In a scenario where the US went Communist in a "Second American Revolution" during the 1930s due to a worse Great Depression compounded by ineffective administrations, what would said Communist America look like? What flavor of Communism do you see being the main ideology of such a Communist America? How would the government of such a Communist America function? Would it be a totalitarian dictatorship or would it remain (somewhat) democratic (i.e they are free and fair elections, albeit one where the choices are different flavors of left-wing)? What would it's foreign policy be like?
What would a Communist America look like?
- Thread starter Whiteshore
- Start date
James G
Gone Fishin'
The Reds TL on the board speculates one possible way which that could have gone. Its pretty much a somewhat democratic nation and not a totalitarian dictatorship - I've never seen the latter done on the board via communism instead of a fascist way.
As to otherwise, I'm not sure how it would have gone should America have fallen to the communists. It all depends upon the POD really, whether it is a gentle tilt or a violent revolution.
As to otherwise, I'm not sure how it would have gone should America have fallen to the communists. It all depends upon the POD really, whether it is a gentle tilt or a violent revolution.
samcster94
Banned
How would race relations work if there is a massive shift to the left(like a "Hugo Chavez" type leader, even if he is a disaster)?
Ancien Regime
Banned
I think a violent revolution could have still resulted in a democratic "USSA" (fun challenge - think of a descriptive name for the new state that maintains the "USA" acronym. Hard mode: You cannot use the word "Soviet" or "Soviets")
Maybe we should distinguish between a communist United States and a Communist United States (though neither is very likely).
I lean more towards Democratic, now it could become a totalitarian dictatorship after the revolution but that is of course not guaranteed. If anything I would imagine that commie US would lean towards Anarcho-Communism or Libertarian Socialism. I do imagine this commie US taking the concept of Worker's Self Management and going further with it.
I don't see State Atheism arising in a commie US due to the strong ideal of Freedom of Religion but also because the US never had an oppressive religious class in contrast to Europe. The new Government would very likely become strongly secular, similar to the french concept of Laïcité I would imagine. That said, I would imagine Christian Socialism or Christian Anarchism being a rather influential cultural movement.
Foreign Policy wise it is hard to say. though I can't see the US not trying to influence countries within Latin America though; except now in a different direction. If a cold war ever breaks out with someone(Britain, China, Russia, Germany, Someone else) then the US might be willing to tolerate dictators in the region to prevent them from turning to the other side.
Probably for the better. One thing to keep in mind is that various militant leftwing groups such as the IWW or the Communist party were very much pro-integration. They pushed to integrate workers together believing that they are all workers and should be united to oppose the capitalist class. That doesn't mean things are going to be perfect especially if it was a violent revolution. But compared to the era, race relations would likely be better.
Since even with the depression the United States had a large market value. So you could give every emigrante the money they needed to get his start. Yes United States did have a lot of extra industrial production but by adding in X number of Jews they just gained a big Market.0
I'm optimistic about it myself; I think Jello Biafra was rather realistic about a radical leftist regime having to arise from a mass movement (which does not have to mean more than 1/5-1/3 the population actively involved; look at the ARW for a comparison) that will be larger than any single "vanguard" party. In the repressive and backward social conditions of the Tsarist Romanov Russian empire, a single vanguard movement monopolizing the most active working (that is, capitalist industrialist sector workers as opposed to the countryside peasantry) was a likely outcome; not so in a developed nation like the USA of the 1920s and '30s. To be sure for radicals close enough to each other to encompass radical anti-private-property movements, an essential for socialism proper though perhaps not social democracy, so that massive expropriation of large sectors of the private sphere will happen as consensus policy successfully sold to democratic majorities, the ground has to be prepared in advance. But there was a lot of radicalism OTL if one integrates together all the diverse ferments between the Civil War and Depression period as is, approaching that lower limit of 20 percent or more; double it so that 40 percent or so of the less propertied 90 percent is radical of some kind--Georgists (aka "Single Taxers") and "Share the Wealth" types along the lines of Huey Long on the "right" or moderate end of the radical spectrum, with anarchists, syndicalists, Wobblies, a big tent Socialist party along Debsian lines and militant vanguard more or less Stalinist hard liner Communists all included, with the latter seeking to monopolize power but pragmatically coming to realize they don't have the authority or grasp to do it, and falling back on "fellow traveler" cooperation with movements they denounce ideologically, then a sufficiently traumatic Depression, mishandled ineptly enough, combined with greater support of radical options reaching back to the turn of the century and exacerbated by the elite handling of WWI and ham-handed political reactions alienating large blocs of people, could all combine to push past the red line of social mismanagement and undermine broad popular support for things as they are while forging more powerful and influential factions committed to the idea that radical reforms are in order. This could set up a situation where the dominant "party of Order," no doubt becoming a fusion of OTL conservative Republicans and Democrats in practice, adopt a bunker mentality which reinforces the claim of the outsider radicals to be the true heirs of American democracy in the sense of both "Spirt of '76" and the crusading mantle of the Civil War era Republicans. The US Army was never a massive force except by temporary mass recruitment in great crises; undermine and divide its loyalties with dubious conservative regime actions (assassinating the democratically elected President-elect in 1932, Norman Thomas, was the last straw for the insurrectionist masses in JB's Reds! for instance) and we have a situation where large numbers of military veterans give their services and experience to revolutionary armed bands and can sometimes cause the official forces to mutiny, at least gaining some fraction of them as defectors and weakening the discipline of the official repressive armies, and perhaps with subverting officers to the Red cause reversing entire units over to the revolutionary side--it will never be clean, even the Reddest regiments will have conservatives defecting in their turn to the old regimists.
