A perspective that I've personally come to adopt is to dialectically consider the Ukraine conflict through the lens of a "Soviet or post-Soviet civil war." This assessment acknowledges, for one, that the ongoing conflict is embedded within the broader paradigm of the Cold War, which has persisted since 1945, experiencing periods of (what can now be seen as) mere "detente" in the 1990s and 2000s. Much like the extended decade long pauses seen in the historical "Hundred Year's War" did not prevent that from being classified as "one" war, I believe future historical assessments may categorize the contemporary period as a continuation of a singular Cold War narrative, rather than distinct "old" and "new" Cold Wars as commonly discussed today.

The significance of this perspective is that it once again reinforces the sheer catastrophe that is the collapse of the USSR, a perpetually relevant historical lesson for all surviving AES states and MLs today. I distinctly remember that, back when the conflict escalated in 2022, there was a post on r/genzedong (which I can no longer find) that showcased street interviews of people in Moscow during (likely) the failed August 1991 intervention where one interviewee in the video presciently predicted there would be conflict between the newly separated nation states of Russia and Ukraine over Crimea.

In such a sense, the fact that there is now a Russo-Ukrainian conflict at all and to have it develop into a proxy war by NATO is the, in full frankness, undeniable victory of US hegemony within the macroscopic historical perspective. This is near entirely forgotten these days, but during the 20th century phase of the Cold War, it seemed inevitable that a NATO-Russia conflict would break out. This was not meant to be in Ukraine, of course, but Germany and specifically over Berlin. NATO has moved this war that was supposedly bound to occur in the middle of Europe all the way into the heartland of the USSR, furthermore subverting the former Warsaw Pact countries into its most fervent belligerents.

This US achievement must be recognized as it highlights that this is Russia's defeat in the sense that its leaders since Khrushchev have failed to appreciate the unchangingly permanent material conditions underlying US-NATO antagonism towards the pole of regional power which the USSR and Russia represents. Their utter idealism led to fantasies that such antagonism could be massaged or overcome through "peaceful coexistence" and then outright capitulation. Through this, the clash between the two was ultimately merely moved a thousand miles eastward and the immense scale of the Soviet surrender just buying two decades of detente as NATO swallowed up the former socialist states between West Germany and Moscow.

However, this does not mean that the escalation of the Ukraine conflict itself by Russia in 2022 is some geopolitical victory for US hegemony, however, rather than a colossal blunder by the geopolitically mediocre benchwarmer Biden presidency. To put it metaphorically, this is akin to having scammed someone of their own house and property and just as you were about to scam them of the very last clothes off their back, they finally wise up and sock you in the jaw. Yes, you still managed to take their house from them, but they ideally weren't supposed to wise up at all nor give you a distracting broken jaw right before you were planning to move on and pick that next fight across the city in the Asian neighborhood.

It is true, in a plainly quantitative sense of body counting, that the barrage of disease unleashed by the Europeans among the so-called "virgin soil" populations of the Americas caused more deaths than any other single force of destruction. However, by focusing almost entirely on disease, by displacing responsibility for the mass killing onto an army of invading microbes, contemporary authors increasingly have created the impression that the eradication of those tens of millions of people was inadvertent - a sad, but both inevitable and "unintended consequence" of human migration and progress. This is a modern version of what Alexander Saxton recently has described as the "soft side of anti-Indian racism" that emerged in America in the nineteenth century and that incorporated "expressions of regret over the fate of Indians into narratives that traced the inevitability of their extinction. Ideologically," Saxton adds, "the effect was to exonerate individuals, parties, nations, of any moral blame for what history had decreed." In fact, however, the near-total destruction of the Western Hemisphere's native people was neither inadvertent nor inevitable.

From almost the instant of first human contact between Europe and the Americas firestorms of microbial pestilence and purposeful genocide began laying waste the American natives. Although at times operating independently, for most of the long centuries of devastation that followed 1492, disease and genocide were interdependent forces acting dynamically - whipsawing their victims between plague and violence, each one feeding upon the other, and together driving countless numbers of entire ancient societies to the brink - and often over the brink - of total extermination.

Stannard, D.E. 1992. "American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World." Oxford University Press.

There was a struggle session on Hexbear when Roderic Day dunked on the Deprogram co-host JT for a pro-MMT video, which got the latter's subscribers very upset. I remember there being some decent ML-oriented takes there against MMT.

