The likely future of American society over the next half century will include the following:
1. An ongoing widening of class divisions driven by a complex convergence of a variety of economic, political, technological, and demographic forces.
2. Growing poverty and the expansion of the underclass, the shrinking of the middle class, and the concentration of wealth into the hands of a super-plutocratic elite (the kind of system that has traditionally existed in most of the world).
3. Rising social unrest due to economic frustration, class conflict, cultural and demographic conflict, social anomie, and political alienation.
4. Increased state repression as a means of curbing unrest, including the use of both the police state created by the previous generations’ wars on drugs, crime, and terrorism, and the military-industrial-complex controlled by a regime that can no longer afford to fight imperialist wars but needs a reason to keep its job(s).
5. Ongoing technological innovations that allow for increasingly sophisticated surveillance and population control methods.
Within the context of all of this, a number of potential scenarios are possible:
1. The slow but progressively steady stagnation of American society to the point where America begins to resemble a traditional Latin American country in terms of its levels of poverty, repression, class polarization, and political strife.
2. The failure and collapse of America’s traditional liberal democracy combined with the rise of authoritarian radical movements from both the Left and Right in a Weimar-like situation.
3. The turning of the military inward in a civil war against the domestic population in the style of a number of Latin American countries in the 1970s and 1980s.
4. The collapse of civil society into a civil war with dozens of factions in a manner resembling Lebanon in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
5. The emergence of a global super-state in which the traditional American state is just a component part, and one which possesses weapons and surveillance technology of the kind traditionally found only in science fiction.
So the question is what are anarchists, libertarians, and associated others doing to build movements that will be capable of facing any of these possible scenarios in ways where victory of any kind or on any level is even a remote possibility?
