Saw this thread, and it really hit a chord with me, as these similar fears tend to constantly weigh on me (for various reasons- being trans, ethnic Chinese, commie, etc).
I think we all (leftists, but also just most minorities) know, shit is bad and will get worse, it’s just a question of how bad it will get. People mention it offhand without usually going further into the details, and similarly in other spaces - non-leftist ones as well, for instance Asian diasporic and LGBT spaces in my experience, these fears come up, but ultimately we keep the bulk of our concerns to ourselves. What are our expectations here, for the west? Not just for the US, but the Anglosphere and Europe?
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
I remember violence against Chinese people spiked around covid, and the sort of person who’d do that isn’t too picky, so it was against East Asians generally
As someone who’s seen how the hate against Indians has exploded (as well as how first nations are treated, etc) I have to agree, shit will get bad.
TBH in regards to the lynchings without repercussions, I’d argue that on the smaller scale (individual violent hate crimes with intent to seriously harm or kill) we’re already at such a point, somewhat…
we’re already at such a point, somewhat
I agree, but they’re still putting on a veil of stop asian hate
Soon people will be supporting killings as long as they give some explanation of them potentially being a spy
This rhetoric is already happening in Silicon Valley where a lot of my coworkers have been discussing how they want to report some of their Chinese coworkers to internal security and the FBl because they think they are “CCP” spies sent to infiltrate American big tech with the rational that suspected coworkers say they like Xi and that China is a better place to live than USA
I agree, but they’re still putting on a veil of stop asian hate
Are they? Seems to me like they’ve more of just stopped talking about anti-Asian hate crimes (though at least part of it may be being too keyed in to Asian diasporic spaces and getting cabin fever over it myself).
This rhetoric is already happening in Silicon Valley where a lot of my coworkers have been discussing how they want to report some of their Chinese coworkers to internal security and the FBl because they think they are “CCP” spies sent to infiltrate American big tech with the rational that suspected coworkers say they like Xi and that China is a better place to live than USA
As for that… while I knew that the witchhunts were ongoing in STEM, against community orgs, etc… it’s another to hear of the other side of the picture. That it’s “a lot” of your coworkers wanting to get in on the action in your experience is actually much worse than what I’d expect, despite having seen a lot of shit where I am…
if you live in an anglo settler colony you are kidding yourself if you think what’s under your society’s mask is substantially different from what you see in seppos
Just can not see it here in Australia.
Are you serious? Australians are racist as fuck I see them doing it just as enthusiastically.
From what I’m seeing from Chinese students perspective, Australians seem about as bad as Americans and hate crimes have also ramped massively since COVID
Not to mention Australian media isn’t any less racist or hawkish towards Chinese
Fingers crossed it doesn’t get that way, then. Once I’d have liked to say the same about Canada (granted back then I also didn’t realize how infinitely fucked some ever-ongoing things against the First Nations are) but whether it be “Chinese” (anyone looking east/southeast Asian), “Indians” (anyone looking brown), or “Muslims” (anyone looking generically west Asian/north African, or fitting the western stereotypes of Muslims in some aspect or another) I think any of the above could certainly happen, in some ways we’re in the early phases of this (hate crimes and lone-wolf individual attacks with what may as well be state complicity).
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.
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
We wouldn’t last very long or live a healthy life without modern medicine, medical professionals, or equipment/facilities. Anprim stuff isn’t gonna work
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.
There’s a comic called Lazarus set in a dystopian libertarian future where the families of various corporations rule basically new kingdom-states. It’s pretty lib at times and I stopped reading ages ago.
But there’s a plotline where a bunch of families bought a homestead together to try and escape the crushing system. But when once in a lifetime floods due to climate change threaten to destroy their land, they are forced to take out a predatory loan to hire machinery to protect their farm, but it doesn’t arrive in time, so all their crops and possessions are lost, but they still have the crippling debt and are forced to walk away and become sort of lumpenproletariat known as “waste” (versus “serfs” who have longterm jobs with “families”).
And I think that is kind of a potential fate for any small scale left wing commune in the future.
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.
concentration camps and forced sterilization cost money so I think they’re not very likely. slavery is possible. murder is likely - I think the police will just be slowly given more leeway to kill undesirables. I don’t think it will be that difficult to convince average americans that petty theft deserves to be met with gunfire.
Agreed. Fascism forms to the superstructure of the culture it inhabits. Police’s history being rooted in slave patrols and their relationship to lynch mobs could become relevant again. Or on the less distributed and more centrally planned side of things (camps, etc) I don’t see us scaling up what we did to the Japanese in WWII, but I do see massive expansions of privately owned prisons with deteriorating oversight as being on the table. And speaking of lack of oversight, some cross between residential schools and the troubled teen industry could quickly become the “solution” to the existence of queer children.
