• ZapataCadabra [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I’m not a doomer but the US it outlasting us. The Russian empire had almost a century of peasant rebellions before the USSR. China had longer. We’re not even close.

      • ZapataCadabra [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Yup, those are factors that make it harder. A society that is not used to rebellion isn’t going to do a big one like that. Not without smaller ones preceding it, normalizing it. I don’t know how we get there. Maybe summer of 2020 was a step to it. Maybe Rodney King was an earlier step.

        • As much as it was an incoherent fuster cluck, Jan 6 was maybe one of those dates too. The difference being that once they caught the car they didn’t know what to do because they don’t have any coherent political project or goals. Pretty sure that isn’t going to change anytime soon either, the types of chuds that are organizing and training are just doing so to murder minorities, not design new systems of power. Never the less, it’s another symptom of people feeling the squeeze of conditions… and the chuds are restless.

  • Vampire [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    This is leftist cope pretty much.

    Some people say China will collapse imminently.

    USA is strong in many ways.

      • AssaultRifle15 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Don’t worry, things can and will get much, much, much worse. Most Americans have a roof over their heads, plenty of corn syrup to fill their bellies and enough treats to keep themselves occupied. The US is definitely declining, but an outright collapse is still very far away.

      • RNAi [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Mate, look at countries with way worse conditions than the US, like Haiti, yet shit has been continuing indefinitely

        • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          They’re going to keep using culture war bullshit as the president release for as long as possible. People who angry about trans athletes or critical race theory or judeo-bolchevism are not going too inconvenience their rulers.

          • jack [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            The US produces gargantuan amounts of food. It’s a massive net exporter. The idea that it would be unable to feed its army is ridiculous. It’s the most agriculturally productive state in human history.

              • jack [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                The US can grow water intensive crops in the middle of the driest and hottest desert on earth. It has access to incredible amounts of fresh water, far more land than its population needs to be supported, and the most advanced agricultural technology.

                Just saying “environmental collapse” doesn’t predict anything about the US’s ability to grow food and what you’re suggesting would need to be like a 50-75% drop in production. A mistake being made by some people in this thread is the idea that everything in the US is broken. But the US can economically dominant the world for a reason: it is a gargantuan economic and industrial powerhouse with a huge variety and quantity of natural resources and a massive population. None of that is going away. Hegemony will fade because it’s a political disaster and China has all those same advantages with far better management, but the US isn’t going to disappear any time soon.

                • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  If it were just as simple as growing food in a desert it would be fine, but the circumstances that allow us to do that are fragile and will be impacted by a lot of shit failing, not just one or two things that can be fixed by technology. The US can grow things in the desert now because it has the rest of the country’s fertile resources to do so. It doesn’t matter what technology the US has. It isn’t just a matter of replacing bees with drones or installing irrigation. The soil will be dead. The water will become anaerobic. The types of plants we can grow will dwindle, and resulting monoculture will cause even more problems. It will be insanely expensive to do. Keep in mind that this is a country that relies on capitalism to survive, the only reason it can keep going is because there are resources that are easy to exploit. What’s going to happen to businesses that can’t get their cheap corn syrup anymore? While this is going on people will be starving, and more pandemics will be occurring, meaning the workforce needed to power this huge endeavor will be strained to its breaking point.

                  I think that the climate crisis has been so diluted by the media that people don’t realize just how bad an ecological collapse is. I haven’t even listed all the details because there would be too much for me to go through and I suck and writing. Either way, look at the Permian great dying and ask yourself if we can survive that as a species, let alone a country.

                  The way the US handled COVID-19 should give you an idea of how unprepared they are.

                • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  When things collapse they collapse slowly, then all at once. The major problem for the U.S. hegemonically is that almost all of our manufacturing input (including the MIC) comes from Chinese manufacturing. If that is disrupted we will immediately come into a late-Soviet economic crisis of ‘lots of money with nothing to buy’. Almost all of our bolts, nuts, and industrial hardware comes from China, and there are no stockpiles of this stuff as it is all supply-chain managed to be immediate input-output to reduce costs. Good luck keeping your machines running if you don’t have the hardware to keep up the maintenance.

