(e.g: sanctions against Russia backfiring, Ukraine being a US quagmire, or a fantasy that decline will mean a great awakening of the masses to seize the moment for a second Civil Rights movement or even revolution)
A state of decline can still be kept afloat through debt and intimidation. With receding rewards and profits of being the imperial core, this system of domination and exploitation can , like a dying sun, become more intense, destructive, and normal.
Think of how much in the past twenty to thirty years has been normalized in the US: school shootings, police shootings/murder and abuse of power by police, state, and federal government. Spying on its own citizens, extrajudicial assassinations and black sites. The list goes on.
A state of decline can find a new grounds of sustainability for its capitalist engine through more overt adopted fascist strategies and tactics against labor and enemies, foreign and domestic.
Is decline a good thing in this context? Would a state of decline transmute the volatility of the state to revolutionary moments seized by a neo-nascent American communist front?
These are just some background thoughts I've been having in my mind when I skim the website, forgive me if the tone comes off as :reddit-logo: :debate-me-debate-me: but I found the insight of some of the posters here quite helpful and astute and was hoping for some of thst collective wisdom.
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they just repealed child labor laws in the US.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"
i thought decline meant decline in the standards of living for most people in america.
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.
In 1945 the USA had half the world's wealth and was the only country that split the atom.
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.
There is a pattern throughout history of the state retreating and being replaced by warlord gangs
just look at Northern Mexico
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?
Because they're doing the government's job? At their own expense? It's deeply humiliating.
It's humiliating to be abandoned or treated like a non-entity, but I don't see how it's humiliating to take care of people?
The government fobbing off its work onto you and you doing for them with a smile is humiliating. No compensation, no acknowledgement, all they got were cops and national guard trying to get them out of the way and stop them because they were making them look bad.
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.
I'm an old, with memories as far back the late 80s. I also majored classical history. And let me tell you, we are collapsing way faster than the western Roman empire did; in the last 40 years we've had at least 150 Roman years' worth of decline. A lot of people reading this will absolutely live to see a time when the USA only exists on paper, if that. tbh there's an argument to be made that we're pretty much there already in most of the ways that count.
as to whether it's a good thing: nothing is a good thing
we are collapsing way faster than the western Roman empire did; in the last 40 years we’ve had at least 150 Roman years’ worth of decline.
well the romans were smarter than our leaders
A lot of people reading this will absolutely live to see a time when the USA only exists on paper
Inshallah
Death to America
Tainter, Joseph. 1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies
Smith, Sid. 2019. How to Enjoy the End of the World
The first link is the book on complexity collapse and the second is a nice college lecture on the same thing tho focused on EROI (energy return on investment). They’re good primers on complexity curves and civilizational collapse. One could argue that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall over time (tm) is an economic maxim describing complexity curves, tho I wouldn’t say that’s traditional Marxist orthodoxy.
I’ve heard the argument made that our current society has passed the point where the proletariat are able to act upon it as the subject-object class as the complexity has increased to the point that the skills necessary to reproduce it are no longer held within a single class (even the workers). The argument here being that society has been so systematized it no longer needs - or can take - human input. Which is to say we’re past the tipping point on our complexity curve and collapse is imminent. Now that sounds great if you’re only thinking of the Great Satan :amerikkka: but the capitalist system of production is now global and inhabits every nation (yes even China), so I don’t see how this collapse could be contained within a specific sphere of influence/region/polity/ whatever. The hope I have internally is that this collapse means the end of the nation-state as we understand it today and the formation of new societal structures in its wake that can more effectively manage a homeostasis between humanity and its environment (crossing fingers for eco-Maoism here instead of anything else)
I think the real decline is the increasing extent to which Africa is doing business with China rather than Europe and America. the decline in neocolonial revenues is a real problem for America. This is also going to really suck for everyone in the imperial core so practice your mandarin guys and gals and enbys
they can only intimidate the countries that don't fall under the Chinese sphere of influence
US decline will set the feral hogs on a global rampage. :frothingfash:
"Will"? It's literally happening right now. Hell, they were on a global rampage before their decline. (That's not to say the feral hogs can't go even more rabid).
As the US dies it will take so much of the world with them, but they would destroy countries anyway
How's this follow? The US is going to stop meddling and repressing and that can only be good.
There's a lot of ruin in a country.
America can be on fire and burning for decades before decline becomes obvious. Don't hold your breath. Decline is happening but it's going to be a long time.
Decline is not good and will be very messy both domestically and internationally. I think the US has been declining since 9/11 and it's only become more noticeable. I don't think it will lose its superpower status anytime soon though. It will just have to share it with a few other countries, China being the most notable.
As much as I hate to say this, it's something both sides do. One overestimates how much more powerful the US is and the other underestimates it.
I also think that the US will become "isolationist" for a brief period to lick its wounds and focus their attention on North America and extracting as much as they can before returning to global imperialism again.
Some of the stuff about how China is now as powerful as the US is overstated. China is way behind the US in many important areas, like computing and AI and nuclear might, and is not catching up.
China has enough nuclear might to kill everyone in America and Europe I think anymore would just give diminishing returns
I think that depends on how you measure power. The US basically doesn't produce anything other than weapons and debt traps at this point. Our manufacturing sector is a rounding error compared to China.
Computing is an area where China is very much playing catchup still, but arguably China has already pulled ahead in AI research.
As for nuclear might, if we're talking about weapons China's nuclear arsenal is pretty unknown go outside observers. That said, China has advanced hypersonic delivery vehicles so even the low count of 200 warheads is quite something if they can't be intercepted and can get to their targets shockingly fast.
That's the copium we are discussing.
The most cited AI research mostly comes from the US and its allies: Germany, UK, Australia, Canada, France. "Earlier reports that China may have overtaken the US in AI R&D [the one you posted] seem to be highly exaggerated if we look at it from the perspective of citations."
If you know anything about Chinese AI research culture, it's very focused on impact factor, moreso than the US, and they're still not outputting a third of what the US is by that measure.
The nuclear superpowers remain Russia and USA.
