It is in many places, just not everywhere. Appalachia, Puerto Rico, lots of small towns, lots of urban neighborhoods. There was some guy saying, he say his country collapse, and it didn’t happen all at once. i think something about, one day there’d be a bombing, and the next day you’d go to the disco, and it just happened a little at a time so there was no big dramatic moment.

I think the US is already in decline, but I’m seriously concerned about the depression wave taking over our schools. I expect shit to pop off around 2030 when most of the COVID school kids graduate. We’re going to see a lot more people who do not value their own lives acting out. I don’t expect any overthrow of the American government, but I expect there to be a lot of civilian skirmishes.

you will be posting from a crater that used to be Chicago during the 18th Great Lakes Clique–Missouri Government War and some asshole on hexbear is going to be moaning about ‘why hasn’t the US collapsed yet’

As others have pointed out here, collapse is a process, not an event. But that being said, I think that if Trump gets reelected (which is almost inevitable at this point) his aggressive deportation plan might very well be a huge catalyst for inter-state conflict within USA:

Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive.

Not to mention deporting as many people as he plans to would take a wrecking ball to the American economy.

It is an interesting question, at what point will the sporadic pointless violence and the constant desperation violence and the disease and the breakdown of public schools and loss of already minimal and difficult-to-access social services and the mass incarceration and disintegrating healthcare system where you stay in tbe ER for multiple days to go into debt and the high prices and the shit working conditions and the unlivable rent and the direct biological abuses of the powerless and the loss of any semblance of a social situation people know how to cope with while reassuring themselves they still have their Individuality™️ or a chance at a life instead of only surviving passes the point of no return into what you’d call collapse conditions. This already feels like the collapse. This is WWIII. That’s why I feel alright. I’ve felt like this since I was 12 years old. I don’t even care about what happens here and I don’t feel guilty about it anymore, so ultimately I am one with the cool cyberpunk future and this is rad as hell actually

2038-06-08 09:15:55 Eastern

As far as causes, I don’t think the current Team Red/Team Blue partisan bickering will have anything to do with the collapse. That bickering is just theater to keep the narrative going. It inspires the occasional random actor to go adventurism mode but nothing organized on the level to get real collapse/balkanization.

I firmly believe it’s going to be the supply chain of treats getting compromised that will trigger the collapse. It’s the only collective national glue, and the combination of climate change reducing productivity in the equatorial third world, the shortage of oil resources with no real transition plan to renewables, international shipping capacity insecurity due to prices, resources, piracy, other countries like China positioning to adapt to that new normal more smoothly, there ain’t gonna be enough treats to go around. That’s going to mean some states/regions attempting to hoard, ports will become points of resource distribution contention, whomever loses out on the federal fight will have motivation to split/rebel/attack opposing states, and we’ve got collapse/balkanization on our hands.

Timewise, thinking somewhere in the 2040-2050 range. There’s enough buffer right now but that’s the range where a lot of the “shit hits the fan” climate points hit and that’s when the equatorial supply chain will be crippled.

Well, if we’re going by the timeline of my satirical short story I wrote a few years back, I think I’d landed on the late 2020s. So, around the same time as the beginning of the Second Russian Civil War, the establishment of the Transgender Republic of Hibaristan, Chinese reunification, the establishment of the Ryukyu People’s Republic, the reunification of Korea, and I think Greenland also declared independence around that time.

Edit: oh and also Palestinian and Irish reunification, but I neglected to mention those.

My prediction is the mid 2040s, because in terms of historical narrative it’s pleasingly symmetrical

pretty soon, the Bell riots are this year

Lenin:

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

Marx:

“Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.”

Evolution of society happens like evolution of species. Nothing happens for a long time, until suddenly something does happen. Only one thing is certain, that change doesn’t happen until and unless the conditions are ripe for change. But the conditions do not in themselves precipitate change, they are only a precondition.

The difficult thing is that one can argue the conditions for a total collapse in the US are already here, and that all is needed is the spark. But it could also be that we are missing some essential condition, like maybe the US Dollar has to be dismantled from international trade, or the US has to lose its access to nukes. We can’t know, we can only interpret events in hindsight, even with our dialectics and our science.

Looking at how other empires have “collapsed” without being invaded or the military dividing up and declaring fiefdoms, it’s been a slow decay of less and less effective centralisation (while still having de jure centralisation) as powerful people and organisations in regions increasingly view other regions as separate.

I think the US military is too organisationally coherent for an Alexander the Great kind of situation. While people do get attached to their commanding officers, it’s not nearly as close to the heroic classical period, and you get used to new commanding officers pretty quickly assuming they’re not complete assholes. We do make jokes about how wonky/privately captured US Military procurement and logistics can be, but this hasn’t translated into factionalism per se, just bloat. I am also willing to be proven wrong on this, especially if the funding dries up or the US Military suffers some major losses. I feel like things like Iraq and Afghanistan, the losses there were lower than the defending population and the type of warfare allows the command structure an easy “out” for its self-confidence.

I also don’t think the US will get territorially invaded. Naval landings suck at the best of times, and it’s surrounded by allies, bases, and intelligence assets. No sane military is going to make that jump. Inasmuch as we valorise guerillas here, they’re only good at defence where there is support amongst the local population. Again, open to see this changing, but I don’t see it for the foreseeable future.

I also don’t see the US Military (as in… The DoD, pentagon, Army, Navy, etc) being divided up territorially. For instance, a portion of the army becomes “The Texas Border Defence Army”. There are a lot of political motivations to keep this the case.

