I have hope that the decline of the empire will enable revolutions around the world. We could see “global communism” by default as global capitalism collapses, while actually existing socialist states and new revolutionary governments form a new world system.
I… don’t have a lot of hope inside the imperial core. I think it’s gonna be barbarism.
yeah, the europe and the US are probably going to have to go through like 7 collapses before there’s any kind of societal consensus on reviewing white supremacy as a foundational idea
I think it’s gonna be barbarism.
already is, always was
I doubt there will be any kind of world system. The climate crisis is real fuckin’ bad.
The decline of the empire will eventually mean the decline of fossil fuel extraction and use. Fossil fuels are the blood of the empire, after all, so as the empire declines and eventually collapses I think the blood will stay in the ground. Oil will peak before we’ve pumped it all, simply because the political structures required to pump oil aren’t going to last.
Plus, China is doing a really good job at electrification, enough to give me the tiniest sliver of hope that we won’t be reduced to less than a million people struggling to survive on the tropical Antarctic archipelago.
Leaving some of the oil in the ground isn’t enough. If we stopped today, fully electrified from non-polluting sources, we will still see warming of multiple degrees. We have spent over a hundred years putting tens of millions of years worth of stored carbon into the atmosphere. The extinction rate is estimated at somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than normal - yes, three to four orders of magnitude greater than occurs naturally! Things are so much worse than this admits. People keep talking about “wild” worst case scenarios like “a million people struggling to survive on the tropical Antarctic archipelago” but that’s not how it works. Far before that point, the vast majority of life will be gone likely leaving only microorganisms. We’re losing all our arable topsoil (1/3 in just the last 40 years), our bees and other insects are under threat… The concern is not that our homes will be underwater, it’s the collapse of food webs worldwide starving us and everything else more than one or two links removed from primary production. That will happen long, long before we have a “tropical Antarctic archipelago”. For complex life to exist you need an entire biosphere, a small group of vertebrates in a limited area like that doesn’t work. The point is that according to all the models, we’re already locked in for 3-4 degrees of warming. Not that many years ago we were shooting for 1.6 optimistically and two at worst because that’s what we could tolerate without too much death. Now three is the best we can possibly hope for and frankly we aren’t heading for that, either. More likely 4+ and that is just not tolerable.
Also, as much as china is doing well at preparing to halt fossil fuel use, they still haven’t. I trust that they’ll meet their goals and that their goals are the best they can reasonably do, but that doesn’t mean they’re enough alongside the rest of the world.
That wasn’t meant to be a wild worst case scenario. That’s a middle case scenario as far as I’m concerned, I understand that there are many natural feedback loops that we are triggering now, the Earth is on track to become largely uninhabitable.
To humans.
But it’s hard for me to believe in some kind of extinction of all complex life in the biosphere. The Earth could warm 8°C and be within the its historical range that can and has supported complex life in the past. It will be a cataclysmic transition, most megafauna will probably die, but there are many species alive today that actually were alive when the Earth was that much warmer.
In our lifetime, we will be subjected to climate catastrophes that will make the previous hurricanes, floods, fire storms, heat domes, etc look like tutorial levels. These events will cause major internal and international migrations, and the western world will crack down on its populations while letting fewer desperate migrants in. Meanwhile, the younger generations, who are inheriting this vile shitshow, will have the opportunity to reject the system that brought them to this point. After they pick fascism, a whole lot of people will die, the fascists will eventually be defeated, and two or three generations from now, our grandchildren will build communism from the ashes
You are making the honestly very optimistic assumption that Homo sapiens isn’t one of the victims of the ongoing mass extinction event.
The leviathan of capital cannot consume the human spirit.
How much more fucked everything has visibly gotten in such a short time and how acutely aware most people are of it
Nothing. The approaching climate catastrophe is civilization ending at best, we’ll be doing well if humanity as a species makes it out of the 21st century. “Just” wide scale civilizational collapse would have been extremely likely even with the ~3 degrees of warming we would have gotten if we had pulled out all the stops ~2 years ago, but we didn’t and we’re getting a lot more than that.
Humanity is fucked and we seem determined to take a LOT of other life with us.
The stupidity and feebleness of modern capitalists
The internalizing of American capitalism propaganda among wealthy Americans who forgot that it’s supposed to be just propaganda and not a how-to.
there are a lot of countries i don’t live in
The fact that capitalism is collapsing faster than we had anticipated. People are going to get sick of this shit eventually.
I don’t see it happening in my lifetime. Maybe in another place. What keeps me hopeful is seeing socialist thought appearing through the cracks of the continuously fading away neoliberal order, despite everything they’ve tried to extinguish it.
My goal is to leave something, for those who come after me, one day they are going to succeed. That’s what gives me hope. People have told me that my emotions make me weak and that’s why I am a loser, but if that’s true then why have the winners failed to accomplish anything? Endless wars doesn’t seem like an accomplishment to me.
The tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
I do not think it will. If it does happen it will be unpredictable and triggered by an unrelated factor. All the successful revolutions of the 20th century (except perhaps Cuba’s?) came in the wake of reality-overturning events like a world war or successful anti-colonial struggle. In the fiction book Green Mars (spoilers to follow) the Martian independence revolution is kicked off by massive collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet on Earth and subsequent 6 meter sea rise. So mostly it’s about being ready to take advantage of events instead of building expressly toward revolution. And that event does not arrive on a schedule.
I do not think it will. If it does happen it will be unpredictable and triggered by an unrelated factor.
This sounds overly pessimistic to me, because unpredictable major events seem to be happening regularly, albeit not on a schedule. Look at COVID-19 for a huge example in all our lifetimes, and look at how much it was compounded in places like the US.
I agree with everything else, especially the last sentence. Building the Party and other summaries of the Russian Revolutions era show just how important and unintuitive or surprising opportunities can be. Father Gapon in the Russian Empire is a great example, the kind of person we collectively would likely (and for good reason) dismiss as a police collaborator/asset and a pro-Tsarist. But their milquetoast protest sparked the 1905 revolution, which in turn is generally considered a major factor in the 1917 revolutions.
But their milquetoast protest sparked the 1905 revolution, which in turn is generally considered a major factor in the 1917 revolutions.
Can you imagine if the No Kings photoshoot somehow inspired a revolution ten years from now?
Covid, big as it was, did not have the scale to actually trigger a revolution I don’t think. I don’t mean to dismiss the scale of suffering and death. But I think an event on the scale necessary to trigger a revolution would probably have to directly imperil and permanently, drastically change the lives of upwards of 25% of fighting-age people.
absolutely nothing lol. even if a global communist revolution erupted yesterday and won instantly and bloodlessly, we’d still be fucked by a collapsing biosphere. that hasn’t happened, so we’re fucked2. if things don’t change extremely soon, i think we’re far more likely to see eco-fascism grip the West than even just tepid social democracy (which is objectively the moderate wing yadda yadda) as the climate refugee crisis kicks in to full gear. but also lenin didnt think he’d see revolution either, so im open to being surprised, it’s just impossible to keep actual hope alive given the circumstances. as other people said, no reason to give up trying though when the literal fate of humanity and most species is at stake this late in the game.
Honestly I am expecting communist revolutions within the next decade. Just not in the imperial core. We will go through a significant period of pure barbarism before communism is attempted.
