If you have to take your best guess, when do you think that the socialist revolution will happen in the USA? Please explain the reasoning behind your guess.
If you have to take your best guess, when do you think that the socialist revolution will happen in the USA? Please explain the reasoning behind your guess.
cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6352717
For once I’m going to be reductive just to make things extremely simple and easy to see.
For a socialist revolution to take place in America, the American working class needs to be re-proletarianized.
Americans are living in more of a neo-feudal society under finance capitalism after the collapse of the USSR than the industrial capitalism of the 19th-20th century. Their labor are tied more to debt under finance capitalism than to production under industrial capitalism, which is a condition required to transform the proletariat into a revolutionary class who has “nothing to lose but their chains”.
As such, the American working class today is functionally more of a debt slave (their bullshit jobs have long been decoupled from production, a role that has been taken over by the Global South countries), not unlike a feudal peasant’s tie to their land.
One of the greatest ideological breakthroughs under Mao was land reform - it destroyed the peasantry’s feudal relation to their land and thus transformed the peasantry into a revolutionary class, that ultimately paved the way for the victory of the Communist Party.
How do you sever the relations of the American working class to their debt? There is only one answer: Wall Street must be destroyed.
And how do you destroy Wall Street? De-dollarization.
Only with the dollar losing its hegemonic status and denies the US empire from getting free ride from all the Global South countries, will American capital “retreat” back to their own shores for re-industrialization as they are being driven out of the Global South, and re-proletarianize the American working class along the way, ultimately leading to a socialist revolution.
Of course, this will be accompanied by a huge plunge in living standards after the US financial capital lost its hold on the labor and resources of the Global South, the civil war that will break out as the contradictions of Capital can no longer be contained, and the possibility of a global thermonuclear war if Capital is to lose its hegemony over the rest of the world.
In the face of falling living standards, how will your typical American workers react? Turn full Fascist and cling on to the last straws of Imperialism as it is being expropriated from the Global South, or turn toward Socialism and form solidarity with the working class all over the world to overthrow the bourgeois ruling class?
There is only one way to prevent Barbarism: you need a left wing movement in America that actually understands and utilizes theory to gain the foresight needed to plan ahead on what will eventually befall the country being torn apart by the contradictions of capitalism. Thus, the final battle lines will be drawn along the Ideological plane. The only possible future where Socialism will have the upper hand of prevailing.
In January 1917, Lenin thought the revolution would not happen in his lifetime. Conditions were very different then, but it's a good reminder that life is unpredictable.
We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution. But I can, I believe, express the confident hope that the youth which is working so splendidly in the socialist movement of Switzerland, and of the whole world, will be fortunate enough not only to fight, but also to win, in the coming proletarian revolution.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jan/09.htm
I wonder how pessimistic Lenin would have been if he knew about Vaush.
The kind Vladimir Ilyich would have funny clown hammered everyone here.
He would have given him the Kautsky treatment and dedicate a chapter long dunk in state and revolution to him
Damn, so he at least saw young people be revolutionary. Most people younger than me that I meet are fascist or soc dems.
I was mostly very realistic in this thread, but if you want to be optimistic, in Lenin's time the Social Democratic parties of Europe actually where some of the most important hubs for communist youth to start to crystallize their radical ideology into something distinct from social democracy. This same phenomenon happened half a century ago in the Students for a Democratic Society movement, though not much material change came from it. There's no specific reason it can't happen with the Social Democratic movements of today except their relative powerlessness in the west.
The world would have to look so unrecognizable for a Socialist revolution to succeed in the center of global capitalism, saying any bounded period of time is really just pulling numbers out of nowhere.
I personally believe there are at least 3 long term requirements for this event to happen: dedollarization, end of neo-coloniasm, and climate collapse. Capitalism cannot survive these, and they're coming within the next century and a half or so (climate collapse will happen in half that time and inevitably bring about the others). In that time, though, we might literally just be extinct from nuclear Holocaust and mass starvation.
