So how come communism never took hold in the south...

Yes and this is a further proof that Marx is wrong. The proletariat rejected the revolution. All so-called socialist revolutions were peasant and anti-colonial revolts.

Pretty much. Marxist-lennism offered an alternative path of modernization to liberalism and was more popular in nations with a history of collectivism (which is most of them). The only exceptions are Japan, really. which was occupied by USA and de facto corporatist.

I wish I was in the land of cotton,
Old times there are not forgotten;
Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land.
In Dixie’s Land where I was born in,
Early on one frosty mornin,
Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land.

>why didn't a fiercely independently-minded Bible Belt embrace an atheistic collectivist socio-economic system

CPUSA made huge inroads among Black and white Alabamans near Birmingham during the 30s, scaring both government and the Ku Klux Klan.

The New Deal, the war draft, and increased civic violence against communists quashed the party's long term success.

That doesn't prove Marx wrong at all. His only failure was inability to account for the degree to which western governments would repress labor organization.

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No, my zealot friend. In Marx's mind the proletarian was the inevitable, irresistible outcome of history, and it was to begin in the developed industrialized nations. He considered peasants reactionary petty bourgeois. He would lauhg at the notion that the revolution would start at backwater peasant nations like Russia and China. But instead we are laughing at him now.

Also western governments repressing organized labor. Take off your dogmatic glasses for a second. In France labor unions can call a general strike at any day of the week, with 90% plus participation. They are ruled by socialists. Nobody is repressing them. But you know what they will not do? Seize the means of production, because they know that communism is retarded meme that only 8th graders and and potheads believe in, and it will ruin their economy and they won't be able to live the life of welfare queens and larp as marxist revolutionaries anymore.

You don't understand, OP.

Communism appeals mostly to people who live in the densely populated urban centers of their respective nation, not disparate and sparsely populated rural communities. In modern industrialized society, the hierarchy is organized in a top down pyramid fashion, beginning from the urban metropolises and spreading out down to the agrarian and rural regions. The policies written in big city halls are what ultimately dictate life for everyone else.

The idea that communism would only appeal to illiterate downtrodden farmers is a meme, which is what the Frankfurt school realized. This is where cultural marxism came from (i.e. political correctness, anti-white racism, stereotyping rural people as evil rednecks, demonization of tradition and religion, urban supremacism)

Communism is an urban invention tailored to the closeted and sheltered urban mindset.

Why do you think communism was invented by inexperienced and socially stunted city people like Marx and Engels?

Why do you think Ted Kaczynski, the anarcho-primitivist, labeled communism and socialism as modern inventions of urban elitists who are bent on controlling every aspect of society and chaining everyone to a bureaucracy that guarantees maximum efficiency at the expense of individual liberty?

Why did virtually every communist regime shit on their own lower class and starve their own rural folk to death by the millions?

Of course the american south would hate communism.

>This entire post

Well said. Marxism is a petty bourgeois ideology, but with an emphasis on control instead of liberty. It's truly an ideology of goverment employees and bureaucrats. Mises called Leninism the philosophy of a clerk.

I'll take this to mean that you don't have any arguments.

>ctrl+f "Huey Long"
>0 results

My, my, the absolute state of this board...

>Thinking southern populism is the same as communism

YANKEE GO HOME

Because of fear of racial animosity between whites and blacks, as blacks would have the most to gain from a communist system (wealth redistribution, enforced equality etc.). It would have effectively destroyed the Southern way of life.

Fear of a Black Uprising has been central to Southern politics since the Haiti massacre and the Nat Turner Rebellion. Given that every communist uprising since the Paris Commune has been characterized by violence, this would have been the worst case scenario for Southern Whites.

Communism and other far-left ideologies like anarchism originated in Europe and were spread to the US by immigrants.

>inb4 joos, most of them were Gentiles

The reason most immigrants came to the North is because there was no economic opportunity in the South.

