Defeat, disillusionment, and the spiral of collapse
  • woodenghost [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
    8·
    26 days ago

    Our task concerning the ideological front is to both speed up this process and replace bourgeois ideology with ours. Concerning the material causes, the task is organizing and building alternative structures.

  • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
    7·
    26 days ago

    Another excellent piece. Your writing just gets better and better. Easy to follow, well structured, each argument laid out concisely without redundant repetition and without being unnecessarily pretentious in language or concepts such that it would alienate the average reader. Inspires me to get better at my own writing.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
      5·
      26 days ago

      Thanks, making things clear and accessible is what I’m going for. My process tend to be to lay out the process I’m trying to describe in my head, and then follow through the mechanics of it. When I start writing, I start by laying out the premise first, and then trying to show how the system evolves over time.

      I find dialectical way of thinking fits really well with the programmer mindset cause you have to go through a very similar process when writing software. First you have to work through the requirements to figure out what it is you’re building, and then you try to visualize your solution, and work through the steps. So, I’m applying basically the same technique to thinking about these types of questions.

      • woodenghost [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
        2·
        26 days ago

        Thanks for sharing your process, so others can learn from it! It really was very clear in way that makes you say yes to every single sentence while you read it.

        One minor distinction that I remembered while reading is about the part on military defeats: while the defeats might be ideological losses and are clear examples of military overreaching, the empire as a whole is not being defeated militarily. The US is still the most aggressive actor in the world. That’s an interesting difference to all the historical examples given as well as to the decline of previous empires, who were usually defeated militarily by fast emerging and very aggressive rivals. E.g. the emerging US fought two bloody wars against the British empire, while China isn’t fighting any wars. Giovanni Arrighi points this out in ‘The Long Twentieth Century’: the American empire isn’t being destroyed, it’s destroying itself because it’s unable to deal with internal contradictions.

        • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
          4·
          26 days ago

          Thanks, and very much agree. I’d argue that the decisive defeat for the American empire is unfolding economically as opposed to militarily. The war in Ukraine acted as a catalyst, forcing countries to make a choice when Russia, a key commodity exporter, was cut off from SWIFT. Nations had to decide to submit to US financial dominance as vassals, or assert sovereign control over their economic foreign policy. Practically every significant power outside the West chose sovereignty, accelerating the fragmentation of the US-centered global financial system.

          We now live in a world divided between the G7 and BRICS, with BRICS surpassing the G7 economically. Not only that, but much of this bloc’s surging trade operates outside Western visibility and control, bypassing Western systems through direct currency swaps and China’s CIPS for transactions. Before the war, dedollarization wasn’t taken seriously as an idea, today it’s a tangible reality.

          The US, seemingly oblivious to the shift of the global economy, launched a self-defeating trade war. While China was clearly the main target, the tariffs targeted the whole world. To date, not a single nation has capitulated to US demands to sever ties with China. Even the concessions extracted from the UK aren’t fundamentally changing anything. This is a massive geopolitical humiliation that exposed American impotence on the global stage.

          Meanwhile, the financial repercussions from the trade war are still unfolding. There is a good chance that the economic overreach triggers a major crash in the US. It would be a psychological blow that’s as devastating as any military defeat.