I’ve been looking for ways to weaken the United States from the inside and I wonder what you guys think of U.S. secession movements. How much emphasis should be placed on them? How should people go about them? I’ve been thinking about this for a few years. I suppose I would meet up at a secessionist group and talk about Parenti’s work.
Secession by any part of the United States would be unequivocally a good thing. All in-fighting and division in the imperial core is good insofar as it weakens the empire. No matter by who or how it happens.
Whether it is realistic is another question. At the moment the material conditions are probably not there yet and any overt involvement with secessionist activities on the part of socialists would be tactically unwise.
Secessionism would give the government an easy excuse to declare your group criminal and imprison you. Let the right wing be the ones who push for it. They get much more leeway from the state for this sort of thing.
I think this is good analysis. Would this apply to germany leaving the eu, nato, etc as well? Imo the same logic could be used here to push for making the main vasall state as dysfunctional as possible.
Only a balkanised imperial core is a good imperial core. /s
Probably not the right time yet, as the core is still strong enough.
Yes and no. The analysis for Germany leaving the EU and NATO is different because that is something that socialists can and should be openly advocating for. For one thing it’s not a crime (yet). There is precedent with Brexit as far as leaving the EU. And the EU is already fairly unpopular and getting more and more unpopular with working class people. The same goes for opposition to NATO. That is something that already exists and that many people are receptive to, both on the left and the right.
I believe most people who are not ideologically hardened liberal-imperialists can be convinced, they can understand NATO is a warmongering organization. We can point to the example of the bombing of Serbia, Libya, or to NATO deliberately provoking and prolonging the war in Ukraine. The Ukraine war is not as popular with the average person as the liberal media makes it seem, especially working class people who don’t see the point and don’t necessarily buy into the ideological crusade aspect of it.
We can also point to how NATO is a protection racket. It forces countries into wasting resources on military spending that could be spent on education, infrastructure, social security. “Your tax money is being given away to weapons manufacturers instead of being used for your pension, your roads or your kid’s school” is something that especially those who are already somewhat skeptical of whether the system really works in their favor can understand and instinctively feel is true.
It is easy to argue that the EU is undemocratic (the right has already shown that this argument works), that power is held by unelected bureaucrats who enforce a tyrannical rule by decree, but as socialists we can also point out how it is a fundamentally neoliberal and exploitative institution, how being in it prevents states from controlling their own economy. The EU and NATO rob countries of their sovereignty. Again this is something that working class people can understand and agree with.
It is much harder to make the argument for balkanizing a state that ostensibly has democratic elections, that people identify with in terms of their sense of national and cultural identity, than it is to argue against membership in organizations that most people don’t really identify with or have that kind of cultural attachment to. Of course there are also a lot of liberals who do have an attachment to the EU, the “true believers”, but as Brexit has shown, they are not a majority.
As socialists we need to take an open anti-EU and anti-NATO stance and make this one of the top priorities in our agenda. We can and should agitate against these imperialist institutions at every opportunity, emphasizing how they hurt working class people, but also when necessary not shy away from the national sovereignty argument. If we don’t do this we just cede this ground to the right, who are always adept at exploiting the growing popularity of anti-establishment sentiment for their own nefarious purposes.
There are a few secessionist movements that we should support, such as Scottish independence and of course Irish reunification, but on the whole i don’t think it’s in the best interest of socialists in Europe to get involved with this sort of thing. Hypothetically, if Bavaria decided to secede or if East Germany were re-established, it wouldn’t hurt and i don’t think socialists should fight it, but a) it’s wildly unrealistic at the moment, and b) it would not do nearly as much good as the US, EU or NATO breaking up, and it’s those last two that should be our focus.
In fact, more and more i think that the EU and NATO are the primary contradiction that we as European socialists are facing. It will be impossible to make any real progress toward socialism until we have liberated ourselves from them.
Here’s what I mean when i say that the right is unfortunately ahead of the curve compared to most of the European left on the issue of the EU. This is from a pretty conservative account so the framing is right wing but the core of the analysis is not wrong:
The EU is nothing but a facilitating structure of the United States, tasked with upholding the post-WW2 power architecture and preserving American dominance on the European continent—along with everything that comes with it.
As long as the EU exists in its current form, Europe will never be sovereign or capable of charting its own destiny.
It will remain an afterthought of the American Empire, bending over in the most masochistic way imaginable to maintain a global order built on a neutered Europe—one that solely benefits the U.S.
The problem with the EU is that it’s a fake concept at its core.
There is no such thing as a “European people” or a shared “European identity.”
