The Glowing Dream: A history of Socialist America

An eventual American Socialist Revolution has a lot of butterflies for Latin America. Right off the bat:
  • Possible restart of the Mexican Revolution assuming its still around by 1919 ITTL and if the Villistas and/or the Zapatistas are still around by then.
  • British seizure of the Panama Canal assuming a potential government in exile on Puerto Rico doesn't keep a hold on it.
  • Potential Anglo-French support of Brazil as they're the strongest capitalist nation on the continent.
 

Deleted member 143777

But anyways I agree with OP, it's best to avoid direct parallels to OTL and try to develop these characters as their own thing

Yeah. Who knows if there'll be anyone similar to Stalin. Perhaps the Lenin-analogue (if there is one) would be succeeded by a "Trotsky", "Zinoviev", or "Bukharin"
 
While I'd avoid making too many direct parallels, I could see Haywood ultimately becoming a military figure, if the Second American Revolution ends up as a full-scale civil war.
 
I'm trying to avoid explicit Russian rev parallels ITTL, but I won't spoil too much beyond that.
I absolutely hate it when TLs portray a communist USA as a carbon copy of the Soviet Union right down to collapsing in the 90s. If a socialist revolution were to occur around 1919 there's absolutely no reason for a socialist USA to do things even remotely the same way as the USSR especially given how different their circumstances would be.
 
I'm pretty sure Iggies agrees with you The Jovian in regards to there not being parallelism between whatever name the post Revolutionary US ends up having and the USSR. @The Jovian. So I am confused why you specifically quoted the author who was responding to a post asking if there was direct parallelism between the Russian and American revolutions ITTL.
 
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I absolutely hate it when TLs portray a communist USA as a carbon copy of the Soviet Union right down to collapsing in the 90s. If a socialist revolution were to occur around 1919 there's absolutely no reason for a socialist USA to do things even remotely the same way as the USSR especially given how different their circumstances would be.
I know - that's why I'm not doing that
 
I personally think the real question is how dictatorial will the post-Revolution USA get. They're not going to be a carbon copy of the USSR but its still a valid question I feel.

For instance, I think that all political parties that aren't the Socialists get banned for their sins in the years leading up to the revolution and in true Leninist Vanguardism. However there may still be elections where candidates are all from the ruling Socialist/Communist party with basically different flavors of leftism.

Outside of that, it could go either way IMO.
 
Great update. One thing I especially appreciate is the fact that we know this will end up in a bloody revolution, so every time that people make mistakes that will lead to that revolution there's this sense of creeping dread. Like with Roosevelt's advice. We know such reforms would deflate the tensions and perhaps avert the coming conflict, yet McKinley refused and it's simply terrible knowing what's coming.
 
The Knife's Edge of Legality
My Wars, by Jack London
(Cripple Creek Publishing Collective, 1950)


In late July of 1903, I returned to Oakland for the first time in nearly six years. I imagined, with my flight from San Quentin as far behind me as it was, and the travesty of Cripple Creek only so much more recent, I might visit mother and Eliza with minimal risk to my life and liberty.

Indeed, I was unmolested for the week I stayed with them. I was much relieved to understand they had not heard my name mentioned in connection with the Colorado Labor Wars and was certainly not inclined to make the connection myself. Of course, they upbraided me for the mess with Mr. Huntington, but that I had been prepared for.

Finding mother as hard up for cash as she ever was, I did consider remaining in California for as long as I was able—but I made myself to understand that I had other duties, now, and these demanded my fullest attention, and personal sentiment could not come into it.

I gifted her what earnings I had with me and was on my way again. It was traveling southwards, in San Diego, that I met with J.R Jones, a Louisiana Socialist who spoke, naturally, with the wondrous accent of his state. We were shortly introduced, and got to talking, and when he understood I was a man who was not unaccustomed to danger or hardship, he revealed to me that he had a ‘job’ I might be interested in.

At this time, the strength of the revolutionists was growing massively in the south of the country, but the Bourbons and their Klan dogs did their level best to snuff it out. Men were tortured, hanged, and shot by the score for their Socialist allegiances in those days, and that was only the start of it.

