I know the Rambo title card is a hoax.
The COTW was chosen in the wake of the aborted sequel to the attempted assassination of Trump being performed by a guy who is VERY enthusiastic about Ukraine, to the point of trying to sneak Afghan soldiers into Ukraine by setting up a house in Pakistan to house them and then further transport them. He also apparently offered to send thousands of Afghan soldiers to Haiti to help them combat gang violence. Whomst among us doesn't have the numbers of thousands of Afghan soldiers on speed-dial. Do you reckon there's a group chat?
Anyway, while there is still no official recognition of the Taliban's government by any country, China has taken a different course than the late USSR and the US - forming economic in-roads, rather than trying their own invasion. This has been a big boon for the struggling country, with various mines and oil and agriculture deals helping keep things barely afloat. A total disintegration of the social fabric of Afghanistan is not in the interest of any of the powers that border it - China, Pakistan, and Iran, with Russia not too far away - so an interesting dynamic of helping-without-official-recognition has been established. I wonder who will be the first country to fully recognize them?
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Afghanistan! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
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 think this vastly overestimates the quality of life for working class Americans. Under a hypothetically totally equal distribution of global income, most Americans would still end up making more than they do today. The U.S. is an incredibly unequal society with the lion's share of its "income" captured by the the top 10% of earners. We die younger, work more hours, and have worse quality of life than most other "developed" countries. Under socialism the average American's quality of life genuinely would improve, and that's in addition to things like health care and education.
The people in the top 10% of earners would absolutely see a reduction in quality of life, and maybe even the top 20%. Besides that, though, it's a false sense of class divide if you think the median earner at $38,000 per year is living some luxurious life thanks to imperialism. The tragedy is that more Americans who aren't in the upper echelons of wealth/income don't recognize that and have solidarity with their fellow exploited workers in the global south.
That’s the thing. You don’t need to believe someone on a $38,000 salary is living luxuriously. Only that person needs to believe it, or at least believe they can reach luxury. Things are bad in the US, but most people chug along because “things could be worse” and they don’t want to jeopardize that security
This is exactly what happened/ is happening right now with the pro-palestine movement. It's wild hearing other minorities throw Palestinians under the bus bc things might get worse for them.
Those stupid trolley memes showing Democrats only running over the Palestinians, while the Republicans are running over other stuff too.
A hypothetical reduction in their standard of living or a hypothetical loss or gain of rights outweighs the current actually occuring genocide that they're fucking funding.
Yeah, I don't deny that. But feeding into the misconception that socialism necessarily results in a lower quality of life for those in the imperial core is just reinforcing capitalist propaganda. No reason for us to be repeating capitalist myths for them.
It is not a misconception though. See my other response in this thread - this is unique to the US whose wealth is built through financial imperialism.
Most countries on the other hand have industries that produce real goods and services - not real estate or the stock market - that can offer actual material gains to other countries. America can run a huge trade deficit simply because the dollar is the most desirable asset, not because it has anything tangible to offer to the world.
When the dollar is no longer the most desirable asset, its exchange value will plunge, purchasing power will fall, imports will become more expensive, and re-industrialization will be needed to rebuild/reshape its own economy until it has something real to offer to the world. This is going to take decades. Why else would other countries want to sell stuff to America when it doesn’t have anything to offer?
I agree with your broad points throughout this thread although I think that when it gets to this stage, the US will simply balkanize. You make the fair point that state separatism (Texan separatism) is nonviable now because the US can simply sanction the breakaway state and completely destroy that state's economy. But this relies on dollar hegemony. Without dollar hegemony, the US will internally collapse due to unresolved internal contradictions and the stresses of climate change.
The US isn't China with 5000 years of history with tradition and institutions that are more than a millennia old and a populace that recognizes its place in that 5000 year old history. The US is an illegitimate settler-colony that's less than 3 centuries old, less than most major Chinese dynasties. And people might laugh at how Zionists have no ability to handle adversity whatsoever, but if there's any populace that's even less likely to handle adversity and even more pampered, it's Burgerlanders. Can you imagine Burgerlanders eating war rations or having to obey a national curfew when they throw a temper tantrum over wearing a fucking face mask?
National unity only exists because they live high off of hegemony thanks to the dollar. And when that hegemony is taken away, national unity will evaporate overnight. The US is a nation of thieves and when the going gets tough, the thieves will turn on each other.