Things like the national guard, police, and other “military”-like forces I definitely do see becoming more separated. Not necessarily with the “border crisis”, but you can see the outline of it with the Texas National Guard. If cops get brought in from out of state as well, which states do this and which don’t will also define these blocks. We’re also partly seeing the outline with abortion laws. Whether or not these issues become “states rights” things, or if new issues are brought in (e.g. banning trans affirming care across all states instead) are all issues that you’ll see further diversification but also weakening of federalism. If, say, a future Republican fed tries to ban trans affirming care and Washington State decides not to follow through, what happens? If DC stops funding to Washington State (I should have chosen different examples), the idea of federalism is weakened. If the law just isn’t followed and local state government doesn’t comply with the FBI, what happens? Do doctors in Seattle stop being able to practice elsewhere in the US? Does DC send in the troops to reign in the Washington state?

The world will look very different with Texadollars and Californibucks, I think that’s a long way down the road. But separated economies and laws which both still sort of use the US dollar (e.g. Seattle would import a lot of USD through corporations, say) is part of the beginning.

Remember that with the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church and Feudal lords carried on many of the legal structures even after the Roman Empire stopped being able to be said to be a single entity. Systems of debt peonage carried over, the division between “arable land owning military citizen” and “slave/debt peon/non-citizen” carried over to “lord” and “peasant”. The Catholic Church maintained Imperial divinity even though it was now a pope instead of an Emperor. Not with the exact same things, but that’s what I imagine US Empire will look like in a few hundred years.

This, of course, is alongside the tightening of Capitalist contradictions. Rich get richer even as profits get squeezed (until mono-oligopolies spread around the world), poor get poorer and more numerous and desperate. But the legal and nationalist concept of “The United States of America” I think will look like the above. Also, the US Military and intelligence apparatuses will continue to defend Capital since that’s why they exist.

Collapse is already happening for way too many, it will accelerate when no one on either coast can get property insurance due to rising sea levels, when the inland aquifers are finally sucked dry and agricultural irrigation ends, and when no more able-bodied children are available as cannon fodder for the empire. Probably the last straw will be when the never-ended civil war goes hot once again. We just need to hope they don’t use nukes on each other this time.

Another vote for “things will just get shittier over time”, not total collapse at any point, except for one possible scenario (I will describe below). If we use the Roman Empire as template, they never really “collapsed” all at once. Britain experienced “collapse” when the legions left in the 4th century, but the Roman area around Constantinople did “collapse” until over 1,000 years later. It’s common among Roman historians to not even talk about “collapse” much per se, and focus more on evolution and change. Heck, some parts of the empire actually saw conditions improve after Roman control ended (in North Africa, they could stop sending all their grain to Rome every year, for example).

Now, there is one scenario I could see that could cause a total rapid collapse: if the US could no longer extract value (i.e. exploit) from the global south. I’m on a Capital vol. 2 and MMT kick right now. Basically, the key insight IMO from the first 17 chapters is that it’s only in the sphere of production that value is created. It can be the production of goods or services, but that is the only place where value is created (well, Marx gives some very narrow examples of value being created in transportation of good and sometimes in storage, but those are extensions of production, really). This is where the fact that Americans don’t make anything really comes back to bite them in the ass. Obviously we don’t make things here but what most people don’t realize is even American companies like Apple and Nike don’t actually “create” value. The subcontractors they use in place like China and Bangladesh is where the value is created. It’s just that Apple and Nike appropriate the value from those places and distribute it here among their marketers, lawyers, etc. The entire non-financial sector of the US economy resembles a merchant capitalist (where no value is created, it’s just taken out of productive capital which is all overseas) economy than anything else.

So what does this mean? If Americans aren’t creating value within the country, and it’s just that value is taken from other parts of the world and distributed here… if you cut that off then all of the sudden the US is a country that isn’t creating much value and isn’t even capable of that outside of a Stalin-esque centrally planned industrialization program. The US depends on circulating capital taken from the global south domestically, not producing it domestically. So if that’s not circulating, and Americans have no real capacity to create value domestically… then material conditions probably degrade on a scale that’s hard to even wrap your head around. THAT would be a hard and fast collapse.

Admittedly, the catalyst for that (the rest of the world preventing the US from exploiting production in the rest of the world) is pretty far-fetched, so at this point it’s just academic and why I saw that I really only see a slow motion degradation happening.

I’m in the “it wont be a sudden collapse, things will just keep getting shittier until we wake up one day and realize that most of the states are basically ‘developing countries’” camp. A sudden collapse would require something like a war going badly and the US getting invaded - and I just don’t see that happening. The US will lose its ability to project force around the globe, but will remain a strong player in the Atlantic and the hegemon of the Americas. I think there will be a new paradigm of foreign relations where we basically lean on Europe and our presence there becomes a lot less gregarious. As control of Africa slips from our fingers the Middle East and especially Saudi Arabia will re-balance their own foreign policy commitments and that will be when you see the true last gasp of American Empire as we try to prevent the cheap oil tap from being turned down - if we;re successful the Empire will last fifty more years, if we fail then the Empire is de facto dead.

Poor regions in America will deteriorate even more rapidly than they already are, wealthy regions will experience something like the stagflation of the 70s and working people will get squeezed even more, mass shootings will become more common, the suicide rate will rise precipitously, fascists will seize power in many governments only to realize that the copper wiring has long been stripped out by corporations, somewhere socdems will take power and try to reverse course only to be sanctioned by the corporations (everyone will point to the capital flight and say that that’s why communism doesn’t work), and so on.

This will continue until a Putin-like figure emerges who can exercise some sort of control over the bourgeoisie and remake the government, or a Bolshevik-like organization does and ignites a class war. But the conditions of shock therapy or post-WW1 can’t be replicated, so there’s no telling how long the ship will take to sink and it might not be in our lifetimes.