Image is of German farmers blocking the road near the Brandenburg Gate in early January 2024.

The ruling German coalition - the FDP, the SPD, and the Greens - has been in dire straits since the war in Ukraine began due to their steadfast commitment to destroying their country as much as possible in solidarity with Ukraine destroying themselves too. Scholz is deeply unpopular, with a record low approval of 20%, and his party's approval is even lower.

The German left has been entirely unable to take advantage of this situation, with Die Linke fragmenting due to split opinions on what position they should hold on Ukraine, among other issues. As a result, the major conservative party, the CDU, has gained a lot of voters over the past couple years. Most worrying, however, is the gains that the fascist party, the AfD, has made - from 10% in 2021 all the way to ~20% today. A significant chunk of the vote is likely protest votes due to the lack of an alternative, but a vote for fascists makes you a fascist nonetheless.

Recent controversies with the AfD - including an allegation that they held a secret meeting discussing a plan to mass-deport millions of migrants in an obvious parallel to Nazi meetings planning to remove all Jews from the country - has recently slightly damped approval for the AfD. This meeting generated counter-protests and condemnation from many Germans. It was later revealed that the meeting might not really have happened as alleged, but it doesn't actually matter, because the AfD's stance is being increasingly reflected by the ruling coalition, who recently introduced a bill allowing faster deportations of rejected asylum seekers and significant new powers for authorities in that regard, including potentially the criminalization of sea rescue organizations and imprisonment for aid workers.

The German government is increasingly considering banning the AfD, with their anxiety and motivation to do so rising as the AfD maintains and improves its position as Germany heads towards elections in late 2025. There are intermediate steps that could be done, such as revoking state funding, but if that doesn't work, then the party might well be banned. While I will never argue with fascist parties being banned, this probably won't fix anything, as the underlying economic and social conditions that are fueling these electoral shifts in the first place are not improving. Germany, the largest industrial power in Europe, is mired in a recession, particularly a manufacturing recession, from which there appears to be no escape. It has so far carefully shepherded its natural gas resources to keep the population as mollified as possible, but this has come at the expense of industry. In a trend starting from July 2022, manufacturing PMIs are still well below 50, reaching 45.5 in January 2024, which indicates decline. I suppose if you wanted to look on the bright side, it's better than it was in July 2023, where it was a whopping 38.8, so the rate of decline is becoming a little slower.

And this is just the domestic stuff. Germany has also famously sided with Israel to support them during the ICJ genocide case, has kowtowed to Netanyahu as they bond over being Genocide Experts, and maintains its support of Ukraine, continuing to send military gear and money to be converted to scrap metal by Russian artillery - rather than spending money on doing anything about the cost of living. In the face of a historic economic downturn, it has only more fervently stated its desire to remain militarily opposed to Russia for decades.

The Country of the Week is Germany! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.

The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.

Israel-Palestine Conflict

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.

Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.

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.
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.

    • ziggurter [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      9 months ago

      You seem to have a positive impression of him.

      Generally. But I make it a strong rule not to idolize people.

      your opinions on his Techno-Feudalism ideas?

      I am honestly not familiar with them. Do you have a link to more info?

        • ziggurter [he/him, comrade/them]
          ·
          9 months ago

          Hmm. I don't know. Maybe someday I'll try to read his actual book. But from this material I tend to agree with the critique a bit more. However, some additional/confounding thoughts:

          • I find that arguments about the strict delineation between feudalism and capitalism are kind of boring. In a lot of ways capitalism mimics both feudalism and slavery, and the "choice" we get from moving between bosses is often as much of an illusion as the "choice" given to us by so-called "democracy". So, like, just because I tend to think it's still capitalism doesn't seem like that huge of a deal.
          • Yeah, I'm a stick-in-the-mud generally in terms of being convinced that technology is fundamentally changing the world. There is no artificial intelligence, the "cloud" is glorified DNS, and the current wave of automation is much like the plow, the printing press, and the assembly line....
          • I find the arguments about financialization and the shift of advertisers rather than users being the market focus to be a bit more convincing. I suspect the current toleration for corporations staying unprofitable for extended periods of time is just going to wind up being more of the same when amortized over the actual ownership-by-capitalists and over time and shit, but I don't know. What I do know is that it feels damned well the same as a worker at the bottom, with the boss having the same power over you and exploiting your labor while letting you keep the same dwindling few pennies. So...shrug?
          • What is rather weird is the more and more abstract nature of the commodities, I suppose. We're still threatened as much as ever by not being able to pay rent (and, across large parts of the world, put food on the table). But I can understand how hypnotic it is that the things we're more and more convinced to spend our money and our labor on are divorced from those necessities: advertisements/attention, fucking bit patterns (i.e. video games and movies and shit), etc. I think there is something there, captured by something in between the ideas described here and maybe David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs". I don't know that it merits being called a new economic system, but it's certainly something for modern theorists to pay attention to in the contemporary world, and to analyze how it contributes to the notion of value created by our labor. Similarly for stuff like mass surveillance.

