American Socialism General - /asg/
I was watching Fox News and this guy, Tucker Carlson, was just ranting on about socialism, how dangerous it is, and how we "desperately" need to fight against it. Shit like this pisses me the fuck off because I KNOW that people are eating it right up. Fucking morons.
So what can happen in America? As much as I love the idea of an American revolution… we can't rush it. It is extremely unlikely that a true socialist revolution would happen in America any time soon, and it would be nearly impossible for it to succeed. There aren't many people willing to fight, and the world wouldn't just sit by as one of the largest economies would be threatened to turn socialist and bring about the worldwide revolution. A bunch of LARP'ers with guns wouldn't defeat a well-trained army, let alone multiple well-trained armies & volunteers. It would miserably fail and tarnish our reputation even more than it already is.
Hell, it might fail so bad that we may as well never return. If we fuck that up, it's gone forever. It'll never come back in America ever again. So I say don't rush it.
Can America democratically turn socialist? It's… sort of possible, but it'll be painful and again, we can't fuck that up either. As much as I hate the DNC, I think that neolibs and closet-capitalists are quickly falling out of popularity among its voters. Even if it's not, succdems are better than reactionaries & libertarians, and that's all we're gonna get for a while. American politics has always been: Which is less shit? Would you rather eat human shit or dog shit?
It would be Allende 2.0. I have no doubt in my mind
That is a reductive reading of Marx from a few early texts like German Ideology and the Manifesto. Marx may have believed the United States was the most progressive society in the world at the time because of its fundamental revolutionary break from old world feudal economies, but that never led him to apologize for slavery. The other poster has a point in arguing whether or not it is anti-Marxist to condemn the US as-such on the basis of slavery, and we can (and I will) argue that point with him, but you just calling me a Proudhonian idealist is hardly justified since Marx himself oscillated between defending the United States as progressive along a historical tract and critiquing it as the nest of especially powerful capitalist developments, which of course he saw as factors that were aligned exactly in their contradiction, but that doesn't make his particular writings regarding certain evils of the US any less opaque.
Thank you for the thoughtful response, sorry it took me a while to get back to you, wanted to give a reply the time it deserved.
I absolutely agree with this, and it's why, despite the sad state of this board, I'm willing to spend time discussing theory on Zig Forums in a way that is impossible on any other leftist forum. I also agree with your fondness for Nietzsche and assessment of the new western leftist milieu as heavily derived from protestant progressive activism, guilt and sin based evangelizing, a hierarchy of legitimacy you can enter into only through suffering clearly aligned with approved categories. But I do come to a different (maybe more cynical) conclusion regarding the Nietzschean contingency of morality. In the same way that Nietzsche's polemics positioned beasts-of-prey and Christians as opposed but not fundamentally separate (both are based on the discharging of ressentiment, the former immediately through pure violence and action, the latter systematically through the production of art and theory), I don't think the left needs (or is even able to) completely seperate itself from this kind of moralism, and that we would be better off insisting on certain fundamentals that ensure the moral culture is aligned with our basic material ends.
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I understand you wanting to prioritize selling socialism to people, and I agree in particular with the idea that we need to appeal to their self interest. But I think that the aesthetic mythology you're trying to align with socialism is too alienated from the "American ideals" as you would like to present them, and is now deeply tied to the American ideals as they have been materially realized – the American flag refers to this particular country with this particular notion of liberty that, in the national conscious and unconscious, refers to "what's mine is mine", i.e. property is liberty, there is no fundamental difference between owning a toothbrush and owning a military production plant, so an empire of private property is an empire of liberty. I'm not saying that we should mock or berate people who are fond of national symbols, and I agree that we should try and insist that the American revolution as an anti-imperial securing of liberty was a good thing, that many of the ideals laid on in the Constitution and Declaration were good, but
it seems ridiculous to me to position ourselves so unconditionally on the side of early American government. Besides the odd remark, they made no real effort at all to dismantle or discourage slavery, and erased native nations with truly genocidal intent. I don't see how this can be justified in a way that is consistent with a properly anti-imperialist socialism. Even the crude dialectical teleology is referring to would require we understand Marx himself as unapologetically supporting imperialism against national liberation movements to spread capitalist institutions and bring primitive societies closer to socialism, and this is a crude teleology Marx himself recounted and developed beyond after realizing its severe limitations. He was one of the few European socialists to vocally and completely criticize American slavery and praise John Brown, and in word and action ended up supporting national liberation movements in general. It is very funny this other poster brings up Proudhon and accuses me of being a Proudhonian, because it is exactly in this issue of national-liberation that Marx often denounced Proudhonian's for their idealism.
