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With every POD possible, how can communism not only spread to at least most of the major nations, but also stable and not plagued by factionalism/collapse?
Worldwide Communism (alr no more pre-1900)
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This... is a doozy. The main problem with early socialist experiments in China and Russia is that their theory wasn't developed enough, and this led to cliques of bureaucratic counterrevolutionaries led by figures like Nikita Khrushchev, Anastas Mikoyan, and Alexei Kirichenko in the USSR and Deng Xiaoping, Hua Guofeng, and even Mao himself during his later years in China. In the USSR, the issue stemmed from an overfunded and overstaffed bureaucracy that gradually began to dominate the political sphere (which is began with Stalin but was a problem even with Lenin) while in China the issue stemmed from Mao's policy of "New Democracy" which said that China had to ally with the peasantry and "national bourgeoisie" on the road to becoming a proletariat state before betraying the bourgeoisie and uplifting the remaining peasantry that hadn't decayed yet.
It's really hard. You're not going to get world communism, at least. That's ASB even if everything went right for the USSR and it still stuck around today. That all being said... here's my take.
In 1919, Yakov Sverdlov does not die from the Spanish Flu and makes a full recovery. After Lenin dies in 1920 he succeeds him instead of Stalin, who remains the People's Commissar for Nationalities, and while their tenures are very similar (Trotsky is still exiled, the NEP is still ended, factions still form, Trotsky probably still tries to overthrow the government, and a general purge still happens although it's probably smaller in scale) Sverdlov doesn't fund and love the bureaucracy as much as Stalin. Instead, he focuses on light industry and efficiency in the government. The USSR invades Germany instead of the other way around, smashing through the German-Soviet border in around 1942 after Hitler doesn't decide to do Barbarossa for some reason (maybe the USSR wins the Winter War a lot more handily: maybe Kulik is purged early). The allies also fail to make any substantial breakthroughs in France and get stopped in southern Italy, so the USSR pushes through the Balkans, Germany, the Benelux, France, and Northern Italy. When Sverdlov dies in... let's say ~1958, his successor isn't Khrushchev but instead Georgy Malenkov. Malenkov focuses on the USSR's light industry and mends relations with China, creating a strong Moscow-Beijing Axis for the international communist movement.
The USA retreats back into isolationism after being embarrassed in Europe and focuses on anti-communist resistance in Asia: this ultimately fails when Chinese forces reinforce North Korea and the USSR also threatens to intervene unless American troops leave immediately due to the UN resolution on the Korean War being vetoed by the USSR and China (who has taken Taiwan). The fall of Burma, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia's governments to communism all convince the US leadership and public that they can't afford to keep defending the entire world as a whole and instead focus on both hemispheres: but Cuba still has its revolution and so does Peru. Peru and Cuba become two socialist-aligned hotbeds in the Western Hemisphere that pressure the American government.
By 2024, the global left-wing bloc and movement is over a territory of something like France to Korea. Maybe Spain and a giant UAR.
It's really hard. You're not going to get world communism, at least. That's ASB even if everything went right for the USSR and it still stuck around today. That all being said... here's my take.
In 1919, Yakov Sverdlov does not die from the Spanish Flu and makes a full recovery. After Lenin dies in 1920 he succeeds him instead of Stalin, who remains the People's Commissar for Nationalities, and while their tenures are very similar (Trotsky is still exiled, the NEP is still ended, factions still form, Trotsky probably still tries to overthrow the government, and a general purge still happens although it's probably smaller in scale) Sverdlov doesn't fund and love the bureaucracy as much as Stalin. Instead, he focuses on light industry and efficiency in the government. The USSR invades Germany instead of the other way around, smashing through the German-Soviet border in around 1942 after Hitler doesn't decide to do Barbarossa for some reason (maybe the USSR wins the Winter War a lot more handily: maybe Kulik is purged early). The allies also fail to make any substantial breakthroughs in France and get stopped in southern Italy, so the USSR pushes through the Balkans, Germany, the Benelux, France, and Northern Italy. When Sverdlov dies in... let's say ~1958, his successor isn't Khrushchev but instead Georgy Malenkov. Malenkov focuses on the USSR's light industry and mends relations with China, creating a strong Moscow-Beijing Axis for the international communist movement.
The USA retreats back into isolationism after being embarrassed in Europe and focuses on anti-communist resistance in Asia: this ultimately fails when Chinese forces reinforce North Korea and the USSR also threatens to intervene unless American troops leave immediately due to the UN resolution on the Korean War being vetoed by the USSR and China (who has taken Taiwan). The fall of Burma, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia's governments to communism all convince the US leadership and public that they can't afford to keep defending the entire world as a whole and instead focus on both hemispheres: but Cuba still has its revolution and so does Peru. Peru and Cuba become two socialist-aligned hotbeds in the Western Hemisphere that pressure the American government.
