Does anyone have the list for the members of the 3rd Internationale anti-colonial committee?
The Widening Gyre: The Great War and the Remaking of Europe
- Thread starter Curby
- Start date
- Timeline Post-1900
PrognosticHannya
Far Too Enthusiastic About Etymology
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- She/Her
Love the chapter! Sad there's no UN equivalent to de-escalate tensions, with nukes on the horizon.
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- They/Them
It was certainly never going to happen as far as accepting the Imperial rule. Rosa Luxemburg's entire idea of political economy rested in part on the idea that the Capitalists needed their colonies or capitalism would be kaput.
Besides the fact that she genuinely believed this, turning away from it would be betraying her general political line and looking both weak and not like the powerhouse intellectual she saw herself as.*
*She had quite the ego, understandably enough as a woman who was one of the first who got a Doctorate in Political Economy.
Besides the fact that she genuinely believed this, turning away from it would be betraying her general political line and looking both weak and not like the powerhouse intellectual she saw herself as.*
*She had quite the ego, understandably enough as a woman who was one of the first who got a Doctorate in Political Economy.
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Wouldn't it be a League of Nations equivalent, considering the era? Besides, nukes are still twenty to thirty years in the future and wouldn't become a credible apocalyptic threat for another decade or two after. They've got plenty of time to find out how to de-escalate.
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I think this is meant to be northwestern? Northeastern France would be on the border with Germany.
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- India
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Yeah, that's what's being referred to
An exchange of some territory on the Swiss border for some other territory on the northeast flank of France, from Calais to Strasbourg
The reasoning seems pretty straightforward — Red Burgundy seems like it's largely rural and peasant, while the northeast of France is prime Industrial territory
It makes sense that socialists would want to switch the former with the latter.
I think the Brits are just scared that if the Reds get enough coastal territory — say, some territory around Calais — on the Northeast, they could attack and easily capture *their* ports on the English channel...an outcome which they naturally consider greatly undesirable
That was my take, at least
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Pempelune
Fanfiction Deep State
Thats's what @QTesseract is saying though, the Atlantic coast is in the northwest, not in the northeast. Burgundy is in the northeast, Calais is in the northwest.
I think people have different ideas of what "northeastern France" means. I'm not french, but to me, "northeastern france" refers to a diagonal strip of land from Calais to Alsace, basically Hauts de France and Grand Est on a modern map. In this conception "northwestern France" is Normandy and Brittany. Thats probably not quite what was meant in the update, but terms like those are vague and can cause confusion.
Curby
recovering analytic philosopher, still sensitive
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To clarify, this is pretty much what I meant, but I will specify my terms in the post because it's clear that the language was vague!
The Interregnum Era: 1925-1945
New
Curby
recovering analytic philosopher, still sensitive
- Location
- Most Serene Republic of Unwashed Brooklyn
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- He/They
The Interregnum Era: 1925-1945
The Restless Decades
The Restless Decades
And so we have come to the new world. And with sudden, violent force it strikes us: how could we have ever lived in the old? We were as children then, full of a quiet piety, a child-like faith in the world as it was, and now the hard knowledge has come to us of the reality of things. We look back and say: alas, what naivete, what simple and good-natured idiocy!
But wait, I fear I have got it all mixed up, for it is in the present that we are full of fantastical ideas, it is now that the future lies frighteningly and stirringly open, and if we once lived as adults, assuming the fixity of all around us, now we are liable to fear that glancing askew at our surroundings will make them dissolve. All that is solid has melted into air, and men labor upon the most strange and wondrous crafts to navigate the universal uncertainty. We have all become children again, impatiently awaiting what is to come, anxious and eager that we may play some part in it.
