(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.

  • HoChiMaxh [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.