The collapse of the American empire would benefit almost every other country. I am starting to feel that since I live in America I should want to accelerate the collapse (or make sure one happens if things start to go back to business as usual). Can someone tell me why this is a bad idea so that I don’t make a mistake here.
Right. One answer leverages a critique of economics that recognizes that some goods and services are part of The Economy, and others are not. There have always been sectors external to capitalism; it cannot possibly control them all without literally putting all of humanity in a prison with perpetual coercion.
One strategy is to expand the domain of the “homestead” to where it includes unrelated people, exchanges less with the outside economy (i.e. direct production for use), and thus deprives the government of tax income in comparison to the average lifestyle. The government’s own propaganda about “freedom” encompasses these “homesteads”; it cannot fight them on a broad scale without a civil war that weakens itself. And when a revolutionary army comes into being, they will need areas of material support that are not just “thousands of broke people in this town support you”.
I’m not a fifth column, Inspector. I’m just a regular American citizen, pursuing the American Dream, this is just a plot of land that I do silviculture on. This is my only structure on the property and it’s an unconventional construction, it probably wouldn’t sell for much.
How would a communist movement push for these “homestead” policies and generally draining the cities of their populations
A lot of these are going to be located in or around smaller cities or towns in the hinterland. There will certainly be a contest over urban planning, no one raised on liberal orthodoxy is going to be excited about the arrival of large multiple-family social units, but if the alternative is decline and brownfields, I think they’d accept it.
The more people you get working together and sharing things, the easier it is to “beat” the model of atomized capitalist subjects, either by saving more, or working and consuming less. As for the details, it’s more of an art than a science.
Whats the difference between this and suburbs?
Suburbs have minimal planning, little space set aside for collective use, individually-owned plots that reify the reactionary worldview of a war of all against all.
Shared spaces, higher density, real estate held by a land trust instead of individuals, fewer cars by an order of magnitude… everything is different from a standard suburb. Possibly even arcology- I dream about acquiring 10 contiguous city lots just 2 miles from the city center and slapping a small version of the Karl-Marx-Hof on them.
It’s not the be-all-end-all of revolutionary organizing, but it addresses some of the biggest frictions that minimize how much working class people can increase their ability to act.
Why don’t communist push for these “homestead” policies? They seem doable
Historically, Marxists have had an emphasis on building revolutionary political parties (especially vanguard parties), as well as expanding labor union participation and militancy.
Full-fledged communes can be fragile in many ways. Some can end up tearing apart under their own internal pressures, some rural communes especially can become permanently isolated and unable to sustain new generations, and some high-profile communes can be outwardly antagonistic enough to the state that they get raided or bombed. There are questions of stability that have plagued past communal movements, but I think we have the ability to address these questions while retaining the model. One of the trickiest challenges, IMHO, is breaking out of the reality of playing out a parallel of “socialism in one country”, or “socialism in one commune” where the concerns end at the boundaries of the commune.
Some Marxists might see communizing as “something that happens after the social discontinuity of revolution”, or view the process as a form of incrementalism, or possibly even see questions of lifestyle as a liberal endeavor, especially if it involves accruing capital to set up the commune. Many Marxists would probably assert that the state would quickly neutralize any commune that began to pose a threat to capital accumulation. Thus the makeup of communes in the past generation or two has been predominantly anarchists.
But I see the party, the union (or the worker’s cooperative), and the commune as mutually supportive aspects of a successful communist movement, and which should naturally have a substantial amount of continuity amongst them. I would say that state repression can be leveraged against any of these, and that the commune is an effective way of developing a revolutionary support base while also directly benefitting proles’ lives in the here and now.
Makes sense so with Americas fall to fascism all but inevitable at this point what can communists do?
That is an extremely broad question. When applied to just communizing, the answer is kind of self-explanatory: find safety in numbers, pick your battles where you know lots of people are ready to rally to your side (like what we’ve seen in LA and Chicago), stick to lower-profile ways of expanding/recruiting, practice dissimulation if necessary.