How stupid do you have to be to think the revolution will happen just because of an economic collapse?

Because history repeats itself on these issues. Revolutions and times of war only occur during periods of this much inequity, historically.

So the cat is basically in the bag, you're just stupid for not knowing this.

No one thinks economic collapse alone will bring about revolution they think the material conditions brought about by economic collapse might spur enough people on the ground in the right direction and might sufficiently scare the rich and their allies into a better society. The process by which this happens and what happens after depends on your sect.

As a post Keynesian anarcho-Christian leftcom I think… Nah just fucking with you.

remind me how 1929 radicalized western workers

It's literally in the thread with the CCCP and Lenin meme, the one with a 100+ replies

read the post again dipshit

Eh. I think people on here tend to underestimate your typical post-grad 20-30something centrist's lefty potential. They're basically good people who don't what to think, and tend to sympathize with succdems far more readily than the upstart crypto-fascists.

When the economic collapse happens, I think it could be a whole lot brighter and uplifting than people think. Fascism will come from the state, not the people.

America had a more violent labor history,

Than any other nation at the time next to the Soviet union, not counting the decades prior

People who use the word "buzzword" at this point are 90% of the time a complete and utter brain dead fuckwit.

Op is faggot.

Lower middle class people that experienced pretty minor reductions in economic well being voted in masses for fucking Trump. In another situation, in a propper economic crisis and not this world wide boom economy things could very different. But besides that you are right, we have to organise and create dualpower now.

Profitability continues to decline and the only cure is taking away pensions and healthcare and all the rest. A bit of Keynesianism can kick the can down the road for a while but the profit rates aren't there any more to pay off the costs.
It's just a shame most boomers don't get it and those that do don't care as they've got theirs.
The country in the worst shape to make capitalism work any more is the UK and bongs love their post war gibs so it would be interesting to see what happens there.

...

I just did, I don't see any buzzwords. Or do you not understand what hegemony, overstretch and multipolarity mean?

I'd say I agree with this sentiment overall - people's ability to endure terrible, ever-worsening conditions always surprises me.

That said, with the decline of the American empire and increased global instability (i.e. climate change and simultaneous economic collapses around the Western world), I'd say that there's at least some chance that the disaffected band together to form a new kind of culture and way of living in a global economic system that considers them a burden. It wouldn't likely be revolutionary in nature, but it would offer communal survival. That's about the best that many will be able to hope for in the future, I fear.

Then again though, I think of Italy, where only half or so of the people under 30 are able to find work. What do our countries look like after 10-20 years of this? What becomes of the masses of people who have never been able to work yet find themselves ensnared in capitalistic systems where their sense of self is trained to be tightly linked with their material wealth?

In a truly terrible way I fear that economic and significant ecological and social collapses may be the only things that could stir people from complacency. They must see their families and neighbors go hungry while Porky's party rages on. They must know true anger (they will) but they must also direct it in a way which will benefit them (much more difficult). This is why local organization is crucial. Memes will only go so far as to radicalize someone. Meeting another angry person and being angry about the same thing is what actually brings about revolutions.

Get out there and talk to people, comrades.

If the Great War couldn't lead to revolution in the West then nothing can. Still pisses me off that that war is overshadowed by WW2.

What's gonna happen if Trump takes the fall for the collapse though?

When will we get /organize/ generals on here? It's way too easy just to tell someone to organize, without properly giving them the tools and know-how. Theory can only go so far.

Who /usethecollapsetoformafascistempire/ here?

Seems more likely that this will happen than any alternative.

Yeah, in America, because you guys are retarded. Finally the rest of the world can breathe.

I agree especially in America where the terms are so chopped and screwed that people don't really know what the fuck they are most of the time.

I am actually in complete agreement. Spontaneous revolutionism is the most purest vulgar determinism where one forgets about something as important as ideology.

I'm tepidly hopeful* that the collapse will just lead to a revival of genuine social democracy, modernised for the 21st century.

*This is perhaps a perverse definition of hopeful. What I mean by this is not even that I think it will happen, simply that the potential is there, the curse of TINA is so strong that even the deviation into possibility is hope, even if it's not a deviation into probability.

The primary lesson from this is almost certainly that emotional state has a much greater effect on cognition than is generally recognized, even though it is generally recognized quite strongly, given that at other times if presented with some small Dutchy in Europe that had actually managed to preserve social democracy the response would doubtless be "It will just turn neoliberal eventually anyway, nothing nice ever happens."

Nothing good, Trump is such an anomoly he can be dismissed by the right. Which means more space for "competent" neoliberals.

Well you've got 20-40 months for your revolution if you want to avoid the next recession. Get yer skates on lad.

