This is conventional Leninist thinking. In China, revolution grew out of the farming class (Maoism). In Poland (for example) it was imposed from outside.
Sort of shoots the whole “History is a process” idea out of the water.
A coup or armed insurrection, maybe not (but if the US economic situation had become even worse, maybe). But why couldn’t the Communist party play like any other political party and campaign for a radical change?
Because first they’d have to get rid of one of the other two big parties…presumably the Democrats, since some of them would have to make up the core of the new US Communist party. They’d have to do this at nearly every level of government, from small town to the federal level. I don’t see any plausible way for them to do this in the time period we are talking about.
Think about it. During such a shift (from the Dems going from being one of the major parties to them being completely defunct, thrown back to being nothing more than one more of the 3rd party wannabes), that would give the Republicans a HUGE advantage in the interim. After all, the Republican party itself didn’t just become one of the big two over night, and they certainly didn’t suddenly come into power…it happened gradually, over time, and during that time the Dems were in pretty solid control.
I’m just not seeing it. Compound that with the fact that any major (i.e. one of the big two) parties is going to be a large coalition, and that while the more radical elements are going to have a voice in the tent, the party itself is going to follow the middle path within the parties framework, and I don’t see how anything but the name would change…instead of calling themselves the Democratic Party they would, instead, be called the US Communist party or something like that (and perhaps they would be some other animal instead of a donkey :p).
-XT
Somebody always has to do this, don’t they?
xtisme, I can envision a scenario where the American Communist Party becomes a viable challenge to the two-party system like the Whigs did, rises to power, then proposes a radical change – so radical as to reform US government from scratch in the Communist mold.
Something a little like this happened ca. 1776 – the Continental Congress was in power and a new government was proposed to replace it, not reform it.
Not likely, but possible. If economic conditions deteriorated enough, the American electorate might get fed up with the “capitalist/democratic experiment” and decide to toss it. That kind of thinking was behind many who joined the Communist Party.
Sure, I agree…but it would take time. More like how the Republicans came to power IMHO. I suppose if you think that the Great Depression wouldn’t have ended without FDR, then it’s possible that, things staying bad (they did that anyway) or getting worse might caused the Communists to depose the Democrats and take their place. The thing is, it seems to me that a more likely outcome would have been the Republican party folding, and I can’t see how the Communists would have filled in the power vacuum from the various fragments of the Republican party…quite the opposite really.
Regardless, even if the Communists DID depose the Democrats, considering our system I can’t see how it would be radically different than the Democratic party…it would have been composed of major elements from the Dems after all, or it wouldn’t have been viable.
I admit that I’m no expert on this stuff, so I could be completely wrong, but I’m just not seeing a chain of events that would have put the Communists in charge of one of the two major parties…and even if it did, how that would be substantially different in anything but name. Oh, I’m sure that they would have been even more left leaning, and have even more true communist or socialist elements in their party planks, but if they were TOO radical they wouldn’t have been able to generate the votes to win any sort of power…certainly not across the board, from the local city, county and state levels all the way up to the national level.
-XT
In addition to what Commissar said: The KKK wasn’t a WASP organization, because WASP ordinarily denotes upper middle class (or higher) whites from the old Northeastern Anglo tradition. With regard to religion they’d usually be Episcopalians or Presbyterians or similar, and by the 1930s they wouldn’t be overtly racist. They might believe that whites were superior, and they might laugh at blackface shows or listen to Amos and Andy on the radio. However, they weren’t about to don bedsheets and hoods and ride out to terrorize African Americans and bootleggers in the dark of night. By contrast, the KKK’s demographic was generally much poorer, comprising poor farmers and laborers. Considered purely from an economic standpoint, these people were probably representative of Americans generally, and as such they would have been likely prospects to join a revolutionary party. Of course IRL we can’t leave out race when discussing the KKK, and actually they’d never have joined forces with a political party that espoused equal rights regardless of race.