I think that despite the tendency of extremists to be able to rally forces to their cause, a US revolution of this kind would be diverse and broad based enough to frustrate attempts at an authoritarian coup; the rebels might be cavalier with the human and political rights of known reactionaries, who could comprise a really large segment of the population--but their very size, combined with recognition of the risks of some Red faction seizing all power if checks and balances are not supported (with the recent example of the Bolsheviks in Russia being both inspirational and cautionary) will lead to conditional extension of both civil and even political rights to outright and outspoken propertarians. Their objections will have some moral weight too. This will focus radical action on consensus targets--namely the great concentrations of wealth. A hard line Leninist will revile the notions of Huey Long as petty-bourgeois, but if they cannot see their way to total seizure of power, they might cooperate with a consensual policy of setting ceilings on private wealth and using the majority of the concentrated wealth of the few to fund national basic incomes and governmentally guided investments in worker-controlled workplaces to get the economy producing on a satisfaction of needs basis. Pragmatically, a mixed public/private economy will develop and with large numbers of experienced industrial workers dominating the shop floors, they'd muddle through to produce outcomes economically superior for the vast majority of the populace, quite quickly since the big problem idling the productive forces of the early 1930s in America (and western Europe of course) was a poor prospect of profits, not any shortages of crucial materials and least of all, skilled labor. This in turn will cement the political legitimacy of the shaky and faction-ridden coalition of radicals and create a moderated center of technocrats with strong labor faction ties to favor pragmatic revision over ideological purity. The doctrinaire revolutionaries will tend to cancel each other with contradictory radicalism, the common people will be both better off and more politically powerful than ever, and perhaps a party of pragmatic common sense will serve to keep radicals in the business of verbal persuasion and being asked to demonstrate the merits of their proposals in diverse experiments of volunteers; meanwhile old line propertarians would be checked by the decline in their ideological stock if a new regime with an eclectic and cavalier attitude toward the sanctity of large scale concentrated property can contend that the old regime is outmoded and inefficient and bad for the majority with credibility.