          Ideas with merit, but to be taken for what value they can offer and not more. I even wonder if the critics and summerizers might be taking the message too seriously. I'm pretty sure I've heard Varoufakis refer recently to the system we currently live under as capitalism. So might people be taking his metaphors too literally, especially for the sake of having something to argue/write/fight over? IDK.

          • IzyaKatzmann [he/him]
            ·
            9 months ago

            found your last point particularly salient, appreciate the thoughts comrade

            • ziggurter [he/him, comrade/them]
              ·
              9 months ago

              Pretty good (and funny/well written). A lot of the criticism is pretty well-founded. But I disagree with some parts. For example:

              As a result, many Marxists—we can skip the internal disputes at this stage—held that, under feudalism, the means of surplus extraction are extra-economic, being largely political in nature; goods are expropriated under the threat of violence. Under capitalism, in contrast, the means of surplus extraction are entirely economic: nominally free agents are obliged to sell their labour power in order to survive in a cash economy, in which they no longer possess the means of subsistence—yet the highly exploitative nature of this ‘voluntary’ labour contract remains largely invisible.

              I find this to be a kind of ridiculous distinction. Wage slaves may have (some) freedom to move between bosses under capitalism, but once they've subjected to a master, the extraction of the surplus labor is still every bit as violent. Go ahead and try to take what you produce (whether real goods or a measure of the revenue you generate) home with you at the end of the day, and see how violent it gets; see how "voluntary" and "economic" is the restriction that you must leave that surplus behind. Your labor isn't "sold" at all, but exercised at the tip of a gun (cops, rather than the spears of the guards/soldiers of a feudal lord), and the surplus extracted before you get your hands on it. There is no exchange. Calling labor a "market" in the sense of actual economic markets where commodities are bought and sold is mostly just liberal propaganda. Its an abstraction that works in some ways and appears close enough that people can be convinced to ignore the gap.

              And there are conditions under which that "freedom" to move between employers is also very heavily constrained, as we all know. The cost and lack of access to education and training helps with this, as does the tendency to monopoly, as does the free movement of production capitalists exercise between countries/areas/etc., as do other forms of control like regulation, criminalization, background checks and credit scores (modern black-balling), etc. Your industry is moving your kind of work to a country where neoliberalism has made labor exploitation more lucrative? Then if you are currently employed, you're pretty much stuck where you are because you're not getting another job if you lose this one, and you're not getting another education so you can change roles/industries real easily. Capitalism suddenly looks a lot more feudal, and as we all know this neoliberal shift and monopoly tendency is a pretty "natural" outcome of the structure of capitalism...the shift toward something more feudal, and the erosion even of that limited freedom of workers to change jobs/employers.

              And the "invisibility" of the surplus extraction is more a function of propaganda and conditioning than it is fundamental to the mode of production. It varies, and to some people who haven't been subjected so much to the liberal brainworms since birth (or which have traumatic lived experience due to their relative lack of privilege to counter that propaganda), it's a lot more visible and obvious. It also varies from context to context and industry to industry.

              So I'd say this is a good debate, and I tend to agree more with the folks saying there's no reversion to feudalism or other fundamental difference in the economic system of now compared to that 25 or 50 or 100 years ago, but I also think they're going too far with outright, offhand dismissal of the idea and its arguments. A synthesis is possible.

              • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]
                ·
                9 months ago

                I think I generally agree; as you lay out, I think a decent way of summing it up would be "As a competitive capitalism tends towards monopolized capitalism, capitalist firms generally trend towards developing characteristics that are comparable with feudalism, but they fundamentally remain different modes of production, and even stereotypical monopoly capitalist firms like those in Big Tech have not reverted to a feudal relationship between the oppressor and oppressed class. These firms still maintain firm control over the means of production and are profit-seeking, investing large sums of money into maintaining those profits. The commodities they are selling may be more abstract than steel or wheat or linen - such as a "branded musical experience" - but they still sell those commodities."