-Heinrich Mann
The triumph of bolshevism in Europe has unleashed a spirit of mad philosophizing, theorizing, and politicking amongst the common man. All education, good breeding, racial distinction, and other hierarchies of rank have come to count for nothing. Each man invents his own theory of the world from cloth. Authority is universally distrusted. One cannot campaign for a local seat without being asked to justify the entire social order. This disease affects even men utterly immunized from socialism, and it is coming to also influence an increasing number of the gentler sex. The refusal to reconcile with broader society is expressed in a vast and disconcerting array of utopian schemes, fantastical films, and bizarre religious sects. The present state of things cannot persist in such a state of universal and constant upheaval.
-Winston Churchill
Nobody can doubt that the temper of our present age is democratic. We have only to ask: what new mad gods shall the mass unleash? And what brutal imaginings shall be dreamt up by "men of rank" as they attempt to beguile their restless inferiors?
-HL Mencken
The women, the homosexual, the migrant and the outcast…all have suddenly burst into the public sphere after centuries in which they were trod underfoot. Not just amongst us socialists, but even among the English and the Spanish nations one hears of such groups at last pressing their rightful claims to recognition. And if many still remain alarmed about the pace of such change, we must remember that we are still in the process of remaking ourselves to be fit for the new era of socialism, and that all old stereotypes and prejudices are but the remnants of an old world which will only fetter the present one. Who knows what buried revelations, what great feats of humanity, shall be vouchsafed once all peoples are permitted full entrance into our new socialist civilization?
-Kurt Weill
In a quite curious manner, it appears that the main adversaries of the Great War have both come out victorious. Not only has Germany been enlarged, but with a prostrate France and a friendly Russia, it has quite little to fear from its neighbors, and has achieved one form of the cherished mitteleuropa idea. And Britain, though battered at every point, has somehow found its empire enlarged and the naval might of its potential continental rivals contained through its Alliance with America. Naturally, this is not what one will hear when one consults the powers themselves: even speaking in this manner, in fact, will lead to accusations that one has not really entered into the 20th century. And even now, the main powers of each bloc dispute amongst themselves, though one must fervently hope that such conflicts will remain in the realm of words and diplomatic notes.
-Unknown American Diplomatic Official
What is it, you may ask, that binds together this grand Anglo-Mohammaden trusteeship over the earth? The religious zeal of the Moslem peoples find its counterpart in the commonsense patriotism and christian charity of the Englishman; both are rooted in time and tradition, mistrustful of pagan experiments in social engineering, and desiring nothing more than to keep faith with those time-honored principles which stretch back to antiquity. The solemn ties of custom, the bonds of locality and place, the trust in plain-spoken instinct, intuition, and rightful authority - the political union of the English and Mohammaden is based principally upon such common values, which we shall tirelessly defend together. God willing, they will triumph over this fallen age, but until then, we shall not consider any sundering of the present union.
-Richard Haldane
This man saved Germany in its time of need! German, do not shirk your debt: sign up with the permanent militia, and one day you may assist in the liberation of the east!
-Permanent Militia recruiting poster, Germany, depicting Sikh-Indian soldier.
To the East, then! There the mass of suffering humanity labors under the yoke of capitalist despotism. From Algiers to Cape Town, from Cairo to Batavia, the toiling people of the world are subjected to a regime of unimaginable cruelty and unfreedom. No man with a conscience can justify to himself the outrages perpetrated daily to subdue half the globe. No man with a sense of historical logic can doubt: the present state of things cannot continue indefinitely, the global proletariat will not surrender itself to bourgeois oppression in perpetuity.
-Georg Lukacs.
We have left the era of high imperialism and entered the age of late imperialism. Even the colonial powers now govern the earth in the name of democracy and "trusteeship". But make no mistake: theirs is a language of knaves. Their promises of independence and self-rule come with a fatal rider: the supremacy of American capital and British manufacture, and the permanent economic enslavement of the "freed" peoples. They intend to turn entire nations into proletarian wage-slaves, and then claim that they have thereby done us a service.
-W.E.B. Du Bois
The Independence of oppressed nations must not just mean independence from the rule of imperialism and finance-capital, but also the right to seek their own path of development. The construction of a genuinely African and Asiatic socialism must be left, first and foremost, to the peoples of Africa and Asia. IntRevMar would do well to keep this in mind.