                  If we don’t fuck up our relationship with China, this whole thing can go on for decades before eventual ecological collapse, but if the blob actually decides to commit to an active conflict with China our goose will be cooked incredibly quickly, within a decade, because we do not have the labor inputs to replace that Chinese manufacturing power, and it is because there are zero engineers in the upper echelons of the corporate or political spheres (because we specifically enculturate them to be apolitically ambient right-wing) that this is even approaching a real possibility.

                • iie [they/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  Is America an industrial powerhouse? The impression I get is that America has deindustrialized and outsourced everything and is now heavily dependent on international supply chains.

                • toomanyjoints69@lemmygrad.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  Your comment wounds like a history channel documentary from the 90s

                  Not saying u r right or wrong. Just like, you gave me nostalgia. Thanks man!

      • President_Obama [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        hyper late stage capitalism so-true

        It’s actually in disco neofeudialism and will therefore last a few hundred years more before Brasil becomes a hegemonic power, read theory

    • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think the “US will collapse any day now” in the way anti China propaganda uses the term collapse. But the US is in the midst of its collapse. Decline is a better word to grasp the pace that this is occuring at but i think collapse is the appropriate word for what is happening.

      • Vampire [any]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        That’s fair.

        It was the unipolar hegemon, and now it’s still the biggest power overall, but there are other players. And African nations etc. have a choice of who to affiliate with; the US-led West isn’t the only option.

  • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    3 - 10 years

    I say this because climate change and the Holocene extinction are going to be a lot worse than people realize. There is going to be more disease, more fire. Capitalism’s rabid growth and consumption has started hell on earth. That’s not cope, I don’t actually want it to happen that way because it’s not just the US that will collapse, it’s all of us, humans, animals, plants. That’s my opinion as a training ecologist. It is so much worse than what they’re telling you.

    This isn’t just about economics or war anymore. There are different forces at play than with other falling empires.

  • BynarsAreOk [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Defining collapse, to me this means US balkanization.

    IMO it will happen when the US gets a few large scale climate related disasters like the Texas snowstorm etc but over a dozen(more than 1 a month) going on continuously for about 3-5 years would be enough to destroy the country.

    I believe it is a certainty because the US government is not capable of mobilizing resources to deal with these disasters, at the end of the day the capitalist class will not allow it. This already happens anyway, Puerto Rico got fucked and Trump withheld resources, nothing was done anyway. You’ll be told to leave or flee or get fucked. Everyone will cheer when Florida goes underwater but will they deal with the consequences of mass migration etc? You can expect headlines like this in the future Trump complains to senators that Puerto Rico is getting too much hurricane relief funding If this isn’t a sign of collapse than what is it? The “richest” nation in the world counting pennies for disaster relief while e.g giving unlimited no questions asked funding for the military.

    Anyway as for the timeline, well climate change is showing signs of nothing except getting worse, nothing is being done and nothing will be done until it is too late, you can look into solar reflection is the goto example, I am all but convinced the US will do it unilaterally and fuck up everything because literaly better to gamble the fate of the world than to talk about changing capitalism, degrowth etc.

    So if you want a date? It is hard to say, we are on the very pessimistic path, you can look at all the depressing headlines if you want confirmation, everything is always “faster than expected” or “scientists shocked” etc even accounting for the usual MSM sensationalism this message is even stronger among the academic circles, before 2050 is already quite likely, but almost certainly “collapse” will happen before 2080.

    Climate change dictates this will happen and to argue against it like saying its “cope” and whatnot would be saying that a country going through multiple disasters and mass migrations has not collapsed yet because technically there are still 50 states and some geriatric dipshit 80 year in sitting on a table somewhere being called a “president”.

  • GaveUp [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    At least one more century just going off of historical examples, the most recent one being the British Empire/UK

  • Owl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Gotta define collapse.

    The domestic system of governance? Already collapsing.

    The ability of the state to project military power? A decade or two for most of the world, an extra decade for South America.

    A formal entity called the United States with structure derived from its constitution? Could be a thousand years.

  • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    This reminds me of how there’s multiple dates that historians place the end of the Roman Empire at and all say something slightly different. The date picked creates a certain interpretation for the end of the empire. For example, some often use the moving of the capital to Constantinople under Constantine (i think like 310-ish AD) as the end of the Empire in the sense of a cohesive entity centered in Rome as we think of it. The Western Empire still existed for 100+ years and the Eastern Empire for like a 1,000 years after that. I think that paints an interesting picture of what decline looks like on that scale.