By 2024, the global left-wing bloc and movement is over a territory of something like France to Korea. Maybe Spain and a giant UAR.
Either have a Reds situation where the US goes Communist in the Great Depression and it results in both hemispheres of the Americas going socialist, or......
Have Lenin get succeeded by Sverdlov as suggested by the poster above me
Germany goes Red in 1919, Polish-Soviet War resulting in a joint German-Soviet victory
Hungarian Soviet Republic survives, may need a shorter civil war in both Russia and Germany so volunteers can be sent to assist with Romania
Red Finns either win Finnish civil war or a alt-Winter War happens later on resulting in a total Soviet victory that results in a puppet government or a Finnish SSR
Italy never goes Fascist or the March on Rome causes a civil war that causes the victory of the Communist aligned forces
The lack of isolation with a friendly Germany bordering Russia(I'm going to wager Poland is directly incorporated as an SSR) deincentivizes excess focus of heavy industry. Internally, Stalin never comes to power, Trotsky is still marginalized because no one really trusted him. NEP might not happen, there may still be purges but not as big as Great Purge
Chinese civil war either happens on cue or alternatively China during the Northern Expedition is finished by a Left-KMT led China, which subsequently takes a pro-Soviet stance
WW2 likely happens in mid 1930s with UK+France vs. German-Soviet Comintern with Japan and China likely having a go at it. The latter side winning resulting in an Eurasia from Korea all the way up to France being turned Red and Britain forced to withdraw from European affairs.
UK slowly loses their colonies due to the Comintern funding anti-colonial African and Middle Eastern rebels, likely what replaces the British colonies a couple of pan-Africanist nations+a Communist run UAR
US forced to contain its' efforts in containing Communism and left-leaning regimes aligned with Communists in its' own backyard and Southeast Asia with almost all of Eurasia impenetrable. Many of these efforts fail with Cuba, Philippines, and maybe Indonesia and Peru going Communist.
This results in Communism in a large chunk of Eurasia and Africa by the 21st century and even parts of the American hemisphere, with only US, Canada, UK, Australia+a couple of Latin American governments as the holdouts of capitalism. Maybe Spain(if not Communist a very left and soviet aligned regime) and Japan(by way of either total soviet occupation or in the sense that it suffers a East-West Germany style divide) go Communist too
tl;dr: A LOT of nat20s is needed to get this result, which while not fully ASB, veers very close to it, and even then the "no infighting/one unified bloc" thing is ASB.
Last edited:
Garrison
Donor
Well unless Yuri of Red Alert 3 fame mind controls all the worlds leaders I don't think you can. I think doctrinal infighting is all but inevitable inside the Communist movement, especially as it expands to countries with very different social and economic circumstances to Europe.
Even my idea of the USSR rolling nat20s and 1919 being more successful would likely see some sort of fragmentation alliances wise down the line tbqh, I don't really see how a fully unified socialist bloc is possible, at most we can have a couple of blocs be cordial with each other.
A number of problems arise with this question:
1) The concrete implementation of a new mode of production where proletarian auto-gestation means that the ideology (false-consciousness) of proletarians is in line with the maximisation of a new mode of production and a new series of concrete relations between people. I have emphasised the ideological here, and the class compositional: the Fordist factory implies the post-fordist proletariat concretely; much as the machine loom implies the bourgeoisie, and the hand-loom implies the petits-bourgeois. The forces of production are adequate for a new class with a new ideology to impose new relations.
2) The possibility of a new set of social relations that while post-capitalist are not communist. Just as Fordist factory implies the post-fordist proletariat it at the same time implies the Fordist nomenklatura or Professional-Managerial class. Proles have a Party of Engineers to defeat.
3) World Systems Theory. Decolonisation involves the violent or peaceful transformation of pre-existing social relations into future social relations. As Marx observed with Perth in Capital: you can't just dump workers factory and foremen on a country and see them create Bourgeoisie, proletarian and capitalist relations of production. Social relations are a [theoretical construct which denotes a] real existing relation between people. Imagine, for instance, how a predominantly peasant society decides to not simply sell their daughters in hard years, and instead take up collective working without individual allocation from their own genius. Or imagine European and North American formerly proletarian organisers who are constituting a Nomenklatura coming into being forcing it upon them.
4) Concrete issues of organising production for each according to need, without producing a bureaucratic PMC: some kind of networked system of consciousness, possibly using signalling? (The economically trained reader may laugh).
5) Best throughput without dedemocratisation? (As above).
6) The optimum allocation of abilities? (Op. cit).
7) The "half-way houses" of real social and economic history, even when the force of all the above is solid and directional, the failures and successes, the imbalanced and backwaters?
8) The concrete actions required to achieve this.
9) And their potential for failure.
10) The historical single economic unit examples of the failures (or part-way houses) of 1-9 across the c20th.
