I had this what if floating in my noggin for a while, back in the 1910s when Russia had its revolution, Russia then was a colonial power similar to the United States and the rest of Europe, had Russia not had that revolution and instead it was France, today leftists would possibly be okay with French Algeria but be rightly against Russian occupation of Siberia. Why? I think that there were was a brief period in the 1900s when a colonial nation could go socialist/left wing and then its colonial holdings could be legitimized as an integral part of an AES nation. There are limits of course, the USSR did give independence to lands it controlled under the czar like ukraine and after ww2 east germany wasn’t part of Russia proper. China could easily have annexed Mongolia but they didn’t, socialists tend not to favor empire as a matter of ideology, but they will use the legacy of it to their advantage. It would have been crazy then to give up that much territory.
So what about America? Maybe in the Great Depression era we could have elected Eugene Debs, or he could have pulled a January 6th. That was probably the last time an actual leftist could have salvaged the United States as a socialist nation. Now it’s going to require balkanization to implement socialism here, it’s going to have to be done piecemeal, probably will require military occupation, a socialist in power would have to basically burn the whole system to the ground instead of taking over the system. No more White House, no more states, congress, constitution, all that shit has to go now, but it didn’t have to if we had achieved socialism early enough. So say America did achieve socialism in the 1920s? What would the borders look like?
I expect the Indian reservations would have become semi-independent republics like we see exist in Russia now, I would expect desegregation would have happened a lot earlier, we probably wouldn’t have kept Hawaii, and Hawaii probably would have still been attacked by Japan or some other fascist nation in the pacific so ironically America could have been liberators there kinda like we were in the Philippines (not saying the US was a force of good there but a socialist US would definitely have a navy in the pacific and use it). Alaska would have been kept, either Russia is our friend and wouldn’t ask for it back, or Russia isn’t socialist so fuck them. I bet the border with the US and Mexico is a more contentious issue because even if both nations are socialists I would expect both to be claiming the south west as theirs, but the US would get its way as the larger socialist state. And Canada, I think we would have annexed it. It was a British colonial holding, Quebec didn’t want to be in Canada, the maritime providences weren’t even officially apart of Canada yet, the northern territories were entirely indigenous land. If the US went socialist it’s unlikely Canada would have lasted. And the Caribbean, imagine if Cuba was like an an American Taiwan, just the descendants of slave owners doing wholesome capitalism off the shores of communist United States empire. It would be incredibly ironic.
Thats it, that’s the post, please tear it apart and explain why my theories are dangerous.
Counterfactuals just generally aren’t very helpful unless you’re writing fiction.
Im not trying to write alt-history and more trying to come up with a justification as to why AES governments of the past got to claim ownership of the colonial empires they are successors of. And more importantly, why it would be impossible now for the socialists in the United States to make a legitimate claim to ownership to the land of the United States. Like there was a point in history where we went from “this nation is salvageable” to “burn the fucker down”.
Engels believed the US wouldn’t be able to support a revolution until all of its speculative markets (particularly land speculation) become inaccessible to the proletariat. American proletarians who speculate on the price of property will always side with bourgoisie parties, which we have seen play out through history as the democrats and republicans successfully repackage leftist rhetoric and actions into something less scary to white supremacists.
It’s only just recently where we’ve begun to see speculative markets break down, hence the handwringing over war with China. It was always going to play out this way, we just didn’t see it. We surmised that maybe the leaders weren’t strong enough or the state was too oppressive. But the reality is that the breakdown of the US state was always going to come “on time” and not a minute early.
American prosperity is dead. The prosperity gospel with die with it. And then America itself will die.
had Russia not had that revolution and instead it was France, today leftists would possibly be okay with French Algeria but be rightly against Russian occupation of Siberia. Why? I think that there were was a brief period in the 1900s when a colonial nation could go socialist/left wing and then its colonial holdings could be legitimized as an integral part of an AES nation
Not in colonial states where the justifying ideology was white supremacy, the minute such colonial states become socialist, independence of the colonial holdings is inevitable
It was inevitable even without a socialist revolution in the French case
There are forms of colonialism so poisonous that the very notion of societal cohesion becomes untenable. There’s no universe where the French colonialists in Algeria could coexist with the Algerian people in anything other than a relationship of domination, no matter how socialist the Paris government became
The logic of all settler colonial projects always leads to collapse and bloodshed, socialist transitions would simply accelerate and reduce the cost of said collapse
Not in colonial states where the justifying ideology was white supremacy
Racism today is the primary reason why socialists advocate for balkanization of the United States over any kind of reclamation or claim to ownership over the nation of the United States itself. For Russia, Siberia was just as much of a colonial holding as Algeria was to France. The USSR was a multiethnic multinational socialist country and it’s not unreasonable to think that had France, or the United States, or hell even Great Britain had the revolution along with or without Russia, parts of their colonial empires would have been ingrained into their socialist governments and those socialist governments would have had a right call those colonial gains their own, because had these nation actually pursued and enacted socialist policies, would that not make them entitled to keep those lands their pre-socialist governments got illegitimately through colonialism?
Like had it been India that gone communist and not China, would you particularly care about China’s territorial claims? No, I would not care about it more than any other capitalist country’s land claims. Socialist countries in the past were allowed to keep some amount of the spoils of their colonial legacies because socialism required nationalism. But now that’s not the case. Now if a new socialist country was to be formed in the west it would have to built up from nothing, even in the global south I wouldn’t expect a socialist to promote a Communist Brazil. I would expect them to promote further protection of indigenous peoples, and the rainforest, they would see no value in making the Brazilian state a socialist state, because they want to abolish the state. Meanwhile a socialist would want to bring back the USSR, because doesn’t Russian nationalism benefit socialism?
What I’m trying to say is, there was a point in the past that socialists could have taken advantage of nationalism and colonialism and now it’s gone. Would you seriously say that in the United States had the radical republicans had their way, fully enfranchised Black people, actually did reconstruction. Would the United States not of been a fertile breeding ground for a socialist revolution had small changes taken place? The United States missed so many opportunities to reform itself into something resembling the Soviet Union, France is the same deal and I don’t know what a socialist France would do with Algeria. Maybe they would try to prop up a socialist government there like the Soviets did Afghanistan, maybe socialism itself would make Algeria and France one and the same on a national level. I know for damn sure they wouldn’t keep Haiti though, there isn’t anyone in Haiti that want the French back.
The Russian revolution succeeded because it advanced the right of self determination for its member nations and because there was a social base for unification, that basis existed because income and class wise there wasn’t much difference between average ethnic Russians (majority of whom were serfs a generation prior) and the various ethnic groups oppressed by the Russian empire, there was a horizontality there that is unique to Russian history
There’s no such thing in the west, the poorest Frenchmen was substantially better off than even a “middle class” Algerian; legally, poltically, economically, thats why there’s no social basis for “taking advantage of nationalism and colonialism”
The class politics and material conditions of French Algeria guaranteed the policy of " the suitcase or the coffin" because otherwise Algerian society could have no social cohesion or autonomous state capacity, and the majority of the world’s problems result from a lack of those two things
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Taking notes for my Hearts of Iron mod.
I was thinking along similar lines regarding the 1918 German revolution. If it had succeeded, would fascism still arise in Italy or other countries? Would WWII still happen, but with different alliances? Would France and Britain still lose their colonies?
