Chapter 10: The Vanguard Party Is Not What You Think It Is: Part VI

Granted, we will need a far cheaper way to send a high-weight, low-value payload like coal to orbit than even SpaceX can currently provide. But with enough research and development, such things are possible. Deep sky stations and cargo space planes are already within the technological competence of American industry; the cost of building out this infrastructure would make the Apollo Program look cheap, but it would literally mark the opening of all of space to working class human exploration and settlement, as well as safely reviving industries like fossil fuels for those proles who stay here on Earth.

So the construction of orbital rings, or a space elevator, or a skyhook, or vacuum balloons, or deep sky stations and hypersonic craft that can ferry people between those stations and orbital stations, or some Isaac Arthur-style combination of the above, will probably be high on the list of space infrastructure for a socialist America to build. And when we build it out, we will be able to settle space much more cheaply in the long run with a viable fossil fuel industry already in existence, rather than having to restart one from scratch. The trick will be in finding things for them to do that aren't pollution until the construction of socialist America's first rail-cheap way to space, whenever that may be. It may well be worth that future America's while to pay them to dig coal out of the ground and just dump it in big piles in the desert until that day comes.

Or more likely, the equipment used to dig up coal and build pipelines can be repurposed. Water pipelines could bring water from flooded areas to deserts, putting more land under cultivation and even creating forests out of nothing. Excavation equipment could build canals, deepen existing waterways, bore through the sides of mountains, and dump the extra earth wherever we wanted it. Perhaps we'll use this extra land-moving capacity to build a Midwest Passage through the North American continent, and islands in the North Pacific. But that's the subject for another book.

While we're discussing the makeup of the current Republican Party, and how it might fit into a new Marxist-Lincolnist coalition, we should not neglect the opportunists and grifters currently getting rich off of small dollar donations to groups with names like "Tea Party Patriots." To the credit of Chuckles Kirk and Dry-Ass Shapiro, they aren't Nazis, and when faced with calls to support actual Nazi lines from the alt-right, they have resisted those calls. Credit where it's due.

People like this are making a buck by organically applying the conservative mass line. That is, they hear what conservatives are saying, and repeat it back at them, minus any spicy bits that might lose them their jobs. Their mass line is only shaped by concerns of employability; they don't touch outright racism or bigotry because they want the big liberal donor money to keep rolling in. But in an environment where the big liberal donor money stopped rolling in, these people would simply adapt by becoming communist propagandists. Chuckles Kirk can totally go from being a conservative Khrushchev to a communist Khrushchev in short order; his class interests don't block it, just his sense of credibility.

For our parts, it's worth it to let the opportunists of the old order come along, so long as they haven't collaborated with actual fascists in the previous dispensation. Their obvious insincerity will be compensated for by their effectiveness at reaching out to the conservative working class. So long as they aren't promoted above their role of propagandists, or mistaken for honest communists, they will be useful to us. They should have no objection to this arrangement either: they get to keep their jobs and their paychecks, but just doing our bidding now.

There's something dialectical in all of this, for it was opportunists who turned the lights off first in the Communist Party, and then in the Soviet Union; and it was the Republican Party leading the Soviet Union's antagonist that reigned over this spectacle. So how dialectical must it be that the Republican Party's own opportunists will revive communism in the party that killed it, in the country that killed it? The very notion rings with an undeniable truth; it's too ironic for every cynic not to feel its truth in their very bones.

In any case, say that our plans come to pass. A refounded Radical Republican caucus takes over the GOP, and writes every single plank of the Republican platform, with an earnest eye to implementing every single plank. This has to be moderate enough to win us election, yet radical enough that Wall Street will feel it necessary to go full Confederate. What might such a platform look like?

Abraham Lincoln was faced with such a conundrum when campaigning for President the first time. He decided that, distasteful as slavery was, America had been founded upon a pact between North and South preserving it, and he must honor that pact in his platform to win election. But he knew as well as anyone that slavery had to expand in order to survive. The cotton plantations grew little else but cotton, and rapidly exhausted the soil, forcing the planters to keep dragging their slaves westwards. Eastern states with depleted soil often turned to the breeding and export of slaves southwards and westwards (reread that; it's absolutely as liberal and disgusting as it sounds); South Carolina's economy was premised on just this when it seceded from the Union.

So Honest Abe restricted his platform to one simple demand that could carry the entire abolitionist vote, the entire socialist vote, the entire free-soil Western vote, as well as the votes of Northern moderates unconcerned about slavery but nonetheless tired of the slave patrols in their backyards. He demanded something that sounded deceptively moderate, that could unite all those disparate factions behind it, something that would nonetheless destroy the Slave Power if enacted: the restriction of slavery to the current slave states. As just discussed, the slaveowners could not agree to this demand and keep their fortunes intact. It appears that Lincoln did not goad them to counter-revolution intentionally; he even offered them what would've been the Thirteenth Amendment, but this one would have banned the federal government from interfering with slavery where it already existed. Thankfully, he was carried away by events; he was trying to keep more states from seceding. But after the loyalty of Kentucky and Delaware were confirmed, any further attempts at diplomacy and conciliation merely demoralized the abolitionist base of the Union cause, as Marx correctly noted at the time (Karl Marx, "A criticism of American affairs," Die Presse, August 9, 1862, http://hiaw.org/defcon6/works/1862/08/09.html; also found in Robin Blackburn's Marx and Lincoln: An Unfinished Revolution, 173-5).

Continue reading Part VII