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.


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.