Huey Long was a left-wing fascist tho

You gotta read books and have no work ethic to be Commy it'd never take root in the south

Southerners like religion, and believe that rich people must have all the money if the economies goin' work gud.

Andrew Jackson
Huey Long
George Wallace

Just because other factors ended up locking them up as sure-fire right wing voters doesn't mean there's no left-ring room in the southern spirit

>Capitalists have to use Ted Kaczynski to arguess for their cause

Oklahoma used to be extremely socialist, with 984 party chapters in 1914, the most of any state. They elected numerous state politicians and gave the most votes to Socialist Presidential candidate Eugene Debs in 1912. It was essentially the Democrats and Socialists as the primary parties in the state. Pic related was the original state flag, which was changed in 1925 after the party died.

>Rather than embracing “true” communism and its abolition of private property, Oklahoman socialists advocated land redistribution so that farmers could conceivably own their own property instead of paying someone else rent, regardless of how their farms performed each year. They borrowed from Thomas Jefferson, lionizing the “yeoman farmer” in opposition to bankers, lawyers and other privileged classes. In such terms, socialism sounded less like a foreign ideology borne from a German political economist and more like the continuation of the United States’ own Founding Fathers. Additionally, Oklahoman socialists invoked Jesus Christ and the Bible, giving their strain of the socialist movement a “Christian socialist” character. With Jesus’ identification with the poor, sick and oppressed, it has never been a hard case to make in any Christian society that Jesus was on the side of the plebeians against the patricians, and the Oklahoman socialists made that case well. Although God is often cited in today’s political rhetoric against extending civil rights to homosexuals or giving women the right to choose, in the past God often featured heavily in the speeches and pamphlets of left-wing radicals who utilized the compassion and charity in the Christian tradition rather than its intolerance and hatred. It seems doubtful that socialism would have bloomed bright red in Oklahoma had it not changed to fit the local political and cultural language. In many other places, socialism tried to change that language to suit its own needs, and often died on the vine as a result.

thats 10/10 post right there, friend

>In 1917, a group of radical tenant farmers called the Working Class Union (WCU) launched an insurgency against the state and federal government based on anger over military conscription. The country had just entered World War I, and not only did most Americans not identify with the Allies (the British had just brutally crushed Ireland in the Easter Rebellion), but few saw any benefit in sending their young men to die in a “rich man’s war.” Despite no actual records documenting what was planned, historians have nevertheless guessed that WCU agitators encouraged farmers to take up arms and march on Washington, D.C. living off the land and eating roasted “green corn” – leading to the revolt being called the “Green Corn Rebellion.” Betrayed by an informer, the rebels gave up when confronted by a posse on the banks of the South Canadian River. Hundreds were arrested, with over a hundred sentenced to prison terms.

>Although it had played no part in fomenting or carrying out the failed insurrection, the incident was used to stir up public opinion against the Socialist Party of Oklahoma. According to the memoirs of Oscar Ameringer, a German-born socialist active in early Oklahoma politics:

>“Though not a single official of the Party was connected with the Green Corn Rebellion, thousands of our members were arrested. Jails were so overcrowded that four hundred prisoners were shipped to the state penitentiary for safekeeping. Thousands sought safety in the Winding Stairs Mountains, in adjoining Colorado, Texas, and Arkansas.

>Of the Green Corn rebels convicted, some thirty-odd went to Leavenworth, the federal prison, from which the last of them were released after Kate Richards O’Hare had marched their wives and children to Washington, where they picketed the White House.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Corn_Rebellion

Southern USA/CSA culture was class stratified like pre Victorian England.

Well, I just said that Jesus and I were both Jewish and that neither of us ever had a job, we never had a home, we never married and we traveled around the countryside irritating people.

Kinky Friedman

pressing f to pay respects

You struggle with your demons and you conquer them. The only currency I value is the coin of the spirit. That's very important in my life. You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island—it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today—and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

Finally, some history. There's an econ prof at TU who is into this. The book "Agrarian Socialists in America" has been recommended to me numerous times - have you read it?

