I’m curious what the Lemmygrad community thinks about upcoming unrest in the US.
With civil unrest growing as more people realize that the foundation of the American state is built on the skeletons of minorities and is satiated with the blood of the ‘unworthy’, which came to a head last summer with protesting. And with future summers becoming hotter, and hotter, to the point that survival in parts of the US will become nye impossible, it’s sure that the United States will become more hellish than it already is.
What do y’all think the outcomes of this might be?
What do y’all think unrest in the US would look like?
What timeline do you think is most realistic?
Are you prepared for unrest? What are your plans?
Looking at it as US unrest is too narrow. I think the 21st century will be defined by mass migrations of workers from the Global South. This will be caused by the white supremacist imperialism of the US and allies (Western Europe and its white settler states) and, especially later this century, by the climate crisis. The total population of migrant people could be in the hundreds of millions or more.
One possibility is that this basically ends countries. Not just some countries, but the very idea of countries, from the point of view of billions at the bottom. The governments of their home countries will be too starved by bourgeois-imposed austerity to protect them from famine and gang violence. Other countries will fear them as dangerous and destabilizing. So wherever they go, they will be forced to live outside the protection of the law. They will be the first class in the world that truly has nothing to lose, not even a country.
The migrant proletarians will be fully networked. They will have to be, because they could be deported or forced to flee at any time. Their networks of family and close friends will stretch across continents by necessity. They will be the first truly global proletariat.
When it finally rises and becomes aware of its power, the global proletariat will be the only class capable of taking on the global bourgeoisie. It will be able to organize strikes spanning an entire continent, covering all stages in production from mining to manufacturing to programming. Since its members will only see laws and political borders as weapons to use against it, the proletariat will make a mockery of bourgeois countries and reach decisions in its collective interest.
My hope is that existing socialist nations, especially China, can help guide this proletariat. The reason I think so is that so far the world has given us two different models of industrialization: imperialistic conquest led by Western Europe and its white settler states, and state-directed domestic development by the USSR and China. The second of these will be the proletariat’s only option in a world with decreasing livable area. But I admit, I’ve grown up in a fog of Sinophobic first-world propaganda, so I don’t know enough about China to say something more definite.