The problem with MMT as I've seen it articulated is that it's the modern equivalent of 19th century takes like "This is how you can make the British Empire work to help you!". It's the contemporary "FDR New Deal" faustian bargain meant to co-opt the Western left and even the PatSoc chauvinists towards pursuing not any economic alternatives like socialism but an ever more perfect capitalism. I'd actually recommend that JT video for a model representation of how MMT sells itself to the Western left. It's "rational" and "logical." All upswing and couched in enough Keynesian economic jargon that the only comprehensible issue with it to the general viewer seems to be just that "the greedy Western political leadership simply don't want to share the pie," thus blocking its enactment.

What goes unsaid is that the entire substructure which MMT rests upon is that of American dollar hegemony. The policies of MMT can only function in a jurisdiction where the imposition of such autarkic currency sovereignty can effectively ignore counter-threats of credit ratings downgrade, sanctions, divestment, IMF and World Bank condemnation and all consequential fallout with impunity. The only jurisdiction capable of that, perhaps even in the entire West, is the US alone, through the half century of work it's done in solidifying its financial hegemony.

When non-imperial core (or wannabe imperial core) countries try to enact it, like Greece under Varoufakis era of the early 2010s, it was condemned by the ECB and the rest of the EU Troika. Greece succumbed to those political pressures, reversed its tracks and instead embarked on typical IMF-proscribed austerity SAPs. The standard of living has subsequently never recovered with current GDP per capita only approaching early 2000s levels.

As such, not only is MMT agnostic of its own basis on the bedrocks of American financial imperialism but it further advocates for the preservation of the current status quo of dollar hegemony through its proposal to trickle down some dividends of that system to the (exclusively American) working class. Therefore, its aim seems to be reeling in those of the tendency in the Western left that drifts towards the "socialism is the best way for gains to be distributed for me personally" in-it-for-myself sentiment rather than those of the anti-imperialist or socio-political bend of Western leftists.

I should add that the "legitimacy" narrative still very much exists to the present day in the Western discourse throughout the propaganda in the media and in academic works on contemporary socialist states. It's like shining a UV light on a shoddy roadside hotel room in that once you recognize the narrative utility, you start to see it everywhere like an ooze. It's particularly evident in coverage of China and Vietnam, through less so with the DPRK and Cuba because the economic warfare against the latter two states has encouraged their governments to actively emphasize the inherent value of socialism against the (historically nihilistic) logic of the "legitimacy" narrative. This Western propagated narrative festered across socialist states in the late 20th century and drove those states to the decisions of pursuing IMF loans and neoliberal Chicago school shock therapy which brought about capitalist restoration and the progress of Cuba and the DPRK in maintaining socialism in spite of their externally-induced economic hardships is a positive step to countering the narrative.

To summarize, "legitimacy" is one of those irregular verbs in the Western dictionary: "You seek continual legitimacy but I have a perpetual, unquestionable right to rule." The concept never applies to the Western capitalist structure even with the routine collective generational economic trauma inflicted from the boom-bust "business cycles." Japan has now gone through three "lost decades" of stagnating GDP per capita and yet its socioeconomic condition will never be discussed in the narrative framework of "legitimacy" for obvious reasons, whereas every single fiscal quarter of perceived lackluster economic performance in China and Vietnam brings about endless citations of this narrative like clockwork.

The real underlying answer is that socialist governments bought into the Western propaganda narrative of "legitimacy." This is where, if socialist governance fails to deliver economic growth, it loses its "legitimacy" and should then be overthrown in favor of capitalist restoration.

Socialism, therefore, is not seen of intrinsic value in of itself, nor are the socioeconomic achievements and benefits of a socialist society recognized. The "purpose" of socialism is solely for delivering and maintaining perpetual economic prosperity agnostic of externally suppressive economic pressures. This is due to the cyclical nature of 1) socialist governance buying into the need for "legitimacy," 2) pursuing "legitimacy," 3) creating public cognizance in their population on the idea of "legitimacy" - and 4) then setting their own population's expectations on the necessity for their governments to maintain this "legitimacy or else ..." approach - which then further 5) reinforces the narrative of "legitimacy" for socialist governments.

Meanwhile, all of this happens as Western propaganda further eggs on the narrative through channels like Radio Free Europe which expands the class of capitalist restoration comprador aspirants in those socialist states.

The 80s were a time of international economic headwinds through the export of the fallout of Reaganomics to the global economy. This caused economic crises most famously in places like Japan, but even though the rest of the world was going into the shitter through the American weaponization of their financial hegemony under Reagan to rescue their own domestic economy, socialist governments weren't "permitted" to stumble themselves, even though everyone else was, through the buying in of the "legitimacy" narrative.

