Oh for sure. There’s however a higher degree of democracy than feudalism, mostly stemming one way or another from the newly developed labour power under capitalism. Power that labour has slowly ceded over the last 50-70 years or so, but it can still regain when pressed. The system still contains this vulnerability (from the point of view of the capitalist) and it seems impossible to eradicate.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-industrial-robots-installed

This is in the making for some time.

You don’t understand, this is just PR propaganda. The robots are just aimlessly moving around for show. Meanwhile there’s slave labour under the floor doing the work.

/s

I don’t think anyone in the West is taking decoupling seriousy. After all that would hurt profits and our owner class isn’t having it. Of course it would be a good idea to rebuild domestic manufacturing but that would take more than a decade since we need to build the education, workforce, supply chains and final manufacturing. And that won’t happen without a drastic shift in power away from the owner class, because that isn’t in its interest.

Our current system is going about how Marx predicted it would. The course correction that occurred after the Great Depression has been now completely reversed and we’re back staring at its approaching collapse. I don’t think we can escape that long term, and we’ll lose democracy in the process, unless we start moving away from capitalism. We gotta attack private firm ownership. Otherwise we’ll keep getting people accumulate enough capital to buy the rest of the system and steamroll the rest of us for profit.