With the collapse of the United States, the society that settler-colonialism set up is experiencing a karmic parallel to the destruction that it’s inflicted upon the nations it’s trampled on. For indigenous people on this continent, the apocalypse happened generations ago. Their civilization was destroyed, nine out of ten of their people were killed, and their land was put under occupation. Isn’t it predictable that after the settlers built a country on top of the ruins from this catastrophe, that country is now falling apart?
It’s falling apart because the United States has never existed as an actual nation. A nation requires its people to have a common history, cultural make-up, and shared territory. If the peoples within U.S. borders are to this day struggling over territory, divided over basic historical questions like whether institutional racism has recently existed, and culturally divided to the point where civil conflict is a serious possibility, the U.S. is not a nation. It’s a scheme for exploitation, founded so that slavery and colonization could expand and ultimately be converted into history’s greatest global imperialist menace. Such a “nation” will eventually consume itself. Which is what’s behind the harrowing conditions we see within the U.S. today, conditions that will keep getting worse for as long as the U.S. continues to exist.
“Driving through the Mojave and seeing how the mountains of stinking plastic trash dumped along the roadside and blowing through the desert was soul crushing,” one individual wrote on the “Collapse” subreddit this week. “Driving down the central valley of Cali and seeing how the only green vegetation anywhere for six straight hours was in the irrigated orchards was alarming. Driving through the other states and seeing all of this and also town after town after town where the only economy had obviously been meth for a long, loooooong time, was eye-opening. America is already well into decline, I would argue it started imploding pretty catastrophically twenty years ago. Anyone who argues otherwise and suggests the nation is A-OK has either not had the opportunity to leave their comfortable city to observe the scale of the decay via a trip like this, or is willfully ignorant of their lived reality and beyond any hope. There were long stretches, such as in the Four Corners region, which were in all respects identical to some of the most failed developing nations I have visited.”
Their outlook is supported by data. Out of the 163 countries studied by the Social Progress Index, only the United States, along with Brazil and Hungary, have overall declined in living standards during the last decade. The index measures living standards according to personal safety, health, environmental quality, personal freedom, and inclusiveness, so it’s easy to see why U.S. conditions have gotten worse in the Index’ judgement between the 2008 crash and the Ukraine sanctions recession. The last decade and beyond has seen a new Great Depression which never truly ended for most people impacted by it, a new living standards plummet due to our government’s pandemic mismanagement, the deaths of around a million Americans from Covid-19, a rise in mass shootings and police brutality amid growing militarization of society, explosions in natural disasters such as fires and hurricanes, and a vast wave of hatred towards immigrants, racial minorities, and the LGBT community.
It’s all been tied in to imperialism, and to how our empire has reacted to the decline in its global hegemony following 9/11. Washington’s war escalations with China have led to an explosion in anti-Asian hate, fueling last year’s mass shooting directed towards Asians. By propagating neo-Nazi terrorism in Ukraine to counter Russia, Washington has nurtured the exact same kind of racism which motivated this week’s anti-black mass shooting; the killer displayed the Black Sun, the Third Reich symbol that’s also been used by members of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.
Whether or not Azov specifically inspired him to commit the crime, Washington’s aid to Ukrainian fascists has created a global pipeline of white supremacist terrorism. Nazis from around the world have come to routinely fight in Ukraine to gain combat experience, and even though this shooter hasn’t been to Ukraine, it’s likely that at some point we’ll see a racial shooting by someone who’s trained there. Washington’s determination to prolong the Ukraine conflict by endlessly supplying the Kiev regime with weapons, despite Russia’s victory being increasingly likely, has maximized the potential for this violence to reverberate worldwide.
The country’s crumbling economy also contributes to this risk for more bloodshed. When the sham crypto market further comes crashing down, the economically desperate young white men who’ve staked themselves in the currency will largely react by turning to the far right. The false solutions that the system is selling, whether imaginary digital wealth, promises of a technological “great reset,” or reactionary visions of an America reborn from conservative social policies, will all prove to be useless at improving our conditions. The goal of the country’s burgeoning fascist movement, and the bourgeoisie which increasingly feels the need to align with the fascists, is a violent purge of the revolutionary elements.
The ruling class is preparing an army, both through fascist militias and through the fomenting of random stochastic terrorism, which it hopes can repress a liberation movement. This purge is already in motion. Since the settler justice system exonerated the political murderer Kyle Rittenhouse last year, another shooting of racial justice protesters has occurred. Maybe we’ll see similar shootings against demonstrators for women’s and LGBT rights, who are responding to the wave of legislative attacks against abortion and social equality.
This palpability of reactionary terror shows that the continent is in the first stages of a revolution. There’s a rising mobilization by workers, social justice advocates, anti-colonialists, and anti-imperialists to defy the U.S. empire from within. From widespread destitution and brutal police subjugation is coming a pushback from the masses.
When the effort to overthrow the state begins, these initial efforts at radical defiance will be undertaken by the colonized peoples, by the communities that are suffering the worst abuses from an ever-deadlier police state. Their efforts will be recognized by much of the population as self-defense. And the social base will appear for an equivalent of the proletarian revolutions in Russia, Cuba, and elsewhere. Due to our conditions of settler-colonialism, this proletarian revolution will have to go along with the abolition of the settler state. Which will entail the resolution of many contradictions, but the revolutionary energy of the masses will create a popular mandate for this process. The masses are desperate for escape from this hell that the United States has created for them.
In the ashes of this artificial “nation,” which has eaten itself up and now exists only as a shell, a socialist federation of liberated nations will be built. These nations will consist of the hundreds of occupied indigenous tribes, the Republic of New Afrika, and the other projects for self-determination by oppressed groups. The existing state, and its supporting socioeconomic system, have outlived their functioning era. Now all the state can do is propagate domestic equivalents of the Ukrainian Nazi terrorists, hoping this will keep preventing the masses from fulfilling their mandate for liberation. The moment of confrontation gets closer every day.—————————————————————————
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