This is- upon thinking and reading it over properly once or twice, actually not so unimaginable. A fair bit of it already has happened, some of it is happening, and others could easily happen again and are well on track to doing so (and they’re pretty honest about their intentions for the straits of Malacca as someone whose family is from the region- and unofficial invasions/regime change/etc of Mexico is absolutely possible and perhaps more likely as the contradictions of empire increase).
Of course, in the midst of all the genocides (domestic and being waged abroad), slavery, sterilization, starvation, and warmongering they’ll also continue touting themselves as the “beacons of democracy,” the paragons of “freedom” and “human rights.” Just as they are now while being guilty of arguably around half of what you described, just as they have for their almost-250 years of settler barbarism… and of course it honestly won’t matter (though we all know it wouldn’t) which “party” and figureheads are running the show.
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.
Ten years ago, the US couldn’t win a conflict with China without using nukes. We have seen the real peak strength of the American military come and go. They can inflate numbers with a draft and throw money at it, but capital won’t accede to their wishes.
America couldn’t win a conflict with Vietnam, it still kneecapped the region and set them back decades.
On one hand- yes. On the other hand, this time around honestly- if China and whoever else gets dragged into the war, does not ensure to strike an eye-for-an-eye (MAD) humanity may as well give up on existence altogether. The US cannot meaningfully threaten China without resorting to MAD- hell, they can’t continue squatting on Taiwan if push comes to shove without MAD- and China remains capable of hitting the US back just as hard (without MAD)- just… MAD is really the only option the US has.
Which is to say IMO, if the US wants to try their luck, they should be yeeted out of existence. As someone who (while not AmeriKKKan) would almost certainly go down with the ship ATM, as someone whose immediate family and loved ones would as well- this is how I see it. All the west has left (as an oversimplification but not by much- and their system is absolutely defunct and then some) is terrorism, and the world cannot back down to it no matter what.
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.
to paraphrase myself in a past comment and altered to fit the circumstances
Socialists see that socialism can win and are making it happen, as anyone who has been involved in socialist organizing in the last 10 years has been able to plainly see socialism exponentially grow more than it has the 35 years before it.
The CHUDS and liberals being ideologically incapable of objectivity regarding themselves, their history, or their current circumstances and the conditions of the coming reality [such as with climate crises events, such as with the mechanisms of multipolarization, such as with the nature of US society, and its history and colonial relations, and the real character and interests of the bourgeoisie, etc.] means they necessarily have and will continue to have bad analyses, bad theories, and so bad practice, and be comparatively woefully unprepared to manage the emergent circumstances and contradictions in society and between each other; and be, as we have seen of them in many cases, unable to remain sufficiently disciplined, organized, and focused to stay ahead in the struggle as ruptures and crises continue to throw more and more of the hitherto apathetic masses into politics while the pressures of the coming future massively complexify circumstances. Whereas the socialists, led by the most principled, incisive, and decisive Marxists, firmly rooted in Leninist organizational principles with scientifically sound adaptations to our respective material conditions — and so having the objective ability to organizationally outperform the other socialists in pure mechanical terms, engage with material reality as it is; not as it was or as we wish it would be or as it might be someday in the future, but as it currently is in living reality in its unfolding and in all its constituent forces, accurately discerned through the methodological framework of historical materialism and dialectical materialism which has and has proven in history to have unmatched predictive power when thoroughly grasped and applied correctly.
And it is in this, with an eye to where the masses of people are and are oriented in their class representations in their various movements and circumstances, and where the revolutionary masses are, and where current material conditions find and changing material conditions will alter the positions and interests, and mobilize in different ways, the masses of people; and through discerning how that can be best maneuvered-in to agitate, educate, and break-through into new fronts the ruptured contradictions between the people and the enemy bringing more of the masses of working people to our side — with and as a part of whom, by being the leading tip of an organized spear, us Marxists among and as part of these conscious masses (whose consciousness is our responsibility to develop) can meet the challenges head on and stay ahead of and strike truer than those who remain bewildered, panicked, idealist and delusional, misdirected or directionless, or capitulated to despair.
I mean just think about the large reactionary bourgeois and petty bourgeois populations, upon which fascism relies; which are rooted in no-small-part in suburbs. Suburbs are themselves objectively (and by design) atomized and alienated and inherently cut-off detachments of society, separated from each other and from access to necessities. They’re a terrible organizational and logistical core body for that section of bourgeois and petty bourgeois to stage and organize anything meaningful in resistance to those outside them, while making a good proportion of who makes up that section of society. Mao is a big help here, but we’re not nearly there (quite now). There are so many real actual things to consider in a dialectical sense for the benefit of real planning, which blatantly serve to contradict the realistic building of these ‘doomed futures,’ which don’t exist because futures don’t arise out of peoples ideas, they arise out of how class struggle is waged in changing material conditions and arrangement of forces and relations.
