How bad do we all think things are likely going to get in the west/imperial cores? How quickly do we think the west's internal spiral to fascism is going to proceed?

people in here really trying to be like “you are defeatist and wrong” and “I have hope” who also don’t wear a mask anymore lol

listen. say whatever you want. I do not want to hear from anyone who isn’t taking Covid seriously anymore. I just don’t. If you are not considering both your community’s Covid response and its climate response as things at the top of your mind in all of your praxis you are naive and you are not prepared to do what needs to be done for any cause with the urgency it requires. And that’s 9/10 people in this thread. That’s 9/10 people in the country. 9/10 people in the world.

There are almost 100 replies to this thread and not a single one mentions disability or anything at all about the consequences of unchecked Covid spread and mutation — except in the past tense, of course…! Nothing anyone says which is like this is a serious analysis of things. You are — willfully or otherwise — neglecting a massive piece of the puzzle then showing me a picture with a hole in it and telling me I just dont get it. I am so exhausted by it.

So no I don’t have a whole lot of hope for this place, or indeed many places anymore, and no amount of Lenin or Mao or any other esteemed thought leaders are going to change that in this current moment.

I agree with Anarcho_Blinkenist. However, I think of that one scene in Disco where the Deserter is talking about how "They're not human" (capitalists), which I agree, detracts from that point that they are actually human who are committing atrocities but nonetheless the reason I thought of that is because I'm afraid what America will do while fighting for it's last breath. Even if all is successful, which ultimately it will be; what scars will the Beast leave on this planet? Just from what I've heard from my time talking to vets and such, etc it is something I think of often.

That's what is scary to me. The loss that will happen.

But it must happen, otherwise, barbarism.

in the US there aren't enough white people to take over the country, I think it'll be neoliberal police state transphobia, not third reich transphobia.

*not trying to be flippant with this brief comment, just trying to be concise because I don't have the credibility to be verbose

If a proxy war starts with China, shits gonna get bad instantly for the diaspora

Canada went from not thinking about Indian immigrants to hating them in like 3 years despite 0 state propaganda against them

Russians got hate crimed when they invaded Ukraine even though they're white

If China doesn't get into any military fights, I'd give it like 10-15 years until Western citizens start lynching Chinese diaspora with little repercussions from the state

Just look at how rampant the racism got from 2000-2010, then 2010-2019, then 2020-2024 for Chinese people. Gonna be exponential every year from now on especially with the state propaganda

The US is going to learn real fast what a reserve army of workers is and is also going to learn that when you starve them all to death, they aren't there when you need to people to print your treats.

I feel so scared for all marginalized groups of people for what the future looks like right now. I'm autistic and it looks bleak for us NDers but I fear more for the people of color and the queer communities. And yes, I'm in my doomer era right now.

I think it might be worth a lot of us looking for large plots of land that we have legal access too and learn to grow food and start communities that aren't reliant on western consumerism.

bad

we're declining really quickly compared to other empires and the catabolic collapse is a lot farther along than you might think

we're getting the crisis of the third century with the gas pedal fused to the floor

concentration camps, murder, forced sterilization, and potentially slavery for undocumented migrants as the climate collapse causes their numbers to swell. Invasion of northern Mexico for a buffer zone. Completely ineffective federal management leaves most local governments fending for themselves. There is regional Junta that does nothing to help, and you only see them 0-3 times a year when they roll through your town with vehicles and equipment that look even more piecemeal than the last time to punish anyone suspected of disloyalty, then leaving abruptly. The return of absolute hunger and deaths from malnourishment. US Navy begins open piracy on food and aid shipments in southeast Asia.

I think this will come to pass around 2045. around 2035 is when the US will have finished gearing up to confront China, and what victory looks like in that conflict will doubtlessly shape the next decade to a large degree. I doubt China will dismantled given it's size and internal security, but the strategic destruction the US can inflict would be devastating. Even if they do sink the US navy, if they don't win fast, then they've lost.

There's a lot of defeatism and pretty un-dialectical projections of '4-chan-fukuyama' doom I see in general in discussions regarding the growth of reaction, which not only often erases comrades doing work every day and have been (when people say "there's no left here to speak of" etc), but which also often have a 'liberal memory problem.' Such as in blatantly not remembering how the 2016 fascist upsurge in the US got overwhelmingly smashed and scattered. Leaders of the fascists started eating each other, reporting on each other, there were even a few inter-fascist murders of leadership. To say nothing of the mass Fed-infiltration that they were incapable of dealing with. They've only recently been re-consolidating. Which doesn't mean vigilance can be lost, but active defeatism is rooted in nothing material and comes from opportunist trends of thought ('why bother' or 'I'll just leave' etc.). The whole 'antifa' panic in the media over how 'big and dangerous' the general anti-fascist movement was was a demonstration of ruling class concern and fear at mass mobilizations of anti-fascist militants --- and the pigs had to resort to agents provocateur to try to undermine it and pass anti-mask and anti-protest laws, from which in all of these events anti-fascists and communists learned a lot and also grew in strength, numbers, and discipline.