Jello Biafra was I think perhaps too optimistic about just how fast and how smoothly a tightly organized though large tent radical party would impose a single, comprehensive, well thought out and uniform planned economy and how well it would work out the gate; my view is that there would be rather more friction and irregularity; the nation can surge quickly from the raw edge of poverty for most people to material security comparable to that of better off workers in the 1920s (OTL, which was limited enough--God knows how bad a suitable ATL's '20s would have been for the majority) but to surge forward from there to OTL WWII levels of production might be a rougher road with more heated political turmoil. But I do share her optimism that a basic broad consensus that the road forward is Red in some sense or other, a consensus of power to the people, a pragmatic shaking out so that grassroots popular worker's organizations dominated by community and shop floor priorities pragmatically enforced with strong control of upper hierarchy delegates forms an unbreakable bastion of genuine democracy despite the leverage technocratic elites would accumulate, and that by hammering away from below guided by this or that claim of some fashionable ideology to shining proper light on the task at hand, workable and reasonably efficient and fair means of guiding production and distribution of goods to balance unmet needs with producer incentives that differ sharply from capitalist market incentives would evolve. I cannot be too doctrinaire about what would and would not work, but I do think there will be an aversion to falling back on capitalist methods if something more humane and democratic can be made to work well enough. There might be inefficiencies that help discredit the American Red cause globally, that give comfort to the Soviet Stalinists that they need not feel too upbraided by softer American means (after all, both Russians and Americans will understand that Russia started out poorer and more backward) and give more conservative European developed nations sufficient propaganda leverage to perhaps arrest similar Red movements in Europe--though I think even mediocre American success would be a near-unstoppable subversion of European order--French leftists for instance might be inspired by an emerging American consensus of practice to unite around a program to implement something similar in France and all the conservative factions together might be unable to stop the left-populist steamroller--even something as treacherous and disgusting to French patriots as inviting Hitler in to help the reactionaries keep "order" and stop the Red Tide would not help them much since Hitler's own program for the eventual conquest of Europe was in an embryonic state in terms of hardware and properly trained forces as late as 1938--so a French crisis any time before then will proceed in terms of domestic French balances of power primarily. Similarly I'd think Labour in Britain would be drawn far left and given a concrete program for reorganizing Britain out of the privations of the Depression that would eclipse Tory legitimacy. (Frankly I remain mystified why the Conservatives could maintain hegemony in the OTL 1930s; I suppose it had to do with a mixture of conciliatory pragmatic welfare policy, careful cultivation of British sensibilities to avoid adding insult to the working class's injuries, and systematic exploitation of leverage on the colonial economies to squeeze out sufficient surplus to run the Empire more or less in the black while avoiding extreme provocations of the colonized--after all, the basic failure of the global capitalist system in the Depression was a collapse of effective demand that could be jiggered around by manipulation of markets such as the Colonial Office and Empire preference trade policies could lever. Even colonized subjects in Africa and South Asia could perhaps reflect that things could be worse and that the Empire was holding the worse wolves from the door, maybe. But I think that a more or less successful Red America would undermine Tory claims of being the best deal on offer and galvanize organized resistance in both the homeland and the colonies, and that both Canada and Australia and even New Zealand and perhaps South Africa might all be lured leftward themselves--SA least of all due to the pervading racism, but that was not as ideologically organized as the Nationalists would manage later, and perhaps significant numbers of white South Africans, even Afrikaaners, might be lured to an anti-racist internationalist stand--if not enough to make white SA majorities vote Red, then enough to keep their police busy and polarize the place, making SA an early and ongoing embarrassment and costly drain.
Colonialist factors might in the end prove key in checking radicalism in both UK and France to be sure.
I really really like the idea that a broadly radical leftist North America would quickly choke the life out of organized and culturally persistent racism, but cynically I am not so sure the path would be very clear. Again I think Jello was reasonable in her restraint and pessimism on this subject--at least some of the radical movements forming the general big tent of consensus would hold that racism is inherently reactionary and anti-worker, and some of the strength of the umbrella would come from very radicalized Southerners who make a point of joining "White" and "Black" forces within their particular movements and creating some liberated safe zones; some regions of the South and towns there will banish Jim Crow and safe corridors of travel to broader and more diffuse racially liberated zones elsewhere in the nation will be enforced--but other regions will be tacitly permitted to continue racial stratification, probably with some effective checking of the most extreme repressive tactics and a general encouragement of African Americans to vote with their feet by withdrawing from these conceded zones--and in the North too, will be bastions of hard line US traditional racism. North and south, such bastions will pay penalties in the form of lowered priority for national wealth distribution and suspicion being cast on all their residents, but it would be too much to expect total crusades to finally eliminate racism; official and explicit discrimination will be a brand of reaction and largely discouraged out of existence as an open practice but stubborn resistance under the table to integration will remain the reality in substantial bastions of reaction. Over time the integrated zones will prosper and African Americans will succeed to positions of national and regional leadership, increasingly becoming part of the face of official America, and the white supremacist sentiment will slowly leach away and one region after another "capitulate" to racial egalitarianism. But some cores might last for generations, perhaps. On the whole newly liberated zones will celebrate their repudiation of the racist past, I hope. But this will take time too, perhaps at least an entire generation.