There are French, German, Italian, Spanish, Austrian, Czech, Polish peoples—with their own cultures, histories, and values.
None of these are respected under the EU’s increasingly authoritarian, top-down structure.
The EU attempts to force in decades what takes centuries to grow organically.
It suppresses national identity, culture, and pride, and tries instead to instill a plastic liberal ideology and a hollow, universalist cultural template that not a single European truly believes in.
The EU is modeled too closely on imperial Rome—one rule, top-down, comply or be crushed.
It tries to manufacture a unity that doesn’t exist—at least not in this form.
https://xcancel.com/DlugajJuly/status/2008202267342909866
Of course the prescribed “solution” of restoring the HRE is batshit crazy right wing nonsense, but the point is that they correctly identify the inherent unsustainability of the EU project as it currently exists.
And by being the only ones (with the rare exception of socialists like ourselves who are only a very small fraction of the broader left) who are pointing out that the project does not actually serve the interests of European people, and by at least in part correctly diagnosing the problem (while of course, because they are not socialists, omitting actual class analysis such as pointing out how the EU serves capitalist interests first and foremost) rather than going along with the liberal establishment’s “just close your eyes and ears and pretend like everything is fine” approach, like the broad mass of socdems in Europe do, the right wing gain legitimacy and support from a not inconsiderable segment of the working class (in addition to the petite bourgeoisie to whom this analysis is most appealing) for their reactionary agenda.
The task of socialists is to reframe this critique from a progressive and class based rather than reactionary nationalistic perspective. The reason many on the right want to leave the EU is because they feel it doesn’t allow them to be as racist as they want.
The reason why we want to leave the EU is because we recognize that the EU is itself a racist and colonial institution that serves capital and empire and crushes the working class with neoliberalism, militarism and austerity.
Yes. Just be extremely careful because plotting for secession is very illegal.
Not really.
For one thing there is basically no real domestic support for secession anywhere in the U.S. The only people who want to secede and have the power to make that happen are bourgeois politicians who will just set up their own microfascist states should they become independent - which they absolutely won’t. The only military force a state has is the National Guard whose loyalty would be a toss up and thus unreliable. They’d have to rely almost entirely on mercenaries and boogaloo boys which the U.S. military would annihilate without breaking a sweat. Even if all the military assets in the state went rogue it’d still be a one-sided battle that would be over faster than the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.
Secondly balkanizing the empire is, uh, not good. The amount of death and suffering that follows balkanization is genuinely horrific. We saw this with Yugoslavia and the USSR. It won’t just affect former US territory either but also spill over into neighboring countries. Better to bring down the whole settler-colonial project at once and replace it with a socialist state than to break it up bit by bit.
The only good thing a secessionist movement in the US would do is destabilize the empire, which in turn would weaken its power projection, but the immediate effects would be too short term to have a major impact and the long term effects would be too subtle to matter either. The only way secession would truly ruin the US permanently is if it was a full-blown secession of like half the country, like a repeat of the Civil War, which is definitely not going to happen in the foreseeable future.
There’s no real political viability for secessionism in the current political climate whether for the proletariat or the bourgeoisie and any secession that would happen will very likely be right-wing or far right. A socialist revolution is unironically more likely at this point, which is saying quite a bit.
Thanks for your analysis. I will take that into account. In this case, I will educate and organize around socialist causes foremost, and leave alone secession.
I’m not really sure how much of an effect that would be, isn’t the Texan secessionist movement is just a joke that no one takes seriously? In my personal understanding, Texas and some other secessionist movements aren’t really about seceding, its more about dick measuring nationalist supremacy contest withing America itself, but when it comes to fighting some “other” enemy from the outside, like bombing browns, all Americans will happily unite. You can correct me if I’m wrong, I’d like to learn more.
I can’t claim to be deeply informed on the topic of Cascadian separatism, and I haven’t dug into the truth behind these claims, but I’ve heard that:
- the area is very white
- there are white nationalist movements that have co-opted or been the source of pushes for secession
If anyone has sources for/against these claims, I’d be interested in reading more.
That’s my current, limited understanding.
Edit: There are lots of different answers:
Yes.
unequivocally a good thing. … Whether it is realistic is another question.
I’m not really sure how much of an effect that would be
Not really.
I suppose this is a good thing, because since there is undecided territory, that means an answer can be formulated. It is best to think tactically. Ultimately, material conditions have first to be met, and the population doesn’t seem to want it outside of small groups. Secession should not be pursued before there is a solid grasp of Marxism-Leninism by the general population and sufficent progress toward a worker’s revolution, if at all.
EDIT: I meant the plurality of different answers on this is a good thing, not secession.