In the case of Poland, for example, the Proudhonians in the International were of the "view that labor should not involve itself with political issues, but stick to economic and social ones. They opposed singling out Poland for strong and specific support, and wished to concentrate on labor issues." They also suggested that Marx and other pro-Polish independence members were allowing the International to "degenerate into a committee of nationalities." And Marx didn't just support Polish liberation, he held resentment and regret towards Germany itself for its prior injustices to Poland, most importantly for the sake of my argument holding the current democratic German assembly responsible as a continuation of the older German monarchy: "[Frederick the Great was] the inventor of patriarchal despotism…it is well known that he allied himself with Russia and Austria to carry out the rape of Poland, an act which still today, after the revolution of 1848, remains a permanent blot on German history."
(source: letters and writings from Marx at the Margins, chapter "The Relationship of National Emancipation to Revolution")
The implications of this are clear, and clearer still when Marx acknowledges that Poland has no proletarian class and is made up of peasants. So Marx very clearly thought that the invasion of destruction of a non-industrial, feudal power by an industrial, progressive power was not only a bad thing at the time, but even in retrospect, under a formally new government, could not be forgiven as the simple progression of history.
I am not claiming that clarifying Marx's position means that I am right, only that imperial expansion and exploitation was never excusable to Marx, not as a path forward or as an occurrence of the past. The fact that his life's work was dedicated to stressing the material origins of historical development does not mean that he was unconcerned with the ethical implications of historical events, and if he had not been it is unlikely he would have seen the liberation of mankind as the end goal of history if he was so unconcerned. This justification of slavery and colonial genocides as necessary historical expansion always confuses me – both ancient Greek and 19th century American forms of slavery were simply facts of history that need to be understood contextually? There is nearly 2000 years separating them, and a massive amount of social and technological development happened in that interim. If the US needed to progress through the social stages of the old world, necessitating a period of autocratic Greek republics with slavery, how was it able to simultaneously adopt mercantile capitalism and the form of ancient republics while ignoring feudalism entirely? This reference to materialist dialectics as a justification for historical atrocities makes no sense to me, it seems to immediately collapse under any analysis, including more than a cursory glance at the Marxist source material it is supposedly derived from. If I had to guess I would assume this misunderstanding comes from an extrapolation of the first chapter of the Manifesto, which is only laying out the bare basics of historical progression in a crypto-polemical format – not to mention how early of a text it is in both Marx and Engels repertoire anyway.
