But, you see, it’s perfectly cool for women, laborers, minorities, trans people, etc. to suffer in capitalist society.
-
Hi Guest!
The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress
American anti-Communism if America had become Communist
- Thread starter lerk
- Start date
One notes that most of the things Communist countries got a bad rap for in the 20th century are basically what capitalist countries did with wild abandon in the 19th. The main difference between, say, the Holodomor and the Irish potato famine, is that the former happened at a time when sensibilities had evolved from Victorian norms, and it was no longer considered acceptable to starve millions of people to death in the name of raising capital, at least if they were white people--nonwhite ones remained fair game for a few decades longer.
Max Sinister
Well-known member
- Location
- The Chaos Timeline
Pretty bad PR if something happens the Commies had claimed would happen only under feudalism/capitalism. That's called "breaking of your own promises". Not sorry.
- Location
- Albany, NY
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Honestly for the sake of offering things I think it would be fascinating to have an opposition group centered on an American equivalent to the NEP-Men, with full awareness that the circumstances that brought about the NEP were distinct and the idea of cookie cuttering them in a Red America is not exactly easy, especially as I do agree with others that a Red US would be a much more labor union centered affair.
I think one of the more interesting possibilities re: religion is organic schisms between Christian Socialist and other left-wing religious types and fundamentalist protestants, with e.g. Dorothy Day/Stephen Wise/Abba Hillel Silver types opposing Aimee Semple McPherson/Charles Coughlin types. It'd be more interesting and complex than stuff like the collaborationist wing of the Orthodox church in the USSR I think because the social basis for religious people who independently support socialism already exists.*
*I also think "American communism" would pretty quickly wind up being a social democracy with red paint, but honestly that seems pretty fine to me.
*I also think "American communism" would pretty quickly wind up being a social democracy with red paint, but honestly that seems pretty fine to me.
Avian Overlord
Mystical American Freedom Bird
I would say termination proceeds even harder and with even less of a fig leaf of consent. Why should the glorious People’s Government be bound to treaties between the government of robbers and primitive tribal despots?
Very much so because they were doing the same historical step, often in accelerated fashion (which means even more violence).
Sounds like bunk to me. Why wouldn't the glorious people's government seek to at least present the image of solving oppressed people's issues, especially when it's comparatively not going to cost it much considering how few of them there's left. At worst you probably get something like the ASSR, which isn't great because it's the soviet union and it sucks, but come on, this isn't it.
As I said, liberal professions are a good bet for this.
I think it'd come down to how @Avian Overlord phrased it, that the reservations are run by "primitive tribal despots" and agreed with the "robbers"; the new government would be liberating them, making them part of the new, better country and clearing up all their problems instead of ignoring them. A combination of them thinking communism is better than systems that aren't communism and that they're still early 20th century westerners, who'd think they are helping making the natives better by making them more like westerners.
If one doesn’t want to go with the Bloody Revolution+Civil War path that China and the USSR went with IRL and imagine a broken post-war dictatorial Amerika, perhaps one could use a democratic model of inclusion for the Communists within a greater democratic coalition from which they could grow in influence (Chile in the 60s and 70s, the Popular Front in Spain)
Lord Caedus
Well-known member
- Location
- Minnesota
Even with the caveat that any America where a communist government could come to power at some point in the early 20th century (per the follow-up by the OP as ATL communist America coming about as a result of the Great Depression) would be substantially different than the OTL country of that same time period, it's difficult to believe that a communist government that came to power in this point in time would not push assimilationist policies on Native Americans.
For one, you're right, these would be early 20th century Westerners, likely coming to power after a violent revolution, making decisions for a collection of scattered small groups of non-white peoples living in remote areas who, depending on when the circumstances of TTL, might not be considered citizens of a recognized nation-state. That is not a recipe for success.
It would also be easy for the victorious communists to find pragmatic and ideological justification for assimilation rather than go against the dominant cultural attitudes of the day. For example, when the Dawes Act was repealed IOTL 1934 Native Americans had lost over 60% of the land they had held in 1887. It would be very easy for ATL's communist ideologues to view this the change in the mode of production (albeit one imposed on Native Americans rather than done organically) from pre-contact "primitive communism" and change the desired end-state of the policy from capitalism to communism by accelerating the end of the reservation system.
I find that unlikely because American chauvinism is something the movement will have to fight to succeed in the first place, as it froms the bedrock of legitimacy for the system they seek to convince people to oppose.
Some feuding with the more regressive parts of native ruling systems, a lot of which don't have that much democratic support from their base, might happen as the communists seek to talk to the people on the ground directly rather than whoever assumed leadership under treaties. And some friction over opening up native identity again is also likely, since that's a common demand of the broader native population but likely to dilute the power of those who profited from the gatekeeping.
As I said, even with a not that great revolution you're more likely to get ASSRs out of it than pure American chauvinism. Which is not the best because it perpetuate the issue with reservations and confinment to poor territory as well as lack of recognition for natives outside those boundaries. But it's not worsening of the situation.
