AHC/WI: Communist America

I always think of capitalism as being strong in the US, but are there any pods that could lead to such a thing as a communist America?
 
I always think of capitalism as being strong in the US, but are there any pods that could lead to such a thing as a communist America?

We're fortunate that it's quite unlikely. Changes post 1865 and a nasty Depression that's mishandled might do it if everything goes right. You'd probably get a lot of populism mixed and minus the anti-religious aspects of Communism to account for America's cultural differences.
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
All TLs of Communism (in a real, genuine Marxist sense) taking hold anywhere are non-starters. It just won't work. Communist theory is predicated on the idea that those who control the means of production will pay wages as small as possible, since doing so maximizes profits. This is incorrect, for the simple reason that the same population which provides labor to produce the goods are also the market for those goods. Therefore, capitalists need to pay workers salaries sufficient for them to buy the very goods they are producing. This, in turn, creates a consumer society, in which Communism can never take hold.
 
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How likely was the US to "go Communist" in the 1930's? Well, let's put it this way: In 1929 the only areas of the globe under Communist control were the USSR and its satellites Mongolia and Tuva. In 1939, they were *still* the only areas of the globe under Communist control. Communism had failed to gain power in many coutnries where it was much, much stronger than in the US.

Sandor Voros (who was campaign manager for Earl Browder in 1936) in his memoirs *American Commissar* wrote that in the 1930's there was "but one group absolutely convinced of the impossibility of a Communist revolution in America--the members of the Communist Party." https://americancommissar.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/chapter-35/

Nor do I think a "no New Deal" scenario would make a Communist revolution any more likely--plenty of nations (the UK under the National Government, Australia under Lyons, etc.) managed to muddle through the 1930's under center-right governments with no serious danger of Communism. Even in France the Popular Front was a relatively brief interlude.
 
Nor do I think a "no New Deal" scenario would make a Communist revolution any more likely--plenty of nations (the UK under the National Government, Australia under Lyons, etc.) managed to muddle through the 1930's under center-right governments with no serious danger of Communism. Even in France the Popular Front was a relatively brief interlude.

The difference being that those countries already had some forms of social insurance to act as a safety net. The United States had very little of that publicly and private pensions were a joke. Given that the same calls for social reform that were grudgingly accommodated in Europe were violently suppressed in the United States, there's at least some logic to the idea that, if the stultified state of affairs continued, something might just snap, like in France or Russia. That said, it's a hundred times more likely that that revolutionary zeal would come from the right as opposed to the left because you know, America.
 
If the economy had stayed at its early-1933 level indefinitely, there might have been greater opportunities for both the far left and far right, though even in that case I don't see either actually taking over. But that was not going to happen. There was a partial recovery almost everywhere in 1933-37 and it would have happened in the US with or without the New Deal.
 
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