On December 4th, Rwanda's Paul Kagame and the DRC's Felix Tshisekedi signed the Washington Accords for Peace and Prosperity (pictured above). Trump boasted that he was settling a war that had gone on for decades, and remarked, idiosyncratically, "[...] and now they’re going to spend a lot of time hugging, holding hands [...]"
A few days later, the M23 militia (backed by Rwanda) advanced into Uvira, a city near the DRC's eastern border with Burundi and a major commercial and strategic location in the region. Burundi, although a small country, is a significant ally to the DRC and has sent thousands of soldiers to aid them during conflicts; this offensive by M23 aims to cut off a direct route between the two, though they do still share quite a long border over Lake Tanganyika. Tens of thousands of civilians (possibly up to 200,000) fled as M23 approached.
Signed almost simultaneously with the Accords was a Strategic Partnership Agreement between the DRC and the United States, which effectively threw open its critical minerals in the east to American exploitation. These minerals include tin, tungsten, and tantalum, which is vital for many industries. The irony is that M23 has been taking territory in the eastern DRC in order to transport these very minerals to Rwanda and onwards to global supply chains. Signing the Accord was, therefore, a remarkably pointless endeavour for everybody involved. Burundi and the DRC have complained, calling for sanctions on Rwanda, and appeasing to Trump's pride, calling this a "slap in the face to the United States", though I doubt the US is ultimately all that bothered about it one way or another.
Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The Zionist Entity'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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
Retail sales in China broke the 2% floor in November. The worst figure since abandoning Zero Covid in early 2023 (or, since a very long time ago):
Month-on-month retail sales plunged to 1.3%, making the year-on-year growth down to ~4%:
Monthly breakdown:
Most significantly, car sales have plummeted (light blue - car sales; dark blue - retail excluding cars):
Deflation does not make things more affordable. On the contrary, deflation reduces wages, and ended up making things more unaffordable.
The official explanation is that 2024 ended on a high base figure, but it is clear that with the government subsidies removed in the second half of the year, the people are most unwilling to spend more than what is necessary, if they are not already in austerity.
This explains for the most part the very aggressive export strategy to make up for the plunging property and consumer markets at home.
However, with news from last week including Mexico imposing 50% tariffs against Chinese goods and the EU complaining and starting to take measures about their soaring trade deficit against China, the signs are showing that the world may not be able to absorb Chinese export goods for long. We can only imagine how much worse it is for the smaller economies across the world.
This, in turn, will worsen the financial distress for the exporter countries around the world, and making it harder for many Global South countries to earn the dollars to service their foreign debt.
Remember when everyone was laughing at Trump tariffing the penguins back in April? Well, laugh no more, because soon we’re all going to have to pay for the economic costs. Still can’t believe Trump got the tariff strategy to work, but it is even more astonishing to see the rest of the world having no clue how to retaliate against the US.
Now do you finally see why China’s domestic consumer market is such an important piece of the puzzle to stop US financial imperialism?
The US is going to try to force China into a massive multi-front proxy war in Asia while cutting them off from the world economy, within a few years.
Why not milk exports while you still can? And civilian consumption is not very helpful for a war effort.
As I wrote in response to your question in the previous thread, why is there a need to accumulate trade surplus?
All of that $1 trillion worth of Chinese goods could sink at sea during their shipment and it would not matter one bit for the financial situation in China. It’s just a number, or think another way, a high score in a video game.
It is a choice to tie your own financial situation to the score you get in a video game. Just like you can still live completely normally if you don’t get a good score in a video game today, there is literally no need for the Chinese government to do so, except for a belief in neoliberal ideology.
Put another way, Chinese labor and resources are being spent on creating something that the Chinese people themselves could not enjoy, but merely getting in return for the equivalent of a high score in a video game. A misallocation of capital, labor and resources.
Export is meant to exchange for goods you cannot produce at home. But in the post-Bretton Woods era, under neoliberal ideology, it has become a belief system that you need to accumulate a certain number before you can invest domestically, otherwise you will run a high deficit which is very bad. The price is the working class in the Global South having to work harder and lowering their own domestic purchasing power in exchange for a number they cannot use, and will never use. An imperialist extraction of the surplus values from the Global South.