You think climate collapse is a necessary requirement for socialism in the core?
I don't think it's an absolute requirement, but I think capitalism exhausting its own resource and ecological foundations is just as fundamental a contradiction as the exploitation of labor. I think as conditions presently stand, climate collapse will precede other major turning points in the undoing of imperialism.
It won't. America will stop being America first.
The US will slowly receded into the periphery, like Britain after WWII. It will grow incredibly more nationalistic between now and then. I think the military interventionism will start receding as well. It will become a tax haven and investment center for the financialization of industry in other countries. US citizen who want revolution will just leave and go to AES countries. As the monsters US capitalism created keep grinding their poor down, the wealthier reactionaries from those countries will immigrate to the US. We'll get some unholy union of foreign born, multiracial striver ghouls from other countries making allies with domestic racists versus a wholly white and affluent liberal enclave. Nobels will have a little civil war as a treat.
As the climate issue becomes the forefront contradiction, the US-World contradiction will disappear. While China and other countries are fighting to save the species, the US will be a joke of a backwater shithole full of diseased and dying royals.
This was my answer as well, thanks for saving me the time.
I think one of the steps that would accelerate this is some sort of balkanization/secession/separatism, probably in the literal corners of the country. But that's still after our lifetimes (yes I saw the post upthread about lenin making this same mistake)
I think it's possible for some states to say "we're done with you holding us back, we're moving on without you". But, of course, if you're splitting off you're no longer part of the US.
This from every direction:
Only after the United States has ceased to be in its current form, whether by civil war or invasion and occupation. Those are the things I think we can expect in our lifetimes. I’m hoping it’s the latter, I’d much rather live in territory controlled by China than some Christian nationalist militia
I’m hoping it’s the latter, I’d much rather live in territory controlled by China than some Christian nationalist militia
Agreed, but what I fear is that no one would think they had a reason to when things start internally going the way of the balkans
I don't think any of us are going to know when it'll happen. Mao and the Chinese communists started out with like 17 people, grew to a few hundred, were obliterated back to 20 something, and this was all just 15 years or so before they took power.
The July 26th movement in Cuba went from around 3000 people in 1953 to about 150 over a year after the failed attack on Moncada Barracks, then 6 years later in 1959 they had seized the state.
Literally no one predicted the USSR would collapse in August of 1991. So it can be fun to speculate on things but there are so many parts that the best attitude to have is to be ready for anything and stay organized right now.
3000 people can be pretty substantial, especially in a country of 6 million.
It must cease to be the USA long before any part of it can become socialist.
These are necessarily simultaneous developments
2040s at the absolute earliest assuming a catastrophic collapse of the empire that leads to widespread economic misery spreading even to the PMC class. Dedollarization must occur. Empire must fail to expand and turn inward, the material conditions must deteriorate enough and people in the core must overcome their inculcated atomization to organize enough.
Most likely much later than that, latter half of this century. Right now we're turning solidly towards more reactionary politics, sacrificing trans people, doing racism against Russians and Asians, pushing back on the notion that women are people, etc and this has been a trend going on before Trump's win by the way though obviously that gives liberals an excuse to continue and accelerate it. Assuming they fail to contain China, fail to subjugate Russia, and China achieves its own goals in the late 2040s or 2050 for a modern socialist society and a rejuvenated nation then as much as they try Americans will begin to learn of how much better things are in China and though the brainworms of individualism, the hyper-atomization of society and so on will keep things in check for a while if living conditions continue to deteriorate for enough people it has to happen eventually.
Non-zero even substantial risk that nuclear war happens first and they end the world rather than allowing their hegemony to slip and socialists to win.
Also exists a risk that climate change comes to bat and does the US empire a solid by hitting most of the world in the latter half of this century so much harder that the US can continue on entirely off importing the most desperate climate refugees in the world and exploiting them as an underclass while using its relative insulation between two oceans and its good farmland and other natural resources to thrive while other nations suffer and capitalism could continue into next century easily while China struggles on regardless.