Kek, none of these people were left.

The rich had (and still continues to have) southern whites direct their anger towards minorities instead of them

O you who believe! Fight those of the disbelievers who are close to you, and let them find harshness in you, and know that Allah is with those who are the Al-Muttaqun (the pious - see V.2:2).

And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.

yet another reason to hate Oklahomans.

Thats why the kikes killed him and silenced his ally Coughlin.

Nope, never read it.

That sounds more akin to National Socialism.

Bump

>fiercely independently-minded
>Bible Belt

A couple reasons. One, communism (and fascism, and liberalism, and Trump-ism, and lots of other 'isms', so long as its not the current system) are most popular when people feel like they are not getting what they deserve. And I imagine that there were still a lot of small land owners at the time in the south. If you are a self sufficient person who owns land, or a paid manservant (employee) who makes wage they feel they deserve, then there is very little to rebel for.

Literally nothing about nationalism, not even left wing nationalism.

wat

Eh, it has a really odd history that's pretty interesting. I'm from California but did some Native American Anthropology courses at OU. Would have been more interesting if Oklahoma and Indian Territory had become separate states; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Sequoyah

Religious people are less likely to want to worship the state

>This is where cultural marxism came from
And I thought this was a serious post

>(i.e. political correctness, anti-white racism, stereotyping rural people as evil rednecks, demonization of tradition and religion, urban supremacism)
Can you quote from any frankfurt school scholar's work where they mention those?

The term "redneck" came from people making fun of Souther labor activists wearing a red scarf around their necks.

Don't know about communist movement in south, but just to let u know.

The term "redneck" actually predates the red union scarves as a reference to the sun burned/heavily tanned necks of the working class, but took on a double meaning after the scarves became a thing.

neat

doing some eyeballing, Sequoyah 2017 would have:

1.7m people
29,000 sq mi

Largest city (by far): Tulsa

2 house reps - can basically leave the Tulsa metro distict and Little Dixie districts unchanged

Compared to OK, SQ inherits most of the state's productive farming, casinos, crystal meth, surface water. OK becomes firmly a western state. SQ can develop more native tradition if it begins in 1905, but you probably get a kind of native/deep South fusion going

The left was *repressed* in the south, and probably more viciously than in the north (because Jim Crow era authorities didn't look kindly on white people rejecting their "race" ideology either), but I don't know that it took hold any less in the south than it did in the north, save perhaps in some immigrant-heavy industrial cities. Commies were pretty involved in early labor organizing and civil rights activism in a time when that shit could get you killed.

They didn't quite manage a red revolution, but they were confronted with a fairly stable polity unified with a North that had universal suffrage and bourgeois democracy, conditions which have historically made it hard for a red revolution.

I think if the south had *won* they might have actually had an easier time; slave rebellions and pissed-off poor whites uniting against an oligarchy running a pariah state seem like revolutionary conditions to me. Then again South Africa held onto apartheid throughout the cold war, so who knows.

Here's a good article about the politics involved, I thought it was funny how seemingly everyone involved wanted separate statehood.

>...the symbolic marriage of Miss Indian Territory to Mr. Oklahoma, which was a shotgun wedding at best. The two former territories that now compose Oklahoma were frequently referred to by the chummy (read: spurious/half-hearted) moniker of the “Twin Territories.” Now, before you start humming to yourself “Territory folks should stick together, Territory folks should all be pals,” remember that this appellation was largely a strategic political fabrication resulting in an uneasy alliance that many locals, both east and west, viewed with ambivalence, if not outright reluctance. For fraternal twins, the two territories had strikingly different dispositions. Indian territory was by large Democratic, consisted of a mix of settlers from the South, and its political and cultural footing was influenced accordingly. Settlers in Oklahoma Territory came primarily from northern states like Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas after the 1890 Organic Act, who were largely, though not entirely, sympathetic to Republican policies. On the issue of prohibition: O.T. was wet, I.T. dry. School systems differed drastically, and you couldn’t find two more distinct geographical terrains, with I.T. possessing a wealth of unexploited natural resources and O.T. relying more on agrarian practices for capital.

thislandpress.com/2013/10/10/nevertheless-and-notwithstanding/

In France you never have 90% participation. what you have is a "solidarity" between unions. If union X goes on strike then so will Y and Z. But the proportion of unionized is laughably low. Unless you are in uberprotected jobs like trains or teachers.

