I think this is about as realistic as those, “I’m moving to Canada if Trump wins” polls. It measures, with huge error bars, whether or not the person questioned thinks politics are “good” right now.
Except that the left of the democrats are calling for police to arrest ice, the west coast and northeast are creating parallel public health infrastructures, California is voting on turning the republican party into a symbolic opposition, and the Oregon national guard is making noises about confrontation with ice.
Those are very early hints of what might develop in 20-30 years. Some of them are still hypothetical. And we haven’t seen any recognizable responses from capital, no big moves. Just following the business cycle, riding a bubble with a full blast of quantitative easing, funding explicit fascists a little more. The distribution and mechanisms of capital vs. labor will dictate the outcome and whether there can be any Balkanization. What could the West coast, say, actually do by itself? Will it create a parallel banking system? Stop paying taxes? These are much higher contradictions than feasible any time soon.
And capital has many global levers to pull. With a modicum of discipline it could hollow out the US, it just needs alternative operation centers to keep the profit machine running, to guarantee the parents, the copyrights, the unequal exchange system of profit extraction - and whatever else it restrictively invents.
To be clear I’m not being doomer, I just want to point out that these are very early stages of any larger events.
I think this is about as realistic as those, “I’m moving to Canada if Trump wins” polls. It measures, with huge error bars, whether or not the person questioned thinks politics are “good” right now.
Except that the left of the democrats are calling for police to arrest ice, the west coast and northeast are creating parallel public health infrastructures, California is voting on turning the republican party into a symbolic opposition, and the Oregon national guard is making noises about confrontation with ice.
There is real will for revolution in the US
Those are very early hints of what might develop in 20-30 years. Some of them are still hypothetical. And we haven’t seen any recognizable responses from capital, no big moves. Just following the business cycle, riding a bubble with a full blast of quantitative easing, funding explicit fascists a little more. The distribution and mechanisms of capital vs. labor will dictate the outcome and whether there can be any Balkanization. What could the West coast, say, actually do by itself? Will it create a parallel banking system? Stop paying taxes? These are much higher contradictions than feasible any time soon.
And capital has many global levers to pull. With a modicum of discipline it could hollow out the US, it just needs alternative operation centers to keep the profit machine running, to guarantee the parents, the copyrights, the unequal exchange system of profit extraction - and whatever else it restrictively invents.
To be clear I’m not being doomer, I just want to point out that these are very early stages of any larger events.