I’d think the true economic mainstream in 1930 was pretty darn poor, much more so than the then-prevalent cultural mainstream would suggest.
More and more every day, I question whether the vast majority of Americans have any clue what racism actually is.
Er… I am going to have to disagree with you, my friend. You seem to be extrapolating from the political realities of the US South, and I believe that to be the fatal flaw of your argument.
At the time in question, the vast majority of US industry was located in the north of the country. The north did not have the type of racial dichotomy that you seem to assign to the nation in its entirety. I believe that a carefully-crafted platform would have captured northern workers of all races, and that alone would have been enough to make us a major party.
The clue is that YOUR interpolation of ‘the KKK’ is what makes the quote absurd.
Did I misread, and he meant WASPs, rather than the KKK? If so, I sincerely apologize, and everything I said still stands.
I would denounce Stalin and adopt a more USA-oriented platform.
Of course, when that invitation to attend the CP International Conference (in Moscow) comes, better tear up the envelope.
Comrad Stalin probably has plans for you.
In 1930 the unemployment rate was 8.7 percent. It would have been better to wait until 1932 when the unemployment rate was 23.6 percent.
However, by then Franklin Roosevelt was a popular Democrat candidate for president.
In 1932 the Communist Party candidate was William Z. Foster. He only got 103,307 votes, or 0.3 percent of the total.
With one exception Communists have never seized power in a democratic country. The one exception was Czechoslovakia after the Second World War, when Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Soviet Army.
The New Deal almost did not happen. On February 15, 1933 there was an assassination attempt on Franklin Roosevelt. He was not killed, but someone else was. Roosevelt’s running mate was John Nance Garner. He had been chosen the Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1931, but I doubt he would have been able to orchestrate the recovery from the Great Depression.
The failure of President Obama to reduce employment demonstrates that Roosevelt or Garner may have been unable to reduce unemployment after 1932. If this had happened, I think the Republican Party would have benefited, not the Communist Party.
The American Communist Party has never been anything more than something for paranoid right wingers to worry about. It has never been politically significant in the United States.
But the KKK did have a lot of divisions along racial, ethnic and religious lines. They did reject non-protestants and non-whites, among others. Which is why a communist movement wouldn’t work here, I don’t think you could get the rural whites, blacks, immigrants, etc. all working together. People would fraction along religious, ethnic and racial lines in the US. I don’t see a large enough % of people joining an economic movement while ignoring other divisions, people are too easy to divide & conquer in the US along those lines.
Karl Marx’s main mistake was this assertion at the beginning of The Communist Manifesto, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
In truth the history of the world has seen struggles between nations and races. There have been very few successful revolutions along the lines of economic class. In those few, the victorious lower class was racially and ethnically homogeneous.
Why do I hate America?
I’m telling you, my deeeeear,
It can’t happen heeeeer!
I think you mean that America as a whole was divided by race, origin, and religion, but the KKK itself wasn’t divided. I’d say they were all at one in their message of hate.
Replace my first sentence above with:
I meant the average, run-of-the-mill white person of 1930 would not, in my opinion, have approved of the KKK or wanted to join it. I’m not denying that many if not most of them were racist at the core, but it would have been a passive, institutional kind of racism rather than the overt attacks that characterized the KKK and other hate groups. I was drawing a distinction between average and upper class whites on one side, and the KKK and their demographic on the other. My original post will parse a lot better if you keep that in mind.
I would establish death-squads of steel-hardened cadres to throroughly assassinate all the self-loving upper-class communist sympathisers amongst the intellectuals and writers, and leave false evidence to indicate they were systematically being murdered by fascists under the direction of the American capitalist establishment. Then alarm the masses into thinking they were in danger of being ground down to poverty and similarly killed if they resisted slavery, so they might as well revolt now.
The intellectuals would be dead meat anyway after any successful revolution; so they might as well gladly sacrifice themselves beforehand to ensure The People’s Victory.
Not that I’d ask them.