Governments in the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia then, through desperation in maintaining "legitimacy," approached the IMF with its poison pill loans and structural adjustment program austerity mandates. Because the conditions of these loans were purposely designed to sabotage socialist societal stability, this then further exacerbated the economic stagnation such that eventually the socialist governments fell victim to the appeal of pursuing the ultimate Western poison pill - shock therapy - which led to the collapse of these socialist states.

The result was that, rather than being overthrown by the collective people as Western propaganda had fantasized, these governments voluntarily, and unilaterally, committed suicide due to the idea that they, and the entirety of socialism, had "lost legitimacy" and the only remedy to this being full-on capitalist restoration.

The diminishment of Yuri Gagarin's historic achievement as "no big deal" by the usual suspects will always be hilarious because it's one cope against the achievement of a man who is destined to be vindicated in the course of the future.

In the far future, whether that's when the human colonies of Mars declare independence from Earth and or eons later when humanity, if ever, reaches systems like Alpha Centauri, when they teach human history, frankly, they won't give a shit about Armstrong who stepped on the Earth's moon (oh excuse me, I forgot the proper spin: the "first to step on another 'celestial object'").

The one human from Earth that will matter, perhaps the only one that will matter at all, to those humans who will be so far distanced from humanity's homeworld will be that person who first entered space, setting off the teleological historical narrative to the context of the journey to their extraterrestrial homes.

That one individual is Yuri Gagarin and it's both profound to realize and empowering to think that while the entire weight of the contemporary West's academic, political and intellectual classes might be arrayed to downplay the achievement of the first human to reach outer space as accomplished by the collective hands of the USSR, this is one struggle despite all their teeth gnashing that they will never win, will never be able to take away from socialist achievement and that, as sure as anyone can be, he will be commemorated long after perhaps any other human from this planet.

Pretty momentous occasion as far as UNSC affairs go. This is the infamous March resolution that has been renewing the sanctions supervisory regime that was first implemented in 2014 and renewed every spring since. This year's would have been the 10 year anniversary of it and having it squashed by Russia and abstained by China is a positive step towards drawing back from a long cooperation with the West on this matter and a necessary preliminary move to re-legitimize any re-establishment of economic relations with the DPRK.

Her biggest accomplishment is paying homage to Mao with a kowtow when she fell down the stairs of the Great Hall of the People. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Evr9IJCUUAEbGzR.jpg

That there is, but there is also no rule that denies the capacity of any non-ML struggle from achieving good or combating imperialism and the philosophical distinction I gave above were made precisely for those groups.

Personally, I view those groups as fellow travellers and not as comrades. For me, the only distinction between those two terms being that we can both talk about the destination down the road we're heading to, but I will tune you out if you start talking about how we should be riding donkeys rather than driving the EV.

Until world communism has been achieved, there’s no simple “choice” between nationalism or internationalism, even then there will be new problems in the new world order.

Fair enough.

I'll also add that "nationalism" is one of those spooky words the West likes to trot out to beat the Global South with simply on the premise that because Western nationalism was an absolute clusterfuck (and here they'll usually point to the "nationalism as reason for WWI and WWII so it must be bad" gimmick which is agnostic of the Marxist discourse on the role of capital and imperialism in those wars), it must mean that Global South nationalism must transitively be bad as well.

Similar to how Western sexpats post pictures on Reddit of Buddhist swastikas trinkets in Asian flea markets and the comments use it as a sign that Asians don't care about the Holocaust. Yes, places like Modi's India show that Global South currents of nationalism can be warped into profound fascism and cultural chauvinism, but this should not be seen as the prima facie character of Global South nationalism, particularly for AES states.

In essence, nationalism in the Global South operates on a different register from how it is seen in the West and this distinction should not fail to be appreciated. The reason why the West itself downplays nationalism is because the entire bloc is now more or less subordinated to American hegemony not unlike how their propaganda once portrayed Comintern/Cominform Internationalism. Countries with flare-ups of nationalistic (or "patriotic") state character like right-wing Hungary interfere with the ease of coordination to Washington directives and thus are a distinctly problem child for US state interests, which is why nationalist currents are generally suppressed today in the West.

The truth is that there's some straight up freaks that pose as MLs and the unfortunate thing about the marginalization of the left in the non-AES world and the need for leftist "unity" is that we have to suffer their presence in our discourse. It's been the state of things back when the USSR still endured and it's still the case today as seen with "ML" takes on China.

