(id look up the quote, but it’s funner to butcher ideas and re-arrange them in new language)
i feel like that’s not just the US as a nation state, but Yankee culture and society in general. Like, I’m starting to think we’re just not capable of incorporating new experience into our collective learned behaviors. Not even after COVID - the polite thing isn’t to mask up or even hand-sanitize when you have cold or flu symptoms, it’s to pretend like nothing happened (and AIDS barely gets talked about and only in the past-tense…)
Most of the art and music and literature getting remixed remade and referenced is from the 20th century, or has roots beginning in that time. In terms of infrastructure, very little built this century seems to have any amount of longevity in mind.
Geopolitically we’re still doing Cold Wars and proxy-conflicts – even when those have been rendered obsolete by our own fucking actions the previous (and first…) time there was a big Cold War. And we never stopped funding and arming settler colonialism, even with practically unanimous condemnation in the UN (take away our VETO for the love of all things good TAKE IT AWAY)
i don’t know that i have a conclusion for this. On a personal level, living in the 20th century US but having 21st century tech reminds me way too much of Fahrenheit 451. It’s maddening. Like I’m trying not to notice the great big Amygdalae on the Healing Church; there’s no outlet for the Insight so it’s just hovering there and i’m scared to walk too close to it for fear of how others respond.
There’s definitely something there. I think there’s essentially two moments for an idea or new ideological movement or way of organizing society - the first point is where the new idea first becomes feasible, and the second point is where the old idea cannot be kept afloat any longer and necessarily collapses. And there can be a gap - sometimes a very big gap - between those two moments. For example, Napoleon might have represented the point at which his set of ideas which replaced the old aristocracy first became feasible (somebody more historically literate than me can inform me whether there was another major predecessor that I’m unaware of), but European monarchies having real power continued to be a phenomenon for decades afterwards until the concept could not continue existing and collapsed. Similarly, the Russian Revolution and the USSR might well be viewed as the moment where socialism first became feasible, but the old order fought back as it wasn’t quite ready to collapse, and that second, true collapse moment is in the years, probably decades ahead.
As such, a person calling the concept of socialist organization a failure merely because the USSR fell and thus socialism cannot exist because of capitalist realism will be viewed as similarly ridiculous as somebody saying that it’s simply not feasible for liberal democracies to exist because of, idk, divine-right-of-kings realism.
And it’ll probably be the case in the future that the transition from socialism to communism will experience something similar - a “socialist realism” which posits that a truly stateless, moneyless, classless society simply cannot work; a failed truly communist experiment in a world of generally socialist nations which is regarded as proof that communism doesn’t work and socialism is the only possible current reality, before socialism then cannot keep existing due to the contradictions and global communism arrives. And perhaps future conditions will introduce further contradictions, maybe aliens come along and that introduces a new stage to progress through, and so on for all of future human existence.
From Desai’s Geopolitical Economy, in 2013:
Crises teasingly hold out the possibility of dramatic reversals only to be followed by surreal continuity as the old order cadaverously fights back. So far in the current crisis military fight-back appears to be failing. Multipolarity and the shift in the world’s centre of gravity to the emerging economies opened the way for the toppling of US-supported dictators in Egypt and Tunisia. Though Western intervention in Libya could not be prevented, it was stalled in Syria. However, there were more worrying signs of continuity in political economy and geopolitical economy. Announcements of the return of the state and of the ‘Master’, Keynes, which came with initial flurry of bailouts and stimuli were followed by austerity, signalling ‘the strange non-death of neoliberalism’.
