But as any good Marxist will tell you, the point isn't to understand the world, but to change it. Using that in-depth class analysis, I've figured out the likeliest ways that a dedicated cadre of communists could legally take power within the American political system, and advocated for a political project that accomplishes those things, all in that Class Analysis and Revolution book.
But all of that is just analyzing patterns in history to figure out how to assume state power. Once that's accomplished, what should we do with it?
I usually don't get into things like this in my writings not because I don't have these ideas, but because it's too easy for the debate in the minutiae of such things to distract us from more unifying proposals. Here's an example: in saying I want to end poverty, and I do, I'm not necessarily speaking up for or against any given proposal to end poverty. The chief contradiction in the world today is American imperialism. Ending American imperialism will do a lot to end poverty worldwide, but some of the people who would join me in ending American imperialism might not join me in supporting a given program to end poverty. Plenty of libertarians both want to return to the foreign policy of George Washington and to take an axe to the welfare state; the welfare state doesn't directly serve communist interests but American non-interventionism does.
This is also a great place to touch on the notion of the democratic demand irreconcilable with capitalism that sparks a bourgeois counter-revolution. It's a standard, even defining, feature of Marxism-Lincolnism that in a bourgeois democracy, this is how the revolution against capitalism is made. But it's also, if you read between the lines, part of the strategy of the Center for Political Innovation. In my case, the irreconcilable democratic demand is ending American imperialism itself. In the CPI's case, it's to advocate four things, and each of these things is a major program or nationalization that the American bourgeoisie could in no wise accept while retaining their economic and political power.
The fact that both of these strains of patriotic socialism independently stumbled upon the same basic path to power in these material conditions is a testament to that path's validity. But, even aware of the CPI's platform, I think I still like mine better.
This is no criticism of the CPI platform's substance; if enacted in full, it would radically change America and the world for the better, and trigger the bourgeois counterrevolution whose crushing would be necessary to see through such changes. Massive international funding and collaboration on fusion energy, fostering economic links with Latin America, nationalization of the banks, these are all excellent steps any communist would be hard-pressed to oppose. But my quibble is that these are all excellent steps any libertarian would find easy to oppose, and there's more of them than us, and so long as capitalism exists and finances false consciousness, this state of affairs will continue to obtain. Meanwhile, the libertarians would be with us on ending the empire, and ending the empire would end the flow of liberal superprofits that finances the false consciousness that keeps the CPI proposals artificially unpopular among the workers.
The only real difference between my tactics and the CPI's tactics is that my message is simpler and already enjoys broader pre-existing support among the workers without having to explain to anyone why such a thing would be in their best interests. I've absorbed the lessons of the 2019 British election. Jeremy Corbyn ran on a laundry list of great ideas that only journalists read and almost nobody understood in full. Boris Johnson ran on "Get Brexit Done." Jeremy Corbyn is not the Prime Minister. Why? Because nobody had the free time to figure out if they agreed with every last Labour idea, but after three years of prevaricating nonsense, there wasn't a soul in Britain not ready to get Brexit done.
So it's better to keep your message simple, and the more radical it is, the simpler it must be. It's called "Marxism-Lincolnism" because Lincoln was an accidental practitioner of this art and it started the Civil War. His democratic demand irreconcilable with capitalism was the restriction of slavery from the territories, the most minimal and unifying possible demand that the abolitionists could make. It was the only thing Lincoln ran on, and having run on it and nothing else, it was a demand that he could not be justly denied within the American political system. So the bourgeoisie decided, secession and war it must be.
It wasn't the only idea circulating among Lincoln's Republican Party, far from it. The Free Soil faction was still talking about "voting themselves a farm," and it came to pass with the Homestead Act of 1862. Indirect subsidies for scientific research through the college land grant system also came to pass, so the vast collegiate network across America owes its existence to Lincoln. Indirect subsidies for the transcontinental railroad, also doled out through land grants, also linked both coasts together with rapid transit for the first time in history. And had Lincoln run on these things too, instead of just letting his voters talk about them amongst themselves with a wink and a nod, he might well have lost the election. Especially the Homestead Act; the Southern planters particularly reviled that idea and would have been able to paint him as unelectably radical had he led with that. So he didn't, he was able to pass it anyway, and the Homestead Act of 1862 became the foundation of America's future industrial prosperity by making yeoman farming profitable for a few generations.