I remember reading Keeran and Kenny's work on the dissolution of the USSR, how the capitalist restoration led the greatest humanitarian disaster since the Second World War, still ongoing today through legacy conflicts like Ukraine. K&K observed how some sociopathic Western "MLs" actually celebrated its collapse at the time because "now that the USSR was gone, real socialism could finally begin."

Xi’s seeming belief in supernatural forces.

And of course, we all know the most supernatural force of all is the eternal science of Marxism-Leninism 😎

The initial book that radicalized me as a early teenager was reading Victor Malarek's "The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade" precisely on the massive wave of human trafficking that arose from the former USSR and Eastern Europe through the economic genocide enacted on the former Socialist peoples.

The work was such a categorical denunciation of the living conditions of that region since the 90s, not through any ideologically-inclined argument but through its coverage of this atrocity that it was impossible for me to ever accept afterwards that the collapse of the "enemy" system was a "good thing" worth celebrating. At that point, it didn't matter how many redditors came up to me with their "my friend's neighbor's grand-uncle had a bad time under communism" bit and the libertarian emphasis on legalizing the sex trade alienated me at a fundamental level from those groups as well, even before I remotely touched any theory or met any comrade groups.

Deeply disappointing, as an outsider to the Murdoch island's internal discourse narratives, to see Australian members (both here and elsewhere) drink the kool-aid on the propaganda against this referendum and bending over backwards to do online global opinion damage control for their settler colonial state's latest collective act of ethnic repression.

The conditions of this referendum are completely performative, yes, but it institutionalizes a recognition of the indigenous peoples these settlers have genocided. This would have been a first step. A very small step, but a step still. Voting down the referendum because there should have been better conditions is a hilariously optimistic expectation for the land of White Australia. It's been two centuries since the establishment of this genocidal settler state, this referendum is the best first step that's going to be ever condoned from such a population, and apparently even this was a first step too far for these islanders.

The propaganda excuse that the indigenous peoples opposed this themselves, from a cursory search myself, even seems wrong give how the overwhelmingly indigenous districts apparently voted for it.

The only valid reason for opposing this performative first step is that it deprives the Australian state from weaponizing this as self-image propaganda like New Zealand does with its "cutsey" Haka performances to pretend like its some decolonized country for the world. Instead, this referendum further confirms this island is still in the collective grip of the failsons of White Australia.

Absolutely, but it's difficult to translate that into anything actionable that sympathetic countries like China on the other end of Asia, or even nearby Iran, can enact in practice. Global South countries simply don't have the capacity or logistical infrastructure for intervention that the enablers of Western imperialism like the US with its military bases occupying every region of the globe and eleven aircraft carriers has.

The truth is that there is nothing substantive that China could do and in fact, the small amount China could do would actually make the situation worse.

Currently, the only thing holding back the West from being completely rabid mask off in their support for Israel (like the EU reversing the aid ban) is because it would completely alienate the Arab world, which they started to care about once again due to their fear that the people they've bombed for three decades would now side with China. This conflict being currently seen as an Israel vs. Arab/Muslim world confrontation is the only thing restraining the West and preventing their anti-Palestinian propaganda from really reaching the Global South.

If China fully sides with Palestine, they'd be able to claim the Palestinians are just Chinese puppets (they recently tried this already by claiming Palestine is just an Iranian lackey) and that'll allow them to push propaganda that this (and all the atrocities they're abetting) isn't an anti-Muslim thing, this is just another part of confronting China (they might even claim "saving the real Palestine from the Chinese influence controlling it").

Another thing is that adding China into the mix and letting the West reframe this with their old Cold War rhetoric would eliminate the substantive progress Gaza's sacrifice has bought on the world stage. One important thing that hasn't been recognized is that the material outcome of Gaza's uprising is that it has been a massive blow against Saudi normalization efforts with Israel. The enemy of the Palestinian cause isn't just the West and Israel, but also the sellout Muslim states like Saudi Arabia, who has basically outright revealed in the past month that they'd happily abandon Palestine if it meant the US would reward them with an expanded military pact and nuclear energy development.

