Ask Lemmygrad

Whether we like it or not, it is a fact that the collapse of the American system is not a linear decline but a transformation of accumulated quantitative failures into a qualitatively new phase of irreversible crisis. Decades of neglected contradictions have now reached a critical mass threatening to overwhelm the system’s capacity to function.

For years, the US has deferred addressing foundational issues, treating them as isolated problems rather than interconnected symptoms of a failing system. Some examples include stagnant wages, over a trillion in student debt, and over half of households living paycheck to paycheck. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives US infrastructure a C- rating, with failures like the 2021 Texas power grid collapse becoming increasingly common. Life expectancy continues to decline, and there's a mental health crisis exacerbated by privatized healthcare. Public schools are severely underfunded, and so on. Meanwhile, prison and military budgets continue to balloon. These are not discrete issues but compounding stressors that amplify each other.

It seems that the convergence of these problems has finally passed a threshold where the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Corporate profiteering and wage stagnation render basic needs like housing and healthcare unaffordable. Trust in government is at historic lows as a result of the standard of living collapsing. Polarization and alienation drive far-right radicalization, while mutual aid networks attempt to replace state support.

This is no longer business as usual, it's a phase change where the contradictions of the system can no longer be contained by reforms or rhetoric. The qualitative shift triggers a feedback loop that causes disintegration to continue to accelerate. Opportunists like Biden and Trump exploit desperation, channelling rage into nihilistic policies that deepen inequality. The Jan 6 riots show that large numbers of people increasingly see the whole system as being illegitimate. Meanwhile, corporations continue to double down on exploitation, union busting, and tax evasion that further immiserate the working class. The "solutions" that the policy makers come up with, like austerity and increased privatization, only worsen these problems.

I'd argue that the US has reached a point of no return. Unlike past crises like 2008 recession or stagflation in the 70s, there is no New Deal or neoliberal pivot that can restore stability. The scale of collapse requires radical restructuring, which the capitalist system is structurally incapable of delivering.

The empire is in a terminal phase where collapse fuels further collapse. The only exit is fundamental change that requires dismantling of the capitalist order. The transformation from quantity to quality is complete, what emerges next depends on who seizes the moment.

Also you have the fact that the economic problems are going to keep piling on, and the ruling class is having more and more trouble keeping the lid on, keeping the population from realizing how badly they’re being fucked over and who is to blame. It is getting borderline impossible to hide the fact that other countries are doing much better. The whole TikTok ban/Rednote migration phenomenon showed that it just isn’t feasible anymore to try and keep an entire population controlled in that way.

Then you had the whole Luigi incident, and more than the incident itself the reaction of the US population to it was an ominous sign to say the least if you are a member of the ruling class. I don’t know exactly what the future has in store for the US but i know it’s definitely going to be some interesting times. History is back with a vengeance.

I mean it is to a degree, much more so than they've managed. They just need better information/narrative control and they're currently pushing through some things which could be preludes to a more sweeping kind of control that to say nothing of the obvious fact the Tiktok ban over Palestine was obviously an information control thing. And there are people among them saying this, the Republicans especially the real interventionist ghouls but also some Democrats who after all pushed the whole narrative of Russian disinfo and bot farms stealing an election for Trump and all the consent for suppression that created among the populace.

It may be too late to put the genie back in the bottle but they can definitely suppress it by passing sweeping bans on Chinese apps, by building a US firewall, by banning Chinese media, by forcing Google/Apple to remove these things from their app stores globally to suppress them globally, by forcing ISPs to block access to such resources over the web and so on. The talk of this piracy blocking for instance would create the first real system in the US that could be easily with the flip of a switch repurposed to block anything labeled "disinformation" by the newly created department of American Patriotism (or whatever the Democrats would name it).

What might sabotage such plans is in-fighting of course. I don't think the Republicans can necessarily resist abusing such a mechanism once created to not do some level of suppression of liberal Democrat thinking and causes, probably only a little, probably mainly fringe stuff the party officials themselves waffle on or condemn on a surface level but it's enough to anger the populace and wake up some portion of them.

But information control is coming to the fore. All the proclamations of an open internet and freedom bringing prosperity dropped inf favor of fearful rhetoric of foreigners, or manipulation, of contamination, of theft of American money via piracy, etc, etc.

This, exactly. Accelerationism is a material process in society. You can participate in it if you try. But just thinking thoughts and feelings feels is not accelerationism.