    Timeframes in the modern era are sped up for a lot of reasons (communications tech, and climate change mostly) but its really hard to put a timeline on something like decline and collapse, even in history, let alone when trying to predict future

    In a lot of ways, i feel that what American Balkanization is going to look like has already occured to a significant degree. The Federal government took little real action or responsibility during COVID, and is choosing inaction as a minority party overturns abortion rights ceding more power to states. They’re also inactive while wild slates of anti-trans laws get passed in the most reactionary states and their extreme abortion restrictions. The Federal government’s policy is basically “your on your own citizens consumers.” I think that process will continue, but i think it looks more like this than states breaking away and forming new countries. I think the federal government will continue to be a middle man for collecting and dispersing tax dollars and running the military to keep the war economies going and facilitate imperialism. When the US can no longer do the later inshallah-script we’ll be deep in collapse. Hard to imagine when it will be, or what that will look like

    Something i noticed in Texas thst i think highlights another aspect of this process. The US has a rural urban divide in political affiliation. In Texas the Republican stare government has been trying to extert more power over the major city governments that are run by democrats. They withheld Federal disaster relief money from Harris County (Houston) after Hurricane Harvey and recently took over Houston’s school district. No federal intervention on these overstepping of powers.

      • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        I’m not sure how useful parallels with Roma are

        I agree, i think in general people make too much out of percieved historical parallels. Thie point i was trying to make was more about how difficult it is the create a timeline of decline and/or collapse even in history, where we already know what happened, let alone when trying to predict the future.

        I don’t really see the US state collapsing

        I agree with this in the sense that i don’t think the Balkanization will take place in the US in the way its traditionally concieved of, with US states breaking off and forming their own countries. In a sense the state would still be intact - collecting taxes, dispensing money to the states, and operating the military. But i do think tge federal gov has shown a trend of doing nothing on what should be national problems (pandemics, environmental disasters) and i think that will continue.

        Without UBI or some kind of concessions to the working class, the state probably will collapse,

        I’m not as optimistic about concessions generally, but i could see what you’re talking about, and if anything remotely approaching a concession happens it would probably be the kind of UBI you’re talking about. It feels less like an outright concession than a necessity to make the kind if society where “you will own nothing and like it” work the way the ruling class want it to, but thats probably me splitting hairs over the term concession.

        The other possibility is outright fascism, although I think the demographics of the US make a fascism based in white supremacy or Christianity basically impossible now.

        I hope you’re right about that. I think we could see some states have christo-fascist governments in the kind of soft Balkanization i think is most likely. Minority rule in the US is the norm, not the exception, and there have been conscious moves on the stare level for over a decade to strengthen minority rule byvthe right in every state with a Republican government. The repeal of the protections imposed on firmer Confederate states by the Voting Rights Act by the Sumpreme Court opened the floddgates after they were already pushing legislation to promote minority rule.

        Like i said I’m not as optimistic about concessions happening at this point in the US, and i think that a lack of that, plus the ruling class’s insistence on confrontations with China and Russia say a lot for the possiblity of seeing fascism rather than concessions.

        It’s really hard to predict. It will probably he slower, more boring, and far worse than whatever our best preductions could possibly be.

  • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    If collapse is defined as swathes of the country either being abandoned or placed under indefinite martial law and if current trends in terms of housing, education, health, wages, pollution, infrastructure and climate change continue

    Then around 20-25 years, 10-15 years if the worse case scenarios for climate change become reality

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Going based on pure vibes and ass-pulling:

    • Irreversible decline: We are here.

    • “The sick man of [continent]”: By 2050s.

    • Losing most imperial possessions: A few decades after “The sick man of [continent]”

    • Minor Balkinization (secessionist movements): ~2070s

    • Major Balkinization (rump state surrounded by successor republics): 2100-2110s

    • Formal end of these United States of America: The rump state could easily truck along for centuries, especially if one of the successor republics manages to conquer the rump state and retroactively claims itself as a continuation of the rump state.

    My vibes-based analysis is unable to incorporate climate change into its analysis, but climate change will obviously speed up the timeline.