askchapo

You need real mass support. Like, huge chunks of the military and/or civilian population sympathetic to the cause. If you don't have the military, you need the people. This is why people here keep telling you to organize your neighbors. You will need help. You'll need people to hide you, feed you, transport you, etc. If you're just a ragtag group on a compound, you ain't shit.

I just want to add, that parts of the military changing sides has been an important factor in many/all revolutions.

Damn near impossible. It won't be the technology that gets you. When the climate crisis hits, 98% of people will happily murder the third-world to secure their increasingly poor quality of life.

You'll have your neighbors signing up in masses to firebomb civilian boats and curb stomp women and children crossing the border. Most people on this site would do the same even if they'd feel bad about it later.

Aside from this being militarily simplistic, you're thinking about this in the wrong way by considering it mainly as a "our guys try to kill your guys" military conflict.

If we had a properly organized militant labor movement, the most important weapon we would have is that the capitalists need labor to keep their machine running. By denying them that labor, they become a much softer target to the point of imploding in an extreme case. This is part of the reason for that slogan "become ungovernable."

is significantly hindered by the fact it can't be tied with anti-imperial nationalism

This is true, and that means it throws your whole premise into irrelevance.

What were the revolutions that featured lengthy and bloody civil wars and guerrilla warfare? Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos, Angola, Yugoslavia, etc.

What do all of these have in common? Invasion by a foreign colonizing (or fascist in Yugoslavia's case) power. Mass violence in every case is imposed by foreign powers. Usually, a liberal or fascist government in one part of the country disrupts national sovereignty with imperial support. The mass violence was not a result of revolutionary people against a reactionary government. Instead, conditions of mass violence and disruption were resolved through the organization, military competence, discipline, and development objectives of communist parties. They emerged as leaders out of extended periods of guerrilla warfare that predate the socialist revolution. The socialist revolution is an evolution of the anti-colonial (or anti-fascist) revolution.

The US is very different from any of the countries that underwent successful socialist revolutions, but it is obviously the closest in structure, scale, and internal organization to one: the Russian Empire into the USSR. What was the nature of the Russian Revolution? Were there years of guerrilla warfare? No. Was the military deployed against the people at large scale? No. Were there great battles between revolutionary forces and the state? No.

The February Revolution was a massive wave of strikes and protests that toppled the old government through mostly non-violent (but not peaceful!) disruption. The provisional government was established. At this point, the Bolsheviks were a minor party with 20 or 30 thousand members in a country of 140 million people. The provisional government fails to deliver on all the promises of the February Revolution and immediately backslides into all the problems of the Tzarist regime. The Bolshevikes are an opposition party who loudly decry the failures of the government and the reason - a refusal to break from capitalism and move to socialism. They explode in size and influence. Strikes break out everywhere, workers and soldiers form councils, factories are seized by the masses, and in October the Bolsheviks prepare for and call a single military action to seize the government. NOBODY DIES!

A revolution in the US will not look like China or Vietnam. It will look much, more like Russia. You will not need to fight the military. The Air Force will not bomb revolutionary cells in American cities. Guerrillas will not roam the hills ambushing military patrols.

In Russia, the Civil War came after the Bolsheviks had seized state power, and the Red Army was built as a state fighting force against insurrectionary reactionary forces backed by foreign powers.

Balkanization has to happen first. There would have been no Chinese revolution without the overthrow of the Qing dynasty. The Qing dynasty had to be overthrown before ideological ground could be cleared for the May Fourth movement, which led to the formation of the CPC. Had the Qing still exist, Mao et al could have never succeeded in what they set out to do and virtually no peasants would've signed on to socialism. The US equivalent of the Qing dynasty is essentially the federal government or the US itself.

A balkanized US is a US ruled by various warlords, most likely coming from the ranks of the (ex) US military and the (ex) US security apparatus. Ideally, various Indigenous nations like the Navajo Nation would also become de facto independent with their own military to defend themselves from settler warlords. Within this context, asymmetric warfare is very much on the table. Socialist guerillas in what was once the state of Utah wage insurgency warfare against the Christofascist state of Deseret, which is fighting multiple fronts against the NCR and the Navajo Nation. One JDAM dropped on socialist guerillas by the Deseretian airforce is one less JDAM dropped on NCR aqueducts and Navajo infantry.

It seems like modern warfare is basically just "my drones strike your drones" and if either side has drones free to not strike other drones, they can instantly kill whoever they like.

It's a lot more complex than that. Modern warfare is Asymmetrical warfare. Economic, Military, Moral. Key aspect in maintaining imperialism is keeping labor aristocracy happy, presenting the military as a force for good, giving everyone treats. You're not wrong that it's a paper tiger, but enough consciousness has to manifest for people to see it's a paper tiger. Like come on even libs have to realize if their country could win WW3 and dominate the world they'd have already done it. They know they can't win.

That being said, USians are already living under an occupying military force; We just call them cops. They've already got tanks and whatnot, with drones on the way. Whatever does go down is gonna need to be assymetrical as hell involving a lot of sabotage and "names and addresses." Winning over the hearts and minds of our communities will be key so that they're cheering for every 🦀. Which is why we should be working on both agitprop/propaganda and the mutual aid/parallel infrastructure to catch people as the system collapses.

