[jmyeet]

I say this without hyperbole: we are (IMHO) on the verge of total systemic collapse.

We've had 50+ years of deteriotating worker conditions and a massive concentration of wealth to like 10,000 people. The 1980s crushed the labor movement, to all of our detriment.

The GFC destroyed the career prospects of many millenials who discovered their entry-level positions no longer existed so we created a generation that we're loaded with student debt, working as baristas.

A lot of people on HN ignored this because the 2010s were good for tech people but many of us didn't realize this post-GFC wave would eventually come for us. And that's what's happening now.

So on top of the millenaisl we now have Gen Z who have correctly realized they'll never have security, never buy a house and will never retire. They'll live paycheck to paycheck, barely surviving until they die. Why? All so Jeff Bezos can have $205 billion instead of $200 billion.

I'm reminded of the quote "only nine meals separates mankind from anarchy".

I believe we've passed the point where we can solve this problem with electoral politics. Western democracies are being overtaken by fascists because of increasing desperation and the total destruction of any kind of leftism since WW2. At this point, it ends violently and sooner than many think.

[tavavex]

> we are (IMHO) on the verge of total systemic collapse. (...) At this point, it ends violently and sooner than many think.

This is, in a twisted way, an expression of hope. The expectation of a grand collapse is one that's shared by many, but can you explain what gives you that complete certainty that it's near or that it's coming at all?

The far bleaker possibility that I think is totally realistic is that things continue getting worse, but they never cross over the final line. Things are mismanaged, everyone is worse off, but that nine-meal gap is never allowed to happen, and any real threats are squashed at the roots. There's no singular collapse, instead of one definitive societal stab wound that's followed by long hospital recovery, we're inflicted with a thousand minor cuts to near-death.

The people who benefit from all this have been refining their knowledge and growing their power and influence. They're near-gods at this point. They may make a mistake, but what if they don't and the current situation is maintained for decades to come?

[brabel]

You’re focusing on the US. In Europe, worker protections are great. However, Europe has been lagging behind the US for a couple of decades and the gap has been growing. All tech giants are based in the US or China. Maybe things will collapse in the US now, but very unlikely to do so in Europe unless the impact from the US is so great it propagates to Europe, despite Europe itself not having done the things that caused such collapse in the US , which seems to be the result of prioritizing profit and greed above everything else, including people wellbeing.

[raw_anon_1111]

Worker protection doesn’t do you any good if companies refuse to hire people abd the government can’t afford the social safety net.

[jmyeet]

Oh I couldn't disagree more. Europe is on the verge of full-blown fascism. Europe has Reform (UK), AfD (Germany) and National Front (France) as well as Hungary.

Europe created the Russia-Ukraine problem by giving their energy security to Russia. Interestingly, this is a (super) rare win for the first Trump administration: forcing Europe to build an LNG port in 2018 [1] and warning against the dangers of dependence on Russian natural gas. This warning has been completely vindicated.

Europe has stagnant wages, a declining social safety net (eg raising the retirement age in France), a housing affordability crisis in most places (notably exlucding Vienna and there needs to more attention on why this is), inflation problems and skyrocketing energy costs. It's the same 1930s economic conditions that gave rise to fascism last time.

Europe has the same rising anti-immigrant rise in response to declining material conditions that the US hass. In Europe's case it's against Syrians and North Africans. In the UK this also included Polish people.

France is really a perfect example here. Despite all the economic problems you have Macro siding with Le Pen to keep Melenchon and the left out of power.

All of this is neoliberalism run amok and it comes from decisions in WW1, WW2 and post-WW2, most notably that Europe (and the US) decided the biggest threat was socialism and communism. And who's really good at killing communists? Nazis. Just look at the resume of Adolf Heusinger, an early NATO chair [2].

Europe has also outsourced their security to the US via NATO. And NATO is on the verge of collapse. There's a lot of thinking that Congress won't allow Trump to withdraw from NATO, as many in his administration want to do, but NATO could well splinter if Trump takes Greenland.

What happens to Europe with an expansionist Russia and no US security guarantee?