"But the Bolsheviks were shit cunts," and I'm not going to disagree, but in June 1917 the Bolsheviks were the old Bolsheviks, and in 1921 the Bolsheviks were every bourgeois leftist in Russia who had previously been organised in different parties. Correspondingly the Bolsheviks + KAPD/AAUD Germany will be different Bolsheviks. Correspondingly Left Fraction Recoherence Europe 1922 is very different to Left Fraction Recoherence Europe + Radical Labour + IWW US Coasts.
Hungary 1956 is a bloody left-com / nationalist disaster for the proletariat. Hungary/Poland/Yugoslavia 1956 could be Istvan Bibo's Central European Commonwealth, and be yet more developed towards the abolition of Capital and Nomenklatura than Soviet Fraternal States were historically; even though the Central European Workers Commonwealth would be a more advanced form of Nomenklatura Fordist society, with a nomenklatura whose balls are attached to functioning workers councils' leashes, it yet still is Nomenklatura Capitalism.
A manual logistics (communication) worker may well have rather have been in a Sov Bloc or British Tower than Alabama or Kenya in 1968. This does not yet make the Tower and the Post Office communist, or even yet tending closer to communism than not.
A maximum extent proletariats with maximum power, exerting maximum power to limit Nomenklatura formation, and reduce the value-form by subsituting free useful things, is possible by 1999. But it is unlikely to start with a clique or claque of bourgerois intellectuals controlling the Russian Empire Alone's economic output in 1917.
yours,
Sam R.
1) The concrete implementation of a new mode of production where proletarian auto-gestation means that the ideology (false-consciousness) of proletarians is in line with the maximisation of a new mode of production and a new series of concrete relations between people. I have emphasised the ideological here, and the class compositional: the Fordist factory implies the post-fordist proletariat concretely; much as the machine loom implies the bourgeoisie, and the hand-loom implies the petits-bourgeois. The forces of production are adequate for a new class with a new ideology to impose new relations.
2) The possibility of a new set of social relations that while post-capitalist are not communist. Just as Fordist factory implies the post-fordist proletariat it at the same time implies the Fordist nomenklatura or Professional-Managerial class. Proles have a Party of Engineers to defeat.
3) World Systems Theory. Decolonisation involves the violent or peaceful transformation of pre-existing social relations into future social relations. As Marx observed with Perth in Capital: you can't just dump workers factory and foremen on a country and see them create Bourgeoisie, proletarian and capitalist relations of production. Social relations are a [theoretical construct which denotes a] real existing relation between people. Imagine, for instance, how a predominantly peasant society decides to not simply sell their daughters in hard years, and instead take up collective working without individual allocation from their own genius. Or imagine European and North American formerly proletarian organisers who are constituting a Nomenklatura coming into being forcing it upon them.
4) Concrete issues of organising production for each according to need, without producing a bureaucratic PMC: some kind of networked system of consciousness, possibly using signalling? (The economically trained reader may laugh).
5) Best throughput without dedemocratisation? (As above).
6) The optimum allocation of abilities? (Op. cit).
7) The "half-way houses" of real social and economic history, even when the force of all the above is solid and directional, the failures and successes, the imbalanced and backwaters?
8) The concrete actions required to achieve this.
9) And their potential for failure.
10) The historical single economic unit examples of the failures (or part-way houses) of 1-9 across the c20th.
"But the Bolsheviks were shit cunts," and I'm not going to disagree, but in June 1917 the Bolsheviks were the old Bolsheviks, and in 1921 the Bolsheviks were every bourgeois leftist in Russia who had previously been organised in different parties. Correspondingly the Bolsheviks + KAPD/AAUD Germany will be different Bolsheviks. Correspondingly Left Fraction Recoherence Europe 1922 is very different to Left Fraction Recoherence Europe + Radical Labour + IWW US Coasts.
Hungary 1956 is a bloody left-com / nationalist disaster for the proletariat. Hungary/Poland/Yugoslavia 1956 could be Istvan Bibo's Central European Commonwealth, and be yet more developed towards the abolition of Capital and Nomenklatura than Soviet Fraternal States were historically; even though the Central European Workers Commonwealth would be a more advanced form of Nomenklatura Fordist society, with a nomenklatura whose balls are attached to functioning workers councils' leashes, it yet still is Nomenklatura Capitalism.
A manual logistics (communication) worker may well have rather have been in a Sov Bloc or British Tower than Alabama or Kenya in 1968. This does not yet make the Tower and the Post Office communist, or even yet tending closer to communism than not.
A maximum extent proletariats with maximum power, exerting maximum power to limit Nomenklatura formation, and reduce the value-form by subsituting free useful things, is possible by 1999. But it is unlikely to start with a clique or claque of bourgerois intellectuals controlling the Russian Empire Alone's economic output in 1917.
yours,
Sam R.
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