The Joker's thesis regarding Gotham; except this time I actually believe it
I think with socialism, countries can reindustrialize fairly quickly though, can't they? The USSR and China shot up without even having the luxury of the US's industrialist past, huge wealth they could invest in such efforts, or modern automation techniques.
Socialism can indeed reindustrialize fairly quickly, but it is also contingent on how fast can the landlord/rentier class (i.e. finance capitalists) be rooted out. The purge and the civil war after the Bolshevik Revolution was extremely bloody, and so was Mao’s land reform - both of which were preconditions to neutralize the ability of feudal landlords to mount opposition against industrialization.
Let me just give you an example: with so much of the American retirement/pension fund being tied to the stock market, good luck trying to take out the financial sector. You’re gonna get a whole lot of reactionaries who would fight tooth and nail to oppose seeing their money evaporates. This is not to say it can’t be done, but it’s going to be bloody.
The US empire is unique in that it is the world’s first hegemon/empire that operates as a global debtor, whereas previous empires have all been global creditors. This means that the US simply prints money to get what it wants from the rest of the world (using “debt” that it will never have to repay), without having to build up a robust industrial core to serve a base to expand its imperialist ambitions.
So it’s going to be very interesting to see what happens if the dollar can no longer be weaponized.
I think even with a massive re-evaluation of the dollar, that living standards could still increase for a lot of Americans. A large part of the domestic economy is based around the financialization of critical needs, like healthcare and housing, with prices grossly inflated.
Even if things generally get more expensive, so much would be improved for so many people with just guaranteed housing and the ability to go to a doctor. I don’t think the impact of that can be overstated.
It depends on how fast America can rebuild its own supply chain. If the Global South can form their own alternative economic bloc that decouples from the dollar, then there is very little reason to export to America.
When countries export stuff to places like China, they can actually get real, tangible things in return. When you export to America, you get junk papers in return. For now these junk papers are highly desirable, because you need them to purchase energy/food and pay back your debt, but would you still want to obtain junk papers when you no longer need them?
With so much of US consumer products dependent on foreign imports (seriously, name a Made in America product at your home, and even then, how many of its components are actually locally made), it will ultimately depend on what America can offer to the world that is attractive enough that other countries would want to sell their stuff to you. Hospitals, schools etc. still need supplies, many of which America no longer make. Maybe China can ship some humanitarian aid to America or something.
I think America can still sell fossil fuel and food, but those are fairly low value added goods and not nearly enough to sustain a high income economy. The country isn’t going to starve or anything, but it will no longer be able to get cheap consumer products like it used to.
Yeah. I don’t disagree that the transition would be rough, that there would be a reactionary tide against it. I just also think that there’s a very real underclass in a precarious position, regardless of the larger income compared to worldwide averages, simply because the base costs of living are also inflated.
38,000 a year is one illness away from bankruptcy within 3 months.
You misunderstand - the US dollar revalued without its stock and bonds will make everything much more expensive. It will take decades for the US to re-industrialize itself under socialism, and during those periods, the standard of living will fall.
The re-distribution of wealth presumes the value of the dollar remains constant, but that would not be the case if the US is to lose its imperialist hegemony and its ability to get free lunch from the rest of the world.
I will use my favorite example here to illustrate: https://www.capradio.org/articles/2022/11/29/california-finance-department-spokesperson-explains-how-state-went-from-record-budget-surplus-to-possible-25b-deficit/
In 2022, the Californian finance department accidentally revealed that nearly half of their tax revenues came from capital gains (stocks and bonds). This is the richest state in all of America, and how thoroughly distorted is its wealth calculation by finance capital. This also means that a re-valuation of the US dollar (that will inevitably occur if the dollar hegemony is to end) will mean a much much lower value than it actually is today.
This is simply the uncomfortable truth for many living in the Imperial Core, if the dollar hegemony is to be abolished. In this case, how many of them will still support a “revolutionary defeatism” in their home country?
I'm less sold on that narrative. A couple of things to consider:
Much of our domestic industry and labor power currently goes towards production of military industrial equipment and luxury goods/services for the wealthy and high earners. That's basically dead weight as far as productive capacity goes. Redirect that manpower and industry towards more useful endeavors, and a lot could be done very quickly to reindustrialize socially useful sectors.
