back in my map era, we're ukrainemaxxing right now
Declarations of the imminent doom of Ukraine are a news megathread specialty, and this is not what I am doing here - mostly because I'm convinced that whenever we do so, the war extends another three months to spite us. Ukraine has been in an essentially apocalyptic crisis for over a year now after the failure of the 2023 counteroffensive, unable to make any substantial progress and resigned to merely being a persistent nuisance (and arms market!) as NATO fights to the last Ukrainian. In this context, predicting a terminal point is difficult, as things seem to always be going so badly that it's hard to understand how and why they fight on. In every way, Ukraine is a truly shattered country, barely held together by the sheer combined force of Western hegemony. And that hegemony is weakening.
I therefore won't be giving any predictions of a timeframe for a Ukrainian defeat, but the coming presidency of Trump is a big question mark for the conflict. Trump has talked about how he wishes for the war to end and for a deal to be made with Putin, but Trump also tends to change his mind on an issue at least three or four times before actually making a decision, simply adopting the position of who talked to him last. And, of course, his ability to end the war might be curtailed by a military-industrial complex (and various intelligence agencies) that want to keep the money flowing.
The alignment of the US election with the accelerating rate of Russian gains is pretty interesting, with talk of both escalation and de-escalation coinciding - the former from Biden, and the latter from Trump. Russia very recently performed perhaps the single largest aerial attack of Ukraine of the entire war, striking targets across the whole country with missiles and drones from various platforms. In response, the US is talking about allowing Ukraine to hit long-range targets in Russia (but the strategic value of this, at this point, seems pretty minimal).
Additionally, Russia has made genuine progress in terms of land acquisition. We aren't talking about endless and meaningless battles over empty fields anymore. Some of the big Ukrainian strongholds that we've been spending the last couple years speculating over - Chasiv Yar, Kupiansk, Orikhiv - are now being approached and entered by Russian forces. The map is actually changing now, though it's hard to tell as Ukraine is so goddamn big.
Attrition has finally paid off for Russia. An entire generation of Ukrainians has been fed into the meat grinder. Recovery will take, at minimum, decades - more realistically, the country might be permanently ruined, until that global communist revolution comes around at least. And they could have just made a fucking deal a month into the war.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
I really don’t know if I should laugh or cry whenever I read stuff like this. Anyone can really write anything and there will be credulous people who want to believe it to be true. No wonder even multipolar bloggers can become gold and crypto grifters.
First of all, this is all predicated on the fact that China has a huge trade surplus from America, because that is the only way China can obtain a huge amount of dollars. On the other hand, America can simply print those money out of thin air. While Global South countries have to endure an entire day’s of hard work for the plantation owner to earn a bottle of drinking water, America (the plantation owner) controls the tap and can pump out as much as it wants at no cost.
Do you know what that means? It means that the hard work of Chinese labor creating goods and services sold to American consumers is being exchanged for a bunch of junk papers, that they don’t know how to spend. This is why the Belt and Road initiative came about - because China didn’t want to keep buying US treasuries and earning a deflating interest on those bonds, and didn’t know what to do with accumulating a whole bunch of junk papers. So they lent them out to other developing countries to help them build their economies - with the caveat that those infrastructure loans are denominated in US dollars.
You can issue USD-denominated bonds to other countries, you can lend it out as Belt and Road infrastructure loans, whatever, it doesn’t change the fact that the US gets free shit simply by printing a bunch of junk papers that you can’t use (Stephanie Kelton was even more incisive about this point: China isn’t even earning junk papers, it’s earning an accounting unit, numbers that only exist in the spreadsheet somewhere on the Federal Reserve. This is how the parasitic capitalism of the US empire freeload upon the rest of the world).
Second of all, it’s even worse now that China is re-dollarizing the world. Monetary sovereignty is key to the preservation of national sovereignty, as evident by how neoliberal capitalism and the liberal free market order over the past 50 years have destroyed the economies of numerous Global South countries (Argentina came to mind immediately with its extremely high external debt).