                I do also really agree with his critique of the techno-feudalists not really paying attention to the state nor geopolitics. Obviously I haven't read any of their work so I can't say for sure whether he's being 100% honest when he says that the techno-feudalists pay little attention to those things, but assuming he's telling the truth, I think it's a pretty big blind spot given that imperialism is the primary contradiction.

                • ziggurter [he/him, comrade/them]
                  ·
                  9 months ago

                  I ran into this video where Adam Conover (sigh) interviews Varoufakis, and he laid out his arguments, I think, much more clearly. I don't think it changes my assessment much, but it's definitely stuff to ponder. My notes:

                  1. He argues that much of the commodity exchange isn't through markets anymore, because online retailers individualize the exchange medium so much between us. Having a market kind of assumes buyers and sellers can all basically get an objective view of what is being bought and sold and for how much.
                  2. Further, that a lot of the extraction is rent rather than production-based because so much of it is automated and/or based on simply being a middle man who doesn't add anything at all to the commodity, but simply acts as a gatekeeper and controls behavior (characterized by reducing or eliminating the actual cost of per-commodity consumption, made up for by rent extraction instead).
                  3. He argues that capitalists are getting a great deal of their money (and other inputs, like technology) from governments now, and not relying nearly so much on sales revenue.
                  4. He argues that there's basically a new form of enclosure of commons that's taken place in our lifetimes, that commons being basically the pre-2000 Internet. And a great deal of that is done through states and banks essentially owning our online identities, since that's the only way we can make payments.
                  5. He says he doesn't see it as a reversion to an earlier mode of production, but an progression to a more "advanced" and exploitative one. It adds some elements of feudalism (as IMO capitalism always tends to as it progresses toward decreasing our choice as consumers and as laborers) and it does so a great deal through opaque algorithms that control many of our behaviors (in our labor, our consumption, our leisure, etc.). And this online/algorithmic control seems to also be circumventing even the limited amount of regulation and other control nation-state governments even nominally had on capitalists, putting them back in more direct political, as well as economic, control.
                  6. He still calls the owners capitalists, but qualifies it (e.g. "cloud-capitalists").

                  I do think it's some very important analysis, whether or not it can be said to be a different mode of production (probably not).

            • ziggurter [he/him, comrade/them]
              ·
              9 months ago

              Yeah, that's fair. We should be clear that capitalism has not been defeated or anything, and that it's fundamentally the same struggle we're currently engaged in.

    • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]
      ·
      9 months ago

      Evgeny Morozov's Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason is probably the best single retort I've seen of the techno-feudal argument.

      It's difficult to give a good summary of it (it's a decently long and well-researched piece) and I don't want to just be like "Oh, Varoufakis and his fellow techno-feudalist believers are idiots because they just didn't consider this basic fact!" but it seems like the techno-feudalists are essentially defining capitalism as a system where there's innovation, whereas feudalism is a system where the rich merely live off rent and don't really do much innovation, and while this is a plausible, even attractive hypothesis for left-wingers ("Those lazy bourgeois failsons can't even do capitalism right anymore! They aren't innovating or making anything!") it doesn't actually seem, like, true. And in the cases where it is true, it's not really incompatible with Actually Existing Capitalism, merely their theory of capitalism (assume a vacuum, assume no air resistance, assume a spherical cow, assume a can opener, etc).

      That's really the great, forgotten stage of most Grand Theories I find - you can very easily create a theory that sounds lovely and plausible and fits the preconceived notions of the world of your audience, but actually going into the data and evidence and fitting it all together and considering all possible refutations of your idea and then pre-emptively responding to those refutations and explaining why they are wrong without just saying "These refutations suck because they're bad and wrong and made by bad and wrong people; here's a total caricature of those ideas, laugh at them!" That is the place where theories go to die. Liberalism and neoliberalism crumbles there. "Judeo-Bolshevism" and its modern equivalent of Cultural Marxism crumbles there. "Wokeism" crumbles there. And I think that this is where the techno-feudal hypothesis also simply crumbles. And Marx remains.