The problem is not just China though - it’s everyone wanting to run a trade surplus because they have bought into the IMF ideology (“you need to reach this score in the game before you’re allowed to eat dinner!”), and this is what makes the dollar hegemony so powerful, because the dollar is that score, of which any number can be easily typed simply through keystrokes.
This is fundamentally different from the previous Bretton Woods and gold standard eras when accumulating foreign currencies through trade surpluses actually get you gold, which is a tangible and finite commodity. The dollars can be created simply out of thin air, and this is what allows the US to get unlimited free lunch. The key to the solution is to stop believing in this nonsense, which the world finds very difficult to pull themselves away from.
I think all countries are in a bind due to neoliberal hegemony. Being able to export a lot and accumulate currency via trade imbalances is the measure of success. Even the countries which benefit from the exploitation of the Global South like those of Europe, Japan and the United States also have this reflexive idea in their political consensus and end up making a lot of unnecessary missteps along the way. Europe should not be practicing austerity, it should not have cut off their neo-colonial relationship with Russia and it should just continue profitting, financially, from importing the fruits of cheap labour and selling it at an European Brand markup. And yet it endangers all of these things.
There is an understanding at least in discourse everywhere that the export driven models of the 1980s do not work any more; that some level of import substitution is economically desirable in the poor south and politically necessary in the wealth west. But it's all just words because financialized accumulation is how you measure success in the rich world and export driven imbalances is how you measure success in the global south.
China is of course on its own league when it comes to the export driven success as demanded by western institutions but its not the only example of such success. Brazil is in as miserable place as ever but it is also a best case scenario compared to, say, Argentina - where debt remains dollarized. And looking at Brazilian history, the last time the export driven paradigm was broken was due to 1929 and the Interwar Period. The Brazilian Elites had been talking about creating a 'national bourgeoisie' and implementing a form of national capitalism for a whole generation up to that point, but nothing was ever done until the 1930s murdered the landowner's ability to monopolize power and pushed the entire fabric of society to the brink.
Nevermind COVID or the Trade Wars. From where I'm standing China will talk about raising domestic consumption until raising domestic consumption is the only avenue for value creation.
Keeping the treats flowing means that China gets to keep and grow the industrial capacity required to produce them, which is important both for geopolitical leverage and potential military production.
You could say that China should boost its domestic consumption as well, but then there might not be enough surplus during wartime which could force even worse austerity.
I do admit that my analysis is pretty vibes-based, and I'm not much of an economics understander, but I want to believe in China. Even if they do stick to neoliberalism after their confrontation with the US, at least their non-interventionism will allow other socialist countries to thrive.
Then why not directly allocate the labor and resources to prioritize the domestic sector? Why not use it to raise the living standards of the people directly?
Why would you need to spend a significant portion of your labor and resources on creating cheap goods for Western consumers to earn their currencies before you are allowed to prioritize your own people?
And we’ve seen the outcome of this export-led growth strategy: deflation, wage stagnation/reduction, low purchasing power, which ultimately led to low domestic consumption. Meanwhile, foreign countries are enjoying the cheap goods Chinese labor are breaking their backs to produce while enduring longer working hours and increasing retirement age, with near zero annual leave.
It looks like the leverage is on the US hands, who simply has to put up tariffs to force China’s export sector to divert elsewhere. Meanwhile, the mercantilism is sending every other country to sell their goods to the US in desperation to make up for their growing trade deficit with China. I don’t see any geopolitical leverage at all. It is the Chinese people who are absorbing the costs.
Honestly, I suspect a lot of Westerner leftists support China because they secretly enjoy the cheap goods from China, and not really support the Chinese workers to get the fair share of their own labor.
Anyone here seriously believe that working 26-28 days a month for 10-12 hours is a good deal? If your impression of China stops at the flashy infrastructure, then you’re missing a huge part of the picture. These are the people who make your iPhones and all the cheap gadgets you are consuming. Shifting away from the export sector will actually allow the workers to get more rest and recreation time to spend with their families.
I can only speak for myself, but I assure you that isn't true. I'm just trying to take China's actions (and lack thereof) in good faith. I want to believe the CPC is still secretly communist and only doing neoliberalism to build productive forces.
I wasn’t accusing you of anything, don’t worry. I think that paragraph lacks context, see my response here to another commenter for a more detailed explanation.