This is worse than China just building the infrastructure and supply chain in the Global South, it is setting up those Global South exporter countries to be bought up by Wall Street finance capitalists with so much dollar denominated loans and assets. What do you think is going to happen if the US is to go through another 2009 GFC-style recession? American consumption will plunge, and all these export economies will have difficulties selling their goods and services. Because China refuses to give up and even doubled down on its super net exporter status, its consumer base will remain weak and cannot absorb the demand that is needed to save these Global South economies. There is only one outcome from this: IMF comes in and takes a “big bite” on the Global South assets.
Third, all US dollars (with the exception of physical banknotes, coins and the special case of Eurodollar) exists in the US banking system. Did people forget that the US literally just seized $300 billion of Russia’s foreign reserve at a moment’s notice? It doesn’t matter how much US dollars you own, if you don’t control the tap, there is very little you can do about it.
The monetary policy (interest rate) is a valve - all the Federal Reserve has to do is to tune the valve to control the global flow of US dollar. For example, by simply hiking the interest rate to 5%, the Biden administration easily funneled all the international capital back to the US, causing a liquidity crisis in the Global South and brought dozens and dozens of countries to the brink of financial default, famine and energy shortage. That’s because the US controls the dollar tap. China controls the yuan tap, not the dollar tap.
So all these flooding the US with excess dollars to drive up inflation is complete nonsense and simply perpetuating the typical neoliberal myth. Inflation in the US over the past few years was caused by energy price hike due to the war in Ukraine, the supply chain issue caused by Covid and exacerbated during the sanctions against Russia, and monopolists hiking prices taking advantage of the rising energy cost.
So why is China doing this? While we don’t know the real answer, the logical and far more reasonable explanation is that they believe that their export oriented economy cannot be abandoned, and is the way towards saving the economy from low consumption amidst plunging property prices and the local government debt crisis. As such, propping up the dollar becomes imperative to sustain the Chinese export economy (US-China trade is transacted in dollar), and attracting FDI (foreign direct investment) has become a short-medium term goal accompanied by the new monetary easing policies.
Only two countries benefit from the current global economic arrangement: the US (by being a super importer) and China (by being a super exporter). No wonder China isn’t ready to give up its exporter status and embrace a Bancor-like system that a number of BRICS+ member states have been keen on getting to. For the Chinese libs, they prefer to flirt with the US imperialists than to forge a radical and transformative path forward.
In other words, the liberal faction has won out. This is going to “save” China’s economy in the short-medium term, but it also gives the parasitic finance capitalism of the US empire a breathing room to reinvigorate itself. This can prove to be fatal in the long run.
So what should China do then?
First, China should prioritize on de-dollarization, not the opposite that it is doing now. To do so, it needs to transition from its export-oriented economy into a domestic consumption model. This will allow the yuan to be internationalized (giving up its net exporter status) and be used to build the productive capacity of the Global South through a Marshall Plan style “yuanization” of the Global South countries.
This means instead of investing in export manufacturing industries, China will invest in high tech manufacturing, R&D, universal healthcare, quality education and many others that improve the living standards of its citizens. Currently, China largely finances its domestic sectors through export revenues (monetary base determined by how much foreign currencies it earn). This allows them to keep their GDP deficit spending to 3% and below (a neoliberal dogma that must be obeyed at all times! - meanwhile the US ignores its own rules and deficit spends 7-8% GDP, and all the people who predicted this would crash the US economy over the past two years turned out to be dead wrong)
Instead, China should drive up its government deficit (central/state bank spending) to directly invest in these sectors. This will also allow the huge Chinese consumer base to absorb the goods and services produced in the Global South when the US and Western economies go into recession, since the plunge in consumption in the West has to be made up by someone else - and China would play an important role in sustaining the global economy.
Importantly, China can also use its huge US dollar reserve ($800 billion) to pay back the Global South debt (e.g. Africa’s $800 billion dollar-denominated debt). Unlike what has been speculated in this article (China flooding Global South with liquid dollars to help them pay their debt, which is bad), China using its foreign reserve to pay back Global South debt will also destroy a huge amount of dollars in circulation in the world (which is good). This can create a temporary vacuum in the dollar hegemony that then enables China to flood the world with yuan (not dollars!) and help them build their economies.
