Ask Lemmygrad

I thought we had a lot more threads about this, here's one of them

Every empire falls, it's just a matter of time until the USA does. Especially in this case, you can't oppress 99% of your population forever, regardless of how much you try to indoctrinate them.

For as long as it is USA? Never.

By looking at the objective reality, there's two possibilities: global socialism or the break down of modern society as we know it (and I'm trying to avoid being overly pessimistic and talking about extinction).

If the capitalist production continues in the direction it's going, climate change will get so extreme in the next couple of centuries that the very existence large scale human organization will become less and less probable.

That much I think even left liberals will admit.

Now, we as Marxists know that the forces within capitalism prevents reforming it. So we know that only revolutionary change will prevent this collapse of contemporary capitalism. So either way capitalism will eventually collapse under the weights of its own contractions, either by revolutionary change or by extinguishing itself.

As climate change fucks up the lives of more and more people, revolutionary change gets more and more likely. So I do believe we'll have a revolution in most parts of the world before the final collapse of everything. I'm actually very optimistic and I think the contradictions of capitalism are rapidly marching towards another cycle of intensification of class struggle that might kick off a revolutionary cycle.

If this is true and we really witness revolutions starting to pop in the next 10-20 years, remains to be seen though. And honestly, I think futurology exercises of this type are kind of meaningless. As Marxists we should adhere strictly to materialism and avoid idealistic speculation. We can and should evaluate the material reality, its contradictions and movements. But we should avoid idealistic projections. A revolution will happen when the material conditions for it are satisfied: a revolutionary class exist, it's conscious of its class and organized, and the levels of class struggle are getting to a point of inflection where the cost of enduring oppression are bigger than the risks of revolution, and so on.

We can only talk in those terms: is it likely that those conditions materialize in the USA in the next decades? In my opinion it isn't impossible, but I don't think it will start there. But this is a futile exercise.

Trying to predict if or when is kind of meaningless. What we can and must do is organize ourselves, and bring about the conditions we can control: class consciousness, worker organization and intensify the struggle in a way that makes the working classes ready and able to recognize the moment, seize it and fight for it when it comes.

Even if the USA were to miraculously transition to socialism geographically intact and with minimal bloodshed, I highly doubt it would keep the name.

America is already socialist, we have food stamps which is socialism.

/s

Maybe, around the end of the century.

Objectively, I think that the conditions for socialism exist in the USA. The population is increasingly disenchanted with its constitutional and economic institutions; criticism of capitalism itself has moved from unthinkable to accepted (if not mainstream); and the imperialist state apparatus is a bloated paper tiger that can barely win a war without hiring a suite of incompetent contractors and bribing the enemy's generals with millions of dollars (and is incapable of reform due to being waist-deep in its own neoliberal dogma). The wannabe-fascists of the Republican Party (and cop-funded mayors like Eric Adams) are a threat to any emergent socialism (and human rights generally), but they have no power base outside of the same haute-and petty- bourgeoisie that would constrain their ability to deal with the crises of capitalism; this is in contrast to 30s-style fascism, in which the national bourgeoisie were content with letting fascist corporatism manage the crises of capitalism their own class leadership couldn't. If there were a political vanguard that was capable of exploiting these conditions and winning the peoples' hearts and minds, I would be cautiously optimistic about the prospects for socialism (although via horrific struggles with the previously-mentioned wannabes committing heinous crimes).

Oh yeah, about that last part...