-George Padmore
One hears much today of "African" and "Asiatic" socialism, terms rendered almost meaningless by their abstractness. If one means merely the self-determination of the African and Asian peoples and their inclusion in the family of socialist nations, there is little to object to. If, however, the speaker intends to claim that the culture of the people of east and south must require some wholly different pathway to socialism, and that these oppressed people should build their society free from the influence of their brethren in Europe, then this manner of national-cultural chauvinism must be rebuked in the strongest terms, not least because it recapitulates the imperialist stereotype of the tribal, backwards native…
-C.L.R. James
Excerpts from The Age of Revolution: A History of the 20th Century, Wolfgang Mommsen (Zurich: Axel Springer Press, 1998)
…The two decades between the First and Second Revolutionary Era is known today as the Interregnum Era. Few historical parallels exist for these twenty frenetic years. In certain respects, their millenarian utopianism and high-pitched ideological combat resembled the first decades of the Protestant Reformation, while their rapid pace of social and economic change came close to the hectic 1870s and 1880s, when a world-wide depression of agricultural prices fuelled industrialization. In their extraordinary effusion of new aesthetic and cultural forms, they mimic the heyday of European Romanticism and the Dutch golden age. The self-conscious attempts to remold the global order among the world's leading powers, however, is more comparable to the 15-year Napoleonic era, albeit with less direct warfare and bloodshed.
Of course, rarely have such variegated developments all simultaneously cohabited a single era. The consequence was the so-called Interregnum Mentalite, an attitude of both uncertainty and openness toward the future. Perhaps the most compelling analysis came from the Hungarian-German sociologist Karl Mannheim, who understood the interregnum era to mark a fundamental break in Western conceptions of temporality. Previously, Mannheim argued, western civilization was in thrall to a liberal conception of empty, homogeneous, and linear time, in which the future more or less resembled the past in its fundamental, qualitative characteristics. The future was merely expected to be a place of continued, gradual progress; the past, meanwhile, was in large part a benighted and lost time, though it might be mined for the forerunners to the present age. The Great War and Revolutionary Era which followed it decisively shattered this conception of time; for the liberals who greeted it with nothing but horror, it became impossible to conceive of the future as merely an improved extension of the present. The compression of revolutionary upheaval in such a short span of time made it difficult to conceive of time as an empty container divorced from what actually filled it. Einstein's discovery of relativity in the early 1920s granted a scientific imprimatur to what was, in reality, a series of changes in people's lived experience.
Even before the Great War, the counter-hegemonic, socialist temporality had a more ruptural and less linear character, though it shared with its liberal counterpart the belief in a better future. Yet if the essential rudiments of this doctrine remained not only intact but bolstered by the events of the past decade, many of its outlying supports were drawn into question. After all, traditional Marxist theory had relatively little to say about war; few predicted that global war would issue so directly in global revolution. The proletariat had, moreover, not taken power in two of the most advanced industrial nations, America and Britain. While the doctrinaire and the dedicated believed fervently in the coming world revolution, the vast majority held faith in the socialist project of their own nation but shared the uncertainty about what might come next for the world. The felt experience of time reshaped traditional socialist dogma.
The future was, in short, a place in which anything might happen. Time could speed up and slow down - and few knew what its rules and mechanics might be. The new mentality is evidenced in such mundane facts as the rate of savings, which never reached its pre-war levels during the Interregnum Era. Fearing war or social revolution, individuals held onto the money that they had. Few believed that the world as presently constituted would last long, and change become internalized as the new norm. Even reactionary efforts to resist the tide did not speak of returning to a dead and inert past, but of creating a new glorious order, freed of liberal-democratic pieties. A kind of promotheanism infected the arts and became widely dispersed throughout popular consciousness: the revolutions and the dizzying pace of social change convinced people that man and his world could be remade through acts of collective will. Against this tendency stood the lingering traumas of the war and the first revolutionary era; however, attempts to "return to normalcy", equally evident in the socialist and capitalist blocs, foundered under the weight of their own contradictions. Those who lived in the new world could not will a return to the old one.