Thus, on the time scale of the 1930s, even a confident and powerful Red America will have some embarrassment in chiding either Britain or France, or nations like Belgium or the Netherlands, for their racist colonialist policies. It will be a popular line in America and excite considerable hope and good feeling among insurgent radical anti-colonialists world round, but American leadership will not commit to crusading wars on that pretext alone and will negotiate with the capitalist European powers that be, as long as they maintain some pretext of liberalism and democratic accountability and some credible pretense of seeking to govern the colonies with some consideration of native interests. I think any European powers that cross the line into repression of democracy however will find themselves facing a hostile America. As for Soviet Russia, Americans will maintain at least a facade of civil relations, for some of the same sorts of reasons Stalin and Mao pretended to be an unbroken monolith of power under the former--Americans will perhaps indulge in mass hypocrisy to whitewash the worst of Stalin's deeds--but perhaps also intrigue with suitably radical Soviet Communists to coup him out, or anyway play hard ball within the alliance to limit his influence over America.
I suppose given the presence of Hitler running Germany not being butterflied away, and the ambitions and compulsions working on Imperial Japan, an ATL version of WWII is pretty certain to happen and that the Americans will be on the victorious anti-fascist side. This may be a grimmer crusade than OTL if the Western European powers throw in with Hitler, but assuming that American democratically guided industry can shake down to match or exceed OTL capacities, I don't think any combination of old world powers can bring enough force to bear on north America to seriously threaten the regime, whereas any attempt to do that will galvanize American resistance and guarantee implacable US retaliations and systematic class warfare. I don't see Jello's particular path of the war in her ATL as being highly probable--not so likely there will be a South American front, for instance, nor that Hitler will be lunatic enough to turn on Britain and France if they have been siding sympathetically with his Reich--either as OTL geopolitical fears trump capitalist class solidarity and Hitler does follow a similar path of conquest of Western Europe and besieging Britain, forcing UK and USSR together as allies along with the Red Americas, or if instead of having to plunder western Europe its reactionary regimes give him a green light for an eastern crusade he will focus on that and the Europeans won't cease to support him until they see the writing on the wall, leading to a harder line post war Cold War period with a hopefully humanized Soviet bloc in alliance with North America facing a hard-line Eurofascist/imperialist one, which I expect would disintegrate rather spectacularly by the 1960s at the latest leading to a Red planet run on post-capitalist though diverse economic lines, with a world government of a fairly loose and federal nature policing low levels of armament and integrated global policy on things like scientific research including space exploration, and guided global economic development and integration, with regional states existing largely for sentimental reasons and being of appropriate scale to administer certain categories of problem.
So, a path to global Utopia before 2000 I would think. The Euro-fascists might collapse half a century before that, in the end game of the second Great War, via domestic insurrection in the context of Russian and Yankee Red Armies at their gates, which might lead to an awkward division between American loose Reds and Stalinist Bolshevik bloc, but the latter would tend to humanize and dissolve over time; conceivably a more durable Nazi/Fascist sphere (along the lines of @varyar's recent TLs) might crush the life out of Stalinism leading belated Yankee reinforcement of the Ural line and preservation of much of former Russia in exile in Asia, though a Red America would probably do more to militantly elevate the economic and political status of a Bolshevik Asian rump state. Nuclear proliferation on both sides of the Red/Black frontiers might lead to a truly macabre balance of terror forcing each side to damp down proxy war essays of "liberation" from the other's bloc, but personally I think the Nazis were too unstable to last under any circumstances. I don't think Jello's notion of a liberal-capitalist anti-Communist Europe plus more or less colonial holdings would stabilize, even under nuclear balance of terror; I think by 1945 the American domestic example would be too attractive for a working class enjoying any meaningful degree of freedom not to rebel and finish the clean sweep of a left wing world, with any last refuges of propertarian reaction rapidly crumbling; there would not be time for reactionary great powers to develop a sufficient nuclear arsenal, deployed with sufficient likelihood of striking North American targets, to make the Yankees stand down in aiding and abetting both anti-colonialist and European socialist rebellions--not if Americans engaged the imperial powers as enemies anyway. If they were comrades in arms I think the conversion of the imperial homelands to socialism in a negotiated and smooth fashion seems inevitable, followed by a somewhat paternalistic liberation of the colonies top-down.
So, not only am I optimistic that a Red America stemming from a 1930s revolution would be a nice place in itself, I believe it would necessarily get entangled in the project of world working class liberation and end in a global Red Utopia.