Fact is though we're in a life or death struggle here. The west knows it and will do everything. If they can create some sort of technology that allows them to adequately suppress Chinese nuclear response they'll launch on China and wipe them out without hesitation to usher in barbarism. So let us hope China in fact gets the technology to check-mate and neutralize US nukes much sooner and either wipes the floor with the US in a war or prevents it ever coming to that as even in a conventional war lots of good Chinese comrades would die.
Also exists a risk that climate change comes to bat and does the US empire a solid by hitting most of the world in the latter half of this century so much harder that the US can continue on entirely off importing the most desperate climate refugees in the world and exploiting them as an underclass while using its relative insulation between two oceans and its good farmland and other natural resources to thrive while other nations suffer and capitalism could continue into next century easily while China struggles on regardless.
This would require reproletarization and reindustrialization. My personal belief is that US finance capital has rendered the domestic economy thoroughly incapable of sustaining industrial growth, it has simply created so much rent that expanding a vast supply chain across the US (in labor intensive industry no less) has become impossible. I think that when the situation reaches this point, there will either have to come another transformative moment in the history of capitalism, or its definite end.
The resource usage of human civilization has arrived at an important inflection point, and so I think the next century will see much more change than the last one. The end of USA's hegemony is a necessary precondition for a socialist revolution, and I don't think the USA can maintain it for another century... so I can't help but come to the uncomfortable conclusion that my own material conditions are going to get a lot worse within my lifetime, and certainly for my children's. If it's going to happen, I think it's going to happen sooner than we think, just because of the pressure cooker the world is in.
After the periphery has broken its chains and has the west under sustained pressure, maybe. I just don't see mass internal defections happening without a tangible show of power from external socialist movements.
When the treats stop flowing.
This is like asking when the socialist revolution will happen in the Qing dynasty. And as history showed us, the answer was never because the Qing dynasty had to fall before the old Confucian-Daoist-Legalist-Buddhist ideological superstructure that had served China so well for over a millennia was broken, creating an ideological void that was filled by the May Fourth Movement, which was the seed that eventually became the CPC.
If you're asking about a socialist revolution within the landmass currently occupied by the settler colonial entity known as the United States, I mean it's socialism or barbarism. Barbarism will be either of the ecofascist variety, the nuclear wasteland variety, or the climate catastrophe variety. Assuming the US doesn't get glassed by Russia or China in a future world war, most likely, the US will be balkanized into various successor states with a possible rump state that is still internationally recognized as the US. Successor states that have strong relations with anti-imperialist countries or arise from national liberation struggles led by the Indigenous and other internally colonized peoples will have a softish landing and be less fucked by climate change while successor states without those will spend their last days in completely depraved white supremacist Christofascism before getting wiped out by climate change.
Never.
Amerika is a fundamentally white supremacist nation that can't even bear talking about the atrocities of their history that led to their current state; let alone properly paying for it or restituting ANYBODY for being kidnapped from ancestral homes, for the destruction of our geneaological records, or for the manifold treaties they broke. When Turtle Island finally knows socialism, it won't be as Amerika. Frankly, I'd say Amerikan whites don't deserve it, either; like how dare you build your civilization the way you did then get to turn around and reap the rewards of civilized people?
Nah. Never. I see the country burning before that ever comes close to happening.
Yeah any revolutionary "America" will need to come after the stripping of whiteness /settlerism and every benefit it affords and/or black/indigenous people establishing juche in some part of the land. "America" is so fundamentally white supremacist, colonialist, and capitalist that it cannot continue in any progressive context and anyone that believes it should is a patsoc lol
never, nuclear war will happen first if not climate change induced disasters.