Everywhere, change, reform, and revolution became the common watchwords of politics, and politics the stuff of daily life. The success of revolutionary socialism in Europe threw the rest of the world into a state of seemingly permanent confusion and self-doubt. The liberal centre was challenged by a resurgent right-wing, inspired by the fascist theorizing of Mussolini, Maurras, and Valois, and all the old nostrums of 19th century politics fell under sustained assault. The traditional advocates of free trade and internationalism found themselves backfooted. Across the world, the socialist revolutions unleashed political enthusiasms of innumerable varieties. Even many of the bourgeois began to abandon traditional liberalism, though they were less certain about its replacement.
None of the major powers had the desire for a new and deadlier world war, and in this there was some reassurance for the common people. Yet war and the shadow of war would not disappear so quickly from popular consciousness. The millions of demobilized veterans, conspicuous by their injuries - both physical and psychic - made this impossible. Societies struggled to reckon with the costs of the decade of fighting. Cultures of memory and remembrance frequently verged on the schizophrenic. Everywhere, fears were rampant of a "second" Great War which would eclipse the first. Literature and film which depicted this possibility in dystopic terms proliferated across both rival blocs.
It would be misleading, however, to treat the interregnum era strictly as a time of foreboding doom. The doctrine of revolutionary socialism, having established a vast beachhead throughout Eurasia, was now broadcast to every corner of the world and gained a newfound prestige. It became impossible for individuals in even the most reactionary societies to avoid engaging the work of Marx, Engels, Bakunin, and Kropotkin. The impact of the new ideas was too thoroughgoing and pronounced to be fully censored. While revolutionary agitation was suppressed, Britain's overstretched imperium simply did not have the means to regulate every corner of civil society. Neither did the fragile states in Spain and South America.
Much to the consternation of the International Union of Revolutionary Marxists, the impact of the revolutionary ideology was seldom uniform. Revolutionary socialism, an ostensibly internationalist doctrine, was typically fused in its host societies with pre-existing nationalisms, protest movements, and religious millenarianisms. Anarchist-inflected ideologies frequently outpaced their socialist counterparts, especially among the rural peasantry whose foremost desire was often to return to an imagined time before the domineering modern state. Of course, the prevalence of radical thought across the capitalist periphery - from the semi-colonial states of South America to the directly ruled areas of South and Southeast Asia - also had the effect of transforming local conditions and mentalities, looping these areas into what was, in effect, a left-wing counter-globalization. Formal communist parties and anarchist organizations aided European left-wing actors in exerting more formal influence, even if in practice the appropriation of left-wing ideas was a dialectical process in which local, popular influence often exercised a dominant role.
The new quadri-polar order granted a semblance of stability to international politics. Whatever the pretensions of both blocs to consult the voices of the lesser powers, decisions were typically made in Berlin, London, New York, and Moscow. In practice, the latter two held the most cards; Britain found itself forced to demobilize the vast majority of its army to redress remaining debts and pay the costs of colonial occupation, while the population of Germany and other Central European states initially refused to tolerate large standing armies, severely limiting their ability to project power abroad. The "Cold War" that emerged was thus waged principally between New York and Moscow, though they were each frequently forced to jockey with their own allies.
Intra-bloc tensions emerged in the middle of the 1920s, and continued until the end of the Interregnum Era. At the time, commentators liked to remark that Berlin and Moscow waged a struggle for ideological supremacy, while New York and London fought one for financial-industrial predominance. Historians have complicated this picture: Germany and Russia also struggled for economic influence in the Balkans, and the two capitalist powers strove to articulate and defend competing visions for cooperation, economic development, and decolonization. Less remarked upon but equally important were the manifold attempts of the lesser powers to assert their place in the new world-system. Brazil, China, Hungary, and Italy all made efforts to adopt their own independent line and achieve a level of insulation from the major powers, with varying success.
