/lit/ - Literature

>>20284495
>My thinking was more that Communism arose as a reaction to the pains of industrialization, comparative backwardness, and the failure of contemporary institutional Churches to provide much in the way of consolation to the peasantry ... But this is a fairly half-baked theory anyway.
That's not really a crazy theory and I think it's similar to what JFK thought. He still saw communism as an opportunistic conspiracy in poor countries, but I think he had a liberal (and rather Catholic-seeming) view that it was in large part a reaction to technological shock. It's for this reason that I think he developed a foreign policy concept based around supporting non-communist / non-aligned left-nationalist leaders to help them hold out, and not fighting communists where they had majority support reasoning that you can't defeat a whole population anyways, but this ran into opposition from within the hardliner camp in the U.S.

>larger portions of the population owned at least SOME land
Yeah and much larger acreage per farmer. If you look at the average American farmer in the 1930s, they worked around 640 acres (on average) while the average Chinese peasant worked... 4 acres. So you can see why the land question and land reform was of central importance to the revolution there. Vietnam too.

>Even in the US most of the rank-and-file were immigrants. American Communists were also overly focused on blacks as a revolutionary class.
Historically, American communism has been attractive to blacks and immigrants relative to other groups. Just speaking from personal experience in college, the only undergraduate class I took that discussed communism at all in a positive way was an African-American history class because of the role of communists in that ranging from W.E.B Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Robert F. Williams, the Black Panther Party (who were Marxist-Leninists) and so on.

This has been recuperated somewhat so you'll see images of black American communists in music videos like Angela Davis putting her fist up, but the rest of the content revolves around generic themes of empowerment or something and the people who might use her image are not themselves communists in many cases:

https://youtu.be/8CFrCk6_0rM?t=76