That all said, everything I just wrote is a preface as to why I'm about to disregard all that, and release a plan for a massive program that, if enacted, would completely reshape the American economy. It stands no chance whatsoever of being enacted under capitalism, because although it would far more than pay for itself, it would not do so quickly enough to be worth considering by corporation or government. It is not a political demand I'm advancing at this time, more of a thought experiment as to the kinds of things we can do for the good of the country once we've taken it back. It may well stand some revision, but I suspect that in the long run, it or something like it will eventually happen, because an ad-hoc version of it is already starting to appear in Europe.
What the hell am I talking about? Glad you asked. It's a plan for a series of canals, locks, river widenings and dredgings, water pipelines, and massive interstate water transfer that collectively I like to call the Midwest Passage. Passage because it's like the legendary Northwest Passage that was believed to allow sailing ships to bypass North America to sail on to China. Midwest because it'll literally go through the Midwest. It will be a massive works project that, when done, will be the basis for a scalable and entirely new (and, at the same time, incredibly old) mode of making a living in this country. A permanent jobs program that will repair the national and global environment for pennies on the dollar, and provide us with the geopolitical ability to disregard the Panama Canal for our own naval defence. It will open up vast new lands for farming, settlement, and reforestation. It is a bold new proposal fully keeping in step with American historical tradition, particularly the internal improvement ideas of the Whigs, forerunners to the Republicans.
Now, I mentioned that an ad-hoc version of something like this is already starting to appear in Europe, and it is, in the barest forms. Because Europe is still capitalist, and because very few (if any) parts of it are suffering from permanent drought, the Europeans cannot maximize the potential of installing such a system on their continent the way that America could. But nonetheless, geopolitics alone has forced many European nations to consider ways to make as much of each river navigable, and for places to build canals and locks between them. Turkey controls the Dardanelles and has the right by treaty to close it in certain conditions. Countries on the Black Sea who are not Turkey would like to be able to keep trading with the world by sea anyway, so there are various plans to link the Danube to the Rhine, and to other navigable rivers. This way, if Romania wanted to export car parts to Canada and Turkey's government was throwing a fit for some reason, the container ships could just sail through the heart of the European continent and pop out somewhere near Amsterdam, and continue on their merry way. Landlocked Switzerland already has a seven-ship blue water navy, and has them only because it has a handful of ports on or connected to the Rhine.
I'm going to list a bunch of seemingly-unconnected facts that, when taken together, provide the logical rationale behind this program.
International waterways boost the sovereignty of nations, by giving their trade more routes to choose from to take to market. Water is the slowest mode of transit, but by far the cheapest, so meaningful access to waterborne traffic is a prerequisite to being a major trading country. Switzerland would certainly concur.
And even when the waterways being developed are only internal to a single country, they boost that country's sovereignty, as well as the sovereignty of every polity they link together. The aforementioned Whigs' main political idea was using a tariff on imported finished goods to both encourage domestic manufacturing, and to pay for internal improvements like canals that would link the country closer to markets, making American goods cheaper and more competitive both internally and externally.
Every single state linked by these canals saw its sovereignty explode in real terms. New York City overtook Philadelphia as America's largest city when it completed a canal from Buffalo to the Hudson River that allowed the agricultural products of the Midwest to be exported out of New York City. Before then, homesteaders had to build a barge and pole it all the way down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, as a young Abe Lincoln had, and New Orleans wasn't American territory when he did it. The New York canal increased the sovereignty of New York versus Louisiana, and increased American sovereignty overall by making sure that a foreign power blockading New Orleans couldn't shut down the entire American grain export market. As Philadelphia lost trade in spades to New York City, they hurriedly built a similar canal that would link Lake Erie to the Delaware River. Although this increased American sovereignty somewhat by making sure that a single explosive charge couldn't shut down American grain exports via the East Coast, it was a mostly redundant backup, and did not help Philadelphia as its backers had hoped. The once-second-largest city in the entire British Empire has been playing second fiddle to New York City ever since.
Canals don't just allow ships passage, however; they passively irrigate the lands around them and can be designed to actively irrigate them too. Out West, this is the use to which we still put canals. Not far from my parents' house in the Omaha suburbs is a series of levies and canals that keep the farmers' fields dry when it floods and wet when it doesn't. The entire state of Nebraska has officially-defined irrigation districts with elected and hired officials that are in charge of water distribution, and Nebraska is not weird or an outlier among its fellow Western states in this respect. Canals outside of Panama and Suez have fallen out of favor in international shipping, but irrigation canals are as state-of-the-art to agriculture as they've always been.
