My sources for the preamble come mostly from here, here, and here.
The thread image depicts Kenyan police, trained by the Zionist entity, in a meeting with President Ruto before being sent to Haiti, sourced from this article.
As has been planned for the last couple years, foreign police officers have been inside Haiti for a few months now. It will surprise nobody to learn that this has not gone very well. Gangs continue to control much of the country, and violence has continued in the form of massacres and forced relocations (approximately 1.3 million). Something like 80% of the capital, Port-au-Prince, is under the control of one gang or another.
The aim by the US was to import 2500 police officers to Haiti from a wide variety of countries. One of those was Kenya; President Ruto had to fight his own country’s courts to force this through, and ironically is now apparently considering withdrawing those officers once the UN mandate expires on October 2nd. The issue here is not only the limited manpower (Haiti has a population of 12 million), but also very pedestrian things, like the fact that the officers who arrive don’t even speak the language.
The situation in Haiti appears to be a fairly standard operation of American national control, in which both battling sides are being supported by the US in order to create maximum disorganization and prevent a coherent political force from arising and thus threatening their Caribbean interests. While the US funds foreign forces to arrive in Haiti to “control the situation” or similar justifications, the Haitian gangs get their weapons smuggled in from the US itself. That this is happening alongside escalations against Venezuela is obviously not a coincidence - in a world in which American interests are being gradually shrugged off, and where the American state military is becoming rapidly more impotent and unable to dissuade and defeat even tiny states like Yemen, total imperial dominion of their immediate surrounding territory must be ensured by any means necessary.
The police and the gangs are likely designed to be mutually reinforcing, without even much kayfabe of fighting each other. As an example, once the Kenyan police arrived, they immediately began brutalizing anti-government protestors instead of focussing on gang activity. They were trained by the Zionist entity, after all.
Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
Israel's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. 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.
It may be neoliberal in some aspects but when all the land and natural resources are owned by the state, it isn’t really neoliberalism. Until there is some talk to privatize the SOEs, TVEs, natural resources and land, it’s hard to say China is truly following the neoliberal model. If anything they have adopted neo liberal accounting principles because they are primarily trading with neoliberal nations
This is quite literaly what top Chinese economists have been proposing in the recent years. Look at what someone some CPC economists themselves say.
This neoliberal garbage is what passes for mainstream economic discussion in some China circles.
You can find more if you care to actualy search for it.
I’m not going to pretend that one guy in a country of over a billion saying things is a sign of what is to come. It is no secret that there are libbed out Chinese people, even within the CPC. There has always been debate within the CPC across the whole spectrum of political thought, and when you are talking about the largest population in the world, you could surely find as many people with perspectives contrary to Zhou Tianyong as you can people who agree with him. When I say some talk, I mean the party itself, not one person. Even if his work is taken into consideration by the CPC in their planning, it will be considered along with the work of people of differing perspectives.
I am still waiting for anyone to give an explanation on why should China run an export-led growth economy by selling cheap goods to the West in exchange for accumulating financial assets that is not rooted in neoliberalism?
The exchange here is real goods and services made using Chinese labor and resources are exported to the wealthy Western (aka Global North) countries, while receiving a financial asset (foreign currency) in return that it cannot use. The only explanation one can have for this is to balance the budget. There is literally no other reason to accumulate $3.3T US dollars in your reserve. I would love to be enlightened though lol.
Also, you have to remember that any country only has to do austerity if they cannot earn enough export revenues to pay back their external debt, or to finance their own internal budget deficit (because of the need to balance the budget). This is what a lot of the post-Soviet Eastern European states faced when they opened up to liberal reforms.
A country like China with a huge labor pool easily out-competed all the other exporting countries since joining the WTO in the 2000s (remember the Four Asian Dragons?) and accumulated such a vast amount of dollars that it never had to run any austerity.
And the US was (and still is) happy to concentrate the world’s manufacturing capacity in China because it renders all the other exporting countries in the Global South vulnerable to US imperialism. Those are the countries who end up having to take IMF loans when their economies fail.
Most of the SOEs have already been privatized in the 1990s.
Remember the 5-6-7-8-9 rule of private sector. It’s very easy to remember.
Private enterprises contribute:
50% of the national tax revenue.
60% of GDP, fixed capital investment and external investment.
70% of high tech industries.
80% of urban employment, and
90% of new jobs creation
There are about 70 million people working in the public sector, and most people work for private companies. The other - the bottom 40% - most of whom living in the rural area, are screwed the worst though.