I think that despite the tendency of extremists to be able to rally forces to their cause, a US revolution of this kind would be diverse and broad based enough to frustrate attempts at an authoritarian coup; the rebels might be cavalier with the human and political rights of known reactionaries, who could comprise a really large segment of the population--but their very size, combined with recognition of the risks of some Red faction seizing all power if checks and balances are not supported (with the recent example of the Bolsheviks in Russia being both inspirational and cautionary) will lead to conditional extension of both civil and even political rights to outright and outspoken propertarians. Their objections will have some moral weight too. This will focus radical action on consensus targets--namely the great concentrations of wealth. A hard line Leninist will revile the notions of Huey Long as petty-bourgeois, but if they cannot see their way to total seizure of power, they might cooperate with a consensual policy of setting ceilings on private wealth and using the majority of the concentrated wealth of the few to fund national basic incomes and governmentally guided investments in worker-controlled workplaces to get the economy producing on a satisfaction of needs basis. Pragmatically, a mixed public/private economy will develop and with large numbers of experienced industrial workers dominating the shop floors, they'd muddle through to produce outcomes economically superior for the vast majority of the populace, quite quickly since the big problem idling the productive forces of the early 1930s in America (and western Europe of course) was a poor prospect of profits, not any shortages of crucial materials and least of all, skilled labor. This in turn will cement the political legitimacy of the shaky and faction-ridden coalition of radicals and create a moderated center of technocrats with strong labor faction ties to favor pragmatic revision over ideological purity. The doctrinaire revolutionaries will tend to cancel each other with contradictory radicalism, the common people will be both better off and more politically powerful than ever, and perhaps a party of pragmatic common sense will serve to keep radicals in the business of verbal persuasion and being asked to demonstrate the merits of their proposals in diverse experiments of volunteers; meanwhile old line propertarians would be checked by the decline in their ideological stock if a new regime with an eclectic and cavalier attitude toward the sanctity of large scale concentrated property can contend that the old regime is outmoded and inefficient and bad for the majority with credibility.
Jello Biafra was I think perhaps too optimistic about just how fast and how smoothly a tightly organized though large tent radical party would impose a single, comprehensive, well thought out and uniform planned economy and how well it would work out the gate; my view is that there would be rather more friction and irregularity; the nation can surge quickly from the raw edge of poverty for most people to material security comparable to that of better off workers in the 1920s (OTL, which was limited enough--God knows how bad a suitable ATL's '20s would have been for the majority) but to surge forward from there to OTL WWII levels of production might be a rougher road with more heated political turmoil. But I do share her optimism that a basic broad consensus that the road forward is Red in some sense or other, a consensus of power to the people, a pragmatic shaking out so that grassroots popular worker's organizations dominated by community and shop floor priorities pragmatically enforced with strong control of upper hierarchy delegates forms an unbreakable bastion of genuine democracy despite the leverage technocratic elites would accumulate, and that by hammering away from below guided by this or that claim of some fashionable ideology to shining proper light on the task at hand, workable and reasonably efficient and fair means of guiding production and distribution of goods to balance unmet needs with producer incentives that differ sharply from capitalist market incentives would evolve. I cannot be too doctrinaire about what would and would not work, but I do think there will be an aversion to falling back on capitalist methods if something more humane and democratic can be made to work well enough. There might be inefficiencies that help discredit the American Red cause globally, that give comfort to the Soviet Stalinists that they need not feel too upbraided by softer American means (after all, both Russians and Americans will understand that Russia started out poorer and more backward) and give more conservative European developed nations sufficient propaganda leverage to perhaps arrest similar Red movements in Europe--though I think even mediocre American success would be a near-unstoppable subversion of European order--French leftists for instance might be inspired by an emerging American consensus of practice to unite around a program to implement something similar in France and all the conservative factions together might be unable to stop the left-populist steamroller--even something as treacherous and disgusting to French patriots as inviting Hitler in to help the reactionaries keep "order" and stop the Red Tide would not help them much since Hitler's own program for the eventual conquest of Europe was in an embryonic state in terms of hardware and properly trained forces as late as 1938--so a French crisis any time before then will proceed in terms of domestic French balances of power primarily. Similarly I'd think Labour in Britain would be drawn far left and given a concrete program for reorganizing Britain out of the privations of the Depression that would eclipse Tory legitimacy. (Frankly I remain mystified why the Conservatives could maintain hegemony in the OTL 1930s; I suppose it had to do with a mixture of conciliatory pragmatic welfare policy, careful cultivation of British sensibilities to avoid adding insult to the working class's injuries, and systematic exploitation of leverage on the colonial economies to squeeze out sufficient surplus to run the Empire more or less in the black while avoiding extreme provocations of the colonized--after all, the basic failure of the global capitalist system in the Depression was a collapse of effective demand that could be jiggered around by manipulation of markets such as the Colonial Office and Empire preference trade policies could lever. Even colonized subjects in Africa and South Asia could perhaps reflect that things could be worse and that the Empire was holding the worse wolves from the door, maybe. But I think that a more or less successful Red America would undermine Tory claims of being the best deal on offer and galvanize organized resistance in both the homeland and the colonies, and that both Canada and Australia and even New Zealand and perhaps South Africa might all be lured leftward themselves--SA least of all due to the pervading racism, but that was not as ideologically organized as the Nationalists would manage later, and perhaps significant numbers of white South Africans, even Afrikaaners, might be lured to an anti-racist internationalist stand--if not enough to make white SA majorities vote Red, then enough to keep their police busy and polarize the place, making SA an early and ongoing embarrassment and costly drain.
