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.
mentioning dedollarization in my answer then seeing xhs made their answer about dedollarization got me feeling like
sorry i didn’t see lol. in fact my answer was far too simplistic but i guess whatever it takes to make a point
Nooo I love your answer and it’s probably the most important thing for someone with this question to hear! I just found it validating that you expanded on the topic I had mentioned (I only mentioned it briefly and didn’t explain why the US dollar was a load bearing part of hegemony)
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.
I personally think environmental collapse would make it more difficult to keep the periphery in line. Possibly resulting in a recession in the abilities and scope of the state.
The countryside surrounds the city. Finance capital can only sustain itself as long as the base of the supply chain keeps producing the food and raw resources that they collect rent on, as well as the vast majority of labor power which sits in the periphery; environmental collapse threatens this process of extraction at its core. Capitalism will not necessarily be eradicated as an immediate consequence of environmental collapse but I think that it will need to go through some transformational change, akin to the grave acceleration of imperialism that happened in the 1970s but in the opposite direction.
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.
People like Vaush have always existed. Lenin had to live at the same time as Eduard Bernstein and Kautsky (to a lesser extent)
The Kautsky comparison always gets brought up but Kautsky actually read Marx and wasn’t a pedophile.
You got me there
yeh even the losers that the old marxists clowned on were more well read than most “left wingers” today
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.
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
This from every direction:
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.
It must cease to be the USA long before any part of it can become socialist.
These are necessarily simultaneous developments
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.
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.
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.
When the treats stop flowing.
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.
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?
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’.
If you don’t have revolutionary optimism why even be part of a leftist space that promotes revolutionary optimism then? Nobody wants to hear doomerist ideas though. Leave that shit in nihilist subreddits.
why the fuck are you singling me out when like the entire thread has the exact same take as me. its not nihilist to acknowledge reality. we have an entire comm called ‘doomer’ fuck off with your tone policing bullshit. ‘leftism is when happy and fascism is when sad’ completely unserious and ableist take
why the fuck are you singling me out when like the entire thread has the exact same take as me
lmao, no they do not. There are lots of more thought out responses than people just being doomers which is literally the most misanthropic selfish way of thinking. All it does is to drag everyone down on bullshit thoughts.
its not nihilist to acknowledge reality.
lmao, all shitty ideologies profess that they are ‘reality’. That is how they cope. Along side with ‘that is just human nature’.
we have an entire comm called ‘doomer’ fuck off with your tone policing bullshit. ‘leftism is when happy and fascism is when sad’ completely unserious and ableist take
lmao, doomers are anti-revolutionary garbage that literally try to make people believe that a brighter future is not possible. You can throw all the liberal insults that you want, but that doesn’t change that you are an anti-revolutionary with no revolutionary optimism, who is just defensively trying to shoehorn your rotten negativity into leftists spaces.
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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.