Damn, what's up with these doomers. Why are you even in a leftist space?
yup expressing despair or cynicism about the revolutionary potential of the imperial core in the context of the imminent threats of nuclear war and climate change means i don't think people deserve healthcare and that i don't think imperialism is bad and that i should just hang out with nazis on reddit or whatever. might as well go get called slurs on 4chan since i disagree on this one thing with the illustrious user The Soviet Reporter, i don't deserve any kind of access to a safer space like this.
i'm just pretty sure widespread intensified climate catastrophe or nuclear war are much more likely to happen within my lifetime than a socialist revolution in the 4th reich hog country. whatever poor souls survive either of those horror scenarios of starvation and desperation will maybe be communist and rebuild afterwards but thats not really a 'revolution'.
before europe
reason: europe's is more sustainabel, like a exploding balloon with the pussy open a teeny bit to let some air out while the US's is completely shut
with the pussy open a teeny bit to let some air out
say what now
I don't see it. Europe is vassalized and totally subservient to the whims of US capital. European capitalists won't outlast US Empire because they'll be up next in the chopping block after Israel, the US would reduce Europe to the ashes Communism was born in previously before it allows itself to die.
I'm curious: if English isn't your first language, do you call the opening of a balloon the pussy in your language?
I'd say after they lose the war to China (if it even happens), absolutely anything is possible. Probably like Germany in the 1920's, where it could go both ways. Either the working class gets out of it's own ass and starts to organize, while also managing to diminish the already omnipresent right wing influence, or they simply get caught with their pants down and mowed down like the Spartacists. Only time will tell.
Impossible to predict in any useful way. The left in America right now is just so fucked off.
And there won’t be a viable socialist movement in America until the end of imperialism. The western proletariat has such an artificially inflated standard of living that they’ll never have class consciousness in their current state.
The western proletariat has such an artificially inflated standard of living
No one can afford a house or health care and half of American adults are functionally illiterate. 2/3rds are medically overweight. Food is primarily processed sugar. Hundreds of thousands of people die every year due to preventable diseases, car accidents, gun violence, drug overdoses, and suicide. A million people died from COVID and the government response was to stop counting. Natural disasters go entirely ignored by state authorities. Young Americans today die younger, have less buying power, and are far more miserable than the generation preceding them.
However, they can acquire huge mounds of plastic at a low dollar amount, so I guess living standards are pretty good
I think this is very important to mention. There is currently no good, common, international quantified measure of 'standard of living'; Exactly like GDP, it's mostly measured by the largely made-up value of arbitrary goods.
The standard of living isn't even that high. Everything just costs a shitload because we refuse to densify/reduce carbrain infrastructure and ship things from the other side of the world instead of producing locally. There's too many middlemen driving the cost up of everything. So despite the relatively high wages, life still fucking sucks for most people.
What most Americans see as a reduction in living standards would actually be a huge increase once they got over their dumb rugged individualist brainwashing.
What most Americans see as a reduction in living standards would actually be a huge increase once they got over their dumb rugged individualist brainwashing.
It's genuinely alarming that communists do not understand this.
tomorrow at 5 o'clock. Please bring snacks.
Far sooner than we think. As soon as we start believing that it is possible. It also won’t be all at once, it and it must start somewhere. We have work to do comrades.
With who? These cop-callin-assed crackers?
No, definitely not. However there are plenty of marginalized people at the edge of the imperial core who see that enough is enough and want to do something about it.
Nobody can know, there's some likely prerequisites (like the general collapse of an American led world order) but at the end of the day none of us are Nostradamus.
Never. Republicans are openly fascist and the Democrats don't want to admit that they're fascist. The rest of America isn't strong enough to do anything or doesn't care enough. The US is going to implode on itself.
I'm more on the side of Maoist third-worldism. The Great Satan is the bad guy. Sure, the bourgeoisie is loyal to their class first and in the event I'm proven wrong they'd jump ship, but by and large it cannot fail because the US government is the ultimate vehicle against socialism. Global south countries will have to liberate first, and hopefully BRICS with China being the ringleader can form it into a tool for socialism with Cuba joining up.
