What are the general trends, public's opinion on latest events, local, global, Ukraine. Is there something of note happening in your country, both good and bad?
I live in India, it's practically a fascist state. Just today leftist journos got arrested. Poor working class Muslims are lynched daily by Hindutva mob. A province which is close to China is burning for 5 months, all thanks to Hindutva nazi ideology . Rapes, murders, casteism violence everything is unfolding before our eyes. Middle class here mostly ultra nationalistic nonsensical people they think India is no. 1. our people dont understand Ukraine or Russia but they think Russia (USSR) helped us in 1970s so we should be friendly to them. Our government think they can control the West and can play both with China and US. It's a horrible government and the whole society is full of rotten people except some people in the South. I have to say this, future of India is very bleak if Modi wins (which I think he will) will bring havoc and a civil war in near future.
The journalists' arrests is pretty substantial but it is getting next to coverage in the anglosphere.
The mainstream media is already almost 100% pro-BJP. Public radio (Akashvani) does nothing but credit Modi individually for meagre handouts. It is absolutely nuts. I don't see any way out of BJP's stranglehold without total economic collapse or something to that effect.
currently stuck in the decades where weeks happen here in canada. i can feel change coming, i dont know if we'll be ready
Texas is pure insanity, continues to descend into a corrupt oligarchy, with treats and pardons for allies, and slashing public funding for every other conceivable state service.
Power outages, from ice storms in winter and >100°F Sahara and Arizona level temperatures for months in a row in summer. Hail storms dropping softball size hail on entire neighborhoods, mine included.
Migrants continue to get their skulls cracked by border patrol and deported, while cartels operate with near impunity, leaving a headless corpse on an interstate highway for police to try to quietly sweep under the rug every year.
Meanwhile every single person to whom I speak about the clear descent of Western society into fascist, technocratic oligarchy just dismisses my concerns with obtuseness, gaslighting, masturbatory sophistry, or outright defense of fascism in the name of their shallow personal identity.
Texas, Florida and Georgia governments are in a never-ending competition to see who can be the absolute fucking worst.
Its been fine in mexico since last elections, the socdems have managed to control and reduce the national debt by a considerable amount and even start some infrastructure projects like an oil refinery and a train in the south. Also they make the conservatives seethe so i uncritically support them just for that.
Some regions are receiving massive foreign investment because of the US change in policies. It is being called "nearshoring" but its basically just a rebranding of offshoring (the socdems heavily criticized offshoring so it needed rebranding), they come to exploit or poverty wages.
Edit: forgot to mention, they implemented a small "ubi" for seniors which i know for a fact that it has helped a lot of people in need. Unfortunely (i think) anyone can apply for it and its not uncommon to see filthy rich people taking advantage of the aid. Ive seen people on brand new SUVs (the obnoxiously big ones) cash out the aid.
In Japan I would say not great, but outside of a short-lived revolutionary surge that was put-down thanks to the US we have existed pretty much as a US lapdog since WW2. So nothing too surprising.
Yen has absolutely plummeted thanks in part to our joining sanctions against Russia. There was a period a couple years back that the yen was roughly equal to the dollar, 100 JPY was about 1 USD. Now we are hovering around 150 JPY to the dollar and it looks to be trending even weaker.
Electricity costs have close to doubled thanks to said sanctions too, especially since we refuse to restart nuclear power in most areas. Almost the entire country's electricity costs have increased by 50% or more and we had a wave of deaths over the summer of people dying of heat stroke. When I moved into my current flat, the rental company suggested we try taking cold baths to save costs.
Ukraine, people seem to be mostly over. People were very outspoken on it right at the start, Japan never wants to be behind on the latest Cause, but once it started affecting them negatively people's opinions started to shift. I actually saw a program on public TV the other night talking about the 2014 coups that precipiated everything.
Oh and one of our few good politicians (the governor of Okinawa/Ryukyuu) is currently in the process of being overruled by the government because he refused to approve the relocation and construction of the US bases in okinawa because nobody there actually wants them. So the government is pushing it to the supreme court to just bypass him, which of course they will do.
So yeah, things are just dandy. The one good thing I hope to see out of all of this is there is a growing contingent of people who want to be free of US occupation. Some people because they are just tired of being the US lapdogs, some people are tired of the occupiers assaulting the locals, and others worried about making Japan a staging ground for aggression against China.
Hello, Japanese comrade🫡 I have a question I'd like to trouble you to answer,This question has been bothering me for a long time. As Chinese we often discuss that there are no more Marxist-Leninists in contemporary Japan, the Japanese Communist Party has turned into a social democratic party that supports the Emperor, and that the student movement org（中核派） left over from the 1960s is a strangely Trotskyist. Do you think that there is still any basic organization/thinker in Japan?
Happy to answer, though sadly I can't say that there is any secret widespread ML organizations that you missed.
I think it's not quite true to say that there are no Marxist-Leninists in contemporary Japan (I am one!) but that they are at a much more grassroots level. In local circles and academic circles, I see a lot more of it. Members of the party that are winning seats in government, much less so.
I will say that your perception of the parties as a whole are accurate though. It isn't the same party that it was under Fuwa. The Kyosanto of today does lean pretty socdem in a lot of ways, as they ran away from a lot of their fouding principles after the red purge. The sudden 180 support of the Emperor is a particular sticking point for me recently, because they used to be very staunchly against the imperial family. The desire to distance themselves from the CPC also seems short-sighted, as they could easily be a great ally for us. There are many areas that the party needs work. It feels like constant concessions towards being practical has just served to undermine the party as a whole.
On the other hand, they do still have some good positions such as being opposed to the historical revisionism we see so often from Japanese politicians and being opposed to the US occupation. The latter of which I think is a necessary first step before basically anything else.
I would still encourage comrades here to reach out to their local chapters though, because I often find them much more left-oriented in their ways of thinking than the party as a whole might be. I think it is important to realise that a lot of the Kyosanto's run away from Marxism is very recent, within 20 years or less. There are a lot of members who predate that and still believe in a lot of core marxist tenants. I don't think it is out of the question for the party to course correct, but it will take a lot of effort.
Thank you for your reply! I think the point about members being more basic than the organization applies to most non-ruling communist parties. I'm glad there are still people fighting!
Hawaii (an outer island), from when the pandemic started to now bougie alt-right and lib mainlanders have been moving here en mass and gentrifying everything.There is a lot of brain drain as kids leave for college on the mainland then are unable to return because everything got so gentrified. It feels like the native Hawaiians are somewhat making a comeback culturally and economically, but all the big native Hawaiian institutions seem to bend the knee to their colonizers and be 100% lib aligned and pro imperialist. I used to hear more chatter about Hawaiian independence and anticolonialism, but those voices seem to be gone lately. My coworkers have been going further and further right and are now openly racist, homophobic, and transphobic. They used to be apathetic. It's crazy since all of them are minorities and one is closeted.
