AHC: Communist Revolution in America

Since it probably needs a Pre-1900s PoD, what is necessary to turn the United States of America into the "United Socialist States of America" ?

One of the must-happen is a radicalization of the workers by the Gilded Age, prevent the monopoly breaks and worker's rights from being achieved by Roosevelt and the Progressives, and a worsened WWI. Maybe something like the Lusitania making the US enter in 1915, and the war ending in 1917 after the US bleeds hundreds of thousands of men in the trenches. Add in an incompetent diplomacy giving in to the French and British and the Americans will believe they bleed for sake of Anglo-French Imperialism. Then throw the Spanish Flu in America and a Post-War Depression.

Is this the perfect storm already ? Or I still need more sauce ?
 
I want to know more on how screw america with WWI.

My knowledge about how murica can hit the shit early on the opera is less than nothing.
 

Mr. House

Banned
Race makes it hard to see leftism becoming successful IOTL America. Maybe a more homogeneous U.S.? I'm not sure how to achieve that though. The non-white labor was needed to fuel economic growth and development.

Maybe the South successfully secedes from the Union during the Civil War maybe due to foreign intervention. What is left of the Union goes leftist in the late 1800s without the South?

Bonus points if that American Soviet reconquers the South and imposes socialism on them later on.
 
Race makes it hard to see leftism becoming successful IOTL America. Maybe a more homogeneous U.S.? I'm not sure how to achieve that though. The non-white labor was needed to fuel economic growth and development.

Maybe the South successfully secedes from the Union during the Civil War maybe due to foreign intervention. What is left of the Union goes leftist in the late 1800s without the South?

Bonus points if that American Soviet reconquers the South and imposes socialism on them later on.

Why does race makes it that much harder ?
 

Mr. House

Banned
Why does race makes it that much harder ?
Whites throughout American history don't want to share resources and space with non whites. See the Chinese Exclusion Acts. Jim Crow. Native Genocides. Japanese Internment. Etc. Even in the status quo the U.S. doesn't have a proper social welfare state due to white fears of non-whites unfairly gaining resources.

To this day Americans are spatially segregated partly because whites don't want to live next to non-whites to any large degree.

The capitalist system uses race to divide the proletariat and produce an underclass that can be more readily exploited due to their place on the caste. Americans have shown from OTL that they can *barely* and slowly overcome that caste system.

To get an actual leftist revolution (not in name only) would require the American public's class consciousness to overcome their racial hatreds and biases. The easiest way to do that is have most of the non-whites not part of the U.S. proper but in the C.S.A.

C.S.A. secedes. The Union goes Leftist. Maybe the Union reconquers the C.S.A. That's the only path I can imagine.
 
Whites throughout American history don't want to share resources and space with non whites. See the Chinese Exclusion Acts. Jim Crow. Native Genocides. Japanese Internment. Etc. Even in the status quo the U.S. doesn't have a proper social welfare state due to white fears of non-whites unfairly gaining resources.

To this day Americans are spatially segregated partly because whites don't want to live next to non-whites to any large degree.

The capitalist system uses race to divide the prolelatriat and produce an underclass that can be more readily exploited due to their place on the caste. Americans have shown from OTL that they can *barely* and slowly overcome that caste system.

To get an actual leftist revolution (not in name only) would require the American public's class consciousness to overcome their racial hatreds and biases. The easiest way to do that is have most of the non-whites not part of the U.S. proper but in the C.S.A.

C.S.A. secedes. The Union goes Leftist. Maybe the Union reconquers the C.S.A. That's the only path I can imagine.
It would be interesting if the CSA separated from the Union, but then I need to have the Union somehow lose such a war to get a revolution. Now forget Axis victories or even Japan against America, having the CSA win an Industrial Total War against the USA is the real challenge. I don't think I can have a revolution by war exhaustion similar to 1917 if the CSA exists and it's clear to the Americans that they won the war.
 

Mr. House

Banned
It would be interesting if the CSA separated from the Union, but then I need to have the Union somehow lose such a war to get a revolution. Now forget Axis victories or even Japan against America, having the CSA win an Industrial Total War against the USA is the real challenge. I don't think I can have a revolution by war exhaustion similar to 1917 if the CSA exists and it's clear to the Americans that they won the war.
Just muck around the C.S.A. victory/secedes threads. It is hard but not impossible. If you can somehow get Britian and France to intervene on the C.S.A.'s side it is easier.
 
The general problem with the success of communist and socialist theories in the United States is that thanks to a lot of myths and outright lies people fervently believe they are one day of backbreaking wage enslavement away from being a millionaire, while dying of starvation and easily preventable diseases. To say nothing of the already well pointed out arguments of how white Americans tend to despise anyone not as freakishly pale as some of them wish we were.
 
Maybe a more conservative Democratic Party going into the 20th Century helps lead to a third-party communist takeover after 1929. Electorate doesn't see the Dems and Republicans as offering anything different to fix the crisis, and swing hard left. Could see the democratically-elected government sieze more powers sort of like a Chavez-type regime. Certain sections of the country are going to be up in arms over this, and you could see some pretty bad internal repression like what the Cheka was up to in the 30s. All pretty far-fetched though.
 