The job, as it was, was explained to me thusly: some sympathetic (and anonymous) northerners of means had purchased 2,000 Winchesters for use by the ‘Spartacist’ leagues of the south, those self-defense bands formed by the SLP for the purpose of fighting the ravages of the Klan. These rifles were to come southwards down the Mississippi in batches of 300 or so, and from there be distributed to the various Socialist party chapters throughout Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana.

I and another man were to collect one of these shipments in Vicksburg, and from there deliver the weapons a dozen at a time to about as many specified towns and cities through the State of Mississippi.

It was all entirely illegal, which deterred me not at all, and I heartily agreed.

Jones furnished me with $50 for my journey, shook my hand, and sent me on my way. In Galveston, Texas I met with Price, the man who was to accompany me in my assignment. Price was a timber worker, big and broad with a bushy black beard. He spoke like an orator, even when we were alone. He was also a mulatto, and I took consciousness of his race to be the reason for his nervous disposition as we traveled across the south, with good reason. When we were stopped, whether it be by fellow travelers or, on one occasion, a sheriff, he would mutter such things as “now we are had,” though we had not yet done anything objectionable, much less illegal.

Together we tramped through Louisiana, and finally arrived in Vicksburg two days ahead of schedule. We frittered away the extra time in the city’s bars and saloons—when a gang of toughs demanded to know why I was so friendly with a negro, Price and I fairly well handled them, and spent the rest of the evening flecked with blood and shattered teeth.

When the time came, we met the men we were to meet at the docks, and surreptitiously they unloaded from a northern ship a crate of fifty rifles. It was substantially less than we had expected, but they explained financial difficulties had pared down the number of firearms available for the party’s use.

Nevertheless, we took the crate, hitched it to a single horse, and were on our way. Our itinerary was confused, half the roads we took could not be found on the maps, and the damp, muggy Mississippi countryside sapped the vital energies of brain and body with unbelievable efficacity. Nevertheless, we performed our duty, traveling from town to town, and delivering ten or so rifles to the local Socialists (or Populists, as it sometimes was) of each.

Usually, these revolutionists were negro tenant farmers, but on occasion there were white men among them. They would take the guns, stow them away in some special place (most often a church, but sometimes a friendly farmer’s barns or a private home), thank us, and we would be on our way.

I said it was heartening, to know there were so many of us scattered even across this desolate countryside—to know we had such hidden strength.

Price replied he would only be happy when the whole system of the south had been torn up at the roots. Seeing the manner in which he, and the other colored men on our journey, were so often treated, I could hardly find cause to fault him for his feelings. Indeed, my own race prejudices at this time were far from extirpated, but the whole job did much to erode them.

Near the end of our trail, we were to deliver the latest load of arms to a little town whose name I have forgotten, situated somewhere in Adams County, in the west of the state. We approached this hamlet at nightfall.

We were greeted on the road by two men with old repeaters slung over their shoulders. They hailed us, bid us stop, and demanded to know two things: our business in the county, and the contents of our wagon.

I told them it was not any of their business, and they responded that, as it was their county, it was indeed their business. Price remained silent, though he had begun to sweat profusely. They did not wear the evil hoods of their order, but on their shoulders bore the Cross of the Klan. We bickered for a while, until one of the Klansmen grew tired of us and shoved his repeater in my face, demanding “for the final time,” that I open up the wagon.

I was inclined to cooperate, at least for the time being.

Price was not.

In one fluid motion, he drew his knife from his belt, knocked aside the rifle, and slashed the man’s throat so deep he was nearly decapitated. He stumbled back, gurgling and bleeding. His companion stood, dumbstruck. In that moment of opportunity, I freed my revolver and fired two shots squarely into the second Klansman’s face. The two tumbled over atop each other, like skittles, and Price and I were left panting like dogs with the energy of the moment, recovering our wits.

We dragged the corpses into the swamp alongside the road’s shoulder and deposited them in a nearby lagoon. I asked if they might be found, or if the alligators would have at them, first. Price laughed and informed me that the rats would do away with all flesh long before the first alligator lumbered along.

We made our delivery and were done with the mission. But the local party head, a man called Jackson, bid us stop, and served us drinks, and thanked us for our aid. We ate and spoke for some time with him and a number of his comrades—Populists and Socialists, both. Finally, Jackson told us that two days hence, he planned to go to New Orleans—which was only across the river—and attend a lecture by some fellow called Vlad Lenin. A Russian revolutionary exile, he said. The name meant nothing to me at the time, nor to many beyond Russia, I imagine. He asked if we might like to come along.