(fucked up the order, this follows immediately after this post, that's okay because it was basically tangential anyway)
For example, I can imagine that the contemporary left's struggle to differentiate itself from flippant liberal identity politics without ignoring or tacitly permitting the issues surrounding people grouped into such identities will result in a sort of new politesse that is repressive in some of its own ways but is not fundamentally any better or worse than what has come before. Pagan institutions were supported by an often irrational moralism of honor and sacrifice, Christian institutions supported by an often irrational moralism of modesty and chastity, secular liberal institutions by ambition and individualism – it's easy to imagine a socialist morality as a pathological preoccupation with contextual power relations formalized into a code of manners and politesse. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try and stamp out the worst redundant and reactionaries tendencies creeping into this developing culture (usually tentacles of identitarian essentialism that insist your right to liberation, organization, speech, etc are dependent on your race or gender.) But I think the worst liberalism in the modern left is not the demand that we should ask peoples' pronouns or avoid using obscene language (I think this is a petty annoyance that I don't even ultimately disagree with), it's the basic idealism that usually accompanies these demands, that knowledge of what is wrong and what group was historically associated with what is a step towards liberation, and as soon as everyone really knows about the bad things white people do to black people, then we will be free. This is the overwhelming, insidious problem with western leftism at the moment. And this is the legacy of protestantism that needs to be rooted out – the fundamental misunderstanding that knowledge and faith will bring us to liberation. In protestantism, empty ritual without faith or personal knowledge of God is not enough, it is heretical. This needs to be reversed for the standards of a socialist morality. Cleetus can hate black people and Jamal can hate gay people, they just need to understand that they can't act on that or they will be endangering the benefits they themselves derive from a socialist economy. Me and you can be annoyed at a pretentious queer trying to direct everything to their identity before a political meeting, but as long as the actual political meeting is administered in such a way that it prioritizes our material interests as much as theirs, who cares if we need to be polite and pretend to like them for a couple hours, we can get a drink afterwards and laugh at them for being obnoxious and self-centered. Right now the opposite happens – we are expected to love every particular identity out of the goodness of our hearts, and as long as we do that, it doesn't matter if we actually get anything done, we only need to theatrically revoke our stake in the importance of our own liberation, and knowledge that that is right is enough. The way I see it, a strict code of permissability surrounding sexual conduct, insistence on appropriate personal titles, etc., is far less important (and many of them admirable, if nonessential and sometimes comically overbearing, cultural developments) than this fundamental misunderstanding.
While Marx was by no means a confederate, and I am by no means implying that he was, I think it should be kept in mind that both Marx and Engels supported the Mexican-American War.
Maybe, you're aware of what was at stake there in that conflict? A country without a ban on black chattel slavery attacked and annexed a country that had a ban on black chattel slavery. This was known to contemporaries and yet Marx and Engels supported the American side in this conflict. Why? It can only be that they held that the material progress the US conquest would bring to world history of greater significance than the fact that it would spread black chattel slavery.
Engels argued this was the case:
I'll be honest that I think Marx's Poland fetishism was ultimately, as history showed, wrong-headed. But, it is true that he had good reasons for thinking it, and let's review why that was.
In Marx's view, the main threat to the European revolution was Tsarist Russia whose massive military and autocracy threatened to drown the Revolution in blood (as it did in some-places). But, the key-thing is that Marx saw Poland as more advanced than Russia and so, for Marx, Tsarist rule created the peculiar situation where a backwards nation ruled over an advanced one. For Marx, especially in his younger years, Russia was not just a threat to the working class movement but even to the bourgeoisie of Western Europe. Marx clearly held the belief that a republican Europe that would destroy what was left of feudalism could be brought about by revolution and that result would accelerate European development bringing the workers revolution ever-closer.
When capitalist development began in Russia and material conditions in the two countries became similar, many, like Rosa Luxemburg began to see Polish nationalism as a revanchist reactionary movement looking to separate the working class of the German and Russian Empires. Ironically, Kautsky was probably more radical on the nat-lib question in Poland than Luxemburg herself who was Polish. As it actually turned out, Poland formed itself into a fascist state with violent exclusionary colonialist policies towards its minorities in the 20s, whereas Germany and the Russian Empire veered to the Left. Stalin, who was a full-throated defender of national revolution, used the Polish example for why every national liberation movement had to be evaluated on its own merits and that the communist revolution could never put national liberation above the needs of the proletariat. Today, Poland is perhaps the most militantly reactionary power in Europe with the exception of Ukraine.
Correctly or incorrectly, Marx viewed Germany in the 1840s as being subject to absolutist Prussian feudal despotism and extraordinarily backwards in comparison with the West. That is why the quote mentions that Frederick the Great was "an inventor of patriarchal despotism" and doesn't emphasize the (overblown imo) "Enlightened" aspect of his rule.
As Bill Warren notes, Marx and Engels, whatever their criticisms (and they were many) preferred Bismarckian development to none at all.