If you look at which countries went Communist organically IOTL (as opposed to seeing Communism imposed from without), one thing stands out; a hunger for basically-competent technocratic management and social mobility based on merit, whether that meant freedom from a local aristocracy or freedom from a colonial master. The United States already has... not precisely those things, but very close to those things, after the Civil War (offer not valid if you're not white, or if you're a woman, yes. Race and gender equality were more ideals than reality under historical Communist regimes OTL, too).

So to get an America that's disgruntled enough to go Communist, I see a couple of routes;
- More complete elite capture by slaveholding planters in the post-independence period (more slave states, a few political compromises that give them even more power, a New England secession, your pick or all of the above) - the country staggers to the end of the 1890s with slavery intact and an increasingly dysfunctional political system, patchy economic growth beset by continual banking crises, all fertile ground for Communist organizing.
- The American Revolution is a misfire, and the country staggers on under British rule through the 1840s... when Certain Notions find their way into the zeitgeist among a new set of would-be revolutionaries. This time, they succeed, and in the bargain create a *Communist state in North America.
 
If you look at which countries went Communist organically IOTL (as opposed to seeing Communism imposed from without), one thing stands out; a hunger for basically-competent technocratic management and social mobility based on merit, whether that meant freedom from a local aristocracy or freedom from a colonial master. The United States already has... not precisely those things, but very close to those things, after the Civil War (offer not valid if you're not white, or if you're a woman, yes. Race and gender equality were more ideals than reality under historical Communist regimes OTL, too).

So to get an America that's disgruntled enough to go Communist, I see a couple of routes;
- More complete elite capture by slaveholding planters in the post-independence period (more slave states, a few political compromises that give them even more power, a New England secession, your pick or all of the above) - the country staggers to the end of the 1890s with slavery intact and an increasingly dysfunctional political system, patchy economic growth beset by continual banking crises, all fertile ground for Communist organizing.
- The American Revolution is a misfire, and the country staggers on under British rule through the 1840s... when Certain Notions find their way into the zeitgeist among a new set of would-be revolutionaries. This time, they succeed, and in the bargain create a *Communist state in North America.
I like this idea of Northern secession, in fact it is even plausible, with the Federal Government going more Pro-Slavery: Fugitive Slave act more imposed, a Breckinridge presidency expanding slavery into New Mexico territory and attempting to protect it in the Comstitution, added with things like the Dred Scott decision and a more radical Republican Party...
 
Impossible. You had a large rural population into well in the 20th Century combined with a prosperous, large middle class.
And can't the rural population also be communist ? There were several farmers' strikes during the Depression, and the peasants were one of the main strengths of the Bolsheviks in Russia.

Besides, an prosperous middle class can be dealt with by an economical depression.
 
Transposing from the duplicate thread:

twovultures said:
The big roadblock to any Socialist mobilization-let alone revolution-is racism. A socialist revolution requires working class solidarity to cut across all other boundaries; but our timeline has seen massive white resistance to the integration of blacks in both the north and south, with things like desegregation and bussing vehemently opposed by all whites, even working class whites who had previously been victims of prejudice themselves (e.g. the vehement opposition to bussing among the Boston Irish). This racial rift within the working class is a major impediment to any socialist movement.


Agreed, and in order to change that to some small degree, you need to make Bacon's Rebellion successful in overthrowing the planter elite of Virginia. Bacon's Rebellion saw indentured servants and slaves both team up in a kinda proto-socialist manner (well as proto as 1670s can be) but after that, the elites learned their lesson and really focused hard on upping the racism as a divide and conquer strategy. Also why they switched from having mostly indentured servants and some slaves to no indentured servants and all slaves.

Having Bacon's Rebellion succeed and racism not be amplified won't erase racism, or make it so there won't be slavery, but the amplification of those things most likely won't occur, and perhaps it can lay the groundwork for later generations to have more class solidarity and not less, by having a "past history" which shows it can be done.
 
Is it really necessary to crackdown on Racism ? If I were to make the TL's PoD be too far back it would drive away the focus in the Communist revolution. Like Bacon's rebellion or Revolutionary War, the PoD would be so far back with so many butterflies that the TL focus would be America in the 18-19th centuries. I would spend too many chapters making the changes for that.

The Northern secession that fails and creates a more aristocratic and slaveholding USA is a good enough PoD as it is, and yet I would need several chapters before reaching the Communist Revolution.

If anyone has a more recent PoD, you are welcome.
 
And can't the rural population also be communist ? There were several farmers' strikes during the Depression, and the peasants were one of the main strengths of the Bolsheviks in Russia.

Besides, an prosperous middle class can be dealt with by an economical depression.

They can be, but tend not to be. There's a reason rural America has always been very conservative, just like other rural areas around the world; they aren't proletarians. This is why Marx advocated against a revolution in Russia and thought the first would be in a place like the UK, given the large industrial class there. As for the Middle Class, the Great Depression just couldn't wipe out enough of them.
 
They can be, but tend not to be. There's a reason rural America has always been very conservative, just like other rural areas around the world; they aren't proletarians. This is why Marx advocated against a revolution in Russia and thought the first would be in a place like the UK, given the large industrial class there. As for the Middle Class, the Great Depression just couldn't wipe out enough of them.
But the Russian revolution is the best example on how an mostly agrarian society can turn to communism. In rural Brazil, for example, most of the people support the worker's party.
 
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