In the case of Cuba, pretty much all the leaders have come around to be against the death penalty, but as Fidel states in his autobiography, much of the population still supports it, especially in cases of truly despicable murderers. Eventually they’ll have a referendum on it, but as its a very delicate matter, they can’t lead too far ahead of public opinion for such a controversial subject.
So civil war can only possibly come as a result of leftist organization? History has many counterexamples.
Sorry, I misinterpreted the OP’s suggestion to mean leftist revolution. But even a regrouping / re-organization of the propertied classes in the US is unlikely to occur, because the capitalist class remains united, and no there are no fundamental divisions within it. They desire stability above all, and all layers of US power are extremely stable, its military, police, legal systems, government etc.
Okay, but what unites them? There are clearly so many different splinters and factions within the US military and if stability keeps breaking down, what common interest would keep them loyal to the state?
Profit. These instances of right-wing terrorism and instability may increase, but for the most part they’re aimed not at the US government, or its power structures, but at minorities, immigrants, non-whites, etc. Right wing terrorism is much more a useful tool to US capitalism than it is a threat, which is why they keep it around, and don’t publicly raise too many alarm bells about it. A few bigoted conspiracy theorist kooks in the US congress, stirring up bigots, and trying to strangle its social services, while ultimately supporting the US military and police, is nothing new either.
I don’t see why people are equating rising right-wing terrorism with the threat of civil war. It is not an organized movement, nor does it threaten the power structures in any way. If anything it supports US capitalists long-existing class warfare against its own poor, and imperialism against other nations.
The US already had a civil war as a partially industrialized nation.
The US primarily started out as a slave economy, modelled after the roman empire. Growing US capitalism clashed with that, and needed a war to supplant it to become secure. and ensure new territories in the west were open for capitalist development, not slave plantations. In short, the civil war happened and was necessary because US capitalists did not have stability.
So did the UK at the height of its imperial hegemony.
What are you referring to here? Britain was stable for the most part during its Victorian period. It was easily able to buy off most of its local population with the spoils of its imperial conquests. Almost all the wars in this period were in its colonies: India, South Africa, Afghanistan, Egypt, etc.
The US does contribute a hugely outsized rate of pollution per capita, but thanks to China’s reform and opening up, the US dismantled most of its industry and exported it to China. So its displaced US as the main industrial powerhouse / consumer goods producer for the world. And the CPC does actively fight climate change by forcing all state and non-state owned industries to meet its climate change targets.
The superiority of socialism is not only doing better than capitalism in terms of production, but also in terms of saving the earth from climate catastrophe. We have the efforts of the CPC and Deng Xiaoping’s forsight to thank for that.
Just because communism won’t win in a single country in the near future, does not mean that communism won’t win globally. Class struggle is still the engine that drives history, and the US can only forstall capitalism’s defeat for a little while.
IMO the US has no chance of falling, or entering a state of civil war, even within the next 50 years, for several reasons:
As to your point about the US civil war, this occurred because it was a conflict between two branches of propertied classes vying for supremacy, and which economic mode would dominate: the northern capitalists with modern industry, against the southern agricultural slaveocracy. Those contradictions could not be resolved, both wanted to expand, and so they entered a state of war.
Nowadays there is no conflict between the “oil and energy baron” republicans, and the “tech and finance” coastal liberals, and their links are so tight as to be non-existent as actual separate categories. Their class interests are fully in unison, and they share members and stock ownership freely.
If someone thinks the US is going to have a revolution or a civil war, they need to explain what group is actually well-organized enough, or powerful enough to threaten the US government, or what capitalist grouping wants to secede so badly as to want to start a war.
Something deeply unsettling and hollow about the depths brands will go to to imbue a fkn can of crappy coffee with emotional warmth.
There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.
Marx
Seems to be a backup temporarily at https://sites.google.com/view/toki-ma
Reminds me of that scene in Doctor strangelove where all the generals are discussing their plans for the post-nuclear world.
Luckily tho, not all empires go out with a bang(Rome, Britain, Spain). Due to the strong economic ties that China consciously built with the US, US capitalists know its not in their overall interest, so nuclear war is probably not going to happen.
We also see that the US, like the bully it is, is only willing risk conflict with countries that aren’t a real threat.
The US will go like Britain… a long, pathetic, whiny decline into irrelevance.
2nded on edible weed varieties… much cheaper than alcohol or other drugs, gets you high for longer, no damage to lungs, helps relieve pain and stress (and helps with the symptoms of a host of ailments as you said), doesn’t make you violent, no calories.
If you live in the US, you can (at least for now) buy delta-8 gummies legally online.
Cassandra hours