Oh and speaking of worker protections, what happens when the price of bailing out European energy or security issues is the privatizing of your otherwise universal healthcare? It was rumored that parts of the administration wanted the UK to privatize the NHS as part of a post-Brexit trade deal. 15 years of austerity has primed the population to accept this kind of thing.

Many Europeans (rightly) look down on the insanity that's currently going on in the US but at the same time they don't realize just how dire the situation is in Europe.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/germany-to-build-ln...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Heusinger

[tavavex]

> What happens to Europe with an expansionist Russia and no US security guarantee?

While European military strength isn't in its prime right now, their capabilities without the US are often way underestimated. Not that most of the other issues aren't applicable - everyone appears to be more or less fucked in multiple ways - but losing a conventional war to Russia isn't on the table, barring unthinkable mismanagement or a world-changing event (preemptive use of nukes, etc). Russia has stalemated a war against a singular country that has a fraction of Russia's wealth, loads of antiquated equipment and a small sample of Western tech. The Russian economy has a massive hole in it largely thanks to said war, and is only propped up by existing savings - they're not in danger right now, they're rapidly approaching that point with no way of stopping. Even if the war never happened, they'd still be far weaker than the whole of Europe and likely some individual European countries.

[theshrike79]

> Europe created the Russia-Ukraine problem by giving their energy security to Russia.

It wasn't "given", Russia did it on purpose. There are SO MANY cases of politicians advocating for Russian natural gas or oil as an energy source who were later revealed to be 100% paid for with Russian money.

[rightbyte]

This is so depressing to read but I can't help feeling you are right. The feeling is quite surreal becouse if I turn off my computer I can't notice the difference locally in my county. It is like lunatics from "the internet" runs alot of things now irl.

[CodeMage]

> There's a lot of thinking that Congress won't allow Trump to withdraw from NATO

I wonder how that is supposed to work when the Executive branch has proven they can do whatever they want regardless of the other two branches. The rules are worthless if there are no consequences for breaking them.

[jimbokun]

I was following you until you implied everyone who’s not a communist is a Nazi.

[jmyeet]

Yeah, they don't really teach this part in history [1]:

> At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.

And NATO [2]:

> The most senior officers of the latter group were Hans Speidel and Adolf Heusinger, who on Oct. 10 and Nov. 12, 1955, respectively, were sworn in as the Bundeswehr’s first two lieutenant generals... Heusinger, a POW until 1948, ...

> That spring Heusinger succeeded Speidel as chief of Combined Forces when the latter was appointed commander in chief of Allied Land Forces in Central Europe becoming the first German officer to hold a NATO commander in chief position

And it goes on.

Nazi links are well-established to Operation Paperclip [3] under Werner von braun.

And there are many others [4].

I didn't say all the non-communists were Nazi. I said the neoliberal and imperialist projects of the US and Western Europe post-WW2 sided with and gave haven to Nazis to fight communism, which is true.

Fascism in the US didn't begin with the Nazis however. You can trace back the roots to the white supremacy the US was founded on, the slave trade, the Civil War, Reconstruction and even the Business Plot [5] that sought to overthrow FDR in 1933, probably labelling him a communist.

But the Nazis were very popular in the US, culminating with the German American Bund rally in Madison Square Gardens in 1939 [6].

Oh and let's not forget Henry Ford's contribution to all this, notably The International Jew [7], so much so that Hitler praised him in Mein Kampf.

Personally, I'm of the view that a lot of this can be traced back to simply not stringing up all the former slave owners after the Civil War.

[1]: https://archive.ph/A8HHC

[2]: https://www.historynet.com/these-nato-generals-had-unusual-b...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

[4]: https://www.npr.org/2014/11/05/361427276/how-thousands-of-na...

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Squ...

[7]: https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...

[brabel]

> Europe created the Russia-Ukraine problem by giving their energy security to Russia.

> This warning has been completely vindicated.

That's funny. The US warned Europe of dependence on Russia all the while promoting policies that antagonized Russia in Europe (e.g. NATO expansion). It's almost like the US wanted to push Europe and Russia against each other, so that it could sell its way more expensive natural gas in Europe!? Perhaps they did not anticipate the Russians would be bold enough to go to war on that, but they were certainly willing to accept the risk.