Oil companies were able to successfully use union jobs as a way to pry organized labor away from the leftist anti-pipeline coalition that opposed their oil pipelines. I don't really support oil pipelines in the abstract, and in the concrete I support winding most of them down in a planned way that doesn't hurt the average worker. But I support the construction of many more pipelines. Water pipelines, when they leak, would not cause any environmental damage. The Mississippi basin regularly floods; it sure would be useful to have massive federally-funded straws at different points of its course that could suck up the unnecessary water and ship it out West where it would be far more welcome. If the federal government just sold that water at market rates out West, it would be making money at both ends: getting paid for the water rates, and fewer payouts due from its federally-guaranteed flood insurance program. And be certain, market rates aren't cheap. They might not be able to finance the construction and operation of such a system by themselves, but ask an Angeleno what their water bill looks like. If the federal government can build this Rube Goldberg contraption in the first place, if it can afford to slap some solar panels on the side so it doesn't have to keep paying the pumping costs over and over again, then it should be able to pay for itself in perpetuity after that. It wouldn't be a direct subsidy to the West, but by massively increasing the water available to every segment of Western society, would create the basis for massive economic growth for everyone out there.
Besides selling the water out West and paying out smaller flood insurance awards, the federal government will be able to charge tolls for using the Midwest Passage. The fee structure isn't important; I don't know if it'd maximize utility to charge every time a lock is used, have a yearly fee for an all-the-locks-you-can-traverse buffet, or even to do one for a smaller ship and another for larger ones. I do know that the Panama and Suez canals put a lot of black inks in the national budgets of Panama and Egypt. Those canals have lines. If the navigable rivers on this network were dredged and widened to at least accommodate two Panamax container ships sailing abreast, then those Panamax ships would be willing to pay a similar cost to those canal fees to cross North America without waiting in line. Putting a larger share of their journey inside states not known for typhoons would also make it safer, and lower their insurance rates, meaning we could even charge foreign-flagged vessels a premium for the privilege of using our network, and they would pay it. Now the federal government is making money out three different ends forever, for the price of a one-time huge investment. The tax bills of our descendants could be significantly lower on a structural basis because of this thing.
Giving American-flagged vessels a break on the tolls would give the moribund and outsourced American shipping industry an inherent advantage that nobody could replicate. When this country was new, Yankee traders knit the planet's markets together. But now the shipping industry's vessels use flags of convenience, from Panama or Liberia or other countries that none of the crew are from. And the sailor jobs? They're now all going to underpaid Filipinos; the only Americans shipping out anymore are ship captains or in the US Navy. Giving ourselves a permanent structural advantage in the shipping industry could bring some of those jobs back here.
The Mississippi River basin has played host to a particular riverine culture since before 1776. Cajun French culture spread across the basin, and as America spread west that culture spread too. Steamboat captains and stevedores, musicians, runaway slaves, ne'er-do-wells in houseboats. This culture was chronicled by everyone from Mark Twain to Creedence Clearwater Revival, but the material basis for this culture has been undermined with the death of the American shipping industry. This is an absolute shame, and must be reversed. America's rivers could provide the basis for the employment of tens of millions.
If, when we carve out the land with things that we will flood to create waterways, we seed those future waterways with freshwater plant life, we can create the basis to bring back the Mississippi culture, and to let it spread to the rest of the waterways touched by the Midwest Passage. As we would be widening and deepening the rivers to make them more navigable, we would also be providing more habitat for fish, oysters, mussels, and various other things we catch, sell, and eat. Lining these improved rivers with mangrove and wetland areas would help stave off flooding, as well as increase habitat and species diversity, improving the riverine catch. Millions could make a living as fishermen alone. And as global maritime trade got its start in most places from fishermen visiting other ports and practicing arbitrage between the prices in those ports and their home ports, a fleet of millions of fishing craft sustainably landing much larger harvests could easily engage in such trade as a side hustle, making America's transit system a lot more decentralized and resilient.
Millions do not know currently how to make a living off of the rivers, nor have the means of production to do this. The government should establish a shipyard whose job it is to mass produce as many high-quality but simple medium-sized river craft as possible, and sell them at cost with loans to the unemployed, who could be taught in their use. These craft would be slightly too big for a single family, and could be used by small collectives too. If we are going to re-create this entire way of life from scratch, we can and should make it as friendly to collectives as possible. Collectivization might also help transmit the necessary skills to live this life quicker and more effectively than the government could do with a program, and might be preferred outright to family-owned businesses. But to preserve competition and foster acceptance for this idea among the widest possible cross-section of society, family businesses in this field shouldn't be banned or discouraged. If done right, this boat-building program would run at neither a profit nor a loss, and be neither black nor red ink in the federal government's budget.
