chat

I think climate change is going to wreck the planet in such a way that the future of civilization on the level we are currently experiencing may not be possible

Humans are pretty resilient and climate change impacts can be mitigated with enough work. We're very much just at the stage of "we've done nothing and we're out of ideas".

As long as we don't drill the Arctic for fossil fuels, but China has basically saved the planet with the cost effectiveness of renewables in the long run.

the billionaires and imperialists are going to ruin any chance we have

Lemme actually respond to your question though, because I do like to imagine what our global post-revolutionary future might look like.

Thinking about what would happen in the (former) USA, the socialist future would come about through some combination of an expansion of worker organizing, militant black nationalism, anti-imperialist consciousness, and imperial decay producing declining material conditions. However it comes about, the worker's government here would need to aggressively go about righting the wrongs of its capitalist predecessor. I see that state gradually shifting to a federation of self-determining nations. By honoring all the US's broken treaties with native nations, you'd carry out an enormous and comprehensive land-back program. Update the old understanding of the Black Belt thesis to reflect current population distribution of the internally colonized Black nation and create geographically secured areas of Black self-determination. Aztlan would also form a nation within this confederation, comprising roughly what is now West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and SoCal (native nations would receive "first dibs" on land back over Aztlan). Puerto Rico and Hawaii receive full self-determination as well.

I see an enormous program of environmental rehabilitation and rewilding taking place across the entire country. Huge tracts of mismanaged farmland would be converted to a combination of fully wild spaces and regenerative agriculture, managed by small ecological labor communities built out of rural industrial and railroad towns. This would also be a key part of desuburbinization. The last 30 or 40 years of suburban development in particular have been extremely low-density and ecologically destructive. Some suburban cores - the ones that represent previously indepedent small towns swallowed up by sprawling metro areas - would be reoriented in the same way as the rural towns mentioned above. But the distributed, stretched out housing would largely be eliminated, and people would be relocated to denser areas, whether major urban centers or small towns. In these towns, the core industry would be active management of "natural" spaces (nature vs humanity is an artificial distinction that must be destroyed btw). The vast majority of people would work on creating sustainable spaces for human interaction with the non-human world, restoring floral and faunal sovereignty, and building food systems rooted in their specific geographic and climatic context (heavily drawing on indigenous foodways paired with advanced monitoring and automation technology). You would see towns operating similarly all around major bodies of water - rivers, lakes, the ocean. You can create a massive employment program in the "nature industry" that varies from building trails, managing the creation of new old growth forest, tracking ecological conditions, restoring coral reefs, operating fish nurseries for population restoration, and more.

Industry would scale up dramatically in some ways and down in others. China is currently pursuing a hyper-automation of their industries in service of building an enormous industrial capacity that can far exceed the education and labor of their massive working class. The US should pursue the same, so that relatively small numbers of industrial workers can produce enormous output in clean energy, infrastructure, housing, etc. Lighter industries, on the other hand, would be shifted to smaller scale co-operative production distributed across the country and focused on production-for-use in their local area, with sensible implementation of lower-level automation. Each of these changes would lead to lighter working hours, eliminate overproduction, and dismantle the commodity economy.

I agree, but I also think that the climate will calm down eventually, even if it takes thousands of years, and there will still be people. It's cold comfort for us, but there have been recognizably human people on Earth for four hundred thousand years. We'll keep going, in some way or another.