With little to do now that our mission was accomplished, we agreed.

The New Orleans SLP had sought some theater or opera house for Lenin’s debut, but as it happened no one would rent out their venue to a bunch of howling reds. So, he spoke instead in the square before St. Louis’ cathedral, standing upon an upturned fruit crate.

The crowd was mixed—there were Italian longshoremen from the wharf on the river, German grocers, ‘old-stock’ white steelworkers, negro bricklayers, and a number of finely dressed, curious bourgeois. Price, Jackson, and I slotted in easily enough, with no real effort.

I had known Russians in California in my youth, and found them to be a brutish and surly, if stalwart and capable, people. In the mold of those men, I expected of this Lenin some haggard rogue with a great Russian beard and arms like redwoods—I was rather surprised when I finally saw the man himself. He spoke English well enough, though the accent remained. Even without it, he would never have been taken for a local, with his great domed head and flashing Mongol eyes and funny little beard. He was no broad-shouldered workman, but an intellectual with a bookish look to him.

“In four months, I have been through your country, north and south,” Lenin told us. He said he was impressed by how rapidly “racial and ethnic barriers are breaking down among the American proletariat, and that base prejudices are here racing towards extinction.” I thought that he must have had himself a pretty well-curated trip to come off with that impression, but no one corrected him.

He told us then that, though he understood the economic troubles were painful, the pressure was “raising the revolutionary consciousness of the American worker to a hitherto unseen level, and at an astonishing pace.” That brought much cheering.

Lenin went on to say that he had been much impressed with the organizational capability of the American Socialists, in the marshaling of our ever-growing forces for the storming of the ballot boxes and the contestation of office. While, he was sure to say, he “maintained no faith in the peaceful conquest of power,” he was dissuaded from many of his reservations concerning the utility of ‘parliamentary politics,’ and had become fairly convinced even bourgeois legislatures and executives could be fairly put to use by the parties of the proletariat in the lead-up to a truly ‘revolutionary moment.’ This occasioned more applause.

He went on to speak of his experiences in that great ‘prisonhouse of nations’ that was Holy Russia in those days, dodging the Tsar’s police spies and wasting in Siberian exile. I daresay these tales far more electrified his audience than all the speechifying and pontification on matters of theory.

Near the conclusion of his address, I resolved to waylay Lenin when he was finished, for there were a number of questions I wished to ask of him. I did not get the opportunity.

He slipped off into the French Quarter’s shadows just as the police arrived to break up the unlicensed demonstration.

I wrote it off as regrettable, but never imagined I might ever have cause to think of Lenin again.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Heroic Years: A Collection of Essays on the Pre-Revolutionary Socialist Labor Party of the United States
(Pariser Publishing, 2015)​

In the last days of the Old Republic, the Socialist Labor Party made a habit of dancing on the knife’s edge of legality. The Daily People and the party’s less prominent editorials always stopped just short of advocating the overthrow of the American government or calling for the assassinations of hated public figures. The party was always careful to disclaim any responsibility for the occasional bombing or shooting carried out by left-wing radicals, even if it vigorously defended the principals of the accused or refused to condemn their motives, as it often did.

As Darrow increasingly became the face of the party from 1899 onwards, the SLP increasingly took on the façade of respectability—paradoxically as ferment and violence increased over the country. He was well-spoken, clever, and most importantly, thoroughly American. One did not look at him and see an ‘alien,’ as they might looking on DeLeon or Hillquit. Darrow in particular fought to anchor the SLP to American history and tradition and head off those who claimed socialism was a fundamentally foreign philosophy.

In a Daily People editorial published amid the market crisis of 1901, Darrow said, “it is charged that we are ‘anti-American.’ That we wish to ‘destroy the American ideal.’ Is this charge accurate? If the ‘American ideal’ is a great cartel, a fat gentleman of the ‘League for the Defense of Property,’ that defends the property of very few and covets that of very many, then yes! If the ‘American ideal’ is a congressman who has long ago emptied out his own head and refilled it with the lies of the industrial tyrants he serves, then yes! If the ‘American ideal’ is a starving child on the street, a beaten workman left to beg because he is an ‘alien,’ a young maid forced to offer her pride and honor up for a loaf of bread, then yes! Away with the ‘American ideal,’ and may nothing so black and evil ever disgrace mankind again! But if the American ideal is the ideal of Jefferson, Washington, and Lincoln, if it is the dream of a free society of equal men that look one another in the eye, if it is a republic of art and toil and plenty, then no—if that is the American ideal, then we, the Socialists, would gladly give up our lives in its defense.”