Those had a tendency to turn to coups as soon as the communist element of the coalition pushed for actually doing socialism with that power. Though a victorious anti coup alliance would be a good basis for a plural left having a non capitalist consensus due to radicalization while fighting.
That's the way Reds! goes about it, which lead to a "loyal opposition" of liberals and left-liberal evolving into utopian socialists. Which leaves mostly the usual suspects for reaction.
Jackson Lennock
Well-known member
My sense is that for the US to be "communist," it'd be in a funky Fabian League way where there's heavy institutional capture. Couple that with an unaccountable secret police, akin to Hoover's FBI, and strongly religious elements.
It'd be very different from the regimes we called Communist historically.
American leftism in 2022 is heavily characterized by the people who believe in it being very progressive very online (twitter?) college educated people, and this tends to lead to a lot of backwards projection that "well this is how my kind of communism would work, so it would work the same if somebody else set up communism 80 years ago." Nevermind that in any system, the same sorts of personalities tend to take charge ... lots of people who were committed and high ranking communists in the USSR probably would have been similarly successful in a different way in a non-communist system. Likewise, many people successful in the US historically probably would climb the ranks in similar ways under a Communist regime, even if the ideologies they espouse are different.
Look, for example, at Lenin's Letter to the America workers. It reads like something an American Republican would write today, not anything like a modern leftist would write. You could similarly compare the old Trotskyists at the World Socialist Web being so opposed to the 1619 Project with the online-left generally supporting the 1619 project. American Communism/Socialism would be very into the idea that Socialism is as American as Apple Pie, with people like Jefferson and Lincoln (Jefferson especially being a darling of the American left historically) as star players in the Communist/Socialist national mythos. To take power, Socialists and Communists would meld their approach with the American Exceptionalism that most Americans generally agreed with. In the USSR, Lenin and his successors totally played into traditional values of the Russian people in denouncing the Tsar, after all.
It'd be very different from the regimes we called Communist historically.
American leftism in 2022 is heavily characterized by the people who believe in it being very progressive very online (twitter?) college educated people, and this tends to lead to a lot of backwards projection that "well this is how my kind of communism would work, so it would work the same if somebody else set up communism 80 years ago." Nevermind that in any system, the same sorts of personalities tend to take charge ... lots of people who were committed and high ranking communists in the USSR probably would have been similarly successful in a different way in a non-communist system. Likewise, many people successful in the US historically probably would climb the ranks in similar ways under a Communist regime, even if the ideologies they espouse are different.
Look, for example, at Lenin's Letter to the America workers. It reads like something an American Republican would write today, not anything like a modern leftist would write. You could similarly compare the old Trotskyists at the World Socialist Web being so opposed to the 1619 Project with the online-left generally supporting the 1619 project. American Communism/Socialism would be very into the idea that Socialism is as American as Apple Pie, with people like Jefferson and Lincoln (Jefferson especially being a darling of the American left historically) as star players in the Communist/Socialist national mythos. To take power, Socialists and Communists would meld their approach with the American Exceptionalism that most Americans generally agreed with. In the USSR, Lenin and his successors totally played into traditional values of the Russian people in denouncing the Tsar, after all.
Last edited:
Jackson Lennock
Well-known member
Oh my, the American emigre is going to be a bunch of Ayn Rands, isn't it?
Come to think of it - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a major Soviet dissident OTL, but his views were hardly the stuff of the generally agreed upon liberalism which permeated almost all of American politics left and right. I.e., he was a guy proclaiming the virtue of a traditional Russia - not the virtues of the regimes which opposed the Soviet Union.
Quite. I assume that everyone here is already familiar with this famous picture, but it's a good illustration of your point:
JesterBL
Gastronaut
- Location
- Flyover Country, USA
- Pronouns
- he/him
Quite. I assume that everyone here is already familiar with this famous picture, but it's a good illustration of your point:
In a side discussion I was asked if the Cooperative Commonwealth in The Stomach of Man Under Socialism had a different flag- my imagining was no- the Stars and Stripes are still flown but tend to be spread out amongst plain red flags and occasionally, the arm-and-hammer red flag of the SLP.
JesterBL
Gastronaut
- Location
- Flyover Country, USA
- Pronouns
- he/him
As to the OP's original premise, while my scenario of American Socialism is different from some of the more popular ones (as @Hendryk says above, it seems to have happened some time around the close of OTL's WWI), I imagined anti-communism among Americans in the TL to have four main components.
The first is wealthy emigres- the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, as well as their country cousins and localized dynasties. In my TL, these are commonly romanticized as 'the Blues' and tend to also include a lot of the Lost Generation types across Europe, who are less clearly aligned against the Revolution. They end up scattered across the Caribbean, Latin America and Europe and slowly fade out of the main pages of history. They simply aren't able or willing to do the work of restoring their wealth and power and so spend their time partying in Havana until they are displaced there, then retire quietly elsewhere.