Pipelines of any sort aren't cheap; I imagine water pipelines would be cheaper because they'd require a lot less permitting and would attract a lot less opposition. I imagine there would be a series of pipelines from various points in the Mississippi basin that regularly flood, and they would all ultimately lead to a huge artificial lake somewhere in the Great Basin. This lake would be somewhere in Utah, Idaho, and/or Nevada. It doesn't currently exist; it might be placed in the footprint of ancient Lake Bonneville. It will have a canal and lock that connects it to the Snake River, another that connects it to the Missouri River, another that connects it to the Colorado River. Eventually, there would be a fourth that connects it to a Humboldt River deepened and widened to permit shipping traffic, and the Humboldt would be reconnected to the Sacramento River after five million years by a canal and lock that passes underneath the Sierra Nevadas, and this would be the main way that Mississippi River water could be sent all the way to the thirsty cities of California if necessary, for that state owns thousands of miles of waterways that drain water from its interior to its cities. Google Lake Mono; liberal Californians only pretend to care about the environment. But this project would give them the material basis to put that posturing into practice.
The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres to anyone who was willing to pay a nominal filing fee and then improve the property for five years. What remains of America's federal lands (and they are substantial) are basically all the lands that those farmers took one look at, and said "I wouldn't take that land if you gave it to me for free." Mostly, these lands were not taken because they don't receive enough rainfall to make them worth farming. Some of these lands were inducted into the National Park System. Most of them weren't, and are under the control of the Bureau of Land Management who oversees some grazing rights and that's about it. If these BLM lands out West could be given sufficient water, they would be as productive as any farm out East. The land required to sustain a family using food forestry, greenhouses, and modern agricultural techniques is a lot smaller than 160 acres; 4 acres would easily get it done so long as water wasn't a problem. Therefore, the Midwest Passage would permit the renewal of the Homestead Act on the same practical terms as the original, and smaller parcels could be provided to many more people than the original, without having to acquire a single acre of territory that the federal government does not currently own.
Redwood forests dominated everything between Reno and Denver until five million years ago. Redwoods, and the understory plants that like hanging out with redwoods, guzzle water. They also, by the process of evapotranspiration, help create rainfall so long as they're properly watered. If a redwood forest is planted in a dry land and kept wet, the land around it will eventually become and be kept wet too. Redwoods capture a lot more carbon than almost any other tree, and some varieties grow quickly. If carbon sequestration is necessary to avert the worst effects of climate change, and it is, turning a giant national hose on at least some parts of this area to bring back the redwood forests would get that done in a hurry.
The evapotranspiration effect described immediately above means that certain watersheds can "loop" water. The Amazon rainforest is one such example. The prevailing winds over the Amazon blow towards the west, but the Amazon River flows east. So rain falls on the Andes Mountains, trickles into the Amazon River, and eventually gets drunk up by a tree downstream. That tree sweats out what it drank, and it enters the atmosphere and gets blown towards the Andes to repeat the cycle anew. Of course, not all the water entering this cycle gets trapped there; you can dip a bucket into the sea 50 miles east of Belem and pull up freshwater. That's because the Amazon flows so vigorously, which it can do because it has a natural self-reinforcing loop like this building up its water flow.
Similar loops will be created by this Midwest Passage. The prevailing winds above the lower 48 states blow east. Pulling water out of Louisiana and putting it in Nevada means that whatever plants drink it in Nevada will just sweat it out, and it'll fall as rain a couple times before getting back to the Mississippi Basin. Once there, it'll be eligible to get sucked back up all over again. In the long run this is why we'll need to deepen and widen the river systems, even if we weren't going to facilitate shipping or fishing: all that water is going to need more places to go. And we will want this water; climate change will make freshwater scarce throughout almost the whole world. Having our own ample supplies will be a national security issue in such a world, and freshwater itself may well end up being a bargaining chip of diplomacy. Better to have such chips stockpiled. They could be stockpiled not only in deeper and wider rivers, but also in more and bigger lakes. Water could be pumped to mountaintops to replenish the glaciers climate change wrecked. Water could be pumped into every lake that Los Angeles emptied.