Peter H. Clark, the old abolitionist and stalwart of the ’77 railway strike, also played his part. The man, even entering his seventies, was a clear and powerful speaker, and entranced crowds in Chicago, Albany, Cambridge, and the other great cities of the north. He was very proud of his participation in the fight against the old south’s ‘peculiar institution’ in his youth and took every opportunity to tie chattel slavery to the ‘modern slavery of wages.’

“The chains that bound my people held fast for two centuries,” he informed a crowd in Augusta. “I remember well how we struggled to shatter them. How we raised good men to office, men like Lincoln himself. Men who promised to struggle for the right, and who so very often did struggle. But the slavers struggled, too, and they would not have their serfs ripped from them and raised to freedom so long as there was breath in their lungs. In the end, the bonds of the negro were only burst at the point of bayonet. It need not be so today. The ballot is still in our hands, still compelling, still worthy. But the great lords of capital fight, as their rebel forebears did. We do not want blood. We never have, and never shall. Yet, let the lessons of the Great Rebellion be well remembered by all.”

The cause of the socialists was thus often spun as a second ‘Emancipation,’ and cartoons depicted a slave shattering his iron manacles only to have them replaced with golden chains. The point of Clark’s speech was, as he summed up, “we are no more anarchists nor terrorists than Lincoln was.”

SLP offices always flew the Stars and Stripes along with the red flag and were always careful to be sure the American colors flew higher.

Nevertheless, for all this drive at Americanism and respectability, the SLP never severed its connection with underground revolutionists and outright criminals.

Jack London, even as he drifted around the country under various assumed names, maintained a constant relationship with ‘legitimate’ Socialists. London, along with Bill Haywood and others such as George Pettibone and the black revolutionary Ed McKay, who in this part of the century were forced into hiding due to their part (or perceived part) in terroristic activities, sustained their links with the ‘above ground’ SLP through a number of intermediaries.

Probably the best-known of those intermediaries was Caroline Hollingsworth Pemberton. Pemberton was assistant secretary of the Pennsylvania SLP. By origin, she was a socialite and of the well-to-do classes. She was also a niece of the Rebel general John C. Pemberton, and in spending time on his southern estate, had become well-acquainted with the wretched conditions of black southern laborers, even after the legal abolition of slavery.

Pemberton was, if not eager to take up arms herself, staunchly defensive of socialists who did, and scorned those who a priori excluded violence as a means to the ends .

She quietly set aside a small portion of the Pennsylvania party’s annual funds—what she would later call an ‘extraordinary fund’—and placed it at the disposal of those comrades who were ‘outside the law.’ Through another tier of intermediaries—trade unionists or simply ordinary party members on the street—she identified who these comrades were, and through those same intermediaries, channeled money to them when it was needed.

It was most likely Pemberton who purchased the rifles that Jack London and his mysterious comrade ‘Price’ delivered to Mississippi socialists in 1903. She also paid for the room and board of the aforementioned Ed McKay, who was laying low in Chickamauga after his part in the bombing of a coal mine in Illinois.

Pemberton established a relationship with London in particular. The two wrote often, friendly letters as well as ‘official’ ones. After London and a crew composed mostly of European anarchists attempted the disastrous robbery of a Rochester bank in early 1902, Pemberton wrote a letter addressed to the young revolutionary, and mailed it to a New Jersey ‘safehouse’ where Socialists often picked up ‘hot’ correspondence. She asked London if he was “well.” Within the month, he answered. “Well enough,” said the twenty-six-year-old. “Except that Buono and Chaskevich (I believe I have not spelled the poor Polack’s name correctly) are dead, and that a bullet has grazed my thigh. But it is not extremely painful and hit nothing of particular import. We who are left, and who will certainly miss our dead comrades, are disposed to try again and may need money for pistols and ammunition.”

She dutifully sent him $80.

Pemberton was hardly the only one. This sort of terroristic sponsorship was especially common in the south, where the SLP was borderline criminal anyhow. Socialists tended to keep buried caches of rifles and pistols, and ‘kill lists’ of influential Klansmen or other foes were often maintained in SLP or STLA offices.