>slavery was a form of socialism
More like socialism is a form of slavery.

>Communism appeals mostly to people who live in the densely populated urban centers of their respective nation, not disparate and sparsely populated rural communities.
So this is why there were successful communist revolution in Russia and China and not USA or England, makes sense!

Ummm... Russia? No they were among the most industrious nations in the world. I mean, yeah, you can say that of Cuba, and most of Russia's satellites, but the latter were basically taken by force or influence.

But Marx's idea centered around factory workers and their relationship with the means of production. In the end, each factory or area of production was supposed to effectively be its own little country run by its workers (the centralized totalitarian state of "Communism", as we think of it today, being an intermediate stage). It made room for agriculture, but only offhandedly, and usually as an extension of the factory or area of production. Land ownership is, of course, much more important for farmers, so it doesn't have the appeal. At the same time, when a revolution is in progress, they also don't have the manpower of the industrial cities, so they don't get much say.

But yeah, whenever someone comes along and says, "We're going to centralize everything to eventually decentralize everything" - some level of disbelief should really come into play.

China had a lot of densely populated trade centers. When you're a farmer, sitting in an area with a population of maybe two people per ten square miles, you don't get much say when the city folk decide to forcibly change your ways.

Granted, they may have bought some rural folks on the lie that communism was their end goal. But none of the "communist" nations ever made even a single step towards the transition from totalitarian socialism to a series of communes. That either means none of them ever intended to, or once they had all that power, they couldn't let it go. Absolute corruption and all that.

protestant work ethic my lad

>he fell for the Max Weber meme

Cus if there's something Southern bubba crackers love more than lynching niggers, fucking their sisters, and drinking homemade moonshine, it's their fucking guns. And no communist regime would allow a bunch of backwoods hillbillies running around, resisting the big red cock of ideological orthodoxy when they send out the commissars.

Marx did not specifically call for a centralized totalitarian state. He was just open to it, and thought it should not be dismissed because he thought that it may be able to achieve results, such as with Jacobins. He gets called a statist by anarchists because he has to defend his position that a state sufficiently controlled by proles would be useful in developing a world where a state was not needed against anarchists that think the state should be dismantled and things will magically work without a state.

>drinking the kapitalist koolaid

Nobody gives a shit about Marx, not even communists.

And yes, that's a real quote
>Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm

But when you're from /pol/ you think liberals fighting for trans rights is Marxism.

You mean Leninists don't give a fuck about Marx.

Yeah and 99% of communists are Stalinists and Leninists. Marxists are only the sheltered university """intellectuals""" that nobody ever reads.

>So how come communist never took hold in this large, racial bifurcated agricultural region known only for growing peanuts and cotton?

Why do you act like most of the South are Cletuses? South was literally 70% nigger in 19th century.

>Leninism
>Stalinism
>Neo-Stalinism
>Trotskyism
>Maoism
>Agrarian socialism
>Juche
>Ho Chi Minh
>Socialism oriented [socialist] market economy

No one gives a fuck about Marx.

Agreed, I just didn't make that clear... The problem is most folks in west think of the USSR or China or Cuba when they think "Communist", when they all took that totalitarian route and never reached that stage. They basically sold a lie, or at least failed to reach their ideal.

They have a point that every large scale effort proclaimed to be an effort at Communism resulted in similar nightmarish tyranny, but there are tons and tons of smaller communes (and even, internally, small companies) that actually do follow Marx's ideals - even if they tend to do so under the protection of a larger capitalist nation.

