(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.
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)