HOPE Through PROPHECY! — On the Obstacles and Opportunities of The Next 77 Years
A leaflet sent to my apartment some months ago. as i remarked to my boyfriend, “The Second Best source of hope is prophecy. The Best Source of All is Baseless Speculation.”
Inspired by this post on reddit.com as well as by the new anum, I wanted to engage in some speculative political analysis and personal reflection for the coming century and beyond. Inverting the logic of this amazing review, I hereby declare exclusive authorship and ownership of the following predictions. Repeat them as much as you please, by all means, but if Reality attempts to rip-off my work, instantiating those sequences of events, faithfully or through creative adaptation, I will consider it a theft of my intellectual property.
Q. What country is most likely to become socialist 50 years from now?
In terms of the post 1917 conceptions of state-socialism, i would put my money on a highly exploited, small to medium state on the imperial periphery, similar to Bolivia. Maybe Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, etc. if Brazil continues to move left post-Lula, it might be able to provide cover for a new Pink Tide. This is not because the people living here are the “most exploited”—as if measuring such a quality were a simple matter of borrowing a cartographical chain and abacus from the IMF—but because there are still contra-capitalist networks, horizontal and vertical, which have yet to be fully deterritorialized according to the neoliberal market ontology currently hegemonic in much of the imperial core, particularly america. indeed, such counternetworks are still critical in much of the world, including the core, and are part of the dividends still being paid from the initial spoils of primitive accumulation, which of course has always been a process of transformation and therefore is necessarily partial. See the underlying assumptions of house work and other reproductive labor which capitalism simultaneously invisibilized and depends upon, or the concept of baseline communism in David Graber’s work. The possibility of counter-state systems emerging rests on the continued transformation of counter-capitalist movements being partly enlisted into state forms even as they attempt to break free from other portions of the clockwork of empire.
India would be my long-shot bet, there's a regional power base and the growth they've been experiencing will probably slow in the next 20 to 30 years, leading to internal tensions which could make the Hindu nationalist status quo no longer viable. the 21st century geopolitical stage has begun to crystalize around a diad, between NATO (still under US hegemony but expanding into eastern Europe) and the Sino-Russian interests. on paper India is aligned with the later, but I'm not sure that will be very stable. China has made inroads into the post-colonial holdings of France, Britain, America, etc through investment in Africa and South America, but that constituency has historically defined by its third-positional nature, playing off the two main powers against each other. states like India and Brazil could have outsized influence in terms of leading other medium and small states to align more with China or form a Third World International.
I also think interesting things will continue occurring in the so called 4th world, i.e. the internal colonies of the core (the American and Canadian Indian reservations, deindustrialized urban centers. See also the ruins of the old coal mining towns, deep rural areas of Maine and northern Canada, etc). not that i think formal secession is in the cards so much as an increase in ungovernability, as these communities will probably be some of the first to become cut off from the supply chains as climate chaos, future pandemics, economic catastrophes throw the current distribution networks into chaos. Will amazon and walmart be able to maintain their hegemony beyond the large towns and cities? Will it even be profitable to do so? hard to say, but i think there will be interesting gaps forming with each crisis, gaps which someone will try to fill, though by what alliance or techniques remains a mystery of contingency.
! Ideological Developments
! Moonshots
! personal program : what kind of materials would i like to impart to my comrades of the 22nd century? and, for that matter, to my future and past incarnations up and down the third millenia
-stories
-theory
-community
-traditions
-techniques
…
Everything is Impossible…
the “most exploited”—as if measuring such a quality were a simple matter of borrowing a cartographical chain and abacus from the IMF
but because there are still contra-capitalist networks, horizontal and vertical, which have yet to be fully deterritorialized according to the neoliberal market ontology currently hegemonic in much of the imperial core, particularly america.
so by this i might mean indigenous networks, but i might have had in mind labor parties, particularly Lula’s party. idk kinda wooly