This is how you can fight US monetary imperialism (or at least one of the ways that seem quite realistic, as long as it doesn’t escalate into a global thermonuclear war). As Michael Hudson has mentioned recently, only Marxism/MMT can help us see through the designs of the parasitic finance capitalism of the US empire. Following the Western neoclassical theories will only end up doing the bidding for US imperialism without being aware of it.
I wont comment on the topic again , i already did twice and since whatever we wrote goes past each other its no use. Im just gonna point out that what you say can also be used to dismiss the analysis you write on the same basis. Some people wanna feed on copium, some on dooming. "credulous people" exist in both directions. The fact that there hasnt been a single Chinese foreign, monetary or developmental choice in the last 1+ years that you have reacted to and written about positively here and that there hasnt been a single US foreign or monetary policy move that you didnt cover as a correct chess move for the empire strains some of your credibility as an objective analyst of these developments through marxist lense, no matter how detailed your analysis or knowledge background is.
On a foundemental level simply because the ratio of good move / bad move for these countries cant remotely correspond to what your coverage is just based on a look around the world today, the two countries and their recent (and not so) history. Also off the to of my head the fact that you have jumped to the chance to doom post the momment you see the most obvious anti-china garbage stories like their submarines sinking (did it twice actualy, the latest one has been predictably once again proven an overexaggerated nothing recently) , using anti-china YT thumbnail level stats for some of your dooming (100 trillion vaccant buildings in china! Chinese EVs make no profit in China!) or reddit analysis for a potential Sino-American conflict (US can checkmate china by strangling Chinese sea trade roots ) doesnt exactly paint you as an non biased unemotional observer bringing some hard reality check to multipolarists and China hopium posters, it shows how easily you can edge towards the opposite side.
Please talk about his argument, not just the fact that he doesn't always see dengism in a positive light. The simple fact here is that the Chinese are building ports not just to get africa to buy stuff from them, but to also build up their bourgeoisie so they buy stuff from China. China is a socialist in one country nation, it doesn't really care if the global south maintains liberalism.
I actualy already answered a previous comment they made on this topic and i already made my own post in this post about the topic. Thats why i started this comment saying that since we already talked past each other on this subject im gonna make a more general observation
Are you kidding me? I have repeatedly said that China has far surpassed America industrially, technologically, while the state has succeeded in retaining much control of its national resources, industries and financial institutions. There is no way the American empire can compete with China on those terms. I have said these words many times before.
However, the US-China conflict is not going to take place along these fronts - it will be a currency war - a full fledged financial warfare that the American empire excels at. This is where the US will hit China the hardest. Let us not forget how the USSR - one of the greatest industrialized nation - was wrecked by neoliberal policies that promised to open up the world market to them, because the ruble was calculated on industrial terms, while the dollar was calculated on real estate and financial terms. This made the disparity between the strengths of the currencies so large that Western capitalists came in and stripped every industrial asset down to their bones in the former Soviet states. This is the power of finance capitalism.
China already has all the fundamentals to take on the US empire on financial terms, yet it is still ideologically restrained by the neoliberal ideology indoctrinated to them by Western economics schools, and as such continues to “gift” the goods and servicesof its hard labor to America in exchange of worthless junk papers, which it proceeds to lend/issue bonds denominated in USD to Global South countries. The latest series of policies from China have all but confirmed its commitment to propping up the US dollar and leveraging them to fuel its export oriented economy.
What I am criticizing here is that China has effectively chosen to sacrifice the Global South countries (by opening them up to dollarization) to be harvested by US imperialism to save their own economy. This is the naive liberal interpretation of how US imperialism works, when they should be doing the opposite by strengthening the yuan (transitioning into a domestic consumption economy) to support the growth of the Global South and shield them from US monetary imperialism.
China is going to benefit greatly from a highly dollarized world, but so will the parasitic declining US empire. Both US and China are going to do fine with this arrangement, and that unfortunately places the entire Global South in great jeopardy. Be careful what you wish for.