That is, when rightists charged the SLP with circumventing legality and abetting anarchy, even murder, there was much truth in the charge. But of course, the Socialists could just as fairly point to the hired thugs of the cartels and the southern Klansmen, and say they were only retaliating in kind.

Though few official records of the party’s early years survive, it seems most of this illegal activity was done on the initiative of regional branches, and little was coordinated from the national leadership in Chicago.

DeLeon most likely knew of it anyhow (and if he did not, he would hardly have been broken-hearted to find out), as did Clark, Boor, Darrow, and other party figureheads. But there does not seem to have been any large scale, organized ‘shadow party’ operating as a dark reflection of the ‘public’ SLP.

Nevertheless, though it may have been mostly a haphazard web of dark money, illegal firearms, clandestine correspondence, the line between the legal and illegal activities of the SLP was blurred and often nonexistent.

In fact, in London’s case at least, it seems he was not so occupied with his life as a revolutionist that he could not spare a moment to write for The Daily People.

In the late, hot summer of 1904, when the depression was nearing its nadir, and the country was fevered with anticipation of the coming election, a piece was published in the SLP’s mouthpiece paper.

It was a sort of fable.

It begins with an assembly of the great men of the day for a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. JJ Astor, JP Morgan, John Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt III, Jacob Schiff, all descend on the luxury hotel for this fictitious banquet. The evening grinds on, as these titans talk politics, finances, society, and indulge in all the conversational niceties of the elites.

Finally, Rockefeller asks, teasingly, of a humble hotel worker (the author does not specify exactly what the job is of this character, who is only referred to as ‘the Worker’) his opinion on the state of the gold market.

The worker takes a stand before all these mighty personages, who wait, amused, for this poor man to drown in a matter far beyond his comprehension. Of course, this being the Daily People, the worker delivers not only a perceptive analysis of the gold market, but launches into a long, flowery speech elucidating all of the shortcomings and contradictions of capitalism, finally assuring his wealthy audience of socialism’s historical inevitability.

The flustered men of gold and silver rise and desperately attempt to explode his argument. Hill, Morgan, and of course, Carnegie; they all stand up, one after the other, and appeal to their philanthropy, their hard work (‘whose?’ the worker asks), their mental acumen, laws of nature and God, to justify their ill-gotten hoard. The worker effortlessly tears apart their tortured logic and leaves them gasping for words.

The robber barons finally fall back and return to their seats, exhausted and defeated.

Only one man among these immortals has remained silent so far: Henry Frick. Now he stands and confronts the worker.

The dialogue is worth reproducing here:

“We have no words to waste on you,” Frick said, haughty and high. “When you reach out your vaunted strong hands for our palaces and purpled ease, we will show you what strength is. In roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of machine-guns will our answer be couched. We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in the dirt since history began, and I read history aright. And, in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power. There is the word. It is the king of words: Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power. Pour it over your tongue till it tingles with it. Power.”

“I am answered,” the worker said quietly. “It is the only answer that could be given. Power. It is what we of the working class preach. We know, and well we know by bitter experience, that no appeal for the right, for justice, for humanity, can ever touch you. Your hearts are hard as your heels with which you tread upon the faces of the poor. So, we have preached power. By the power of our ballots on election day will we take your government away from you—”

"What if you do get a majority, a sweeping majority, on election day? " Mr. Frick broke in to demand. "Suppose we refuse to turn the government over to you after you have captured it at the ballot box?"

"That, also, have we considered," the worker replied. "And we shall give you an answer in terms of lead. Power, you have proclaimed the king of words. Very good. Power it shall be. And in the day that we sweep to victory at the ballot-box, and you refuse to turn over to us the government we have constitutionally and peacefully captured, and you demand what we are going to do about it in that day, I say, we shall answer you ; and in roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of machine-guns shall our answer be couched. You cannot escape us. It is true that you have read history aright. It is true that labor has from the beginning of history been in the dirt. And it is equally true that so long as you and yours and those that come after you have power, that labor shall remain in the dirt. I agree with you. I agree with all that you have said. Power will be the arbiter, as it always has been the arbiter. It is a struggle of classes. Just as your class dragged down the old feudal nobility, so shall it be dragged down by my class, the working class. If you will read your biology and your sociology as clearly as you do your history, you will see that this end I have described is inevitable. It does not matter whether it is in one year, ten, or a thousand—your class shall be dragged down. And it shall be done by power. We of the labor hosts have conned that word over till our minds are all a-tingle with it. Power. It is a kingly word."

