The Year Ahead in 2024

(10% increase in likelihood of global civil war)

Hey everyone,

The second round of chemo has knocked me on my ass but, writing from bed, I wanted to get out a little newsletter.

This is a partially facetious, partially serious forecast for the next 15 years, or more specifically, an adjustment to what we might expect out of the next 15 years, as seen from this current bend in the road at the very beginning of 2024.

I’ll explore some of the thinking behind these prognoses in another newsletter. And at the bottom, there are reading suggestions on an anarchist analysis of the future.

take care of one another,

p

the likelihood of global civil war: +10%

the likelihood of the current world system continuing : -15%

the likelihood of a successful (meaningful) revolution persisting in some significant region of the globe: +2%

So now, the forecast for the next 15 years is as follows

• the current world system (led by the US, NATO, the UN, WTO) continuing in place, but decomposing, losing coherence and organizing power: 50%

• the US rejuvenating and reforming the world system it leads to enable a new era of geopolitical harmony and capitalist growth: 3%

• a new world system coalescing around a BRICS or post-BRICS framework (China, India, Brazil…) : 12%

• global civil war: 34%

• global revolution and the abolition of the State: 1%

• However, smaller victories seem a little more in reach. The chance of a successful (meaningful) revolution somewhere in the world: 8%

  [this would be a feature compatible with options a, c, or d above, and not a global situation]

And, one of the biggest questions people should be asking, probability of a global ecosystem collapse?

…

..

.

100%

That was a trick question and shame on anyone who got it wrong. It’s 100% because it’s already here. Every year, an unknown thousands of species are going extinct. Every year, an unprecedented amount of territory is being converted from an ecosystem—trembling, resisting, but alive—into a dead zone. Every year, hundreds of millions of humans are being killed by industrial pollution, food shortages, and climatic changes caused by capitalism. Already one and two decades ago, the greenhouse gases causing the present intensity of climate catastrophe were already being released.

It’s already happening, it’s already unavoidable, what we have on our plates is to figure out what to do to the people and institutions responsible for it, how to survive, how to care for one another (including all living beings, not including any non-living institutions or social fictions), how to help ecosystems adapt and shift, and how to explain to future generations what the fuck went wrong.

Will this be the year when revenge killings of millionaires becomes a trend? Or the occupation and destruction of billing departments in hospitals? Or the anonymous sabotage of all that unprotected oil and gas infrastructure? The year when people give up on superficial political frameworks, open their eyes to the complexity of life and realize it’s okay to sit with the contradictions? Or are Taylor Swift and the latest iPhone going to dominate the news for another year?

That’s entirely up to you.

Or us, if I can get out of bed…

Recommended Reading

It would bring me unparalleled joy if anyone formed a reading group and discussed this text.

Diagnostic of the Future, from 2018, was my attempt to analyze all the different changes and tensions building up across the planet, throughout the global system of states and colonial capitalism, to see where it might be headed, what exit strategies might save it, and whether anarchist revolutionary strategies were well adapted to or even conscious of this changing landscape.

How well have my predictions aged? What about my framework has proved effective, or ineffective? What are the collective mistakes we all made that many of us are refusing to acknowledge or learn from?

And, oh my gosh, would anyone write an updated diagnostic of the future for 2024? Lemme know in the comments and warm my sick little heart!

https://crimethinc.com/2018/11/05/diagnostic-of-the-future-between-the-crisis-of-democracy-and-the-crisis-of-capitalism-a-forecast

A useful background study, and a seminal work on world systems theory, is Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long 20^th Century.

And here’s a critique of that book, “Anarchy in World Systems,” that names things we can appreciate in Arrighi’s frameworks and also the parts of his framework that we can identify as wrong, based on the predictions from Long 20^th Century that didn’t come true.