I think almost every Western leftist is exhausted by the flow of cheap, socially useless commodities and would prefer much less of that shit be imported. Anti-consumerism is usually the very first seed of anti-capitalism in the States because it's the most obvious. Our society is religiously obsessed with consumption that makes our lives hollow and provides nothing of value. We are surrounded by an incomprehensible, unending whirlwind of advertising that makes us fucking bonkers. This is shit teenagers understand.
"Western leftists" or "leftists in the west"? Because the breadtube/jacobin read crowd never really supported china, until like very very recently when it became so obvious that china is leaving the west in the dust and nobody wants to be friends with a loser, so they switched rhetoric. And honestly china is marketing itself as a stabilizing force creating a world build on the same principles as now, but without forever wars, so the "saviors of capitalism" aka socdems find it more palpate to become "friends with china".
While marxists in the west at worst called the PRC a revisionist capitalist empire and adopted ultraleft positions and best had a naive wish fulfillment view of china, where they basically do the socialist world revolution for them and bring socialism onto their shores. But cheap treats from china, were never really a talking point, mayhaps from the more cynical economical literate minority but this faction is part of the greater breadtube co-prosperity sphere and not Marxists in the west.
Maybe “support” was not the right word, but I meant that Western leftists want China to keep the status quo because they seem to have forgotten that their endless flow of cheap treats actually come from migrant workers who work 10-12 hours for 6-7 days a week with very little access to public services that urban citizens enjoy.
Remember that there are 280-300 million migrant workers who are the true underclass in China that produce your iPhones, build infrastructure all over the country yet they have very little rights compared to the middle class that are enjoying the fruits of those labor. They have restricted access to healthcare, pension, housing and education for their kids despite working in the same cities as the urban citizens.
The irony here is that the government simply has to raise the income of this group of people to solve the low consumption problem. But clearly, they won’t.
That’s my point. It’s already embedded into their status quo thinking. When they think of China’s incredible industrial output, who do they think are the driving force behind that? It’s not the people from affluent upper middle class lifestyle you watch on Douyin (Chinese TikTok).
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i find Xiaohongshu's analysis interesting from time to time but these random-ass passing comments they sprinkle in just reveal that they're from one of those types of rare combative tendencies and that they spend their time shadow-boxing made up guys, lol
I think it’s a paragraph that’s easily misinterpreted because I didn’t provide the context. And I apologize for that.
As I wrote in another response, maybe “support” wasn’t the right word to use, but there is an implicit consensus that Western leftists want China to keep the status quo because they either forget or completely ignore the fact that it took an entire underclass of migrant workers to sustain China’s vast economic output.
When you think of China’s incredible industrial prowess and the amazing infrastructure, who do you think are the driving force behind this? I can assure you that it’s not the affluent middle class kids you watch on Chinese social media.
There are 280-300 million migrant workers in China (nearly the entire population of the US) who are mostly invisible to not just to the Westerners who admire China’s incredible development, but even among the Chinese middle class themselves. These people have limited access to housing, healthcare, education, pension and public services despite working and living in the same cities as the urban citizens.
And yet this is the true underclass of workers in China that are making your iPhones, that are building all those amazing infrastructure that the middle class is enjoying the fruits of their labor from.
This is also where the “90% house ownership in China” myth comes from. It’s because when your hukou registration is in the rural area, the municipal governments do not have to provide you with access to those public services in the cities. You are technically not a resident of the city, only a migrant/visiting worker, because you technically have a home back in your provincial town/village that your parents own.
Again I can assure you that when people think of China’s amazing development, not just foreigners but even many local middle class folks, they almost certainly never think about this huge underclass of migrant workers who are behind this. And thats my point.
Ironically, in order to solve the low consumption problem, it is these people who need to be taken care of. And simply by raising their income (which will include China giving up its net exporter status), the huge potential of its domestic consumption market can be unleashed.
Whenever I see Xiaohongshu talking about something I know about, they are often obviously incorrect. I don't know as much about China as they claim to but I have no reason to believe it's any more coherent than the shit I know they're wrong about
What are those things that are incorrect? I’d love to be corrected and learn from you. Thank you.
Generally speaking, they're the posts like this one where you make some wild statement and get pushback from multiple users. I know I've commented on some of them. Forgive me for not wanting to spend my time digging through your post history to win an internet argument.
