I'm reminded of when Margaret Thatcher first became Prime Minister in the UK. Some commies there supported her because they thought she would sharpen the contradictions and therefore bring about a revolution. We all know how that turned out.
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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Accelerationism isnt taken seriously because it doesn’t guarantee social change but more specifically to you advocating for and trying to collapse the American nation isnt accelerationism since collapsing it would actually benefit the communist movement as a whole
Accelerationism means actively working to make things worse for most people. Not only is it unnecessary because the decline is already ongoing and an eventual crisis of some sort therefore inevitable, but it is also bad strategy. Communists should not be seen to be making things worse, needless to say that is very bad optics. We should be seen as those who are most strongly on the side of the working class, defending and advancing their interests.
We want the masses to see us as trustworthy and reliable, as having their back and as those who they can trust to lead them. In order to win that trust you need more than just the right words, you need action. You need to show to the people by standing side by side with them in their struggles against capital, landlords, fascists, state violence, etc. that communists are those who will fight the hardest for their well-being.
By helping workers in their struggles you also contribute to the sharpening of contradictions as the limitations of the liberal bourgeois system are exposed and the need for a radically different system in order to fulfill all the needs and demands of workers becomes evident for more and more people. Organizing the working class is also how you prepare for "after the collapse", it's how you prepare the working class for eventually seizing power.
It is not sufficient for a collapse to occur, revolutionaries must be prepared and have the necessary support from a sufficiently large class conscious subsegment of the masses (in order to achieve this educational and agitation work is necessary) as well as the organizational infrastructure to be able to quickly mobilize the masses and fill the vacuum of power before our class enemies do.
I will add one caveat to this which is that you will frequently see the term "accelerationism" used incorrectly by disingenuous liberals in an attempt to intimidate or shame communists and other leftists out of sticking by our principles. According to these people the definition of accelerationism is "when you don't vote for or support Democrats". That is of course ridiculous and people who say such things should be ridiculed.
The American empire can be simplified into 2 parts.
One is the power projection overseas, and you can't really do much about that unless you have federal executive power, which the government and adjacent organizations are structured to prevent people like you and me from gaining. It will only be the geopolitical adversaries of the empire that wear this down.
The other is national cohesion. This includes logistics, domestic production, taxation, and even peaceful participation in American life. This is the glue that you can break down.
Things are going to get worse no matter what, there's no need to push them in that direction. Instead, every revolutionary has to consider the possible moments that will set off revolution, and make themselves as prepared as possible for those moments. What is a revolutionary force going to need?
You're not going to beat the chuds gun-for-gun or bullet-for-bullet. But they don't eat guns and they don't keep warm with bullets. Their sustenance comes from a globalized system of logistics that brings electricity to their houses, gasoline to their vehicles, and meat to their bellies. Consider that a lot of the enemy lives in suburban or exurban areas, well away from distribution centers, extremely car-dependent, and not efficient in electricity use at all. These are all glaring weaknesses; their way of life is teetering. You should be thinking not about how to slaughter them all, but about how to make them realize (beforehand or in retrospect) that they cannot just do a Civil War 2 to wipe you out without critically weakening America's domestic cohesion or maybe even its global power projection.
But counter point you want to collapse and weaken americas domestic cohesion but you don’t want to do that by feeding the fascists or intensifying capitalism
Right. One answer leverages a critique of economics that recognizes that some goods and services are part of The Economy, and others are not. There have always been sectors external to capitalism; it cannot possibly control them all without literally putting all of humanity in a prison with perpetual coercion.
One strategy is to expand the domain of the "homestead" to where it includes unrelated people, exchanges less with the outside economy (i.e. direct production for use), and thus deprives the government of tax income in comparison to the average lifestyle. The government's own propaganda about "freedom" encompasses these "homesteads"; it cannot fight them on a broad scale without a civil war that weakens itself. And when a revolutionary army comes into being, they will need areas of material support that are not just "thousands of broke people in this town support you".
I'm not a fifth column, Inspector. I'm just a regular American citizen, pursuing the American Dream, this is just a plot of land that I do silviculture on. This is my only structure on the property and it's an unconventional construction, it probably wouldn't sell for much.