The Cold War took place on three territorial fronts: in the struggle for the allegiance of the neutral states, the battle for the hearts and minds of the colonized peoples, and in systematic efforts to undermine the non or semi-colonial states on the capitalist periphery. Japan emerged as the key battleground of the first front; the United States realized early on that it was absolutely essential to integrate Japan into the capitalist world-system. For its part, Japan knew that its neutrality was one of its key sources of leverage. Ironically, Japan may very well have stood in a more desirable position after losing the Sino-Japanese war than it did before embarking upon it. Radicals also found favorable terrain in South America and China, where nominally independent states struggled against semi-colonial domination. The rapid pace of economic and social development created dangerous cleavages and contradictions in these societies, and their success in making it through the forty-years crisis of capitalism was contingent upon both the perspicacity of the national leadership and the willingness of their sponsors in America and Britain to come to their aid.
For understandable reasons, the colonial front has received the most coverage in most prior historical work. The Ostwende, or "turn to the east", has become a staple of socialist historiography. There is no doubt that the socialists found conditions unusually propitious here. Contrary to stereotype, Britain was well-aware of this, and the ambitious colonial reform agendas of the 1920s were intended to address the possibility of further radical subversion. Yet with the power of British finance capital annihilated by the war and America growing increasingly wary of British intentions, the task of empire would prove more difficult than ever. The flow of subversive literature and radical ideas could not be shunted off without closing the windpipes of global commerce or embarking upon a suicidal war. The task, it was realized, would have to be one of persuasion. And yet in this age, few doubted that in the end, Imperial rule rests principally upon brute and naked force. This was something recognized by colonizers and natives alike.
We would be remiss not to discuss some of those other changes, often more subtle and less remarked upon, that transformed daily life and lent the interregnum period a wholly new cast. Over the latter half of the 1920s, the telephone began to replace the telegram in most major cities; radios entered into popular circulation, as did photography and film. This was the era not just of mass politics, but also of mass culture. This took very different forms in different places. The radio came to be a vital part of the public sphere in Italy and America, though it had a notably more varied and freewheeling character in the former nation. All of the great powers felt obliged to subsidize the creation of films, which typically had some form of propagandistic intent. Efforts toward creating photographic "art" were most popular in Germany and Russia. Advertising became ubiquitous in the capitalist sphere, and, in a very different and less commercialized form, in Northern Italy. Something akin to advertising, but instead produced by Soviets, Worker-councils, and political campaigns emerged in Northern Europe and Russia as well. This resembled advertising not so much in its logic as in its pervasive presence in the public sphere and in its attempts to persuade and convince - in this case, not to purchase a commodity, but to join a cause or enter into the politics of the new democratic institutions the nascent socialist republics were struggling to construct.
The "permanent campaign" was not, of course, solely a feature of the new socialist polities. While the socialists had perhaps invented the art, their counterparts in London, New York, Tokyo and Beijing were eager to imitate this particular innovation. "Drives" were conducted to recruit citizens into "Anti-Bolshevik Leagues" and "Patriotic Societies", and citizens instructed to be on constant lookout for red agents and spies. A similar attitude of surveillance and suspicion often held across the socialist states as well, though much of the campaignism also focused upon the enlistment of the population into the "socialist cause"; individuals were urged to participate in worker council's, union meetings, and local planning bodies. This inevitably also included military recruitment and ideologically-inflected "political education".
The semi-permenant mobilization of civil society was likely bound to eventually cause a certain backlash, especially from war-wearied populations often eager for a return to normalcy. Some of the more eclectic - and longer-lasting - artifacts of the Interregnum Era emerged from individuals trying to carve out spaces free from the claims of the state. A common thread runs through the German Wandervogel, British "return to nature" movement, and Russian "youth societies". Politically, these groups all tended toward an individualistic anarchism, though they seldom articulated this in academic or theoretical terms. They shared with the European romantics a veneration of nature as a renewing, rejuvenating source of transcendental meaning. In a different but not unrelated vein, surrealist artists and new insular, religious-mystical movements sought to induct initiates into a closed circle free from the world's travails. More conventional, mainstream religions also experienced a revival in the capitalist world, as individuals looked to forge communal bonds unmediated by the metastasizing state. Though such efforts undoubtedly contributed something to the vitality and heterogeneity of the interregnum, in the end, many of them rested upon a conservative yearning - close to a delusion - that the freight-train of modernity could be brought to a halt or exited outright. In the final years of the Interregnum Era, such presumptions were to receive a rude comeuppance.
