Permanently Deleted
look at what happened to russia after the USSR collapsed; decline does not result in good outcomes. especially in a country as fascist as the USA, the OG apartheid police state.
a neoliberal hellscape where every single victory achieved by the working class during the revolution was rolled back
they just repealed child labor laws in the US. it has been going backwards towards the gilded age for years. that decline hypes up the working class for VENGEANCE. like trump says “Let me be your retribution”
The difference is that Russia, even after it went revisionist, was a socialist state that supported other socialist states around the world while the US is a fascist empire that uses its vast economic and military power to obliterate anyone who gets in the way of it plundering their country.
There is not going to be any revolution without a rupture - in that sense decline is good. Decline also means a decline in the ability of the US to wield imperial power. This would be unfathomably good.
Obviously decline will at least temporarily decrease standards of living in the US, but a lot of the standards of living in the US are not sustainable anyways and these standards of living are unlikely to drop past the standards of the global south whose exploitation subsidizes these standards in the core. At any rate, this is a good reason to be actively organizing mutual aid programs right now, to build infrastructure to help workers support each other.
There’a video from the 60s of Gore Vidal touring his italian home and he looks out on the horizon and says “a nice place to witness the decline of the west”. So people have been claiming decline for decades, even before reagan, even before the 70s staglfation.
I don’t think they’re wrong. Collapse is a process, not an event, and I think there’s a good case to be made that the US’ imperial noon only lasted about ten years before it started to recede.
the US’ imperial noon only lasted about ten years before it started to recede.
when was it?
I’d put it from the early-mid 50s to maybe the mid 60s. It’s definitely over by 1973. The country is the world’s biggest agricultural producer and manufacturing hub with undisputed control of the Pacific, and a Europe whose countries west of Berlin have basically signed on as junior partners to Washington. Even Britain is on the outs after Suez in 1956. A lot of central america and the carribean is also underfoot during the mid 50s, until Cuba manages to upend things, and the US’ prsence is strong enough in Asia that Japan is a client state and we can replace France as the occupying colonial power in Vietnam even after the height of the Korean War.
But the Cuban Revolution and Bay of Pigs then end up as imperial embarassments, the Kennedy assassination (I think) shows the internal fractures between different factions of the capitalist and political classes, and unaddressed social tensions start to crack in the civil rights movement, the anti-war protests and other 60s counter-cultural movements. By 1973 there’s really nowhere left to go but down, even if the financialization of the economy leads to some people ever-more ridiculous giant piles of money. It’s a very gentle slope down at first, but there’s never reclaiming that brief time in the mid 50s when it took the global imperial steering wheel from Britain.
It can take centuries but it can also happen very quickly. The US power on the world stage has dramatically declined in just the last few years as multipolarity is rapidly emerging.
If nothing else, climate change will cause a complete restructuring of geopolitics in the next 50 years or less. We don’t have centuries.
Have you read ‘Hinterland’ by Phil Neal? His analysis really resonates with yours. The big thing is an analysis of the decline and effective departure of the State from rural and disinvested areas, and why the right is able to thrive in that context by taking on some of the necessary community work like disaster response. As things get worse, that will describe more and more of the country I think.
why the right is able to thrive in that context by taking on some of the necessary community work like disaster response.
That explains the Cajun Navy rescuing all those people after Hurricane Harvey. They were abandoned by the government and they had to do it on their own dime and they were so proud of it. “You can piss on our heads and tell us it’s raining and we’ll smile!”
Given how infantalizing and top-down federal disaster response is, who wouldn’t be proud? Even if it is fascist, what organization is going to see the profound suffering of the people (it considers ‘the people’!) and sit on the sidelines?
The biggest impediment to leftist development is that the state loathes our existence whilst welcoming wiling brownshirts crying out for more fascism. Though it will be horrible the decline of the US empire will be a net good for the global south as well as for any leftist movements that can occur, I do not expect any within rural America but urban sectors will likely see them flourish as people band together to stave off a declining state. The biggest threat at that point will be local police and fash militia which will require a armed and prepared leftist cohort to organize alongside other aspects of leftist mutual aide (food kitchens, shelters, community libraries/classrooms, community medical outreach etc).
The US will be hell until the US ceases to exist and then what rises from the ashes will continue to be hell until they accept Juche. The only other possiblities are China becomes so powerful that they start overthrowing capitalist governments or a capitalist nuclear power destroys the world before communism comes for them.
