Genuinely curious. I keep thinking “it can’t get much worse without some kind of mass uprising” but the ability of the general population of Western states to just soak up suffering seems endless. Do you think we will actually see mass movements in the next decade or two? Or just slowly lurch into a void of ever-shittier liberalism?

By the West I mean like. Western Europe and the Anglosphere I guess.

  • Maoo [none/use name]
    ·
    6 months ago

    You could look to similar countries for inspiration. Donbas is an example, it broke away as part of a civil war but enjoyed popular support. It broke down along ethnic lines as the country used Russophobia to fuel its nationalit project, but of course had underlying political economic foundations.

    Are there any Western countries that could be Ukrainified? Forced down a path of poverty by the others, turned into a peripheral country until the stresses crack and the place breaks along various fault lines? The US is already breaking down what sovereignty Europe has and eating its lunch. Which country will fail the hardest? It will surely be eaten by the vultures, foreign capital brought in to use them as cheap labor for something that's high-cost in the US. You know how Google fired its entire US Python team to pay Germans less instead? Europe has a large white collar-focused workforce that will cost less and less over time so long as financialized costs don't weigh them down faster. Tech has been desperate to pay its workers less, that's what all the STEM education and new attempts at imperialist trade deals pushes are about.

    My money is on one of the countries that's already mistreated, like Greece. Or one that's just less rich but still beholden to the imperialist pact. Like Spain.

    I've focused entirely on Europe because it's undergoing dangerous changes. There's more to the West than them. But I think the other countries you could throw in there aside from the US might be sites of "pink" revolutions and I don't missy how that will go down because it will depend on the strength of imperialist forces at the time.