Finance imperialism does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to sucking out the productivity of foreign nations, no doubt about it, but very little of that ever makes a material improvement in the lives of your average American. If you think the US' ill-gotten imperialist loot is trickling down then you're thinking about the US 50-70 years ago. Reagan and every administration since has made sure more and more of the wealth is protected from redistribution to the dirty poors. Our bridges collapse, 1 in 6 children live in poverty, and our healthcare and education is second rate at best. Don't overestimate the quality of life of the average American.
The US has the natural resources, arable land, and labor power to accomplish a great deal very quickly. It's throttled by neoliberal economic policy focusing on a rentier economy instead of a productive one. Once Wall street becomes Wall street, if you catch my drift, there's nothing in the way of a very quickly repurposing of criminally underutilized potential. Furthermore, were the US to undergo a socialist revolution, so too breaks the intellectual property chains shackling development the world over. You predict prices would rise, but that's only if productive capacity stayed the same. If all of a sudden global South countries are able to develop properly and aren't forking over rents to Western financial firms, or worse yet simply prevented from developing entirely by protectionist patents/trade secrets, we could end up producing a great deal more on the global scale than ever before. There's also presumably more cooperation between nations in the area of production beyond just getting out of each other's way. The sharing of knowledge and technical expertise between nations and previously competing firms would reduce duplicate labor and allow for much more to get done than is today.
Someone posted this on lemmygrad, I'll do my best to paraphrase.
The country is built on stolen land, this isn't up for debate.
The idea that the biggest contradiction could be anything except settler colonialism is one that isn't worth any serious ML's time. In fact this contradiction is so large that you can't even put class on the same level as it, or even remotely close to it.
The country was stolen, how do you nationalize stolen land and resources? This is no different than "labor Zionism" or "socialist Zionism." The contradiction is so deep that any plan for socialism is doomed to fail if the primary contradiction isn't solved.
Decolonization has to occur before socialism can occur in the United States. That's the only way
its why i have little hope for organizing in america, since most of the movements fail to address this contradiction and are inherently reactionary. Settler colonialism is the largest contradiction in these lands, as well as systemic racism, and of course both go hand in hand.
Any 'socialism' on stolen land is exactly what you say, labor zionism in essence. Americans who debate this fact have no right to be near any socialist space as they are reactionaries.
America does not deserve socialism because america is a false and unholy construct that must be undone
Yup. I know the Gaza genocide has really poured cold water on many people's hearts for organizing in the states. That one Palestinian lady who said that Chicago was ready for Harris on twitter got harassed by yt Blue MAGA who proceeded to, true to their name, proceeded to hurl the most anti-arab islamophobic insults and threats against her life. In the end, the FBI paid her a visit.
You know who started that whole mini pogrom? A black woman on twitter who felt that her post was "threatening."
The Palestinian woman who was beaten so badly she had a concussion at the DNC.
The Arab professor that was getting hit on the head with "we love Biden" signs.
There's so many examples of this. You can't trust Americans to stand up for one another. They'll just end up reporting you to the feds while claiming to be "leftist progressives."
Sorry if I don't want to be arrested for organizing, because with "comrades" like these, who needs enemies?
Has decolonization occurred in countries where the colonized are the minority though?
Yea the Russian Empire, Lenin's "The Right of Nations to Self-Determination" talks about the importance of the self determination of the oppressed nations
I mean Palestine is undergoing decolonization.
And you're never really a minority, other colonized people will have your back
That's not even really true 100% of the time anymore; look at the misleader-assed Black Capitalists
Removed by mod
New award for Worst Shit I've Seen In The Modlog Lately
Said the fucking worthless settler.
Since we're going to play the % game, what about black Americans?
They were forced to be here, they're absolutely not immigrants nor are they settlers and they make up 14.4% of the population.
What about Mexican Americans? Didn't you know that the entirety of the southwestern US was stolen from Mexico? Mexican Americans make up 10.7% of the population.
So now we're at 29.1% of America is either indigenous or black.
Bygones will never be bygones you settler fuck; I will spit on you and your name until one of your pigs guns me down
Inshallah you will gun them down first
dude, fucking delete this right now or im having you banned for spewing settler colonialist talking points
How dare you besmirch the name of Balthier with this settler garbage.