Colonialist factors might in the end prove key in checking radicalism in both UK and France to be sure.
I really really like the idea that a broadly radical leftist North America would quickly choke the life out of organized and culturally persistent racism, but cynically I am not so sure the path would be very clear. Again I think Jello was reasonable in her restraint and pessimism on this subject--at least some of the radical movements forming the general big tent of consensus would hold that racism is inherently reactionary and anti-worker, and some of the strength of the umbrella would come from very radicalized Southerners who make a point of joining "White" and "Black" forces within their particular movements and creating some liberated safe zones; some regions of the South and towns there will banish Jim Crow and safe corridors of travel to broader and more diffuse racially liberated zones elsewhere in the nation will be enforced--but other regions will be tacitly permitted to continue racial stratification, probably with some effective checking of the most extreme repressive tactics and a general encouragement of African Americans to vote with their feet by withdrawing from these conceded zones--and in the North too, will be bastions of hard line US traditional racism. North and south, such bastions will pay penalties in the form of lowered priority for national wealth distribution and suspicion being cast on all their residents, but it would be too much to expect total crusades to finally eliminate racism; official and explicit discrimination will be a brand of reaction and largely discouraged out of existence as an open practice but stubborn resistance under the table to integration will remain the reality in substantial bastions of reaction. Over time the integrated zones will prosper and African Americans will succeed to positions of national and regional leadership, increasingly becoming part of the face of official America, and the white supremacist sentiment will slowly leach away and one region after another "capitulate" to racial egalitarianism. But some cores might last for generations, perhaps. On the whole newly liberated zones will celebrate their repudiation of the racist past, I hope. But this will take time too, perhaps at least an entire generation.
Thus, on the time scale of the 1930s, even a confident and powerful Red America will have some embarrassment in chiding either Britain or France, or nations like Belgium or the Netherlands, for their racist colonialist policies. It will be a popular line in America and excite considerable hope and good feeling among insurgent radical anti-colonialists world round, but American leadership will not commit to crusading wars on that pretext alone and will negotiate with the capitalist European powers that be, as long as they maintain some pretext of liberalism and democratic accountability and some credible pretense of seeking to govern the colonies with some consideration of native interests. I think any European powers that cross the line into repression of democracy however will find themselves facing a hostile America. As for Soviet Russia, Americans will maintain at least a facade of civil relations, for some of the same sorts of reasons Stalin and Mao pretended to be an unbroken monolith of power under the former--Americans will perhaps indulge in mass hypocrisy to whitewash the worst of Stalin's deeds--but perhaps also intrigue with suitably radical Soviet Communists to coup him out, or anyway play hard ball within the alliance to limit his influence over America.