Then there was the George Floyd uprisings. People who were at those protests and riots know what the real score is, and how many masses of people also know what the score is. And I mean the real mass movements of those uprisings, the pigs response against which produced way more left-radicalism, not less. The real movements, not the later-day shift which saw Soros&Co. billionaires finance liberal NGOs, whose same bourgeois-class' corporate media collaborated to co-opt and divert contingents of the protests in more petty-bourgeois areas taking it out of the eye of broader society's public (petty bourgeois) view (again, from which people learned a lot of essential lessons). Anyone trying to tell you those movements in their masses, in their real core rather than the bourgeois' and their media's narrative-construct of it, were liberal movements --- and not the mass and very militant uprisings which they were, with much consciously overt and explicit anti-capitalist and anti-fascist revolutionary politics behind the push against white supremacy and the pigs and their prisons who serve these structures and systems, is telling on themselves that they weren't in the shit and didn't know or talk to anyone who was. The state's response is and will always necessarily be disproportionate to dissuade through terror --- but they didn't come like that out of nowhere. A lot of the explicit messaging of these uprisings and protests and by their leaders were speaking in terms which make a lot of you on HB look like wandering liberals. Those uprisings got so dire for the bourgeois apparatus that they had to pull federal prison guards from DC to deal with the protests there (of which there are many implications for those who studied their theory and history of the struggle in their own country's borders).

The current sustained and in many cases militant protests against the genocide in Palestine by many diverse peoples throughout the nation, more than bourgeois media will ever report, including even on college campuses which are petty bourgeois institutions (and as such act as a sort of societal 'water mark' of the extent-of-reach through the social and class strata of certain phenomenon) who are quoting Lenin and Mao and Fanon didn't come from nowhere. It is a continuation of this history we are all living in and helping make (one way or another) every day. And this is the ongoing trajectory, from the struggles of the past unfolding today into our immediate future; which is integral to be conscious of and in its dialectical relationships with other movements and the changing material conditions, and not fall into 'liberal memory problems' where we are 'born afraid-and-outraged yesterday' about every new event and only considering how it relates to our own idealist projections on society 50 years in the past or 50 years in the future with anti-materialist and un-dialectical understandings of how it exists now.

Things 'getting worse' is a law of capitalism; Comrades Marx and Engels already exposed the various ways this integrally happen; expanded by Comrades Lenin and Nkrumah to further international politico-economic extents, which, and in their changes, can be dialectically understood in their inward-facing effects, and how those shifting material conditions dialectically interact with, and are interacted with by, the various segments of the masses of people in their class representations. Frantz Fanon and US revolutionaries of the BPP lineage who drew from his and Mao's works themselves wrote and both in old and new generations still write plenty with which one can ground their understanding of colonialism and decolonization and the material conditions of the United States and the tasks of the struggle today as well, which is the only way to root one's understanding seriously otherwise one is speaking nonsense. 'No investigation, no right to speak' applies to these topics as well.

There are always and have always already been fascistic colonial elements toward its internal colonies and in prisons in the US. This will remain and heighten in crises as they always have done until the system is overthrown. But this discussion in this thread and others about some qualitative shift as a blackshirt seizure-of-power turning all of this bureaucratized colonial terror with a neoliberal veneer, that all of you in the US have always lived in as you do live and have lived, into some overt judge dredd reality led by the myriad Little Eichmanns of twitter with nazi death-camps turning people into soylent green and mass enslavement expanding its infrastructure beyond the current confines and historical bounds of the prison system (which already enslaves people and you're existing as you do now) into a fundamentally different society like that like people are envisioning, is marvel-brained thinking --- the parts of this that aren't flatly totally unrealistic are themselves not remotely as immediately imminent or likely as the defeatists convince themselves and others. Talking like this is an un-dialectical mode of thinking; only serving to create panic and confusion and deflation, instead of inspiration and focus and steeling ourselves and each other to continue constructing out of the changing material conditions a new antithesis to this organization of society, for which fascism is merely a restatement of the already-existing thesis into the new conditions. To talk in many of the ways people do here is a very un-dialectical mode of thinking, and an idealist conception of things to be focused in this fantasizing in fear about imaginary futures and projecting "hm yes in 2045 there is going to be these death camps and these factions and circumstances blah blah" with no work shown or in earnest actually done to build that proposed analysis. It is an idealist and opportunist 'dream of the future' and an exercise which serves nothing of value in dealing with the hard real tasks of today, of which struggles are ongoing every day --- against imperialism, against police, against prisons, against lumpenization and gentrification and ghettoization as an extension of settler-colonialism (which even has its own manifestations with its own particular character in the lumpenization of those in old industrial towns creating critical contradictions as well as points of unity), etc.