The second is the standing military- as explained on the other place, the Reds lose most locations on the periphery of American Empire, because the military authorities there see no need to recognize the government in Washington/Chicago and the Reds have no means to actually assert power beyond the metropole. They generally turn themselves over to Entente forces post-WWI and greatly complicate later diplomatic relations between the former Entente and the now Cooperative Commonwealth. Like the Blue emigres, they slowly fade from prominence, simply because you can't maintain a military over such a period of time without access to the metropole, and my imagined scenario is largely bereft of the large scale Civil War seen in Russia (in part because that simply isn't what the US Army was geared up for or positioned for in any scenario).
The third are intellectuals- who run the gamut of outright disapproval of socialism to veiled critiques to, in some cases, attempts to infiltrate and co-opt the system (I toyed with an eccentric analogue to the Technocracy Movement being briefly popular within the IWW-SLP and leading to some concern about 'shadow bureaucracies' but haven't really seen a way to weave it into the text). Some, like Scott Nearing, are critics of the regime who are later rehabilitated. In the era where the TL is set (late 1980s), there is a rebellious undercurrent of fascination with 'outlaw capitalism' among many intellectuals which is itself running into the proliferation of wider imports in hard-currency shops (and an acknowledgement of inequality therein) as well as whatever 'openness' and 'restructuring' are bringing to American life.
Finally there is rural resistance- which runs the gamut from small family farms to local elites to the middlemen of all rural economies who form a rough analogue to the NEP-men of Soviet Russia. The IWW-SLP is most worried about rural rebellion in the early years of the Revolution and after- and this leads to a very hands-off approach for decades (to the racial element above- they create full equality under the law within the cities but turn a blind eye to what happens in the countryside, which horrifies a later generation of radical youth). They also adopt an intentional system of neglect towards rural development, based on their own reading of Kautsky and Orthodox Marxism's theories of rural transformation and their own fears of 'deproletarianization'.
The socialism of my TL has its own internal tensions- between the IWW's freewheeling syndicalism and the SLP's immortal science of Marxism-DeLeonism, between different generations, between cadres forged as allies through service in different regions, between centralization and decentralization- but the forces truly opposed to socialism are mostly dissolute, with only rural resistance being (rightfully) feared by the IWW-SLP.
The first is wealthy emigres- the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, as well as their country cousins and localized dynasties. In my TL, these are commonly romanticized as 'the Blues' and tend to also include a lot of the Lost Generation types across Europe, who are less clearly aligned against the Revolution. They end up scattered across the Caribbean, Latin America and Europe and slowly fade out of the main pages of history. They simply aren't able or willing to do the work of restoring their wealth and power and so spend their time partying in Havana until they are displaced there, then retire quietly elsewhere.
The second is the standing military- as explained on the other place, the Reds lose most locations on the periphery of American Empire, because the military authorities there see no need to recognize the government in Washington/Chicago and the Reds have no means to actually assert power beyond the metropole. They generally turn themselves over to Entente forces post-WWI and greatly complicate later diplomatic relations between the former Entente and the now Cooperative Commonwealth. Like the Blue emigres, they slowly fade from prominence, simply because you can't maintain a military over such a period of time without access to the metropole, and my imagined scenario is largely bereft of the large scale Civil War seen in Russia (in part because that simply isn't what the US Army was geared up for or positioned for in any scenario).
The third are intellectuals- who run the gamut of outright disapproval of socialism to veiled critiques to, in some cases, attempts to infiltrate and co-opt the system (I toyed with an eccentric analogue to the Technocracy Movement being briefly popular within the IWW-SLP and leading to some concern about 'shadow bureaucracies' but haven't really seen a way to weave it into the text). Some, like Scott Nearing, are critics of the regime who are later rehabilitated. In the era where the TL is set (late 1980s), there is a rebellious undercurrent of fascination with 'outlaw capitalism' among many intellectuals which is itself running into the proliferation of wider imports in hard-currency shops (and an acknowledgement of inequality therein) as well as whatever 'openness' and 'restructuring' are bringing to American life.
Finally there is rural resistance- which runs the gamut from small family farms to local elites to the middlemen of all rural economies who form a rough analogue to the NEP-men of Soviet Russia. The IWW-SLP is most worried about rural rebellion in the early years of the Revolution and after- and this leads to a very hands-off approach for decades (to the racial element above- they create full equality under the law within the cities but turn a blind eye to what happens in the countryside, which horrifies a later generation of radical youth). They also adopt an intentional system of neglect towards rural development, based on their own reading of Kautsky and Orthodox Marxism's theories of rural transformation and their own fears of 'deproletarianization'.
The socialism of my TL has its own internal tensions- between the IWW's freewheeling syndicalism and the SLP's immortal science of Marxism-DeLeonism, between different generations, between cadres forged as allies through service in different regions, between centralization and decentralization- but the forces truly opposed to socialism are mostly dissolute, with only rural resistance being (rightfully) feared by the IWW-SLP.