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- Not the asylum anymore
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Ah, yes, the telephone replacing... itself.
Still, I am very interested to see where this goes.
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For a moment I wondered what the hell happened to George Lucas in this timeline. But no it's a completely different guy.
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How yoga or Buddhism or vedanta societies impacted to religious and mystic proto movements?
What is Red vatican's reactions towards non abrahamic faiths? Will it be some thing close to john Paul's stance aka Nostra aetate?
What is Red vatican's reactions towards non abrahamic faiths? Will it be some thing close to john Paul's stance aka Nostra aetate?
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Doubloon
Quelle horreur!
Great update! It's always a delight to see a new entry in this timeline, and I'm excited to see what you have in store now that the decade of total war has passed us by. I'm particularly excited for that update on mass culture this post is teasing--Old Hollywood, the German expressionists, agitprop, the birth of pulp literature, no shortage of fertile pastures to draw on.
Take care, and happy writing!
Take care, and happy writing!
Bisexual-Mart
Far from the shallow ground
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Old Hollywood? If that period is anything like IOTL, German and Russian socialists are going to consider it the high water mark of capitalist decadence.
(Look up Fatty Arbuckle for just one example.)
(Look up Fatty Arbuckle for just one example.)
QueenOfRoses
Athena Promachos
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Why do you use New York to represent America instead of well, D.C.? Is it because in-universe orthodoxy places more emphasis on the center of finance and capital of the US than well, its political capital?
Also I don't remember if you've covered this, but how's Mexico doing? The Revolution started around the time of the PoD, so ITTL it would've progressed under the aegis of a Bryanist, progressive, isolationist US and its outcome consolidated under Root's internationalist, reactionary one.
So...yeah, how's Mexico doing?
Thirdly, God I love the quotes — and on the debate in the final ones I am definitively on the side of CLR James. As expected, really.
Amazing writing, it really...captivates you as you head along, with the reader themselves ending up engrossed in this spirit of wonder, hope, uncertainty, and change you've so compellingly written
It's brilliant
Oh one last thing
The USSR was under less pressure ITTL than IOTL, something the narrative acknowledges throughout.
You mention how the Council for Peoples' Commisars and Soviet Government in general nonetheless does a soft political repression through the FRE, gerrymandering delegation sizes and using a fair bit of political repression.
(Side note: I've had questions about the strange, Red v Green civil war that occurred ITTL that I haven't really asked her, but that's for later.)
Anyway considering how it's Sverdlov who's Chairman of the CPC and presuming that he, like he did IOTL, prevents the consolidation of the party-state — which is assisted by the much milder Civil War — I'm presuming that as peace settles in, Moscow democratizes.
I do hope you go into detail about that process
And that hopefully, just like we have a constitution for the DSR (which, no offense, FSRD sounds much cooler 😛) and iirc at least an outline of how the Italian chambers of labour function, I hope you do end up releasing a similar piece about how the USSR functions politically
Edit: Just noticed that there was mood music -- inspite of not having used that while reading this installment, I definitely had echoes of that sort of music reverberating through my head.
Again, just, spectacular writing.
Also I don't remember if you've covered this, but how's Mexico doing? The Revolution started around the time of the PoD, so ITTL it would've progressed under the aegis of a Bryanist, progressive, isolationist US and its outcome consolidated under Root's internationalist, reactionary one.
So...yeah, how's Mexico doing?