This is the most barebones positive thing that you can say about China. So much so that its barely a "positive" thing to say rather than just an observation of reality that has leaves room for personal interpretation,opinions and analysis. Its a concrete reality so undisputable in most aspects its a view held even by most anti-china leftists, liberal comentators and increasingly so mainstream media. Its also not a description or reaction to current geopolitical and monetary events and choices by the Chinese state but a general observation of the material and bureocratical ourcomes that have culminated from how the Chinese system was set up and operated over decades. Doesnt really contradict anything my comment said
Look, I still remember a few months ago some of these internet accounts were jumping up and down about Saudi Arabia “ending its 50-year contract of petrodollar” and how it’s going to “end dollar hegemony” and I had to write a post debunking it.
I have no interest in winning any arguments here, and would prefer not to engage if I can, but I feel obliged when there is a need to debunk myths that perpetuate neoclassical views of economics.
I hope this site will continue to engage with global geopolitical affairs as Marxists and materialists, not subscribing to some fantasy that many “anti-imperialist” social media accounts are promoting which obviously have to do with them promoting gold and crypto to gullible audience. It’s easy to fall prey into these internet narratives and I hope I am at least saving some people from falling into these holes whenever I debunk these stuff.
Overall, I agree with shipwreck's analysis, but it's tempered by these things:
The US will not lose its seat in the throne without a war. Yes, I don't think China is optimizing its fiscal policy for the sake of weakening the US, but if China actually did, the US would almost certainly push towards a hot war against China. US foreign policy operates under Thucydides Trap and if it gets to the point where the US is about to lose the throne, they will either pursue or threaten to pursue a hot war as either a last ditch effort to hold on the throne or to say that if the US can't have the throne, neither can China. So the question is not whether Chinese economists are neoliberal but rather whether the party and people are willing to bear the cost of direct military confrontation. If they're not willing to, then they will continue the status quo. It literally doesn't matter if every single Chinese economist has their brains replaced by clones of Michael Hudson's brains.
Shipwreck vastly underestimates the internal contradictions within the US which permeates throughout US society. I suspect this is because they weren't raised in Burgerland. In their analysis, they even admitted that China's more timid moves has good short term and medium term benefits but questionable/bad long term prospects. But I don't think it's good analysis to leave it at that because if the US lacks the means (and it absolutely does lack the means) to resolve those internal contradictions, then whatever roosters that should come home to roost in China will never come because the US will suffer even more from those unresolved internal contradictions. You can even see this happening with Trump. Shipwreck has more or less been right about the economic dimension of the war in Ukraine, but with regards to how Biden is some 5d chess grandmaster, it's not so much that Shipwreck is wrong but more that Biden will not be in office forever and his subsequent successors (ie Trump) might not and most likely will not have the same talent in 5d chess as Biden. I think Trump's second administration is going to challenge much of what Shipwreck has said because if Trump's administration wind up sabotaging what Biden's administration has carefully build, then the the bloomers could just say that China purposely didn't rock the boat because they knew Trump would fuck it up for them.
@xiaohongshu@hexbear.net has spoken favourably about Chinese dedollarization efforts before, in 2022 or so. I don't recall the details but xiaohongshu isn't just all gas no brakes.
the problem is that his talking points havent changed in the past 3 or 4 years but he deletes all his posts so you cant actually cross reference for yourself. in brief,
you can go look up geikei's recent good faith attempts to engage (you actually cant because the responses are deleted), either the talking points are side stepped or they get bogged down in a gish gallop rehash of of the above three points. i recall i made a conscious decision to reduce engagement with xhs right after he first started this bidenomics bit after federation and already he didn't bother backing up his points with anything substantial (softballed him with some stuff about resource swapping and i got basically point 1 in essay format)
in any case, i still don't think his points, esp wrt the chinese strategy, hold any water as it's been established that roosevelt's vision for the marshall plan failed, and as hudson himself has pointed out, america's postwar military adventurisms were a response to the failure of the marshall plan. for china to do something like this would be a fantastically nihilistic interpretation of history particularly as the chinese are at a similar point industrially to the postwar US (major exception being that the war of capitalist transition is only just beginning for us)
Who is “he” here? Please try not to misgender on this site, thank you. (and I will note that this is not the first time you have done this and have this called out before)
Besides, for everything I have written, I laid out the exact mechanisms on why it would/wouldn’t work, what are the alternatives and explained how they would work.