That's being quite hopeful, since the crisis will likely hit next year or in 2019.

Russia and it's population where further right in 1917 then the US's is today

All of these threads pretend that your average Neolib will do nothing, won't protest, and all leftism will disappear from the media as Porky deathsquads (fucking as if) are going to roam the streets and impose martial law when the big shit hits the fan.

The Neolib "left" are still incredibly well organized, and aren't are enemy the same way your average porky is. Please remember that these are well meaning people who have been duped into thinking, basically

These people can be radicalized and they are our comrades, even if they don't realize it yet. We just need to make efforts to organize; online and off. Pessimism and infighting won't do shit.

Can someone give me a rundown on the global economic collapse meme, and how it could ever be worse in the short-term compared to, say, The Great Depression given that we won't have to face the dust bowl and keeping in mind how cities and communities have tended (or at least artificially appeared) to be more unified and peaceful units in recent years?

People turn revolutionary when the contradictions of capitalism are most apparent, not just when their economic well-being is the worst. It'll be the indifference and incompetence of the bourgeoisie that will set people off during the next crisis, not just the fact that people are broke, unemployed or hungry.

Economic crisis alone just tends to push people to the right.

Well the DOD and pentagon released a report on the collapse of the American empire which is interesting and there could be a financial crash in a year or two. All the info is in the thread with the CCCP and Lenin meme.

do you have experience organizing?

In a nutshell the declining economy is gradually breaking down as consumption drops and unemployment increases. Manufacturing is slowing, shipping is slowing, and growth for nearly every relevant nation has stagnated. Real growth for the US has been around zero percent for the past decade. Even China's growth is slowing down as their real estate bubble reaches its limits.

All of this is on top of all the trends and processes that led to the economic crash in 08, because absolutely nothing has been done to correct those system and cultural problems. The Fed has been tentatively raising interest rates but even three financial industry has been issuing warnings on the state of the economy. The massive car and student loans industry are starting to buckle as more people default on their payments. 40% of student loans aren't currently being paid on, and there's something like a trillion and a half dollars for education alone.

So aside from all that, no one is talking about the problems the economy is facing or solutions to these serious problems. If another crash were to occur, no one is really sure what will happen. There could be a government bail out but there is talk of that being politically and economically unfeasible. Some banks are experimenting with bail ins where all the customers' deposits are seized by the banks. Somehow this is supposed to be more feasible than a bail in.

And if neither of those options are utilized then there's the very real possibility of the entire global economy as currently exists coming to a screaming, crashing halt as all the value built up over the past decade evaporates and whole industries shatter, leading to a catastrophic disruption of every industrial economy on the planet.

That's a vulgarization of the Marxist view. The Marxist view doesn't necessarily speak of (total) economic collapse. In fact, this is unless enabled by the communist movement, entirely impossible: capitalism will without resisance always find a way to regenerate itself. The only "total collapse" capitalism will produce without being able to stop it will consequently be the end of our species (although even ecological and environmental capitalism can exist, or even eco-fascism).

The Marxist view may possibly best be described by Philip Mirowski's text Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (a good text on its own, so check it out!): capitalism may never fully let itself die, but it will always produce crises, small or large scale, that it must treat symptomatically. We cannot find an example of hitherto existing revolutions not spurred first by such a crisis, and we may take one of the biggest as our first example of this: the Russian revolution.

What enabled the Russian revolution? In Lenin's own words: "[the Party (Bolsheviks)] simply found power in the streets and took it", but when? During a civil war, most importantly the civil war's extension and spilling over well into the first Great Imperialist War, a direct product of capitalism and its highest expression: imperialism. This crisis of capital is so monumental to the existence of the October revolution that an entirely new communist international, the Comintern, was built upon its premises and from the ashes of a successful seizure of power.

Mirowski's text treats many more examples like this in the text I just mentioned, including one of the most influential on Marx and his views, the Communard Uprising in Paris, but also the original establishment of the workers' Soviets in 1905, the several revolutions between that and the October revolution, the Chinese revolution (both the one in the '20s and the left one that split from the cultural revolution of the '60s), the Hungarian workers' council revolution, May '68, et cetera.

But in Tsar russia 85% population have nothing and live in total poverty. They did not afraid goverment and army becouse they prefer death then contine that existence.

It seems pretty weird that the Fed doesn't have anything up its sleeve to prevent this though, given that the factors leading to it seem pretty obvious. This total doomsday scenario just seems more alarmist than reasonable.

As incompetent and blind as our Gov is, I'm not totally willing to believe that this major end-of-capitalism crash is really going to come. We were able to bullshit our way out of '08, why not this time?

