If we’re being honest, it really is lol. If someone invents a time machine in the future, one of the missions will be to stop Hudson from publishing his book.
According to Hudson himself, the US establishment fell into panic mode when Nixon abruptly ended the Bretton Woods in 1971, and presses reported that the American century is about to be over (amidst the other crises like Vietnam War, civil rights movement, trade union movements, the international isolation of the US that would follow in the Bangladesh Liberation War and the Yom-Kippur War, the oil price shock and stagflation from 1973 onwards etc…)
If you read the Foreword from the 2nd edition onward, Hudson wrote that the State Department bought two thousand copies of the book to study how to get out of the empire’s own contradictions. Super imperialism allows the US to export its industries to the rest of the world while crushing the domestic working class movements at home, and real wages began to stagnate since.
You can laugh at the boomers all you want but the American left in the 1960s and 70s were armed militants and fervent trade union organizers. They lost the fight in the end and many turned reactionary eventually, but they did put up a fight.
Gen X and some of the Millennials had the Iraq War protest and Occupy Wall Street. A significant downgrade and no longer armed but ok, the spirit was still there. I’m gonna throw in the Bernie movement in 2016 for the Millennials as well though the bar was already low.
I don’t know what Gen Z has though. Seems like they are more interested in online cultural critiques but that’s about it.
I have lived long enough to witness the dwindling fighting spirit over the years. Young people would rather hide in virtual spaces and embrace doomerism than to organize on the ground. They are reactionary in the very real sense of the word in that they have given up the fight to change the world for the better, and simply waiting for the inevitability of the status quo to fall apart.
Maybe the post-Bernie era has crushed all fighting spirit, but if the bar was that low, then they were never going to succeed in the first place.