There are not many rivers in America that flow towards the west, but every single one that does will be a potential water loop if it does not already flow through amply-watered land. The Ohio River flows west, but it flows through a verdant country. The Humboldt/Sacramento system flows west, and the Humboldt mostly flows through desert. Nevada's Humboldt River will probably enjoy the most dramatic greening of anywhere in the West if the Midwest Passage does happen, because of this simple geographic fact. The upper reaches of the Colorado River will enjoy similar greening for similar reasons, although it trends more southwesterly in its total course and so won't enjoy it as dramatically as the Humboldt.
Just like the internal improvements of the Whigs, this Midwest Passage would not be a direct subsidy to any aspect of American industry, with the exception of resurrecting the Mississippi riverine lifeways of the past. Instead, the effect would be to make all of American industry more competitive. We would have far more agricultural resources to sell on world markets. And because transportation makes up a huge portion of the cost of those goods, lower transportation costs would lower prices for consumers without hurting producers. And if many different goods become cheaper all at once simply through greater efficiency, it represents a sort of deflation that helps the working class. It was this sort of deflation (not the type that emerged out of Wall Street speculation) that Stalin fostered in the USSR, reasoning that workers were tuning out the bonuses they were getting at work, and measuring the real improvement of their lives by the prices of things. The whole deflation subject deserves its own article, and will get one, because the communist approach to it has historically been much different from the liberal approach. But deflation driven by real economic improvements is a good thing, and would be certain to happen if the Midwest Passage were built.
The earth that this project would require moving would be quite voluminous. Entire islands could be made of it, where there are not currently islands. This could be used for important geopolitical purposes, or just to create more land to produce goods and services on. It might be nice having more islands in the Pacific, perhaps built atop currently-existing seamounts. Selling the land created might even recoup some of the costs of doing it, although the real point of doing it would be the long-term tax revenue one could create by having land with taxpayers on it.
What are the downsides? It will require billions, perhaps even trillions, of dollars to do it correctly and to the fullest extent laid out in this article. A lot of the jobs created will be specialist; we will have to hire people who can operate enormous excavator machines, not merely shovels. If you're an anprim or a deep green, the idea of ripping out millions of acres of virgin desert to install a forest or farmland might give you an aneurysm, although to be fair if that's your gripe, I don't really care what you think and we wouldn't eradicate the whole desert anyway. Carbon sequestration is considered to provide moral license to polluters to keep on truckin', so these reforms likely would not reduce carbon levels in the atmosphere without an end to global capitalism too.
But what are the upsides? It allows the government to intervene in a big, no a huge way in the economy, without creating government dependency in the long term. The Midwest Passage would, after it's all said and done, be a self-sustaining system paying its own way. Small-government conservatives have already gotten behind a similarly mammoth government program on the basis that it, too, pays its own way: the national interstate system, funded by the gas tax. Small-government conservatives got behind the Homestead Act in Lincoln's time on the same basis; those acreages were a way for the worker to help himself, and not depend on the government. If enacted, the Midwest Passage would create millions of jobs in agriculture, fishing, shipping, timber (all those forests wouldn't just be there for carbon sequestration's sake, after all), and millions more jobs created to process or distribute the goods created by those. A one-time massive investment to right the economy so the average worker can flourish in it by their own labors seems much preferrable to a government benefit program that may or may not still be fully funded by the time you personally get to use it. I don't hate the welfare state like conservatives do, but I can also see its limitations like liberals can't. And since we have to lean on the conservatives and not the liberals to end the late capitalist threat this time around, we need to have our massive planned state intervention in the economy pass through conservative forms. They are wary of every such plan on general principles, but are likelier to get behind a plan that takes their principles into account and tries to cross those principles as little as possible. I don't ever plan on campaigning on the Midwest Passage, but on ending American imperialism, and probably that alone. But people will inevitably be interested in the other ideas of Marxist-Lincolnists, and this puts some flesh on the philosophy in a way that shouldn't do any real harm with the target audience or step on any anti-imperialist outreach to them.
I mentioned the Midwest Passage in Class Analysis and Revolution, but I don't think I wrote about it quite as extensively as I did just now. I could probably draft up a more serious map of the system proposed than the MS Paint exercise at the top of this article, forecast different statistics for a completed system to estimate the additional yields it could provide us. Maybe if there's enough interest, I might. But all of this is just a thought exercise, because the workers do not currently control a party that has assumed state power. But one day, when they do, things like this, or many other similar proposals, will be possible. Our job right now is, first and foremost, to oppose the American imperialism that makes such possibilities moot.
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