MBS doesn't give a fig about Palestinian suffering and he actually threw Palestine under the bus right before the uprising. Just this month, there was a rumor in the Western press that the Saudis wanted to pause the normalization talks due to Israel's refusal to give concessions for Palestine and MBS was so desperate for normalization that he literally personally went on an US interview to deny the rumor. However, his dilemma is that he has to pretend to care about Palestine because the Saudi reputation as the "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques" and the "leader" of the Islamic world is contingent on appearing to defend Palestine. Part of the consequence for this uprising is ruining the Saudi attempt at treachery. If the Saudis managed to normalize with Israel, the Palestinian movement is effectively over, because a domino effect would take place. Undoubtedly, the other Gulf monarchies like Qatar, Oman and Kuwait are waiting in the wings for the Saudis to act as the windbreaker to justify their own normalization with Israel. Gaza's uprising brought all of that to a halt and here as well, if China intervened, US propaganda that Palestine was just acting on Chinese orders would give MBS plausible deniability to resume his normalization goals.

"the London Economist, the European organ of the aristocracy of finance, described most strikingly the attitude of this class.” - Karl Marx

"The Economist, a journal that speaks for the British millionaires." - Vladimir Lenin

Having both Marx and Lenin speak out against a publication shows how this rag has been consistently on the wrong side of any struggle for the past two centuries. Their modern flashy r/designporn-bait cover designs and tidy site UI hides the sociopathy of their publication history.

For starters, the modern day sinophobia of the Economist is no surprise. They're the original China haters, and I mean that with zero exaggeration. They've been calling for war and imperialism against China for two centuries now. They lobbied in the UK for the Second Opium War using sociopathic mercantilist justifications:

"We may regret war … but we cannot deny that great advantages have followed in its wake"

It's an unsurprising stance when their founder literally earned his fortune from the forced opium trade imposed against China following the First Opium War.

The British capital-centric profit driven agenda they've followed puts them even on the wrong side of a "liberal" perspective of history. They've historically opposed the UK abolitionist movement, protesting that "the boycott they proposed of all goods made using slave labour would hurt British consumers and punish slaves."

They were the only British publication to support the Confederacy, arguing that:

"It is in the independence of the South, and not in her defeat, that we can alone look with confidence for the early amelioration and the ultimate extinction of the slavery we abhor."

In a mask-off moment, they said that the slavery issue was secondary compared to the lucratively low cotton tariffs the Confederacy could offer, which made Marx himself ridicule the rag when he wrote for the New York Daily Tribune, saying that the Economist was finally: ‘honest enough to confess at last that with it and its followers sympathy (for American emancipation) is a mere question of tariff’

Their chief editor at the time, the Confederacy apologist Bagehot, still has a "cutesy" little column named after him to this day.

Showing that they've learnt nothing in the centuries since, in a 2014 book review on a book about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, they unironically complained without a shred of self-awareness that:

"Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy."

For more further reading, the Citations Needed podcast had an episode on "The Refined Sociopathy of The Economist." https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-98-the-refined-sociopathy-of-the-economist-4966767e1688

American biotechnology companies commercially exploit genetic resources obtained at low cost from developing countries and apply for patent protection, so as to gain huge profits.

Meanwhile on CNN today: "China’s sitting on a goldmine of genetic data – and it doesn’t want to share" https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/11/china/china-human-genetic-resources-regulations-intl-hnk-dst/index.html

@ComradeEd@lemmygrad.ml @satori@hexbear.net Having gone through my own reading rabbit-hole on UN diplomacy in the past, I can clarify: The vote was on passing the "important question" scheme that the US first devised in 1961. Every time a motion in the UNGA was put forth to restore the UN seat to China, the US inserted a preliminary amendment to have the motion considered a "important question," which would require a supermajority rather than a simple majority for it to then pass. This blocked China's membership for 10 years until 1971. This is why the vote in the video has the US and its underlings voting in the affirmative and why the Assembly laughed, because by the US' turn to vote, it was already clear that the UNGA majority would reject the supermajority amendment and thus be able to restore China's membership.

The end came abruptly for the Taiwanese delegation. On October 26, 1971, the General Assembly narrowly rejected the “important question” resolution, which would have required a two-thirds majority to replace Taiwan with the Communist government. Anticipating the inevitable next step, the Taiwanese delegation walked out of the General Assembly moments before the lopsided vote that formally evicted them. In that instant, Chiang Kai-shek’s government lost all rights at the United Nations, including the coveted council seat. It was just as well that the Taiwanese had left. Many delegations broke into wild applause—and even dancing—as the results were announced. Finally, after twenty-five years of exclusion. Communist China would be in the inner sanctum.

Bosco, D. 2009. Five to Rule Them All: The UN Security Council and the Making of the Modern World. Oxford.