This is not about winning internet arguments though. This is a discussion forum for us to share our knowledge. Nobody is winning any points here lol. (And I’m mostly here to practice my English and share things I don’t often see reported outside of China)
If you know something that I’m obviously wrong, please do share. I read most comments responded to me and try to learn from them. Since you said it’s about things you know about, I simply thought I’d ask.
I think there's a different reason for why you don't see a lot of Westerners, or more broadly speaking the members of the so called Middle Class, pay attention to the issues workers face. Is because they have never experienced them. It's not that they "secretly" enjoy cheap goods, it's just a fact that the exploitation of workers directly benefit their interests. And they've never had to work in a sweatshop, they never had their family members work in one, they don't know what's it like to lose your family to being overworked.
Just look at how much attention they pay to War Heroes like Zaitsev or Lady Death. Meanwhile I have never even seen any of them even Mention Stakhanovite movement. Do they even know who Stakhanov is? Westerners just want to automate this work, which isn't inherently a bad thing I've worked in a farm before and I would not want to do it again, but the issue is they just don't care what happens when the worker is no longer needed. They can say they care, but words are meaningless without action, none of the theory they care about so much would mean anything, was it not for the workers who put it into practice and built these amazing cities.
Just like you have said I have seen those workers left abandoned in desperate situation and having to rely on Charity, in Chinese cities. Same as they have been abandoned in cities where I live. It is a great shame veterans of labor are treated like this.
"Enjoy" really depends on who and what. A lot of local industries are getting crushed by China flooding the market, so it doesn't even benefit them long term. Hence some countries like Mexico you mentioned, setting up protective measures for their local industries. Sure consumers like Chinese goods, but it's short sighted. And also one sided because a lot of these countries can't offer China anything that China wants, or China simply says no even if we have something we could export to China. That's another thing lack of domestic consumption in China influences. If China had more domestic consumption, they'd be more willing to import goods.
South Africa has had to turn to Europe as someone to export goods to, because of US tarrifs exporting to the US is not competitive, and China simply not wanting to import more South African goods as South Africa's trade deficit with China grows and grows.
I just struggle to see who this merry go round benefits long term aside from capitalists.. Chinese workers toil away to make goods for export, said goods crush local markets outside of China which hurts workers there. China doesn't want to import more due to lack of domestic consumption, so the trade imbalance between China and foreign nations grows and grows, and foreign countries have to find other markets for their goods, at the moment it's Europe because of US tarrifs. But Europe could also implement tarrifs and protectionist measures down the line, and then the merry go round continues.
So is fiat currency backed by military threat rather than gold reserves?
The CPC is at least aware of the issue of slagging domestic consumption, judging by their goals of the next Five-Year Plan. The question for me now is, what steps will they take to try and address this? Maintaining a devaluated currency and relying more and more on exports of manufactured goods is clearly not helping, but as you have pointed out before the issue is the political will to move away from this neoliberal mindset that came out of the reform and opening up era.
On top of that, you also have the CPC’s almost stubborn adherence to a non-interventionist foreign policy, which is not just born out of ideological pragmatism but also because changing the current economic strategy risks antagonizing the US, which jeopardizes the ability to maintain non-aggression towards the global hegemon.
China has essentially backed itself into a corner where it can’t solve an economic issue without fundamentally changing how it views itself as a world leader, and its official ideological line on “the new era”.
I feel the next 5-10 years will be the most interesting but also the most critical for the continuation of China’s socialist project.
At this point I am convinced that neoliberalism has achieved total propaganda victory.
I mean, Russia is literally at war with the Collective West and they still couldn’t abandon neoliberalism. China is literally under unprecedented sanctions from the US and they cannot imagine a system that works without neoliberalism. BRICS+ just reaffirmed their support for the IMF, World Bank and WTO during the Rio summit this year and vowed to defend neoliberal free trade ideology even without the US.
Even if the US economy were to collapse tomorrow, all the BRICS+ countries will voluntarily transfuse blood to keep the US economy alive, because they cannot imagine a future without the US consumer market.
Eh. If China has to learn the lesson against neoliberalism by fire, it will, it is the only country I trust to do so. Will it cause distress to the masses? Probably. But if it is the only way Chinese socialism can evolve, then it is the way it will.