You have vastly overestimated the productive capacity of the Imperial Core. Jason Hickel’s latest paper Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy paints a drastically different picture:
The vast majority of the productive capacity is now in the Global South. The US imports most of its stuff from the Global South. The Imperial Core extracts primarily through financial means, and the end of Western imperial hegemony must necessarily mean the loss of such privileges, and in order to sustain the same level of living standards would mean importing more expensive goods relative to America’s actual productive capacity.
Yes, re-industrialization can and will eventually happen, but it won’t happen immediately. At least you still have to fight a civil war against bourgeois counter-revolution(s), which will almost certainly incur even further destruction of productive capacity (think the Russian Civil War immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution). And only after peace and stability is restored can re-industrialization truly happens. And in the meantime, Global South countries like China will have surpassed American industries by leaps and bounds, and the catching up will take decades.
This is not to say that America will be a bad place to live in, it is simply that its standard of living will be below what its citizens are currently able to “enjoy” (in relative terms to the Global South). Meanwhile, real economic growth will happen in the East where their living standards will be far above the former Imperial Core, and you can expect many skilled talents would seek to emigrate as well.
Once again, from history we know that the establishment of a socialist state is an extremely violent process that accompanies societal upheavals, and only through it can an emancipatory project be carried out. It is a historical and objective process not nearly as rosy as many fantasize it to be.
I hope the American left doesn’t fall into the American Exceptionalism thinking that somehow their country is so special it is immune to historical materialism.
It definitely wont happen exactly because there is a reason capitalists moved to the global south in the first place. Industry in the north is not profitable. This will never change unless the north population goes through either some massive economic shock doctrine akin to a WW2/3 scenario or probably massive climate change catastrophe.
Its like every single time we forget history, the only reason why the US industry grew in the first place, the only reason the west managed to industrialize in the first place, the obvious consequences for Germany when they were put on the dead end of industrialization(e.g entirely dependent on imported energy).
If we consider these things the US is far more likely to collapse and balkanize. I expect chuds shooting liberals well before chuds and liberals hands together working in a factory for $5 an hour which is necessary for industrial profitability nowadays.
If by "East" you mean China yeah maybe if we consider the richest cities, otherwise you need some reality checks on what the average work and life condition in Japan and South Korea is like.
I think you've shifted the goalposts in this discussion. You started with a question of "how many americans just want the plunders of imperialism shared more evenly with the working class" while predicting substantial reduction in quality of life for Americans post imperialism. I contend that most Americans do not have an improved quality of life even with the imperialism: that value and wealth is retained by the PMC and bourgeoisie. Sure, "the Global North" is taking a massively disproportionate share of global GDP via ownership, financialization, and rent seeking in general, but the vast majority of that is captured and retained by the top income earners in the US. Lumping in your median global North worker with his/her boss is absurd.
"About 50.7 percent of the household income of private households in the U.S. were earned by the highest quintile in 2022, which are the upper 20 percent of the workers."
https://www.statista.com/statistics/203247/shares-of-household-income-of-quintiles-in-the-us/#:~:text=About%2050.7%20percent%20of%20the,earned%20by%20the%20lowest%20quintile.
The top two quintiles account for nearly 75% of total US income. If we got more granular, I think we'd easily find income drops off very quickly as you move down the second quintile too. No matter how you cut the numbers presented, though, my point I think stands. You may disagree for other reasons, but for the sake of argument if you were to grant that most Americans don't benefit from imperialism, then it doesn't seem to follow that their quality of life will go down when it ends. I think you're creating false division between workers in the imperial core and periphery. It was more true even just 20 years ago than today, but neoliberalization has been eating away at earlier concessions to the working class for decades now.
But you've switched gears and are talking about post revolutionary war and degrading of industrial capacity from conflict. That's just an entirely separate can of worms. I genuinely contend that the US and world in general would be substantially more productive if you ended things like intellectual property, redundant labor due to inefficient competition instead of collaboration, and squandering of productive capacity on non-socially useful endeavors like the MIC and conspicuous consumption. Those are good organizing points for bringing more people around to an anti-imperialist mindset. Plenty of Western leftists can and do accept socialism on anti-imperialist grounds precisely because we recognize we're in the same class as workers elsewhere in the world. If you're asking how many American "Socialists" are actually just Vaushites/dem-sucs, I guess I'd answer most of them? But like, they're not actually educated on political matters. They think the Nordic model is socialism. But that's not really related to the rest of your claims that I think are out of line with the reality of quality of living and distribution of income.
