If America Should Go Communist¶
Core Argument¶
In this appendix to his 1935 pamphlet Whither France?, Leon Trotsky directly addresses the American public, aiming to dispel the widespread fear that communism would mean the replication of Soviet Russia’s poverty, bureaucracy, and repression. His core argument is that a communist revolution in the United States would be fundamentally different from the Russian experience, precisely because of America’s immense wealth, advanced technology, and developed consumer culture. Far from imposing austerity and regimentation, Trotsky insists, American soviets would unleash unprecedented abundance and genuine individual liberty.
Trotsky grounds his case in a class analysis of American society. He argues that the revolution would be swift and relatively bloodless because the overwhelming majority—the working class, farmers, and even the lower middle classes—have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The tiny oligarchy of billionaires (Mellons, Morgans, Fords, Rockefellers) would be unable to recruit a serious counterrevolutionary force. The new soviet government would nationalise only the “commanding heights” of the economy—banks, key industries, transport—leaving farmers and small businesses to voluntarily observe the superior efficiency of the socialised sector. Trotsky predicts that costs of production would fall to 20% of their present figure, and that American advertising and publicity techniques, far from being obstacles, could be repurposed to win over the middle class without compulsion.
The chapter draws heavily on the contrast between backward, pauperised Russia and industrialised America. Trotsky is sharply critical of the “radical professors” of Roosevelt’s Brain Trust and the NRA, which he dismisses as a doomed attempt to shore up capitalism. He polemicises against the notion of “managed currency” championed by these academics, arguing that a stable gold-backed dollar is essential for any planned economy to function as a regulator of wages, prices, and distribution. The Soviet Union’s monetary instability, he claims, is a source of its bureaucratic distortions, not a model to emulate.
Trotsky directly confronts American anxieties about bureaucratic tyranny, press censorship, and cultural standardisation. He argues that America’s wealth would eliminate the scramble for necessities that produced the Soviet bureaucracy. Soviet America would not need a monopoly of the press; instead, printing plants and paper mills would be nationalised, but access to them would be allocated proportionally based on electoral support, ensuring genuine political pluralism. He predicts vigorous public debate over economic plans, education, eugenics, and even stratosphere communication.
The text is notable for its confident, even provocative predictions: Japan and Britain would likely go communist before or immediately after the American revolution; the Western Hemisphere would be unified into a Soviet United States within a year, with its capital at Panama; and, in a final flourish, Americans would stop chewing gum by the third year of soviet rule. Trotsky’s polemic is aimed squarely at the conservative and liberal American imagination, which he accuses of being trapped in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationalism and empiricism, unable to grasp the dialectical necessity of social revolution. He presents communism not as a foreign imposition but as the only logical fulfilment of American technological and democratic potential.