Thirdly, God I love the quotes — and on the debate in the final ones I am definitively on the side of CLR James. As expected, really.
Amazing writing, it really...captivates you as you head along, with the reader themselves ending up engrossed in this spirit of wonder, hope, uncertainty, and change you've so compellingly written
It's brilliant
Oh one last thing
The USSR was under less pressure ITTL than IOTL, something the narrative acknowledges throughout.
You mention how the Council for Peoples' Commisars and Soviet Government in general nonetheless does a soft political repression through the FRE, gerrymandering delegation sizes and using a fair bit of political repression.
(Side note: I've had questions about the strange, Red v Green civil war that occurred ITTL that I haven't really asked her, but that's for later.)
Anyway considering how it's Sverdlov who's Chairman of the CPC and presuming that he, like he did IOTL, prevents the consolidation of the party-state — which is assisted by the much milder Civil War — I'm presuming that as peace settles in, Moscow democratizes.
I do hope you go into detail about that process
And that hopefully, just like we have a constitution for the DSR (which, no offense, FSRD sounds much cooler 😛) and iirc at least an outline of how the Italian chambers of labour function, I hope you do end up releasing a similar piece about how the USSR functions politically
Edit: Just noticed that there was mood music -- inspite of not having used that while reading this installment, I definitely had echoes of that sort of music reverberating through my head.
Again, just, spectacular writing.
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Curby
recovering analytic philosopher, still sensitive
- Location
- Most Serene Republic of Unwashed Brooklyn
- Pronouns
- He/They
Thank you for the kind words! Will go through these point-by-point.
There are a couple things going on here.
Firstly, as you intuited, there is more of an emphasis on economic and finance power in even capitalist historiography. This is partially the consequence of orthodox marxism exerting a much more sustained and thoroughgoing impact on the academic scene in America and England. We'll learn more about this once this TL hits the 1950s, though we still have a long way to go!
Secondly, New York is a significantly more important city ITTL than IOTL. This is largely the consequence of London losing its status as the world-financial capital twenty years early. IOTL, Britain successfully pegged its currency back to the gold standard, which helped ensure that London remained a crucial competitor to NY. ITTL, Britain is not only too broke to do this, but it would require a program of domestic austerity which is simply neither politically palatable nor in the self-interest of British industry. As a consequence, an immense amount of wealth has flown into New York in a very, very short period of time. The deflation which came with the depression has only made it a more desirable location to put one's money.
I can assure you that the Mexican Revolution has been placed under responsible trusteeship! Right now, the leaders of the revolution have consolidated their control over the country and agreed to conciliation and compromise with the United States. After all, what other option is there?
I would say more, but I will eventually have an entry out on Mexico, Central America, and South America during the Interregnum years, and would prefer to avoid spoiling too much.
I'm actually intending on writing three full-length posts on internal developments in Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union; they each will travel very different pathways to socialism. There, I'll go into much more detail there about the way that these new political and social institutions actually function in practice. There are going to be quite varied efforts to build "socialist democracy", some more successful than others. We'll eventually get some entries in political philosophy and comparative political theory analyzing some of the key differences between socialist and liberal democracies from the perspective of the inhabitants of this time-line.
As for the Soviet Union itself, I will simply say this: don't assume that the consolidation of a party-state and the achievement of worker's control and democratization have to be antithetical developments. The party-state has already come into existence - the process of "liberalization" discussed in prior posts wasn't the party-state deliberately weakening itself so much as it was the party-state feeling sufficiently secure to open itself up to popular pressure. In certain respects, at least, the party's subsumption of civil society will be even more totalizing ITTL.
There are a couple things going on here.
Firstly, as you intuited, there is more of an emphasis on economic and finance power in even capitalist historiography. This is partially the consequence of orthodox marxism exerting a much more sustained and thoroughgoing impact on the academic scene in America and England. We'll learn more about this once this TL hits the 1950s, though we still have a long way to go!
