This is also why America’s future may look less like collapse and more like controlled decline combined with harder nationalism, stronger surveillance, weaker labor power, and more political anger directed sideways instead of upward.
I have to agree. Many imagine a big dramatic implosion where the US just loses power and kind of collapses in a heap arguing with itself which isn’t likely to happen. The imperial boomerang is already coming home with heightened repression, police state, surveillance. Think of the children bills, VPN bans coming in not just the US but the EU (it’s vassal) so there is nowhere in the western world to run and the rest of the world can just be blocked or you can be black-bagged in the night for being a commie for using a non-western VPN (none such that are no-logs and unlimited* exist that I’m aware of funnily enough).
*I exclude criminal network VPNs that require high costs and are for cybercrime use and would be impractical for your average torrent user or privacy seeker to use.
But the empire will endure, transform, repress at home to keep the line going up and lash out as much as it can externally at free African states, Latin America, Asia, etc. And it will be strong enough even if this is part of a final decline to keep doing this and repressing at home for decades IMO. Of course Lenin himself thought he’d never live to see the revolution so things could always change but the current structure of problems for the US barring new developments doesn’t seem to lend itself to anything that dramatic, just the US putting on a new outfit and tightening the chains on the domestic proles.
For sure, it’s very hard to predict how things will actually play out. Only thing we can do is follow the trends and try to extrapolate the range of possible outcomes based on the material conditions and history. And collapse is just one possibility here, with far worse scenarios on offer.
I used to think (when I was still a lib) that some populist fascist politician would wind up spurring CA or other western states to secede kicking off Civil War 2, but now I’m thinking a collapse into a military junta might be more likely. I can see the powers that be just doing away with the democratic pretense altogether. I think we in the imperial core are going to reap everything we’ve sown in the third world.
that’s always my first thought whenever people talk about the inevitability of us collapse.
we got an even bigger fight ahead of us.