What you’re saying is not wrong, but you still have vastly underestimated the toll it’s going to take on America’s economy if the US can no longer rely on the dollar to get what it wants.
Let’s put it this way: what does America have to offer to the world?
Typically, countries trade with one another because they have something to offer that the other wants. The US is a unique case in that what it offers is a hard currency, something that every country in the world would like to get their hands on. This is what allows the US to run such huge trade deficits and practically get everything on the cheap without having to offer much to the world.
Who wants to sell to America when you can no longer offer the dollar as a highly desirable asset?
Let’s imagine what happens when America can no longer leverage on the strength of its currency, what can America offer to the world?
Boeing planes? Intel chips? 5G telecommunication infrastructure? Google and Amazon services? The tech sector is already being surpassed by other Global South countries, and many of the technical deficits after half a century of neoliberalism will take years if not decades to restore.
Military hardware? Sell them to whom? To fight whom?
Hollywood/Netflix/cultural exports? This can be one of the surviving industries, but the investment cash that used to flush these industries would also be greatly diminished if the dollar is no longer the attractive asset that it is.
Fossil fuel and food/grains? These can also serve as export goods, but they’re pretty low value to sustain a high income society.
And we’re not even talking about how America as an immigrant country will no longer have the pull it has to poach skilled labor from other countries who raised and fed their own people for decades, only for America to just take these labor away through offering them a strong currency that they cannot obtain in their home country.
Who’s going to come to work in America? Who wants to come to America? These will also be big question marks. (The Soviet Union was able to take in talents from America thanks to the Great Depression, but who is America going to poach talents from when the empire itself finally falls?)
So, yes, even the working class in America will have to take a plunge in their purchasing power and hence living standards. This is simply what happens what you have little to offer to the world, and your wealth is built on financial colonialism.
And I’m going to be honest here: if it ever comes to this, you should consider yourself lucky if no Global South demands reparations from America. Otherwise it’ll put on an even heavier toll on the economy.
So, don’t be surprised if your average America chooses to rather be a slave worker under imperialism, who still benefits from the plunders of imperialism even if it’s just crumbs, than to accept the reality that America is no longer at the pinnacle of the world and rebuilding the country will take decades of hardship.
we're gonna end up with some Treaty of Versailles shit. the American Hitler figure who takes power after the post-defeat resentment of America to try and revitalize the country and crush all working class organizations is currently a 10 year old laughing at skibidi toilet memes
I think it is self evident that the lion's share of value is retained by the bourgeoisie, another much smaller share is afforded to the PMC and that the vast majority of americans benefit much less than they would had they any political sense. Americans, by and large, are exploited by a series of monopolies and rentier schemes.
At the same time, however unequal the US is compared to France there is still a difference between being an exploited worker in the US and an exploited worker in Brazil. To put it simply: americans are now complaining that their treats (say, eating fast food) are becoming unaffordable. Going to McDonalds is now something that you do once in a while, for a birthday or another special event. That has always been the case in the global south. Anecdotal to be sure, but I'm upper middle class in Brazil and that was always the case for me.
To give you numbers, the average credit card interest charged in the US seems to be around 20 to 30 percent. In Brazil its above 400%.
The american elites might have given people crumbs in the form of, say, fuel and food subsidies and whatnot. They are still crumbs, and yet those crumbs would be 'unaffordable' if the US was a normal, unequal nation like those in the global south.
GDP is not an accurate measurement of per-capita wealth. Just for example, let's take the US steel industry. US and India produce similar amount of steel, but US only requires 1/5th as many workers, so the average productivity of a US worker is 5 times more, even though both contribute a similar amount to GDP. That's why the wealth of an individual American is more. This factor also applies to everything else, agriculture for example, the average American agricultural worker is 10 times more productive than their Indian counterpart. Average US car factory worker is 7 times more productive etc.
The vast majority of global south productivity is actually in China, which is already industrialized and considerably wealthy compared to other global south. Countries like Pakistan or Dominican Republic or Peru or East Timor are poor mainly because of low productivity.
Broke: Buying dinars because they'll become valuable
Woke: Buying dinars because the US dollar will stop being valuable