As far as my information will tell me, the best case scenario for socialism in burgerland is if colonized people rise up and form an opposing state. But as others have said, the US simply would be something else entirely.
after the empire collapses and after the failure of the fascist regime that takes power after the collapse
How do you get communism from within fascism though?
In or about I think it was the summer of 2051 in my future fiction project. In the present day we're seeing in real time the collapse of US hegemony overseas; by the late 2030s internal conflicts within the USA's bourgeoisie about how to save the empire, end up causing a second civil war, triggering mass flight from the USA primarily to Europe and Australasia; the 2040s then see many of those who left the USA during the war returning to work in postwar reconstruction, the USA's relevance abroad completely dead and buried, and the experiences of these returning refugees leaving them thoroughly disillusioned. This is what allows for the emergence of a revolutionary industrial proletariat in the USA, with enough strength to end the bourgeois dictatorship once and for all.
Sent from Mdewakanton Dakota lands / Sept. 29 1837
Treaty with the Sioux of September 29th, 1837
"We Will Talk of Nothing Else": Dakota Interpretations of the Treaty of 1837
I don't think a revolution is likely to happen until the US itself is basically beaten by the rest of the world. I think it's likely the US is headed into a period of barbarism and humiliation before we see anything like a socialist revolution. The deteriorating conditions and the federal government's complete abandonment of governing could, and i think will, provide the pressure that will force peoole to overcome atomization. Atomization is the greatest impediment to socialism right now. It is so deeply ingrained that it is frankly going to have to be beaten out of people by experiencing a bit of the horror the US has been inflicting since before its founding. This combined with the weakening of US global power and the rise in power and legitimacy (in Westoid eyes) of the PRC is going to make socialism look like a winner to enough people to start things moving toward genuine socialist revolution.
The only things that upsets my projection is climate change, i can't really account for how its going to disrupt things, how quickly, when or where in the specific ways that ots going to happen. The other is the US doing a first strike, which could happen and would obviously be devastating.
Never
It wont happen with the US in its current form. Climate change is absolutely the only hope now. Ideals such as American exceptionalism are key parts that can't be changed. American democracy is very close to a real religion and its not subject to external pressure from other countries or cultures.
The only way forward is destroying the very fabric of American life, ideals and society in a way that forces specially the younger generation to realize they must change the world otherwise they'll die rather soon. However even that is of questionable hope, younger generations are already disillusioned today. Everyone already understands they'll never own a home or even retire. Humanity as a whole is already behaving like frogs in the boiling water. Everyone knows of the disaster or realize something is going wrong, everyone is unhappy and miserable, yet there is no alternative, ever.
Sadly though we only have a few years left, none of this will actualy happen anyway because people will think of the shortest path to survival. Ecofascism and expansion of American influence while everyone else gets crushed or do their own little bit of carving up the global south for themselves(BRICS is somewhat like this).
So I'd say it wont ever happen, but if it could happen, climate change seems like the only real strong enough force to change American society to the core. However even assuming that I also can't jump to wishful thinking that humanity will survive climate change and we will emerge as communists as a result, rather the opposite realy so idk.
or do their own little bit of carving up the global south for themselves(BRICS is somewhat like this)
I'd like to see your investigation for this assertion
Respecfully, were you sleeping under a rock when Brazil single handedly fucked Venezuela out of BRICS like 2 weeks ago? Are you not aware just how fascist Modi's India has become for years now? Seriously? They literally had a border dispute recently. Modi/India is well known for its desire to play both sides with US/China.
CGTN is currently bashing every single ML out there with piece of trash like this? Bringing us liberal some economics understander to bash us on the head telling us exactly why the party wont fight the US and even why its a consensus that "globalization"(liberal mainstream term for US imperialism) is good for them.
Q: China has definitely said that China's goal of having a healthy stable and sustainable relationship will not change China has said its principles of mutual respect, of peaceful coexistence and will cooporation will not change.
