Image is from this Black Agenda Report article by the Communist Party of Kenya.
In June, large anti-government protests shook Kenya. President Ruto and his parliament were attempting to pass the new Finance Bill 2024, which, among other things, would have hiked taxes on the population, with a 16% sales tax on bread and a 25% duty on cooking oil, as well as new taxes on financial transanctions and vehicle ownership. There would also have been levies on women's sanitary products and digital goods such as phones, among other measures affecting hospitals.
Hundreds of protestors stormed the parliament building and began to tear the place apart. Shortly afterwards, on June 26th, Ruto announced that he was withdrawing the bill, calling the tens of deaths and hundreds of injuries "unfortunate". A couple weeks later, Ruto then fired his entire cabinet (aside from his foreign minister) and communicated his wish to the nation to form a "broad-based government". Funnily enough, in July, it was announced that the majority of positions were to be filled by members of the old cabinet, while other positions were taken by members of the opposition. This has prompted scepticism among the population, including calls to resign, but there haven't (yet) been any major anti-government events to pressure this outcome. The Communist Party of Kenya has been working to get some of their comrades back after they were abducted by the police during the protest period, and have otherwise supported the protests against Ruto.
The measures in the bill were strongly encouraged by the IMF. Kenya's debt is currently around $80 billion, of which about 10% is owed to China for infrastructure projects (such as a railway linking the capital, Nairobi, to the port city of Mombasa, as well as 11,000 kilometers of road throughout the country). The rest is owed to a combination of the US, IMF, World Bank, and Saudi Arabia. More than half of government revenue is going towards repaying the debt - but despite these massive payments, it has only grown. The most recent round of IMF plundering (and the impetus for current events) began in 2021, when they offered a 38-month programme to "help" Kenya, which would involve the usual warfare on the poor and the dismemberment of any useful societal institutions.
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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 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.
Yes, but many 'communists' take 'no war but class war' so literally that they advocate against the wars of oppressed nations against the oppressor nations, due to them being not socialist (and even then).
they also tend to be the kind of people that advocate for, say, the Palestinian and Israeli working class to join together to overthrow their respective bourgeoisie. just very tedious people who think of the world in such abstract terms that they're useless (at least, until they learn/experience more)
Usually you can break through to these people by bringing up Iraq and Vietnam wars, since opposition to these wars is so ubiquitous in the west even among the ultras and radlibs.
If it really is “no war but class war” then are they saying that they don’t critically support the Vietnamese and Iraqi populations defending themselves from invasion? They are equally in need of opposition as American invaders? Really?
yeah, I think it's an okay slogan during times of impending/ongoing war when the critique is implied to be directed at a war in particular, as in "we shouldn't be invading X country, we should be fighting our bourgeoisie" but as a general piece of analysis outside of those contexts, I think it's useless or perhaps even worse than useless. it flattens all violence and conflicts into either justified and should be supported (class war) or unjustified and should be opposed (everything else, from the Soviets fighting the Nazis to liberate concentration camps, to colonized people fighting for their independence). a supporter of the phrase would probably be like "well, we obviously think the Soviets fighting the Nazis was justified, that even kinda counts as class war" but once you start down that pathway, every war can be described as a class war if one simply uses a wider definition of "class" than simply "proletariat" and "bourgeoisie".
it's only a single step above the sort of timid pacifism one sees from time to time in Westerners (though I imagine all countries have these kinds of people), where the violence inherent in the system is seen as so legitimate that it's not even seen as violence anymore, and so people fighting against it and for a better world are denounced for not "doing it right". and, weirdly enough, the wars started by foreign Bad Countries always receives orders of magnitude more attention and opposition than those started by Western countries, which are generally seen as (to a greater or lesser extent) humanitarian but simply misguided/overly prolonged.
See, my reading of the quote is that it means working class people need to stop fighting each other in many ways. Hatred between different working class groups is mostly the fault of the fascist rich pitting us against each other so we won’t eat them instead.
The capitalists want the working class to blame each other for their problems instead of recognizing the real problem, them.
What Palestinian bourgeoisie? Find me a single Palestinian in the state of Palestine that has over 2 million dollars. Happy to be proven wrong here.
They're usually talking about Hamas, I think
huh, that's interesting