The defeatism and opportunist doom-dreaming is ill-placed compared to the radical upsurges we saw in response in past uprisings, and which have grown and will grow --- socialism has grown exponentially, more than corporate media will tell you, and will continue to. I've seen it with my own eyes and in my own groups and actions since 2016. Socialist gun clubs have also only grown since 2016. Fascist street groups have already always been vastly outnumbered by their street resistors even in the US. It is one of the reasons it gets expressed in stochastic terror on soft targets instead, is their otherwise lack of strength and cohesion. This all needs to be understood and worked into our dialectical understanding to continue with our better understandings and so better theory and practice than our opponents; and take these concrete realities as they actually are and are unfolding to be worked into our analyses and practice with rigor toward the tasks of the proletariat today, not in some possible or otherwise imagined future, but today.

No one can know than in advance, but it will also depend on what resistance fascism will find itself opposed to.

Will it find an unorganized working class where half of them expect an elected saviour and another part of them fight against fascism without fighting against capitalism and towards revolution? Or will it find an organized working class with a strong vanguard party that has the ideological preparation, the ability to reach out to them, strong and massive unions, etc?

This is not the whole part of the equation but it is one that relies mostly on us. It is our job to organize the working class and get them to unite under a common direction, and more importantly to provide them with a realistic and necessary alternative to capitalism without expecting it to arrive magically but through every day collective action. Fascism gains ground where there doesn't seem to be a viable alternative to the current system, when people have been too propagandized to ever consider a revolution as a possible alternative and there's no force saying otherwise effectively, so they fall into the populist magic solution bullshit that fascists provide in an attempt to see real change in the system.

This is for the US specifically. Ok so I’ve thought about this A LOT and my best prediction, avoiding both wishful thinking and doomerism, is that I don’t think those who are openly fascist will be able to turn the country into Nazi Germany. The US is just too diverse and that kind of blatant fascism likely will only fly with a minority of white chuds. This is especially true of the younger generations who would need to be co-opted in order to enforce it, since old people are generally not the best when it comes to fighting wars, either internal or external. As it stands now, younger generations are increasingly more diverse and increasingly have shifted left in their views, which would make co-opting them difficult, and an example of this at the present time is the issue the pentagon has been having with military recruitment. They (the fascist right) really don’t have the numbers on their side. Remember when US marshals under Trump tried to subdue Portland? That was a complete and utter failure, and it’s only one city. Imagine if they tried that in every major US city.

So yeah, I could be wrong but I don’t think open fascism is likely. What’s more likely imo is a continuation of the dysfunction we’re already seeing, which means more stuff like mass shootings, terror attacks, etc. by chuds, more quiet “liberal” fascism that pretends the US is a functioning democracy, and potentially more Balkanization. The US is also going to be facing more and more pressure on the world stage as China passes it up economically and militarily. I think all this combined will lead to a worsening situation and increasing destabilization, but again I think open fascism isn’t all that likely to succeed.

For Europe I’m less certain, but some of the same arguments apply I think. The US is the lynchpin holding the current global order together, so once they start to falter, Europe may starting looking to boost ties elsewhere, such as with China and Russia who may have more to offer. Also open fascism in Europe would likely threaten the EU, which it seems would not be the best outcome for the ruling class, so I think they’d likely lean towards EU stability over nationalism in individual EU countries, but that’s just a guess.

I say at least in the USA its going to be a big civil war, probably going to looked like a mix of the chinese and russian civil wars with warlords and fascist armies fighting for territory and the main goverment federal faction slowly losing territory to them

For the US I see it in the short-term being in another Gilded Age. Class consciousness will begin to spread, but there will be heavy pushback. A few riots will take place that will need the military involved to shut them down. Opinions will vary with many in support and others unsupportive.

I think terror groups like the White League could make a comeback with their presence stronger in the climate-ravaged south, possibly able to overwhelm state governments before the military is sent in.

Being openly queer might be made illegal under some purity sex bullshit. I can see a few military excursions into Mexico as well. There will probably be a couple of economic depressions with one of them being especially bad.

If the far-right in Europe and North America continues to grow unopposed;

Unions will be outlawed and any expression of LGBTQ+ identity will be outlawed. "anti-woke" laws will be enforced rolling equality back a century or more, guaranteeing the power of the rich white man. Social welfare will be scrapped and if you can't afford to feed your family you'll have no choice but to literally slave for a big corporation (the modern version of poor houses in Victorian Britain). Non-White immigrants at best will be incentivised to leave the country and at worst will be forceibly removed. The death penalty will be expanded where it already exists and implemented where it doesn't. In Europe, universal healthcare will be dismantled. Conscription will return (for the poor) and you will be forced to go to war against poor people from a different country.

Some of the above is already happening, but put it all together for a truly dystopian nightmare.

yolo

Honestly I'm not sure, all I know is that we'll see more pogroms like we saw in Britain become regular in the West, and it will target anyone they perceive as Muslim or Chinese.

I hope to leave before it gets more serious.