The amerikan military cannot occupy amerika--its too big. They couldn't occupy Afghanistan, Iraq, and will not occupy Iran. They can try, but they will fail. Occupations are costly and cumbersome, its why they do finance imperialism.

I find it interesting that a lot of my own evaluation is reflected here in the comments and the conclusions as well.

I think it's entirely dependent on region

There are certainly areas which are filled with people who would support a massive sea change and others which wouldn't

This will most likely lead to a nasty period of Balkanization as these areas break apart dependent on any number of factors

Racial lines, religious denominations, economics, it would be a goddamn mess

At least right now anyway

It's hard to say. But it is important to remember that there have been many times in the history of the US, even at the height of it power, has had it's military humiliated. The US is currently very unstable, socially, and economically. It is showing all the death rattles of an empire dying and lashing out in it's last gasps. It is spreading thin and acting erratic. It's also being run by sheltered rich clowns who are detached from reality and therefore are constantly making uneducated decisions that will pile up and catch up with them one day.

Think about it, you have Christian Zionists among leadership that literally think causing the biblical apocalypse is a good thing. How long do you think a suicidal empire like that is going to last even if the people don't revolt?

It really depends on the context in which it happens. Surely it will be during some extended state or crisis or extended cycles of crisis. But what will the formations look like? We have not actually seen an imperial core revolution that wasn't some fight between larger powers, let alone in modern times.

Militarily, it depends on whether there is an external military element as well. If we took a snapshot of the US as it is and said, "okay there's revolution now" (which of course wouldn't happen right now but stay with me), the largest issue is actually industrial base and food and energy. The US military could not occupy the US itself militarily, not with troops, and by the time revolution was happening a good chunk would not be on the state's side. It would be entirely dependent on whoever controls the basic resources that have been made productively scarce. Much would need to be imported by everyone. The US can produce food and oil and electricity right now but cannot produce replacement parts for the industry needed to keep that going.

So what I'm saying is that it will depend on the conditions at the time. It could be a matter of masses of people because the military shoots its shot early and is too small, so it focuses on controlling a smaller area and leaves the rest to regional powers of a balkanized country. It could be a matter of literally who China decides should win (who gets imports) compared to how fervent the US revolutionary forces are (I mean right now they suck). It will depend on military doctrine, as you mention, as the current US military only functions to destroy countries that are poor and have little way to strike the US itself nor defend themselves locally. It has basically zero experience fighting on its own territory, all it knows how to do is end civilian infrastructure. That will destroy its own leftover industrial base, the lives of its own families. It would require a different approach or implode rapidly, leading to new conditions.

I think it's fair to say that we don't know. Precedent is lacking and the conditions under which it would happen look different than our current ones.

As you astutely pointed out, the prerequisites for revolution have to be realized before a real revolution kicks off, and these takes I made a few years ago are what I believe the prevailing conditions will look like when revolution becomes possible in the United States

1. The Mormons will become the Word Bearers of the Dark Neo-American Empire
2. White Supremacist ISIS will emerge out of the Northwest states
3. California, Hawaii and Texas will become independent, Nevada and Arizona go to California, Texas swallows half the deep south and the southern half of the Great Plains
4. The Feds will maintain control over most of the East Coast, with massive right-wing insurgencies in the southern portion
5. The Midwest states are an enigma to me, I don't really get what their deal is, maybe they'll fall to American ISIS in surprise campaign that shocks everyone

The possibilities of a US civil war lies in one place only; the factional rifts (potential and actual) among armed federal agencies and the true identities of their capitalist suppliers, backers, investors and patrons, the 18 intelligence agencies of the United States would obviously form the nexuses of new leadership castes, absorbing or leveraging the 3,000 or so private intelligence companies active in the US

It's a path of least resistance that flows towards whatever government entities has the most guns, and these new power blocs will scramble to absorb the various branches of the US military (assuming of course the various officer corps of the US military don't somehow overcome the combined pull of 18 intelligence agencies)

The police will obey, or they'll be branded foreign infiltrated rogues and destroyed (this may have the unfortunate effect of confusing certain leftist radicals who may form incorrect assumptions about the new "cop-killing federal government")

Militias will either be absorbed a la Azov battalion-style or suffer a similar fate to the more uppity pigs

This picture is likely to emerge by the mid 2040s

I believe revolution in the United States will acquire a balkanized nature with the military situation being defined for both sides by defeat or victory in detail, there will be states where the left wins utterly and states where it is crushed completely, but the defeats and victories won't be confined by state borders, which are largely irrelevant, but by the economic character of whole regions

holding any territory would be a fuck

"guerilla war" would look like a trickle of "lone wolves" making a mess, you wouldn't even know it was a war per se

and is significantly hindered by the fact it can't be tied with anti-imperial nationalism.

a Black movement could but the numbers were never there even at the height ~50 years ago and i don't know what would rekindle separatist nationalism.