Marx didn't support imperialism against something that didn't even exist yet. There were anti-imperial movements in Europe but many, perhaps most, Third World nations are constructions of European colonialism and hence, they needed to go through colonialism to have a nationalist revolutionary movement in the first place. I don't think its an accident that Marx and Engels made sparse comment on the great expansion of European colonialism at the tail-end of their lives. Ireland, at least partially aligned with Marx's schema, although more backwards then Britain he saw Ireland as backbone of the British aristocracy and the British monarchy. Hence, home-rule for Ireland if possible under a socialist government but also an independent Ireland was not inimical to their purposes.
I don't think its a coincidence that the first and second internationals just didn't focus very much at all on colonial/national oppression outside Europe. Anti-imperialist Marxism, while having a fair basis in the text, is still largely an ad hoc project responding to a change in the international situation.
I'm going to leave aside your points about the US in particular for the moment. I mean to re-emphasize a point I made in my reply first post:
(>>2776758)
How, pray-tell, was capitalism to expand without colonialism? And, isn't colonialism, by definition, a form of imposed (which implies violent) external rule? Everyone acknowledges that the discovery of the New World gave the impetus to the rise of capitalism in Europe and Engels argues this very beautifully in a speech given on Columbus Day worth reading in-full
thecharnelhouse.org
Indeed, its very difficult, though not impossible, to imagine take-off of the feudal and barely post-feudal European economies in the succeeding centuries without the flood of American gold and silver expanding demand on the domestic and international markets. In addition to this, the American colonies allowed exotic and new products to be produced for the first time that captured the minds of European imagination and produced new incentives to work longer hours or economically rationalize things to attain new use-values. The subsumption of the Americas by European colonialism provides the most rapid acceleration towards a true world market.
While European colonizers sometimes employed in the early period of European colonialism, such as at Potosí and certain mines in Mexico–slavery, forced labor (of varying kinds including feudal), theft, and violence were always in the background. But, how could it have been otherwise? Even in the most populous regions of the Americas, labor was scarce primarily due to the ravages that disease inflicted on the population. How would this new region be developed peacefully and economically without any type of coerced labor when the vast majority of Europeans were subject to coercive and extractive tributary systems? How would the resources of the continents be developed peacefully and efficiently with respect to Indian property rights?
Imagine if the European colonists had said through some weird historical foresight:
The only thing that would have happened is a European aristocracy would be replaced by an indigenous aristocracy siphoning off its financial resources. And, of course, there still would have been conflicts in our counter-factual. Even in 1776 it is quite likely that American settlers outnumbered native Americans–like that wouldn't have created conflict under even the most peaceful conditions?
One of the major benefits of the Americas and settler-colonies in general is that colonial conquest meant that the price of land low and rents cheap allowing capitalism to thrive more easily in these environments than, often, even Europe itself. It seems difficult to imagine how the highly underpopulated and undeveloped regions of Australia and Northern America could have developed capitalism in a sufficient period of time even in a pure counter-factual scenario.
If we're looking at history, Hawaii and New Zealand perhaps offer the best examples of peaceful European settlement and development of an underdeveloped indigenous region. But neither was particularly peaceful or conflict-free. Even with the horrors of colonialism and legacies of racism not unique to European civ or modern times btw the poor in Latin America are still better off than the poor in Africa or the poorer parts of Asia. If you hold that capitalism was a progressive force in history I think its also inevitable that you must hold that colonialism was, to some degree, progressive. That does not mean that it wasn't harsh or that at some point it would become outmoded.
The US actually had some semblance of a feudal system on the East coast. The early system combined elements of mercantile capitalism with feudal norms and slave-holding. It was an odd mix but not necessarily unique as other early mercantile powers/colonies seemed to blur the line. That the US broke its feudal system during the revolution and later broke the slave system possibly explains much of its rapid-development and divergence from the Latin American world.
The only alternative to slavery in the early colonial American world was pushing more European peasants off their land and forcing them to work as wage-workers while displacing more Indians. Presumably, moralist critics would also have found this to be an outrage as well, maybe even more so; though I admit it was probably more desirable.