In the end, however, I would argue that Marx's organizational ideals cannot be successful outside of very small and externally protected scales. No group of communes can stand up against a united force, and there will inevitably be conflict between them and mutual interests, in addition to cults of personality, that will cause them to so unite.

>tfw fact that he was demonstrably wrong over a dozen times doesn't prove that he was wrong

>they all took that totalitarian route and never reached that stage
Because it's impossible. Achieving anarchy through totalitarian government is like fucking yourself to virginity, it's absurd to even think this would be possible let alone attempt it.

You just need a state that is sufficiently democratic. You can't in full honesty say that the average USSR or PRC citizen had a more meaningful say in government than in capitalist liberal democracy.

Why do people think democracy is any good is beyond me

>Russia has no cities!

The revolution began in the cities with the October Revolution.

A democratic state can choose to behave like a monarchy if that's what everyone wants.

For the USSR, that would entail allowing the Turkic and Siberian nomad people to vote.
And the Tibetans, Uyghurs, Hui or other minorities for the Chinese.
And you can't have that!

>Turkic and Siberian nomad people
All five of them?

Kazakhs, Kyrgyzs, Uzbeks, Turkmens, Buryats, Oirats, Manchus, Mongols, Balhae Koreans
And we're not even including the Caucasians like Stalin's native Georgia, the Chechens, the Circassians, Armenians
Altogether, they are a not-insignificant chunk of the former Soviet Union's population, and Stalin became a huge Russophile during the latter part of his regime.

Uzbekistan alone had some 15 million people.

The Russians were only slighly over half the union. Of course the wars (WWI, Civil/Polish, WWII) and purges wiped out millions.

In either case it wasn't supposed to matter, as long as the Communist Party was in charge everything was going well.

As for China, the Han outnumber all other groups by such a large margin that the fear of minorities voting even as a bloc is unfounded. The Chinese Communists, like all Chinese dynasties, rightly fear their own people voting as that would make them realize that they are something more than serfs.

Again, agreed. Said as much in the last sentence of the post that started this tangent.

Yes, that's what he said.

Problem, bootlicker?

Well, it's not as if every slav in the USSR nor every Han in China was a voting member of the communist party. I mean, if that's really was the problem, they could have just as easily made a racially exclusive socialist democracy.

But modern "democracies" are highly centralized republics for a reason. I mean, prior to the invention of the internet, direct democracies on such scales were pretty much impossible. You run into a similar problem with Marx, who tries to shift down all power to the local levels, essentially turning every factory town into its own nation. That can't compete against a larger nation with a more united purpose, nor can it last, as eventually those mini-nations are going to war and/or unite into larger ones.

That's not true though. Marx was an absolute statist compared to say, Bakunin.

His communes were absolute, but they were, as the name communism suggests, communes: self governing bodies of workers based on areas of production. Basically the opposite of every nation that ever declared itself working towards communism, and most of them acknowledged this discrepancy, saying they were in a "socialist" stage and working towards his ideal - Marx himself saying much the same. But basically only hippie camps, small private communities, and a bunch of IT startups have ever applied his ideals successfully, and only while they remained small.

It just doesn't scale up - or even hope to work in the modern global market. I could see why he might have felt it an inevitable evolution during his time, but things just didn't go that way.

>Kazakhs, Kyrgyzs
Those weren't nomads, they had centralized government even in Russian empire.

>Buryats, Oirats, Manchus, Mongols
Completely irrelevant. There are 180 000 Oirats in Russia TODAY, literally the suburb I live in has more people.

You haven't even read Marx. You're just regurgitating things you've been told.

>muh conservatards see the world as a zero-sum game ain't I above it all dude

People living a good life are opposed to change in general.

Not to mention the factors had fucking nothing to do with population, the russian """"revolution"""" was a mere german plant to take russia out of world war one, a group of subhumans sent inside a nation already on its knees to instigate people to rebel and take over said rebellion for their needs.
China was split in internal tensions, cue japan devastating the nation and communists filling the power vacuum of a previously fascism-friendly state.

Not an argument