way.
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My bet is somewhere in northern Africa. Maybe even the Middle East. The area is going to be absolutely fucked because of sanctions on Russia and war in Ukraine afaik, and that is very good ground for revolutionary sentiment.
I could see Libya become Gaddafist again or even ML with how unstable their political landscape is.
India, Greece, Myanmar, Libya, Somalia or Palestine. Well India, Myanmar and Palestine are mid revolution, but I do think theNaxalite, BCP and the PFLP/United front for palestine/what ever they call themselves will bring about Socialism or in Palestine’s case at least stop the genocide. KKE(as cringe as they are) are decently popular and Somalia and Libya are both in such poor conditions it wouldn’t shock me. Plus people in Somalia likely like Siad Barre.
Bolivia have the most developed class consciousness of Latin America, as the last election showed. After the coup was defeat and MAS returned to power there is momentum to solidify it’s hegemony and build some long term democratic socialism.
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As an Indian, it’s quite laughable that you have India as the first candidate on this list. If anything, India will slip into fascism in the near future.
I think people always see that the communist party in India has 9 million + members and think it’s impressive but don’t take into account that that’s like 1% of the Indian population
I agree, as much as I wish it was the case. India is still a very far cry from a revolution. I see people bring it up on Lemmy a lot for some reason, I’m assuming because of the support in Kerala and WB. But thats just a drop in the ocean of the Indian political spectrum right now.
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Its true that there have been some pretty large farmers protests, but for the most part a vast majority of the Indian population still supports the neo-fascist BJP and their Hindutva ideology. Mostly because of a huge amount of social media propaganda and a significant support base of Hindu nationalists all over the country. As for the conflict with militias I’m assuming you’re referring to the Naxalite insurgencies, they were gaining some traction in the early 2000s, but year after year they’ve died down and their presence is dwindling to the point of irrelevancy compared to what you’ll see from the right wing extremists with their constant lynchings and murders. You’ll only see the Naxals in the news when they’ve been arrested or killed by the police. So as far as armed revolution goes this certainly isn’t enough.
the ashes of capitalism always causes communist radicalization
I feel like the whispers of the next revolution haven’t yet begun. I think uncontrolled free markets will be quite brutal in the coming years. china’s state capitalism and hopefully transition to socialism will be the blueprint every country fucked over by the west will use.
Holy shit, you read my mind!
Russia, somewhere in Africa or South America
