I am aware that the West’s best time was essentially at the expense of the rest of the world - but where can one find opportunity and prosperity of those times today? Was this a great anomaly of history? Is it time to hedge your bets on living out the Chinese dream?
Is it time for the West to accept that what our parents experienced will never exist again?
Will the world overall need to accept that the western living standard of that time will never be reached again? (It’s too unsustainable - for the planet, and because superprofits won’t flow as they once did)
What has actually happened that’s caused it to collapse?
No, need for ever-increasing profits means it won’t happen under capitalism, and dealing with the fallout from a civil war and the climate crisis will leave a future socialist US too damaged to have that level of prosperity.
I think this became clear around I want to say 2022, when they started clawing back all the mildly redistributive emergency measures taken once they had convinced people that COVID was no longer an issue.
Yes. This is extremely problematic for any potential revolution, as imo the main factor that determines if a people support their government is if their standard of living is continually improving.
The bourgeois needing an ever-greater slice of the pie means that workers get less. As most of the populace is workers, this leads to a decline in standard of living.
there is much to be gained through wealth redistribution and rethinking what it means to have a high living standard in a post-capitalism world
Sure, but in reference to the downwardly-mobile white “middle class” of America I don’t know if this bears true. Things like cheap meat or international travel can’t be allowed to reach those levels again.