I literally said that Russia cancelling $21 billion of Africa’s debt in August 2022, which China immediately followed by waiving interest on their loans to 17 African countries were the correct moves towards de-dollarization. If China had continued to do that, de-dollarization would be on the table, especially with the interest rate hike sucking out all the dollars in the Global South and many countries were close to default.
I also warned that they have to do this fast because once the short term US treasuries matured in late 2023, the US is going to flood the Global South with dollars again, and the window of opportunity would start to close. This is exactly what happened, and the irony is that China is now proactively helping the US doing exactly that by dollarizing the world.
Once again, we should update our views based on actual, real world events, not clinging to some fantasy that has no basis. I was optimistic, until the actual events that transpired proved me wrong. I have to update my view based on the new evidence. We are materialists here (at least I hope we all are) so try not to subscribe to the neoclassical view of economics.
So he has spoken favorably about things that happened before he started commenting on current developments but never about any contemporary development or move at the point of commentary. And that favorable coverage of past moves is pretty much never on its own but is actualy only brought up in the context of their current doomer negative coverage to as to comperatively highlight and support his current negative coverage.
Saying "Back then i actualy thought this and they were doing the good thing but i was naive and they libed up now" doesnt negate my description that there hasnt been a single Chinese foreign, monetary or developmental choice that happened while they have been an active commentator on this sub that they didnt react negatively and that there hasnt been a single US foreign or monetary policy move that they didnt cover as a correct chess move for the empire. It actualy enhances it
Always appreciate the critical effort posts even if I don't agree all the time. You say that the liberal faction of the CCP has won out and is thus throttling the dollar. Has there been a political shift in policy or change in personal to indicate this change towards redollarization as a strategy? Assuming and you are correct, can it really be ascertained if this is a change in strategic policy or a temporary tactical move anticipating some type of hemorrhage. Thus the shoring up of actual productive assets in Yuan while unloading its liabilities in speculative markets (US dollar debt) onto the global south (which is wrong, but could be leverage in a real moment of cleavage from the dollar)...? Perhaps a bit multi dimensional chess but China seems to be taking a very measured approach to dedollarization and I certainly wouldn't see them temporarily slowing that down as being out of their ballywick, if that's what they deem necessary in their estimation to achieve their ultimate goal. Of course none of us really know what that is
Of course we can only guess, but let’s look at the trend and make some educated guesses.
Back in 2018 when Trump attempted his foray into a trade war with China, the Chinese Marxist/MMT economist Jia Genliang already warned of an impending shift in the US strategy (reissued article in February 2024, in Chinese):
The whole article is well worth a read (I am told that machine translation works quite well but I never tried it myself), and while Trump wasn’t able to do much back then, the Biden administration had resumed and doubled down on imposing tariffs against China, which, when complemented by the high interest rates since 2022, led the Chinese libs to fall hook, line and sinker for their deception.
Looking back, these words appear prescient. The tariffs are just covers, the real meat is to enter the Chinese capital market. As much as I don’t want this to happen, recent events have me concerned.
Immediately following the interest rate cut in September, China announced its monetary easing policies to entice foreign investments. Chinese stock market even jumped for a short period then. This was then followed by various policy changes to make it easier for foreign direct investments to come into China by removing previous restrictions to ease the concerns of foreign investors.
More concerning is what the CSRC president, Wu Qing, announced on Monday (article from Global Times):
…
The trend is clear. China is now committed to its export sector and financial opening up, apparently believing that this will be their path towards saving the dampened domestic consumption amidst property market crisis and local government debt crisis (which can be traced back to the 2009 GFC and I’ve written this elsewhere so I won’t be elaborating for now). In this interpretation, the dollarization of the world economy will be good for China, a strong US economy is good for China. Other countries might get squeezed in the process, and de-dollarization won’t be on the table any time soon, but China will register growth in the short-medium term.
What remains to be seen is the long term consequence - was Jia’s prediction that the US finance capital will exploit the opportunity to infiltrate the Chinese financial market correct? What will China do in response to this? What will happen to the Global South exporter countries who will now become ever more dependent on a dollarized economy? What will happen to these countries when the US runs into a 2009 GFC style recession and consumption slumps? These are the key questions that need to be thought out further.
This is precisely what I feared and you put it way better than I could have.