I suppose given the presence of Hitler running Germany not being butterflied away, and the ambitions and compulsions working on Imperial Japan, an ATL version of WWII is pretty certain to happen and that the Americans will be on the victorious anti-fascist side. This may be a grimmer crusade than OTL if the Western European powers throw in with Hitler, but assuming that American democratically guided industry can shake down to match or exceed OTL capacities, I don't think any combination of old world powers can bring enough force to bear on north America to seriously threaten the regime, whereas any attempt to do that will galvanize American resistance and guarantee implacable US retaliations and systematic class warfare. I don't see Jello's particular path of the war in her ATL as being highly probable--not so likely there will be a South American front, for instance, nor that Hitler will be lunatic enough to turn on Britain and France if they have been siding sympathetically with his Reich--either as OTL geopolitical fears trump capitalist class solidarity and Hitler does follow a similar path of conquest of Western Europe and besieging Britain, forcing UK and USSR together as allies along with the Red Americas, or if instead of having to plunder western Europe its reactionary regimes give him a green light for an eastern crusade he will focus on that and the Europeans won't cease to support him until they see the writing on the wall, leading to a harder line post war Cold War period with a hopefully humanized Soviet bloc in alliance with North America facing a hard-line Eurofascist/imperialist one, which I expect would disintegrate rather spectacularly by the 1960s at the latest leading to a Red planet run on post-capitalist though diverse economic lines, with a world government of a fairly loose and federal nature policing low levels of armament and integrated global policy on things like scientific research including space exploration, and guided global economic development and integration, with regional states existing largely for sentimental reasons and being of appropriate scale to administer certain categories of problem.
So, a path to global Utopia before 2000 I would think. The Euro-fascists might collapse half a century before that, in the end game of the second Great War, via domestic insurrection in the context of Russian and Yankee Red Armies at their gates, which might lead to an awkward division between American loose Reds and Stalinist Bolshevik bloc, but the latter would tend to humanize and dissolve over time; conceivably a more durable Nazi/Fascist sphere (along the lines of @varyar's recent TLs) might crush the life out of Stalinism leading belated Yankee reinforcement of the Ural line and preservation of much of former Russia in exile in Asia, though a Red America would probably do more to militantly elevate the economic and political status of a Bolshevik Asian rump state. Nuclear proliferation on both sides of the Red/Black frontiers might lead to a truly macabre balance of terror forcing each side to damp down proxy war essays of "liberation" from the other's bloc, but personally I think the Nazis were too unstable to last under any circumstances. I don't think Jello's notion of a liberal-capitalist anti-Communist Europe plus more or less colonial holdings would stabilize, even under nuclear balance of terror; I think by 1945 the American domestic example would be too attractive for a working class enjoying any meaningful degree of freedom not to rebel and finish the clean sweep of a left wing world, with any last refuges of propertarian reaction rapidly crumbling; there would not be time for reactionary great powers to develop a sufficient nuclear arsenal, deployed with sufficient likelihood of striking North American targets, to make the Yankees stand down in aiding and abetting both anti-colonialist and European socialist rebellions--not if Americans engaged the imperial powers as enemies anyway. If they were comrades in arms I think the conversion of the imperial homelands to socialism in a negotiated and smooth fashion seems inevitable, followed by a somewhat paternalistic liberation of the colonies top-down.
So, not only am I optimistic that a Red America stemming from a 1930s revolution would be a nice place in itself, I believe it would necessarily get entangled in the project of world working class liberation and end in a global Red Utopia.
A lot depends on just what group or who comes out on top in the post revolutionary political shake-up. IMO the IWW is going to be left holding the bag. Plus some areas will go through the process fairly calmly. Other areas, especially the South and West will be anything but calm. Another factor is property. Large corporate holdings are one thing. The government showing up to sieze the family farm it something else entirely.
Its just my opinionbut the likelyhood of this happening is pretty close to zero without help from Skippy.
Its just my opinionbut the likelyhood of this happening is pretty close to zero without help from Skippy.
There is a book written that covers a communist USA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_in_the_USSA which might give you some idea of how things would go.
So I would suggest that a possible POD would be that Senator Huey Long of Louisiana was not assassinated before 1936 and he was able to ride his Share Our Wealth movement into the White House in 1936 either as the Democratic nominee or as a Third Party candidate. His platform was clear redistribution of wealth and limits on earnings.
If one assumes that Huey Long would create a Social Democratic style of government then perhaps the leap to Communism is not that far.
If one assumes that Huey Long would create a Social Democratic style of government then perhaps the leap to Communism is not that far.
What would a communist America look like? (I would scale down the image, but I genuinely don't know how without making it unreadable, and I thought this was funny enough to mention.)
According to the CPUSA, milquetoast social democracy, some advocacy, and ridiculous utopian dreaming. (This is a real poster):
According to the CPUSA, milquetoast social democracy, some advocacy, and ridiculous utopian dreaming. (This is a real poster):
marathag
Banned
State Forces would be taking care of the Wreckers and other Class Enemies, no need for irregulars to do the job that the Commissars should be doing in the first place