I find it hard to see how communism would become popular in the CSA.
While breakup the large Plantations owned by the slave owners might popular with the poor white and black people full communisms is another matter.
Hard to see atheist communism going down well in the bible belt.
A communism strongly linked to religion might work better.
Would the CSA have a large enough industrial class for communism or would in be more rural like Maoism.
I think CSA economy would be most selling farm produce and importing manufactured goods like Rice, Cotton,Tobacco,Turpentine,Sugar,Indigo
later oil and coal could become important. if they take Mexico silver could be important.
I imagine the effect of the dust bowl might be even bigger that the bowl weevil.
Poor people in Farming based economies want to own their own land, not a good start for the communists.
I wonder will probation of alcohol happen in the CSA.
I think that a comparison to Cuba is better than, say, a comparison to Russia or China. Cuba was largely an export economy and was heavily dominated by foreign investment which was leveraged by the regime to keep power and reward its cronies. This would largely be a Cuba writ large, and race relations - if communism could push past the mud-sill theory and men like
Newton Knight certainly proved this was possible along with the aforementioned Parsons - could be addressed of the working man is pushed hard enough. Being sent to die in waves by an uncaring and exploitative planter class and out of touch elites in Richmond would probably be enough to push most people over the edge.
Though you make a good point about religion. My personal belief is that rather than the atheistic Marxism of OTL a Southern inspired communist movement would bind people through shared hardships, and bridge the racial gap with religion. Evangelical Marxist-Parsonism?
Economically, I would imagine the CSSA is still export heavy in terms of economics, but with the pre-war and post war years to build up industry they could have a passable domestic industry to call upon in expanding their economy.
One of the reasons I actually think the CSA is MORE vulnerable to Communism - the same reason we saw revolutions in a bunch of other backward rural countries with an out of touch ruling classes. There's a reason it was Russia, China, Cuba, places like that falling to Communist Revolution, as opposed to say, the industrial nations like Germany or Britain Marx once envisioned - LOTS of disenfranchised people that are poor, angry, and with not a lot to lose. The places with large pre-existing industrial economies never fall to communism - probably because organized labor and rising living standards take the wind out of those sails.
The CSSA will see some industrialization, to mixed successes - Communist five-year plans may do a crap job as rush industrializing, but hell, anything's an improvement over the Confederate government that made industrialization quite literally impossible. For example, MASSIVE steel production, too much iron, and coal in Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia not to at least try that. The economy will still be mostly agriculture and raw goods, but increasingly smaller percentages - the plantations turned into communes now. Yet I think ya'll are going to go
wild when I reveal what the CSSA's replacement for King Cotton as the South's new cash crop is.
Officially, the CSSA is officially atheistic, and they do crackdown on organized religion, sometimes worse than others. Some of the old Southern gospel has survived has underground - there is going to be a cameo from someone in the novel that will either make people throw down the book in anger, or cement it as a favorite forever.
Plus, it helps that there are some trappings of the more "fun" parts of the church. your local communist party chapter organizes the occasional barbecue/tent revival event celebrating the revolution and the state, complete with dancing and gospel choirs, albeit they've swapped out "Amazing Grace" for "The Internationale".
I wonder could Huey long be the leader?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_Long
Huey Long Collection | Share Our Wealth Speech | 1934
Huey Long Seen as Threat to FDR in 1930s
This is a man who could sell communism in the south.
Huey Long is one of the folks on my shortlist for leadership in the CSSA - literally the only thing that has me on the fence is that the part of Louisiana he's from ends up on the US side of the border, but it's not too crazy to think he may strike out for the CSSA post-war instead of trying to make a new life in the USA.
That has been one of the hardest parts - getting the right mixture of white Southern leftists like Parsons and Long, black Southern leftists like
James W. Ford,
Ned Cobb,
Owen Whitfield,
Richard Wright and pretty much anyone involved with
these guys or
this lot, and a collection of OTL leftists from the North the USA sent South to raise hell during the war, or all but forced to emigrate post-war at gunpoint, like Upton Sinclair, William Z Foster, Emma Goldman, Bill Haywood, Jack Reed and Earl Browder.
Other folks I considered using, such as
Harry Haywood, are among the rare cases where someone from OTL who could not exist had the South won - one parent from was from Missouri, wrong side of what is now an international border.
In fact you can roll in female suffrage as part of the earlier than OTL civil rights legislation. The mandatory military service for all could simply be looked at as the other side of a double-edged sword.
Then what would be a good way for this USA to be notably behind our own?