How would a communist movement push for these “homestead” policies and generally draining the cities of their populations
A lot of these are going to be located in or around smaller cities or towns in the hinterland. There will certainly be a contest over urban planning, no one raised on liberal orthodoxy is going to be excited about the arrival of large multiple-family social units, but if the alternative is decline and brownfields, I think they'd accept it.
The more people you get working together and sharing things, the easier it is to "beat" the model of atomized capitalist subjects, either by saving more, or working and consuming less. As for the details, it's more of an art than a science.
Whats the difference between this and suburbs?
Suburbs have minimal planning, little space set aside for collective use, individually-owned plots that reify the reactionary worldview of a war of all against all.
Shared spaces, higher density, real estate held by a land trust instead of individuals, fewer cars by an order of magnitude... everything is different from a standard suburb. Possibly even arcology- I dream about acquiring 10 contiguous city lots just 2 miles from the city center and slapping a small version of the Karl-Marx-Hof on them.
It's not the be-all-end-all of revolutionary organizing, but it addresses some of the biggest frictions that minimize how much working class people can increase their ability to act.
Why don’t communist push for these “homestead” policies? They seem doable
Historically, Marxists have had an emphasis on building revolutionary political parties (especially vanguard parties), as well as expanding labor union participation and militancy.
Full-fledged communes can be fragile in many ways. Some can end up tearing apart under their own internal pressures, some rural communes especially can become permanently isolated and unable to sustain new generations, and some high-profile communes can be outwardly antagonistic enough to the state that they get raided or bombed. There are questions of stability that have plagued past communal movements, but I think we have the ability to address these questions while retaining the model. One of the trickiest challenges, IMHO, is breaking out of the reality of playing out a parallel of "socialism in one country", or "socialism in one commune" where the concerns end at the boundaries of the commune.
Some Marxists might see communizing as "something that happens after the social discontinuity of revolution", or view the process as a form of incrementalism, or possibly even see questions of lifestyle as a liberal endeavor, especially if it involves accruing capital to set up the commune. Many Marxists would probably assert that the state would quickly neutralize any commune that began to pose a threat to capital accumulation. Thus the makeup of communes in the past generation or two has been predominantly anarchists.
But I see the party, the union (or the worker's cooperative), and the commune as mutually supportive aspects of a successful communist movement, and which should naturally have a substantial amount of continuity amongst them. I would say that state repression can be leveraged against any of these, and that the commune is an effective way of developing a revolutionary support base while also directly benefitting proles' lives in the here and now.
Makes sense so with Americas fall to fascism all but inevitable at this point what can communists do?
That is an extremely broad question. When applied to just communizing, the answer is kind of self-explanatory: find safety in numbers, pick your battles where you know lots of people are ready to rally to your side (like what we've seen in LA and Chicago), stick to lower-profile ways of expanding/recruiting, practice dissimulation if necessary.
As @starkillerfish@lemmygrad.ml said, accelerationism isn't particularly useful, and risks desparation from the reactionaries plunging the world into war. Without working class organization, there is nothing to resist that meaningfully.
I think a common pattern with your posts is that they tend to fall into desparation and confusion stemming from a lack of theory. In your case, I think reading theory would be immensely clarifying and comforting. I made an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list, but many others out there exist as well. I recommend you give that a try!
Don’t we want a non nuclear war?
What we want is a socialist revolution in the heart of the Empire, led by an organized working class with indigenous Americans and other oppressed nations within the imperial core at the forefront. This is feasible, increasingly so, as imperialism crumbles and the treat printers run dry.
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This may seem unprompted, but it has been something I've encountered in these threads before.
In these types of posts, I want to clarify that wanting America to be cut off from it's imperial exploitation of the global south is not "accelerationism". None of the things we are offered in the west are "granted" to us, they are taken by force; either violence or economic coercion and the average person benefits from it. Even someone like me who grew up in a demunicipalized slum with no warm water, no constant electricity and no basic amenities as a child could tell you that. Despite those conditions, I still benefited from colonial exploitation of the south.
Any measure or method by any nation to enforce it's economic and political sovereignty by seeking independence from American hegemony should be supported.
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