And so ended the night with the men of the Cartel. *


The short story is credited to ‘J.L’

London never publicly claimed authorship, but the style is certainly his, as is the hard-nosed pragmatism. If he did write it, it certainly would have been transmitted to the editor in Chicago via Caroline H. Pemberton.

The real Frick never spoke with such forthright villainy, and the arguments presented by the other titans of industry are largely composed of straw, but the story is nonetheless instructive.

It shows a current—increasingly a dominant current—in the Socialist movement. One that did not necessarily disdain peaceful, ‘legitimate’ means, but was not shy of appeals to force should those means fail. That was the spirit of the party, and what so affrighted its foes. “We shall play your game, for now.”

That was legality’s razor edge.

The story itself proved massively popular in those heated days. DeLeon himself was said to have liked it very much. It was controversial enough that in some cities the presses of the SLP were temporarily shut down by municipal order.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

*This section is taken more or less word for word from OTL's The Iron Heel
 
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I personally think the real question is how dictatorial will the post-Revolution USA get. They're not going to be a carbon copy of the USSR but its still a valid question I feel.

For instance, I think that all political parties that aren't the Socialists get banned for their sins in the years leading up to the revolution and in true Leninist Vanguardism. However there may still be elections where candidates are all from the ruling Socialist/Communist party with basically different flavors of leftism.

Outside of that, it could go either way IMO.

I mean planned socialists economies are self destructive and guaranteed to fail has the socialist calculation problem has proven without doubt. I think market socialism or syndicalism could avoid this problem if they had some markets,
 
I mean planned socialists economies are self destructive and guaranteed to fail has the socialist calculation problem has proven without doubt. I think market socialism or syndicalism could avoid this problem if they had some markets,
I have an issue with that kind of over-generalization of an entire economic school. The USSR survived with what was probably one of the worst varieties of planned economies that you can develop for over 70 years, all the while having its population utterly devastated by a genocidal war, then immediately being embroiled in a Cold War with the most advanced and developed economic powerhouses in human history. Even then, it took a culmination of political bureaucratization, bloated military spending, ethnic tension, and a disastrous coup attempt to cause the USSR to collapse. As someone who's no fan of either the USSR or even planned economies in general, I don't think it's fair to prescribe an inevitability of failure to all planned economies.
 

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Banned
Ancient Egypt was a successful example for having a mostly planned economy.

So was Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and eventually China.

Even the United States was a planned economy going forward for their industrialization, following Hamilton's model until the 1970's.

There is a range of economic planning you could go for, and industrial policy is one of them. Along with List's industrial policy proposals.
 
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Rereading the piece I noticed that the term 'revolutionist' instead of revolutionary is used. Is that a deliberate example of the divergence of descriptions ITTL?

Also to the main content, it is really interesting to see how the SLP is diverging from what I understand about their contemporaries in the Second International amongst the major parties with the primarily revolutionary character of the party under it's veneer of respectability in contrast to the more reformist European counterparts. Has that caused any sort of friction for the SLP in comparison to the rest of the Second International?
 
Ancient Egypt was a successful example for having a mostly planned economy.

So was Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and eventually China.

Even the United States was a planned economy going forward for their industrialization, following Hamilton's model until the 1970's.

There is a range of economic planning you could go for, and industrial policy is one of them. Along with List's industrial policy proposals.

Are you seriously comparing a bronze age economy with a modern industrial one.
 
I have an issue with that kind of over-generalization of an entire economic school. The USSR survived with what was probably one of the worst varieties of planned economies that you can develop for over 70 years, all the while having its population utterly devastated by a genocidal war, then immediately being embroiled in a Cold War with the most advanced and developed economic powerhouses in human history. Even then, it took a culmination of political bureaucratization, bloated military spending, ethnic tension, and a disastrous coup attempt to cause the USSR to collapse. As someone who's no fan of either the USSR or even planned economies in general, I don't think it's fair to prescribe an inevitability of failure to all planned economies.


Math is Math and the socialist caulcution problem is solid.
 
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