This is not a joke. I actually don’t know.
As a matter of fact, the exact opposite is the case. Marx’s idea is that the working class must break up, smash the “ready-made state machinery”, and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.
, State and RevolutionIf you haven’t read State and Revolution, I recommend you do so at your earliest opportunity. It’s one of the best pieces of theory and written with such passion. A joy to read, tbh.
Anyway, as others have posted, but also the US is a bourgeois state and is structured for the purpose of reinforcing bourgeois rule. Anything that could be called communist that rose within its borders would be so fundamentally different that the United States of America would be dead: its corpse fertilizing the soil for something good to grow in its place.
That’s a really good quote. Is State and Revolution an easy read? I’m a dumber communist because I get demotivated easily with reading material.
It’s easier than Capital for sure. Lenin was a very captivating writer, IMO. State and Rev and What is to be Done? are bangers. I’m not as well read as I would like to be, but i highly recommend those two. You’ll come out the other side shit talking Kautsky for sure.
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For the same reason Israel cannot: No reform is possible or really desired for a genocidal settler state.
Yeah fuck america
The big counterexample there is South Africa.
Counter? Certainly not the desired result of a decolonial effort. If Israel were abolished, but the Palestine that arose was subject to the same neocolonial bondage, with the same minority owning the land and means of production, that was used as an example of a failed state by islamophobes around the world, I wouldn’t call that a desired outcome
I’m not saying it’s the ideal outcome. But it is a settler state that went through an enormous political change without the level of violence we’re seeing in Palestine now.
Remember in Lord of the Rings when the one guy says “we should use the power of the ring to destroy Sauron” and then all the other guys tell him no that’s fucking stupid and then he still thinks it’s a good idea and then he fucking dies because of how stupid of an idea it was and when he’s dying he’s like “Fuck, that was such a stupid fucking idea. I’m such a dumbass and everybody told me I was being a dumbass and I didn’t listen and now I’m getting killed by orcs or something because of how monumentally stupid of an idea that was”?
It’s a lot like that.
It being a settler colonial state means that a sufficient reform of its structure would no longer resemble what the United States of America looks like anymore, and so, it would cease to exist
Sorta like Israel. If you fixed its issues it wouldn’t be a Jewish ethnostate doing genocide anymore, so then it wouldn’t be Israel anymore. It could just be Palestine with everybody living in it.
America’s really big though so there would be land given back to lots of indigenous groups, possibly breaking up into smaller countries, etc.
Because “America” is a settler colonial entity violently occupying many Indigenous nations and the Black nation in diaspora.
This was my first thought, no settler colonial entity has a right to exist.
Ah right the very concept of an existing colonial entity. I suppose you can’t make it right by letting it exist.
I wonder what First Nation people would call the land when it’s all said and done. I feel like it would be defended against more strongly if they protected it as one unified power.
The simple answer is that “an America with its inner power structures replaced with communist ones” would simply not name itself after Amerigo Vespucci, in the same way as it would not erect statues of Confederate generals.
The slightly longer answer is that the settler-colonial nature of the United States has afforded whites more class mobility and broadly more comfortable lives that disincentivize class consciousness. This means that the actual proletariat of the United States, the exploited section of the population with the greatest class consciousness, are the “othered” ethnic and racial minorities — and these groups already have names for their own countries, solidarity with one another, and desire that their countries should be liberated from their exploitation by a foreign power. When we reach the point where whites in the United States actually are exploited enough to develop true class consciousness, these whites will understand very well the need for solidarity with every section of the proletariat, in order to further the interests of the class as a whole. This means that the correct stance for white American workers is to support the liberation of the exploited countries.
This is really no different from the example of Sweden and Norway, where Norway’s independence was directly the result of the Swedish working class striking and otherwise fighting against the efforts of the Swedish bourgeoisie to keep Norway by force. Lenin praised the Swedish working class for its efforts, which strengthened bonds between the working classes of Sweden and Norway and ended the friction between the countries. The only real difference between the example of Sweden and the example of the United States is that there is essentially no land that legitimately belongs to the United States. It then follows that showing solidarity with workers of all countries, means that the United States of America must be abolished in its entirety. Whether there should continue to exist a socialist state whose borders largely correspond to those of the USA, is a matter for the working class of the region to decide when the revolution is a reality.
I’m sure there’s more to be said, but I’m sure there’s already a lot more comments in this thread already going over things I haven’t thought about.
Incidentally, if I may ramble about my WIP future fiction: the United States of America, which by the time of the socialist revolution had annexed Canada, was replaced with the Union of the Leagues of Commons of Turtle Island, commonly known as “Locoti”. The terms “America” and “American” were largely relegated to the history books after that point, except in reference to:
- A new ethnic group descended from refugees of the Second US Civil War, who called themselves “Americans” partially to skunk the term in reference to any bit of land between the Atlantic and Pacific.
- American Sign Language and its users.
If you change everything about a system, is it the same system? even if it has the same name? can you imagine reforming the CIA, like what would a communist CIA even be?
In terms of revolution - it’s unlikely and it’s just so many people I don’t know how we get to that and not balkanize, realistically. Which is crazy to imagine. So I think we’re just going to trot along as the planet warms up and something external breaks it up.
Electorally it’s impossible. Our last reformers with actual potential to change fundamentals were all assassinated and nobody was held accountable. The ruling class is even more powerful domestically now, and since things are more desperate all around the police state is more obsequious.
“America” as an institution would stop existing, i.e., “inner power structures replaced with communism while remaining in existence.” As funny and deserving as it would be, the country doesn’t need to sink, if that’s what you’re confused about.
Depends on how you define “America.” After you change the government, economic system, culture, and name, it starts to be a Ship of Theseus thing.
The only question left is the borders, but “in a communist world” borders are less important. We might even have overlapping voting regions and sub-regions like a big complicated Venn diagram, depending on the issue at hand. Maybe everyone in the Rio Grande watershed votes on Rio Grande-related issues. If your farming community straddles the watershed divide, maybe half your neighbors vote on Rio Grande-related issues and the other half don’t.
I don’t see a reason to keep the current borders of America, but also, I’m not sure what the borders will even mean.
Lot of good answers here. As I always keep bringing up contradictions are resolved by practice. The USA is built on a whole host of contradictions international, national, economic and societal, and we can’t predict how they will be resolved. Even if the very unlikely event everyone somehow peacefully threaded the needle to resolve all these contradictions in a way that a USA still exists it would not be the same USA through the process it’s been through.
The destiny of this country is a military dictatorship with large climate-blasted swathes of it being left to neo-feudal pasture
By the time that state collapses, no one is gonna care about “America” as some idealized city-on-the-hill prospect, like the 19th century conception of “Britannia” it will pass into history as a jingoistic anachronism
New formations, new identities, new parties will develop, whether they’re communist or not
The USA must be abolished, the same way the russian empire was
The land will stilp be there