> It's the same 1930s economic conditions that gave rise to fascism last time.

Please. Europe may have some issues , but it's not nearly as bleak as you try to make it... I live here, I go around a lot. Europe is as affluent as ever. People are having a good time, in general. In the 1930's some countries had hyperinflation... you're comparing that to 5% yearly inflation these days?

> Europe has also outsourced their security to the US via NATO.

On that we agree. It was a really bad decision, but understandable given how much the US soft power after WWII was absorbed by Europeans. Some Europeans act like European countries are US states. They take to the streets to join movements that are 100% American, like BLM. It's bizarre.

> What happens to Europe with an expansionist Russia and no US security guarantee?

It shocks me that people like you think Russia is a serious threat to all of Europe, rather than just Ukraine (and maybe Moldova and Georgia if you push it). How can you justify that view? Russia has not drawn any red lines about anything related to the rest of Europe like it had with Ukraine and Georgia (which was thoroughly ignored by Europe, with the strong support and should I say it, advice of the USA), it has not said anything as threatening as Trump saying Greenland will be part of America the nice way or the hard way, yet you believe the US is not a threat, but Russia is. There's some serious dissonance in this line of thought.

> Oh and speaking of worker protections, what happens when the price of bailing out European energy or security issues is the privatizing of your otherwise universal healthcare?

Americans have been saying this for 50 years... they just can't accept that the system has been working well in Europe for workers for all this time (though not as much for companies, as you can clearly notice it's much harder to make behemoths like FAANG in Europe, no doubt because without exploiting workers you can't really do that).

[jmyeet]

> The US warned Europe of dependence on Russia all the while promoting policies that antagonized Russia in Europe (e.g. NATO expansion)

I think there's a certain amount of historical revisionism going on with this. It is complicated however.

You can point to George W. Bush opening the door to NATO membership in 2006 [1] as a turning point but NATO had been gobbling up former Communist bloc countries for more than a decade.

Another noteworthy event is the 2014 revolution that ousted Russian puppet Viktor Yanukovych as the president of Ukraine, culminating in the Minsk Agreement (and Minsk II) to settle disputes in the Dombas and elsewhere.

Russia does have legitimate security concerns int he region such as access to the Black Sea and not having NATO on their border. And by "legitimate" here I simply mean that Europe and the EU do the exact same thing, most notably when the US almost started World War 3 over Soviet influence in Cuba (which itself was a response to the US installing nuclear MRBMs in Turkey). Also, in terms of the threat of a conventional land war, Ukraine is basically a massive highway into Russia, previously used by both Hitler and Napoleon. Not that it worked out well for either.

Whatever the case, having another Belarus in Ukraine was ideal for Russia and I think their designs on this long predated any talk of Ukraine joining NATO, which was DOA anyway. Germany, in particular, were always going to veto expanding NATO to share a border with Russia.

My point here is I'm not convinced that any promises of neutrality by Ukraine would've saved Ukraine from Russian designs.

> Europe is as affluent as ever

Based on what? Personal anecdotes? The EU acknowledges a housing crisis [2].

> It shocks me that people like you think Russia is a serious threat to all of Europe,

It is a serious threat. Not in the conventional land-war a la WW2 sense but we're dealing with the world's other nuclear superpower (China doesn't have the nuclear arsenal Russia does, by choice). But Putin's playbook is oddly reminiscent to Hitler's playbook leading up to the war. That is, Hitler argued he was unifying Germans in Austria, the Sudetenland, etc. Similarly, Putin is using ethnically Russian populations in a similar way: as an excuse to intervene and take territory.

There is a significant Russian population in Latvia who are stateless. IIRC it's estimated there are more than 200,000 of them.

American security and energy guarantees are really the only things holding Europe together right now. If NATO splinters, what's to stop Russia from seizing parts of Latvia?

This situation is precarious.

> they just can't accept that the system has been working well in Europe for workers for all this time

No, they don't care that it works. In fact, they've been doing everything they can to make it not work. We now have a generation of people in many European countries (and I include the UK here) who have never not known austerity and constant government cutbacks. Satisfaction with the NHS deteriorates as it's been deliberately starved for 15+ years.