Secondly, New York is a significantly more important city ITTL than IOTL. This is largely the consequence of London losing its status as the world-financial capital twenty years early. IOTL, Britain successfully pegged its currency back to the gold standard, which helped ensure that London remained a crucial competitor to NY. ITTL, Britain is not only too broke to do this, but it would require a program of domestic austerity which is simply neither politically palatable nor in the self-interest of British industry. As a consequence, an immense amount of wealth has flown into New York in a very, very short period of time. The deflation which came with the depression has only made it a more desirable location to put one's money.
I can assure you that the Mexican Revolution has been placed under responsible trusteeship! Right now, the leaders of the revolution have consolidated their control over the country and agreed to conciliation and compromise with the United States. After all, what other option is there?
I would say more, but I will eventually have an entry out on Mexico, Central America, and South America during the Interregnum years, and would prefer to avoid spoiling too much.
I'm actually intending on writing three full-length posts on internal developments in Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union; they each will travel very different pathways to socialism. There, I'll go into much more detail there about the way that these new political and social institutions actually function in practice. There are going to be quite varied efforts to build "socialist democracy", some more successful than others. We'll eventually get some entries in political philosophy and comparative political theory analyzing some of the key differences between socialist and liberal democracies from the perspective of the inhabitants of this time-line.
As for the Soviet Union itself, I will simply say this: don't assume that the consolidation of a party-state and the achievement of worker's control and democratization have to be antithetical developments. The party-state has already come into existence - the process of "liberalization" discussed in prior posts wasn't the party-state deliberately weakening itself so much as it was the party-state feeling sufficiently secure to open itself up to popular pressure. In certain respects, at least, the party's subsumption of civil society will be even more totalizing ITTL.
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- Location
- Fort Worth, TX
What are plans for South Asia?
Now that an "interwar period" has set in, what happened to the Philippine insurgency? Is it ongoing or has the conflict been "contained" as I don't see the fighting completely ceasing due to myriad peasant revolts OTL and the Philippines never getting its promise of independence.
Curby
recovering analytic philosopher, still sensitive
- Location
- Most Serene Republic of Unwashed Brooklyn
- Pronouns
- He/They
The insurgency is indeed ongoing, particularly among the Moro people and some of the peasants of Luzon. The United States has not reneged on the promise of independence granted under Bryan, but has "extended" the time-frame.
There are many plans for South Asia. As has already been hinted, South and Southeast Asia will be very, very important to the fate of the global revolutionary movement. I don't want to reveal more than that, though I'm very happy to answer questions about what's going on in different nations at the present moment, or what specific individuals are up to.
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- They/Them
I know it's classic obsession/etc with a single heroic figure who doesn't actually matter THAT much, but DID Zapata get got in this version of events?
Curby
recovering analytic philosopher, still sensitive
- Location
- Most Serene Republic of Unwashed Brooklyn
- Pronouns
- He/They
Emiliano Zapata is, in fact, presently living in a villa just outside the Umbrian steel town of Terni, where he has become an important figure in the local anarchist/socialist-controlled Chamber of Labour. He managed to flee into Central America after Carranza inflicted several defeats on his guerilla army in early 1919. In 1920, sympathetic Spanish anarchists helped him book a ocean liner to Italy under a false identity. He has since learned Italian and is one of the editors of a Spanish-language radical journal which is syndicated in Argentina, Chile, and Central America, as well as a military advisor to the Italian Worker and Peasant's Militia.
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Oh huh! That's interesting! It makes sense that that's the direction he'd go, though obviously IOTL his ideological path is kinda muddled if very clearly, like, Left-adjacent/capitalism-skeptical.[1]
But then, him not exactly being a doctrinaire communist (or Anarchist either for that matter) is probably if anything helpful in terms of matching and understanding/etc the forms and presentation of radicalism that would appeal in Central America, etc.
[1] There's other things going on here OTL, like a clear, like, second-hand Anarchist inflection or so on, so I'm simply saying that it's more complicated than a simple answer.
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Something tells me America will have their own socialist uprising when the Second revolutionary era comes