That reminds me, I could be forgetting but I don't think TTL Chomsky has been mentioned yet. I can certainly see him as still being a great political philosopher but I wonder if it might be interesting to have a version of Chomsky who, in the absence of an American capitalist society to critique, mostly focuses his career on analytic philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science? (although on second thought, the guy is definitely on the wrong side of history when it comes to linguistics lol)
He was mentioned in the old semi-canon post about the Social Ecology Union and his role in founding it.
I have personal plans on Chomsky's ideological development and his role in founding that organization. A lot of it is going to look like a synthesis of Gilles Dauve, Kohei Sato and Murray Bookchin. Eco-Marxist communization, basically.
Chomsky grew up a militant anarcho-communist but became more critical of American foreign policy and became closer to peace anarchists. He'll eventually became alienated from them as well and by the time he wrote "American Power and the New Mandarins", he's already a "Marxist".
Murray Bookchin, as Aelita already decreed, is going to remain in the Liberation Communist Fraction. He didn't experience the same alienation from Marxism and anarchism that his OTL counterpart did. He did develop most of the same stuff, though, but he sees them best applied not through "libertarian municipalism" but through the existing structure of soviet councils and congresses. Liberation being the party closer to the ideas of Paul Mattick became a permanent home for him.
I envisaged an original Social Ecology fraction remaining with Liberation along with Bookchin. That's missing in the old update.
Bookchin's "social ecology" is going to be widely embraced throughout the spectrum that the "Chomskyites" decided to borrow the term and use it as the name of the new organization.
Bookchin will accuse Chomsky of being a "modernizer" in the process though but it's not going to be bad blood.
Sorry, I might have missed that in the timeline. Do you mind pointing out where it says that Lenin did those things? If that's the established canon, then fine I guess. But even if Lenin did proclaim any affinity for DeLeon that doesn't necessarily imply he will be accepted by American socialists and officially made part of doctrine (he is already, I just don't believe that he occupies a visible position as you imagine). I am sure that he will be revered and honored by socialists throughout the world, however.
Lenin said it IOTL to a letter to someone whose name I can't remember. This was written in this link that you can read.
Witness to a century : encounters with the noted, the notorious, and the three SOBs : Seldes, George, 1890-1995 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
The bigger presence of the SLP meant that Lenin might more publicly associated himself with the ideas of DeLeon, at least for show, and establish closer relationship with people like Eugene Debs, which is not impossible. He is well-aware of Debs' work and advocacy. Meanwhile, Debs wrote Lenin in 1922 IOTL about his disapproval of the Bolsheviks' execution of dissidents.
You also underestimate the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution in this time period and are looking at this from a more distant 21st century American exceptionalist lens of OTL, even with the bigger 1917 that is 1933.
I understand the reflex of distancing American communism from its "more authoritarian" counterpart given the history that we know but it just doesn't look that way this early in the timeline.
I think the most important thing to explain all of this from a Doylist perspective is the fact that two of the Troika that co-writes most of Reds! are left communists with positions that align or overlap with the positions of the International Communist Party and its off-shoots rather than with councilists of Mattick, KAPD. That should inform you about how their/faer views permeate in terms of how the timeline looks over the years since its AH dot com days. It just doesn't look like it because they played very little role in those outdated American political party posts in the past. One of the members of the old Troika who just returned recently, Illuminatus, was also a former leftcom.
I am also not speaking of this as a casual "Marxist-Leninist" so I hope we are just having a good conversation and not doing casual reflexive gestures of dismissal of anything that screams "Russia" or "Bolshevik".
I don't contest that the WCPA or even "Marxism-DeLeonism" wasn't influenced by the Russian Revolution, Lenin or Bolshevik-Leninism. Absolutely, you're right. But from my reading of the timeline, it seemed to me that American socialism succeeded and evolved mainly on its own and not entirely because of practical innovations they borrowed from other countries. I do believe these borrowings were necessary and helpful, but I don't believe that makes "Marxism-Leninism-DeLeonism" in the grand way that you envisage, actually a thing.
You are speaking of two contradictory things in the same sentence here. You can't say that Marxism-DeLeonism was influenced by the Bolsheviks while saying American socialism also evolved independently on its own. The 1918 General Strike and the Biennio Rosso wouldn't exist without the Bolshevik Revolution. The UASR wouldn't exist without the USSR.
I think the reason why it's not apparent to a lot of people including yourself is because it's not being made apparent by the main people who co-created the timeline but make no mistake that Lenin can be found all over the place in this timeline, far more than DeLeon. DeLeon's work has been finished by 1934. His vanguard party, which doesn't even look like the same one that he died on leading, succeeded in getting elected to bourgeois government and then do a general strike (it almost failed to do the latter, though). At the end of it, the form of government that was established is not a DeLeonist industrial republic as he envisioned but a form of government closer to the Soviet Constitution of 1924.