From the perspective of an illiterate peasant in western and central Eurasia, the times from 1914-1923 probably seemed like the end of the world. But the communists weren’t moping ‘it’s hopeless’ or speculating on dreams of ‘what the future of the return of super-Tsarism will look like’ (CONCEDING DEFEAT WITHOUT STATEMENT, which is objectively counter-revolutionary and outright reactionary) — They didn’t embrace despair and reinforce the hopelessness of the backwards masses, they acted as the most advanced segment of the working class, motivated them, pitied and counseled those who were afraid of repression, and instead inspired and led them into acting in material reality, shaking them from their hopeless dreams into the material tasks before them. They engaged with material reality as it was, and from this struggle secured and built all that came after. It was not without death and suffering, just as there is today, and in every great time of change in history regardless, and including in pre-history and the time of life on this planet in general, where there have many times, and always been, great times of great change. Life went on and changed with it. We take the material conditions of our time and engage with their changing as they come, just as all life does when it comes into being and while it goes through its span.
And it is not just the people mobilized right now to consider — every “fairweather” sympathetic-to-communism ‘leftist’ whose agreeance we win who, even if not organizing or currently directly engaged, will be much more likely to tacitly or openly support us and to join these mass movements which are being and have been being built every day by dedicated revolutionaries as they grow, when crises throw more and more of the hitherto apathetic masses into politics (as has been historically and was described by Lenin as symptomatic of every revolution and which we have seen portents of in recent uprisings the past years) — every one of those “fairweather” leftists is worth more to the cause of socialism than 100 vulgar “materialist” defeatist Marxists who convince themselves and try to convince others of defeat because of ‘X Y Z possibility in the future.’ Who will be less likely to join mass movements now as well as when they grow, because they’ve convinced themselves (and even worse, possibly others), just as they often do now, that “it’s not enough, too late, too small, it’s barbarism” or whatever self-defeating dream at odds with reality; convincing themselves the only options are retiring, accepting a fate, fleeing, etc. Which amounts to opportunist capitulation before the battle has even been pitched and encouraging others to do the same, if not in word in effect. This has been true in what I’ve seen of others’ attitudes and potential in my own organizing experience among socialists and non-socialists alike, as well looking objectively in a mass-politics sense, is and will necessarily be true. I would take a hundred eager yet naive or as-yet-uneducated ‘leftists’ before any well-read Marxist making defeatist capitulationist statements and arguments and speaking in ultra-style ‘discouragements-as-virtue’. Socialism is growing exponentially, and will continue to and become stronger; especially if directionless defeatism is not spread through the ranks of who’re supposed to be the working class’ most advanced contingent.
In the abstract one can think of such a phase. In practice, however, he who denies the sharp tasks of to-day in the name of dreams about soft [or otherwise] tasks of the future becomes an opportunist. Theoretically it means to fail to base oneself on the developments now going on in real life, to detach oneself from them in the name of dreams.
in assessing a given situation, a Marxist must proceed not from what is possible, but from what is real.
(…)
they are surrendering power to the bourgeoisie—a fact which does not in the least contravene the theory of Marxism, for we have always known and repeatedly pointed out that the bourgeoisie maintains itself in power not only by force but,also by virtue of the lack of class-consciousness and organisation, the routinism and downtrodden state of the masses.In view of this present-day reality, it is simply ridiculous to turn one’s back on the fact and talk about “possibilities”.
The flight of some people from the underground could have been the result of their fatigue and dispiritedness. Such individuals may only be pitied; they should be helped because their dispiritedness will pass and there will again appear an urge to get away from philistinism, away from the liberals and the liberal-labour policy, to the working-class underground. But when the fatigued and dispirited use journalism as their platform and announce that their flight is not a manifestation of fatigue, or weakness, or intellectual woolliness, but that it is to their credit, and then put the blame on the “ineffective,” “worthless,” “moribund,” etc., underground, these runaways then become disgusting renegades, apostates. These runaways then become the worst advisers for the working-class movement and therefore its dangerous enemies.
Fear is a natural human impulse; no one is “wrong” to have fear, and deserve compassion for it and to have their concerns heard. But one is wrong to make fear their politics and then choose to spread that fear in their political groups. HB is not an organization, but it is a socialist space where people come and learn things, as well as where people exist who do or will participate regularly in real life organizing (as everyone who is able it is necessary and heavily advised to, not only for the practical reality of building a better future but as well as it actively helps these emotions not fester into directionless helpless fear because they are put towards positive construction for change). This must be held in mind, and cognizance must be taken about what is being said and what effects it has on not just the construction of socialism and peoples ideas and political education and development (which is important to consider), but also the immediate emotional and psychological effects on our comrades. It is not good for them or us personally let alone in a mass-politics sense that some of these un-dialectical and idealism-rooted fantasy-horrors are painted as if they are an inevitable reality and are not just allowed but encouraged and reinforced in a race-to-the-bottom as in some of these comments and many threads. It serves no one. It serves reaction in its effects. It’s part of why I really dislike the existence of the ‘c/doomer’ community, which actively encourages all of the worst strands of these trends both emotionally and politically. But that’s my part on all this.