A:I myself also agree with that for several reasons first the biggest reason is China do I think inside China we do have some kind of consensus like globalization is good for China I think majority Chinese agree with this uh it's of course it has its disadvantage the dark side but generally speaking it's good... we may argue for different approach but generally globalization and also constructive China-US relations and also of course uh constructive China-Europe
Q:Why is President Xi still being so calm and respectful having heard having seen what the US did suppressing China's high tech for instance you know selling weapons to to Taiwan these are red lines but why is China still saying this relationship has been stable on the whole?
A:I think the the problems you mentioned are basically part of maybe one part or two parts of China us relations. China-US relations is very comprehensive one so what I'm talking about the supportive attitude to China us relations is the general assertion I will say we agree we support that and that there is a consensus I think there China is not divided on those issues so this is very important reason.
Are we at the point we need Xi to shake hands with Trump? Is Biden not enough? Twice in a year even?
The party wants us to know very explicitly that everyone is happy nodding along with US imperialism because it benefits them. Why is the state TV bringing liberal academics to tell us globalization is good for China? That good US-EU-China relations is good?
Because they want you to know this is not a debate or an ideological crisis, its a consensus.
As long as we believe in a magical world of friendship and cooperation we can pretend Imperialism doesn't exist or Communism is not fundamentaly opposed to capitalism in all forms and most importantly we can deny what being a communist is even supposed to be about.
Communism was definitely never about cooperating with everyone, specialy those of anti-revolutionary/reactionary tendencies at the same time specialy when you say the quiet part out loud that its because its working out for us. Dengism took "improve material conditions" as a complete distortion of what is just a mere observation of the requirements for socialism(not even the only one) as a religious mantra that justifies cooperation with exactly the same anti-revolutionary and reactionary forces communists have struggled against since the beginning.
As a result BRICS will not fight the US directly, Brazil will inevitably fuck with Latin America(praise Lula and Haddad's neoliberal crushing of the brazilian working class, the left was already crushed in the elections last month) as it has been historically the biggest US vassal there. Indian fascism will continue to flourish etc.
Likewise please understand a significant part of Russian conservatives see MAGA as their ally and/or Trump as a potentially better for them. The world is inherently moving towards the right. Russia is an example of this. Everyone should be careful of the illusion Putin learned anything at all and in any case there is no "leftist" Russia anyway, its wrong ideology and the wrong leadership struggling against the US somehow coinciding with the correct choice. For years since 2014 the same Putin did nothing and let the Nazis do their shit.
Likewise I already talked about Chinese disastrous approach to the ME, in the past trying to cozy with Israel and right now they're doing business and selling weapons to Saudi Arabia. There is no anti-imperialist line that intersects with supporting both Israel and Saudi Arabia in less than a decade period. Least so during a genocide of this proportion. Its insane to me.
IMO the 2022 sanctions blowback narrative created this huge BRICS grifter shit in the west that even I admit I believed in it, I wrote and supported it back then because yes its absolutely true for a moment it China was aggressive and willing to do its own thing. That is history for now though.
Never. The closest you'd get in the US is Nazbol shit. Literqlly too much racism for anything else.
Never
Damn, you must be fun at parties.
It's an exercise in futility to predict revolutions. Lenin didn't expect a recognition in his lifetime in 1917. History moves fast enough so any numbers in this thread are analy sourced at best.
Domestic proletariat seizing the state? Without any discontinuities like world war or climate change or balkanization, 2150 at the very earliest, but possibly never.
Proletarian elements establishing stealth enclaves that make the details of the government much less relevant? This coming decade.
I know which one of these I'm aiming for.
2217 at this rate.
Because at that point the USA will likely not exist, and the centuries of reactionary society will hopefully be weakened. 21st century? Seems too far off, but I'd think it would only happen at the collapse of their empire, so maybe this century? idk there would be a massive fascist/liberal reaction against any mass movement for the working class.
As soon as morale improves.