There's a reason why DeLeon died earlier in
Reds! than in real life. It is by design. I was told of this. DeLeon's and Debs' roles in this story is to keep an American socialist movement intact going into 1917. But they're not going to take the movement to a revolutionary point. That's not their role in the story.
Some people here would talk about the visible impact of labor unions (the Solidary Federation) in the current structure of government and their presence (a form of syndicalism) but they don't even know how to elaborate on it. I can do it myself if you want but I assure you, it's nothing but a supplementary role, not a primary one.
No thank you to this kind of historiography ... American socialism learned how to fight and survive in the red biennium, don't forget that. I object to this great man style historiography.
A bad historiography or not (it is bad), this is not something that will just disappear because there's "American socialism", whatever that is. We'll see this expressed more by Western Europeans, I'm sure. American communists ITTL have their own reflexive attitude in dismissing things like this. They don't like "isms" associated with "great socialist thinkers" anyway. That's already established.
Well, a "ideological unification" has yet to be 'officially screamed out' in the canon as far as I know, but I would support future thinkers in Reds! reinterpreting the Leningrad Treaty and its effects to be such an ideological unification.
The Leningrad Treaty has nothing to do with this (a treaty of economic integration and military alliance) and there's no "ideological unification". However, if you missed this, there's a party school called the "Institute for Scientific Socialism". They're the best candidate to create an Americanized codification and ideological canon similar to what the Soviet Union did.
That is definitely an interesting historiographical take which I wager will happen. But as for what I actually think of it? I think it's entirely too oversimplified and like OTL will be either at best a lie or at worst damn communist movements to failure for mechanically applying the formula 1-1 everywhere. In my heart of hearts, both Marxism-Leninism and Marxism-DeLeonism are trite. Really. Very trite. Even Marxism-Leninism-DeLeonism. What's wrong with ideological innovation and differentiating yourself? What's wrong with finding a new formula, that works for your use-case?
Like boy, all this really is just political lip service (which it was OTL tbh, and that principle is the same reason Marxist philosophy was doomed in the USSR -- see the problem of diamat that Francis K mentioned)
I'm not sure what you are talking about here as if we are looking at it from a mid-1930s view.
What I said is just an analysis of what's already happening in the timeline. It's a Doylist view from our vantage point looking at the 1930s when the timeline is already at 1943.
It's not something that "will happen". It has already happened. So it's just fair to look at it from certain OTL comparisons for "differentiation" and "distinction" that you're probably looking for.
And why do you want an overly complicated abstract philosophical explanation over something that can be "overlysimplified" explained historiographically? And what formula are you suggesting that I'm applying?
This doesn't make any sense to me at all.
I don't think that's a fair comparison.
To begin with, Marxism-DeLeonism was never a splinter off the ML geneaological line, it developed on its own. I will not contest again, that it borrowed from Marxism-Leninism, just as the other has. Whether there has been an ideological unification is entirely down to future Reds! events (and I doubt there will be an official, major, world-encompassing unification). Damn man, they don't have to be seen as heresies in Reds!, and don't forget that Mao went to great lengths to distance himself and Maoism from ML and the USSR. He was part of the Sino-Soviet split just as much as Khrushchev. In Reds!, there is nothing like that happening, on the contrary, the opposite is in fact happening with the UASR going to great lengths to support the Soviet Union.
Does that mean they have become one in thought? No.
Again, please stop with the casual dismissal reflexive gesturing surrounding the Soviets/Bolsheviks.
Marxism-DeLeonism OTL "developed on its own". It never even borrowed from "Marxism-Leninism" IOTL. It's so insular of a movement that there's just no interaction.
We are talking about ITTL. This is not the same "DeLeonism" that many people are thinking about. It's one thing to accept the idea that it's not the same, but I don't think most people thought about how it is not the same.
At the same time, this is not an attempt to create a Red ideological monolith or "ideological unification". We are talking about conditions of the 1930s and 1940s.
If you want to think about it this way, the codification of "Marxism-Leninism-DeLeonism" by the Workers' Party establishment can be seen as an attempt to explain how different 1933 is from 1917. But this is definitely not about countries. We are not doing a "tale of the tape" boxing match here.
This is also about making you and others realize that we're trying to create distance between the UASR and the USSR here when none exists. The two countries are different, sure, but let's stop doing something that the Troika has already stopped doing years ago in comparing these two countries and to think that they're so different when they're not while being so overly conscious and careful about this given our preconceived biases about OTL's USSR. Please stop being "American exceptionalist" about this.
This is communist internationalism. I don't know if this is ripples of Cold War anti-communist conditioning that got passed through generations or part of the current anti-Russian sentiment and environment that we live in but this is probably subconscious at this point. Let's be careful about this.