I’m not arguing for or against the model I’m just saying the economy at large isn’t neoliberal when land itself can’t even be owned privately, all the natural resources are publicly owned, and the majority of the economy is publicly owned. That isn’t what neoliberalism is. There may be a subsection of the economy that is running entirely on neoliberal principles in order to interact with a world economy that is neoliberal but that is not the same thing.
Except for the countries taking loans from China instead of IMF. there are many talks on youtube from people who negotiated directly with China for their own nations like Gyude Moore, Yanis Varoufakis, and others giving insight about how they were able to get better arrangements via China, the first avenue to circumvent IMF and World Bank that has been available in the modern era. Let us not pretend that before reform and opening up the global south was not vulnerable to US imperialism, and it was China’s economic model that made them vulnerable suddenly. Framing things in this way seems knowingly misleading to me. China is not responsible for US imperialism, and China’s model is the only one that has offered an alternative since the fall of the USSR, which they have only been able to do at the scale they have because of their economic model. It is obvious that China has built up their own productive capacity to the point that they have been able to spread that around to dozens of other nations.
and yet over half the economy is still SOEs, not even counting TVEs. The majority of the economy is publicly owned. That’s simply not neoliberalism. There is no argument that can say that a majority publicly owned economy is neoliberalism. It is literally antithetical to neoliberalism to have a majority publicly owned economy. On top of that, all the major private companies have CPC bodies within them monitoring and guiding their decision making. This is again, antithetical to neoliberalism.
and most Chinese private companies have less than 10 employees. Let us not pretend that this is some neoliberal model. Does every wet market, street vendor, and house cleaner need to be publicly owned? Does it make sense right now for every city to directly control how many bowls of noodles get sold on the street corner? The idea that “most people work in the private sector” is a very specific way of phrasing this, it alludes to a false notion that a capitalist class is controlling the workers, instead of some mom and pop shop mostly staffed by people who are related to each other or live in the same neighborhood. In the very beginning of socialist transition, I don’t think a bunch of Chinese people having small businesses in their local communities is a warning sign that China is slipping into neoliberalism, into an economic model that is driven entirely by private interests for the purpose of profit seeking above all else.
A lot of unsubstantiated claims but you still haven’t answered the main question:
Why should China run a huge trade surplus economy just to accumulate financial assets (e.g. dollars) that they cannot use? What is the point of that, if not a neoliberal economic model?
Why is it NOT neoliberalism when there is a net flow of actual goods and services (made by Chinese labor and resources that should have been used to improve the lives of the people domestically) to the Global North countries over decades? Think in real terms of trade!
Why does the Chinese government have to balance the budget? Why can’t it directly run the deficit to directly raise the income of the working people so they actually have money to spend? Why can’t it provide jobs guarantee to the high rate of youth unemployment right now? Again, think in real terms of the economy.
You can say all you want about public vs private sector and how many mom and pop shops there are in China (again, lots of misinformation there) but you still haven’t gotten to the core of the issues that truly reflect the economic policies being run in China today (e.g. why is there “overcapacity”? why is there deflation? why are people reluctant to spend money?). You need to answer those questions in order to argue that this is not an economic model rooted in neoliberal thinking.
Please explain how are these countries going to earn the RMB to pay back to the Chinese creditors if China is running a trade surplus against them? China has been reducing its net import (domestic consumption is low), which means there are even less RMB out there for countries to earn from.
Yes, they are getting better terms from the Chinese creditors, but they still have to sell to wealthy Western countries to pay back their Chinese creditors.
If the loan was dollar-denominated, then they will have to earn USD or exchange whatever currencies they earned for USD in the first place.
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Ok, I’m actually confused now - knowing this fact - what leverage of the proletarian dictatorship does the party have over Capital to even register call it socialist, let alone communist nation-state? You know what - I may have to give BynarsAreOkay some credit I guess -
State-owned enterprises give very good benefits, although the jobs are limited. Ten years ago few people would want to join the SOEs because they are somewhat career limiting - you might be working the same job with little promotion for a couple decades for the rest of your adult life. These days, with an economic downturn, people compete to join SOEs because there is at least stability in employment and you get decent wages and benefits. Better to stay employed for the next 20 years doing a boring job than to get laid off in the private sector.
You can also join the civil servant, which requires you to take the national civil servant exam (考公). Once you are “in the system”, you will have stable employment for the rest of your life with decent benefits as well. However, the spots are extremely limited. In 2022, there were over 2 million people (!) competing for 30k spots - the intake ratio was 68-to-1.