There is an old European folk tale, which most of us know as ‘Chicken Licken’. In the course of the story, the title character wanders around telling various animals (Henny Penny, Ducky Lucky, Goosey Loosey, Turkey Lurkey) that the sky is falling down. They believe him, and together they head off on a mission ‘to tell the King’ about this looming catastrophe. But finally, while Chicken Licken and his friends are engaged in this task, they encounter a sly fox, who coolly exploits their obsession with imagining that the world is falling apart. Foxy Loxy leads the animals to his den (where he claims the King is waiting), and eats them for his dinner.

There are many morals at work in this fable forged out of the battered wisdom of the European masses, and we will return to one of the main ones in a short while. But for now, we might make the simple observation that human beings have clearly imagined for centuries that the sky is falling down. In other words, there is absolutely nothing new about the feeling of decline. People in every era since the dawn of time have felt that they are living at an unparalleled nadir of human history — that things are getting worse to the point that a great collapse of everything and everyone seems inevitable.

Crucially, however, just because people have continually felt that they are living through a time of downslide and fracture (even at moments — the 1970s is a good example — when the global population was statistically better off than ever before), it does not follow that decline is always an illusory phenomenon. Indeed, in our present tense of the mid-2020s, there is some consensus that people have unusually strong grounds for thinking that they are living through a period of rapid social disintegration.

To be more historically specific, there is an obvious sense in which social disintegration has been the whole point of the dominant Anglo-American politics of the last half century. When neo-conservatives like Margaret Thatcher initiated the neoliberal paradigm shift back in the 1980s by announcing that there was ‘no such thing as society’, we should really have taken them at their word and considered the darkly literal consequences of what they were promising.

The victory of the Thatcherite revolution against society itself over the last few decades has been comprehensive and devastating. Governments following in Thatcher’s wake have mostly succeeded in gradually undermining and unstitching the welfare state, the trade union movement, civic infrastructure, popular democracy, and countless other enlightened forms of social architecture — dragging average living standards down in the process, and leaving behind a fragmented non-society in which right-wing narratives of decline and racialised dreams of recovering ‘greatness’ have rushed into the void.

And so we now find ourselves in an almost literally post-social scorched earth. In the post-neoliberal 2020s, though neoliberalism itself is no longer the hegemonic force it once was, a mass socialist countermovement is still lacking (despite our best efforts), a truly viable socioeconomic rebuilding project has not yet been confidently envisaged, and there are a growing number of novel existential threats — from renegade right-wing leaders to climate breakdown — to compound the feeling that we are sliding downhill at breakneck speed.

It is all very well noting the often delusional human tendency to imagine that the sky is falling down. But to look no further than the increasingly plausible realities of nuclear war and ecological collapse — not to mention the living hell of Gaza — we have to acknowledge that the sky might indeed fall down, metaphorically or actually, in the not-too-distant future.

The articles in the new issue of Tribune are unflinching in confronting this direful present moment. From Grace Blakeley’s economic analysis of the ‘living squeeze’ suffered by younger generations (who are now invariably worse off than their parents) to Keir Milburn’s survey of the ‘impossible futures’ proffered in a world dominated by economic stagnation and the prospect of ecological breakdown, there are necessarily bleak summaries of the wider global picture. At the same time, many of the writers in these pages focus on more local contexts: in particular, the moribund hard-centrist regime of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer (surely the most immoral and enfeebled Labour leader since Ramsay MacDonald), whose government has become both emblem and embodiment of the era’s crushing atmosphere of inertia.

In unsparing dissections of the Starmer un-phenomenon, Helen Charman and Jennifer Jasmine White excoriate the prime minister’s combination of a characterless persona and a dreary political vision committed to austerity, authoritarianism, and — in the case of the government’s apologism for the mass slaughter of children in Palestine — sympathy for something approaching theological evil. Meanwhile, Chris McLaughlin, Dan Evans, and Dominic Davies supply vivid details of the backdrop to Starmerism’s peculiar version of national declinism, suggesting that it is merely a postscript to longer-term processes of decay in Britain’s democratic, social, and economic infrastructures.

But while we have to look the grim reality of contemporary Britain (and the world) in the face, there would be no point at all in a socialist publication like Tribune if it confined itself to gloomy jeremiads about the present. After its initial summaries of decline, this issue also tries to shine a light on various sources of hope — as well as ideas for how to move constructively beyond the hopeless-seeming malaise of the 2020s.

In a discussion of contemporary music, Chal Ravens and Liam Inscoe-Jones discuss the possibility that popular culture might now be moving beyond the nostalgic ‘retromania’ of the century’s opening years. Meanwhile, Owen Hatherley ventures to the public toilets of East Asia to consider how feasible it might be to revive a similarly generous approach to public convenience in Britain’s ailing civic spaces — and on adjacent ground, Keir Milburn suggests that the socialisation of essential services like water, electricity, and food is both a moral imperative and a means of forestalling ecological disaster. Perhaps most importantly of all, RMT leader Eddie Dempsey argues that it is only through rebuilding the power of the British trade union movement that we can hope to achieve any kind of victory in the war against decline.

In turning finally from despair to hope, we recover the soul of socialism, and it is here that the underlying moral of ‘Chicken Licken’ becomes pertinent once again. Some people say that the story is a fable about how easily people can be misled by sinister forms of group-think. But while there is no doubt that the animals in ‘Chicken Licken’ ultimately come to a bad end because of a misguided herd mentality, the important thing in terms of its central message is the specific kind of herd mentality — a sort of hapless, hysterical fatalism — that first subdues the animals and then destroys them completely.

Being realistic about how bad things are right now is an essential precondition of socialist thinking, debating, and activism. But at the same time, we cannot let pessimism overwhelm us by imagining that the sky has already begun to cave in. Even more importantly, we cannot afford to think that our fate ultimately lies in the hands of some external tendency — the ‘King’, a right-wing demagogue, the managerial rulers of Grey Labour, the global elite, or whoever — who can be entrusted to get us out of this mess if only we allow them more time and lend them our popular support.

The sky has not yet begun to fall, and there are better forms of group-think than succumbing to collective despair and holding out for an authoritarian hero to save us. In reality, the hero is ourselves, collectively empowered and organised as a coherent mass political movement. The only way to defeat decline in the final instance is to realise this essential truth, and act with it in mind.