This is a well-worn and successful playbook called starving the beast [3]. It's laying the groundwork for a push for privatization. It'll be partial privatization to start with and just creep from there.

I'm not sure you truly appreciate just how much US foreign policy is designed to advance the interests of American corporations.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/01/nato.georgia

[2]: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/housing-crisis/

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

[brabel]

> You can point to George W. Bush opening the door to NATO membership in 2006 [1] as a turning point but NATO had been gobbling up former Communist bloc countries for more than a decade.

The 1990's Russia was a hugely struggling nation that could barely feed its population, but even then they opposed NATO expansion strongly!

> The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990.

Source: (Gorbachev in interview from 2014) https://www.rbth.com/international/2014/10/16/mikhail_gorbac...

> Based on what? Personal anecdotes? The EU acknowledges a housing crisis [2].

The housing crisis is mostly limited to inflated prices in large cities and is itself evidence that people have a good purchasing power, since it's not being driven by foreign capital (at least where I live, in the Nordics).

Which statistics show the EU is NOT affluent?? If we look at GDP (+1.35% yearly in the last 10 years [1], not too bad for developed economies) and unemployment (currently around 6% for the whole EU [2]), it's not bad, especially if you consider the huge number of recent immigrants (unemployment among the native population is much lower than the total figures show, in Sweden, for example, native Swedes have near full employment).

But yeah, I think personal anedoctes are also helpful to establish whether a country looks like it's going down... and everywhere I go, I see only good signs: shops expanding, lots of new buildings, full bars and restaurants, people are driving the latest electric cars... what I don't see is things like businesses closing down, struggling local shops etc. which are normally very visible (I know, I've seen that) in economies that are in dire straits.

> There is a significant Russian population in Latvia who are stateless. IIRC it's estimated there are more than 200,000 of them.

Yes, I've been to Latvia and Russian is clearly spoken by a large percentage of the population (to my surprise, including the young generation). As long as they are not suppressed from speaking their language (as is happening in Ukraine right now and even before the war, and in some areas in the Baltic countries) and they're not made second-class citizens (as is happening in Estonia, where they can no long vote [3]), Putin will not have any excuse to do that, and those countries would be wise to not provide such excuses! Anyway, I think that regardless of that, NATO will survive even without the USA (as something else, perhaps, but the union between European states is extremely important to maintain) and I really belive Article 5 will exist even if NATO evolves into a Europe-only alliance.

> I'm not sure you truly appreciate just how much US foreign policy is designed to advance the interests of American corporations.

Not sure what you're referring to... I think I do appreciate it. The interview [4] Trump had with the American oil companies after the partial "annexation" of Venezuela couldn't be a better example of that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union#...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union#...

[3] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/russia/article/2025/03/26/estonia-...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_7VhFaRqKE

[theshrike79]

At one point there will be enough people with no job or no hope who will do the math of "there are 100 million of us and 3000 billionaires" and hopefully have read enough history to learn about the French Revolution and the tools they used.

The only way to prevent this is to guarantee that people without jobs will still have a roof over their heads and enough calories and micronutrients every day to survive - and some entertainment.

[shimman]

I do wonder what will come next, it seems very unlikely that modern states can effectively be toppled and replaced by revolutions but maybe the nature of revolutions will change themselves. After all, it's not like the neoliberal paradigm was always so, it was systematically planned by elites in the 1970s and we're now proudly living in the society they envisioned (elites have wealth while everyone else struggles). The neoliberal establishment was definitely a revolution that impacted and destroyed many lives but it wasn't treated as such.

I guess the next turning of the wheel will be similar too.

Or maybe we all just have poor imaginations.

[stanford_labrat]

at the dissolution and decentralization of empires feudalism in it's many forms historically seems to be the most common outcome.

i would say that we firmly live in the American Empire with techno-feudalistic tendencies, but a historical event of such magnitude as the complete dissolution of the American state will probably see a reversal to a more traditional feudal system. Think Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates buying up and becoming the Dukes of the PNW.

personally though i don't think we are at this stage yet or even close to it. until the federal government becomes COMPLETELY inept and the average citizen cannot buy food, this won't happen. yes market conditions are currently not the best but we are nowhere near starvation.