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Closing the 'Collapse Gap': the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US
(www.resilience.org)
Yea it kind of implies a narrative that keeping your society ethnically pure is kind of fashy. I'd think that relative income inequality is more of an indicator of crime and overreaction to crime than mere ethnic differences.
(edit) I do like the rest of this article.
It's definitely not without problems, but I thought on the whole it was worth linking because it does have some interesting insights.
Not even true for Russia, let alone the USSR. Russians became more priviledged towards the end, but nowhere to the level of the system of white supremacy in the US.
I hope the collapse in the US is a million times worse than it ever was in the USSR. And I say that as a Canadian who expects much (though hopefully not all) of it to either be mirrored here in Canada, or close to it. The last things to go, after all (not the first) will be the military-industrial complex, the corporate-finance sectors here in the west, and the policing and mass incarceration sectors of the west- as we're already seeing. Best to kill the beast of empire entirely and let something (or ideally, many somethings- a balkanized America is a better America) new emerge from the ashes, than let it go slowly, rabidly, and painfully.
The proposed solutions for collapse seem, funnily enough, nigh politically impossible, that said. The debts will never go away preemptively, same with the militarism, the prisons will stay full thanks to contractual obligations and widespread corruption till the state that legitimized said sentences goes entirely (and honestly I wouldn't be surprised to see attempts to maintain the prison labor in many places- now even more reminiscent of plantation slavery in its essence- in the aftermath). The US would surely sooner nuke its own citizens than abandon the nuclear option entirely as well, and the first things whose funding will dry up (and are drying up) as the empire continues to decline are environmental and safety regulations, and the transition to renewable energy.
In other words- the opposite shall continue to happen, and the empire shall only head into worse preparedness for its wholly deserved collapse, as said collapse draws nearer. Inshallah
This reminds me of China Miéville’s project, Salva☭e, which may have petered out last year.
Salvage is a bi-annual journal of revolutionary arts and letters.
Salvage recognises that the catastrophe is already upon us and that the decisive struggle is over what to do with the remains.
Salvage is for a communism of the ruins.
I think that's a good perspective to have on things. The collapse is the most likely scenario, so the focus should be on what to do after.
And how to survive. To realize any plans for the "after" you need to make it that far first.
indeed
Oops this was written in 2006
And getting more relevant by the day. :)
something is very off in that article
Reducing the USSR to just Russia, claiming that this "Russia" was somehow not ethnically diverse, Solshenizin soloing the USSR - according to the author, the usual ramblings about muh inefficient government factories, the pink lensed idea of how the US handles protest and dissent.
Yeah, I get what you mean.
thanks for elaborating better, comrade. another thing that ticked me was the separation of socialism to how soviet union was structured, instead of the other way. this is why i thought about chauvinism, in my understanding he points that su was prepared because russians toughened up through hardships
Do elaborate.
some parts of it sounds like social chauvinism.
That's fair, but overall analysis seems to be sound. The parts I found particularly interesting were around things like city planning and infrastructure where USSR was planned around communal living, and that made it possible for people to create mutual aid networks to get through the hard times. On the other hand, US has a big suburbia and car culture which is far more problematic in time of shortages and insecurity.
Definitely written by a liberal or worse. But they make great points, outside of calling USSR an evil empire et al ad nauseum
The collapse gap that we must close is between the Soviets that collapsed and the US that didn’t yet.
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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