I think there's a good chance the next crash will be blamed entirely on Trump by both the dems and the repubs (not that Trump isn't porky garbage, just that this is a problem decades in the making), and that will provide enough cover for the system for it to stay afloat a bit longer.

More people will be foreclosed on, more vehicles will be repossessed, tent cities will grow, students who do find jobs after college will be in their 50s by the time they pay off their loans, instead of in their 40s (assuming they pay them at all). Basically the hard times will get harder for the average American, but the magical stock market will keep chugging, because it's already propped up by the mysterious force of known as 'speculation'.

It will be interesting to see how the rest of the world evolves while America declines. One thing you can bet on though, the wars will continue.

That's my expectation for this whole thing. Although the systemic problems that caused 08 still haven't been fixed, at least UK regulators have shown alarm at the student and auto debt crises, and seem to be moving forward with new regulations. Whether that'll be enough is to be seen, but even "there will never be another crisis" Yeller can't be that blind.
If I'm being optimistic, perhaps the old guard and neoreactionaries of both parties will be pushed aside. The reformist left may have hope yet.

Is it really so weird that capitalism prioritizes profit even in the face of utter annihilation? The Fed isn't there to prevent economic ruin, it's there to continue facilitating the profits of the spectacularly wealthy. Aside from that, they're all operating under numerous assumptions, but chief among them I think is that the economy is natural and right and that everything is going as planned. And why wouldn't they think that? Profits are up, stocks are up, everything is up, unless you're a working person.

Even the Fed can't be blind to declining profit margins. Even if things seem to be going relatively well for the already well off, the incoming energy and debt crises seem to be on most commentators' radars. Not to say that they're perfect or all seeing in any way, but I refuse to believe that they're just plain stupid.

I wouldn't call it stupidity per say. They're getting paid to do what they're told.
I know the Upton Sinclair quote is posted here like every day, but-

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

I think this is why we hear more stories about millionaires and billionaires buying/building end-times bunkers. A lot of people from all classes understand (and more come to understand each day) how tenuous the nature of things are, yet even the wealthy and powerful could not force capitalism to effectively switch gears at this point. There is simply too much inertia, both industrial and cultural, wrapped up in the system for it to radically change without collapsing.

There's a section from Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn, that I always think of with regard to the failing of complex systems. If you haven't read the book I highly recommend it, but to pull the reference from cliffsnotes-

"…Ishmael explains by describing an early attempt at flight. He describes a man pedaling a bi-winged contraption. He says that if the man runs off a tall cliff, he will experience free fall for long enough that it will feel like flight to him, even though he's not actually flying. Additionally, the man will keep pedaling because so far it's working, even though below him he'll see abandoned crafts just like his own. But, eventually, he'll fall to the earth because his craft hasn't followed the rules of aerodynamics. Ishmael suggests that Taker culture is in the same boat: it's an experiment in free fall, even though it feels like flight, and Takers are accelerating toward a crash. Takers also see abandoned attempts at civilization (for example, the Mayans) but nonetheless believe that their attempt will survive because it has "worked" so far. The narrator jumps in at the end of Ishmael's lecture and says that people will just try to do the same thing all over again if the narrator's culture ends in catastrophe; Ishmael sadly agrees."

Does anyone have a copy of the falling rate of profit chart?

Interested in making some ad-hoc year comparisons. In particular with the date US private debt passed 100% GDP. (Partially linked to pic related.)

I appreciate the poetics, but it seems like an unfair comparison, I don't think the higher ups at the Fed are paid to not understand. That just sounds like baseless cynicism.

I respectfully disagree. I think there are roughly two possibilities here, and both are rather cynical.

First possibility - the people who run the Fed know they're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, that economic collapse is inevitable given the current system (perpetual growth, finite supplies, dying world) and that their job is to keep it running for as long as possible. In this sense they are 'paid to not understand' in that they won't be the ones telling the population at large that their economy is based on magic. They are essentially paid to keep the status quo.

Second possibility - they believe in the system to varying degrees and will strive to keep it alive as long as possible. Again, they are paid to keep the status quo, because they wouldn't be the people running the Fed if they didn't desire to keep the status quo.

It might be cynical in its outlook, but I'd argue that it's the reality of the situation. Whether the people running the Fed believe in the economic system or not is essentially irrelevant - they are being paid and if they don't keep the status quo they will cease to be the people running the Fed, cease to be paid.

Is there a non-cynical lens through one can view the rulers and magicians of global capital?

They work for the people that own Congress and have Trump's personal number. They aren't really worried about what might happen, because they won't personally be taken to task for it, or have to pay for any damage they cause. I can't find the article at the moment, but some of these people actually hope for another crisis, fully expecting another bailout.

So you're right, these people aren't stupid, they're just in it to make money. Worrying about the economy is for the little people.