Just how fucked is the United States of America? Are we talking point of no return fucked? Does this end in balkanization or is the US on path for something worse?
It's pretty severely fucked. It's in serious need of all kinds of reforms, but all the mechanisms for doing so are dominated by bourgeoisie whose class position absolutely rely on no positive reforms being passed. Their current "plan" right now seems to be trying to catch up to China by immitating its special economic zones with super-sized company towns under their personal control. Since in their heart of hearts they despise everything which made those work I don't think they're gonna have much success one way or another.
>Balkanization
I think there will be a fracturing of authority like what happened during the warlord period in China, but I don't think the geography or culture lends itself to long term balkanization. The US has a huge interior that is only viable because of support from other states and external trade, so even if some bloc or another does break away for a time it won't resist being subsumed back into the whole for very long (on a historical time scale).
Personally I think de facto balkanization is going to come as increasingly severe weather changes induce the government to write off ever larger portions of the country and population. The cost to maintain these places will be too great to justify on the basis of "running the government like a business" and this will be used to force people into the new "special economic zones" the billionaires need to try and reindustrialize. They and these abandoned areas will still be part of the "United States" but in practice they'll more or less be written off except for the most economically essential parts.
Imo this is why the work to develop communist consciousness among rural populations needs to be done now, because eventually this is going to mean an influx of communist minded people, or at least people that have been exposed to these ideas, into these SEZ as they develop, but also as the federal government recedes, the modes of organization in these forsaken areas are most likely going to be religious based with the sort of reactionary communities that can't or won't be integrated into this new arrangement, remnants of other racist associations like the kkk which will probably still receive material support from the rump US government, and whatever communist organizations manage to lay roots there.
>>2373270Oh, sorry but I'm not familiar so I don't quite get what you're alluding to.
>>2373621The Gilead stuff is off the mark but I do think they're right about the ruling class being divided. I think what we saw with this last election was a contest between the more radical billionaires, especially those in tech, and the more conservative sections of the bourgeoisie. On the one hand you've got technocrats that want to minimize or abolish democratic interference entirely, and a whole political class reliant on acting as the middle men between business and the political system. Another dimension of the conflict is the billionaire class cannibalizing the millionaire class. In the desperate struggle to keep up profits, outfits like Amazon are trying to muscle out the "local gentry" from businesses which have traditionally supported them like car dealerships.
Imo the level of wealth that billionaires have, coupled with the need for profits so large that they can only come directly from or with the active participation of the government, is driving a bifurcation of the western bourgeoisie. A historical parallel would be the knights and barons wars of the later middle ages, when smaller local landowners were no longer necessary and were eventually "rationalized" by their larger aristocrat competitors.
>>2374517> I should also mention that the US currently has a successful genocidal vassal state in mena, people in this thread are kinda brushing over that.Assuming you're referring to Israel, it's on borrowed time as well. Its success hinges entirely on the patronage it receives from the US, and without the US imposed regimes of its neighbors, the military production of its patron, and the protection of nato, Israel is doomed.
None of those things are assured any more for a variety of interrelated reasons. This conflict with Iran is revealing just how fragile and increasingly ineffective a tool Israel is becoming. The cost/benefit of supporting the state was much more profitable when Israel enjoyed technological superiority over its neighbors, but that advantage has been eroded to virtually nothing. Then there is the cost of what Isreal is doing in the minds of the diaspora, but even more so in all the populations those non-israeli jews are living in. Israeli lobbyists have a lot of money to influence politics, but it's not infinite in volume or effectiveness.
Then there's the military aspect. The might of the US military is in its sheer size, but much of its armament is cold war era and institutional problems have prevented it from developing and deploying modern replacements. Recent developments have proven that what is available is unfit for task, as the expensive weapons systems that the usm and its allies use aren't any more effective thsn their opponents', which can be made in greater volumes at lower costs. This current stage of the Iran/Israel conflict came to a halt because Israeli AD couldn't stop Iranian missiles, and they were days away from running out of interceptors entirely. Nor could they absorb the damage inflicted on them like Iran could.
I think also like we're seeing with Ukraine, as US/Nato priorities shift, they don't lose any sleep about leaving their "allies" out to dry. The biggest concern for Israel right now aside from Iran is Turkiye which represents a potential rival in the same space that Israel is seeking to expand into. I think the past several years show a tendency in Turkiye to act contrary to the rest of NATO’s interests in the service of their own. They were willing to collaborate with the destruction of Syria, but now that Assad is gone I think eventually circumstances are going to develop there which put them both at loggerheads.
Israel is a "success" right now, but I think that they're going to "succeed" themselves to death.
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