Image is sourced from this article.
It takes very little effort to find an article from Western state propaganda decrying Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas as authoritarian and rife with human rights abuses. This is the natural reaction the US has to any successful liberation movement. This fairly long report from Jason Cohen, a socialist who travelled to Nicaragua one week ago, should quell any suspicions.
He describes a country with high political consciousness among the masses, who are working to construct critical infrastructure for the country and their communities. There is a virtual education system that is free across the entire nation, which serves the dual goal of democratizing education and ensuring that those in rural areas or without much free time for university can still achieve degrees and a quality education; and these classes cover technical skills in the production of infrastructure and agriculture, but also political and ideological education in order to counter the fascist propaganda produced by imperialist nations abroad.
While Nicaragua is deeply invested in its nationality and national figures who led to their socialist revolution, such as Sandino, they are also immensely proud of their indigneous history, recognizing it as also part of their anti-colonial history which continues to the present day. Additionally, they honour the struggles of other nations on the continent, such as the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, as well as Castro in Cuba and Allende in Chile. Countries around the world are also celebrated and admired, such as Burkina Faso; during the Reagan administration, Nicaragua and Burkina Faso were comrades in arms, and now Traore is continuing the legacy of Sankara’s anti-imperialism in the present. Perhaps most relevant today is their dedication towards Palestine, involving the creation of the Parque Palestina (shown in the post image), in which the Palestinian flag flies alongside the flag of Nicaragua. In July, Leila Khaled of the PFLP gave a speech in Nicaragua, in which the solidarity of the two nations was highlighted.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you’ve wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don’t worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Nicaragua! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.
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.
First Russia-China Barter Trade May Come This Autumn, Sources Say from Naked Capitalism
As the commentary on NC said, this is bad. Chinese banks have finally succumbed to US secondary sanctions and have massively disrupted import flows into Russia. Barter, or crypto, or gold, are all highly inefficient mechanisms to get around the fundamental problems underlying the secondary sanctions imposed on businesses trading with Russia.
Russia got too comfortable with the mild sanctions effect in the first two years that they actually believed they can rely on China forever. They are now paying the price.
Of course, Russia is in a unique position (energy/food secure, low external debt) to overcome this - through war communism. In fact, you can even say that Russia is probably the only country in the world that has the conditions and the capacity to fully resist Western imperialist sanctions, but that requires mobilization economy (war communism) and many people aren’t going to like it.
So, they can choose to wait for the sanctions to get bad enough that people would rather flee the country, or mobilize the economy immediately which will also scare off enough people to flee the country. In either case, Russia’s demographic crisis just got so much worse.
And because the libs won’t actually mobilize the economy, the US has practically won the financial war on the European front. All it takes is for Ukraine to sacrifice itself. Next stop - China.
This may end up happening but it kinda feels like “Russia/China will collapse any day now” rhetoric we get all the time.
Didn’t Putin and Xi meet like a day or two ago? One imagines that a Russian economic depression is bad for China as well, and that there is significant collaboration going on beyond what’s publicly announced.
YS is such a BRICS doomer she’ll read something completely from “anonymous sources” in Reuters with the only data suggesting it’s actually not an issue
And uncritically use it because it supports her view that the dollar basically can’t be defeated
I am posting only one source in English but have been following the Russian readouts since 2022.
You should realize that Russia-China trade is hugely imbalanced at this time - Russia’s export to China is 13 TIMES higher than its import from China (in metric tons of mass). With the secondary sanctions starting just in the last few months, it is anticipated to fall even further. All the Russia-China trade turnovers posted seem like things are doing great, but if you inspect closely these news often don’t look as rosy as they seem.
It is not that dollar cannot be defeated, but because nobody is mounting a challenge against the dollar. The yuan is the only currency at this moment that has the capacity to defeat the dollar, but that would require China giving up its long privilege of enjoying being a huge trade surplus (super net exporter) status, and you can see why China would be hesitant to do so. As such, the dollar continues to win, because nobody wanted to face the problem head on and everyone keeps dragging their feet thinking it will somehow return to normal soon.
Inaction is what the US had gambled the rest of the world would do, and it might just turn out to be right .
Isn’t that expected if Russia is exporting minerals and oil, etc, and importing items like electronics? Seems like an odd metric to choose.
Russia and China aren’t going to collapse lol. But it does mean that the critical window to challenge the US hegemony has passed. We are slowly returning to the “status quo”, in quotation marks because everything will only get worse from here and unlikely to avoid the consequences of climate change.
We’re also seeing that either the Chinese government has less control over its own banks than we previously thought, or they believe that the economic benefits of trading with Western countries still far outweigh a closer relationship with Russia (a very tiny economy compared to the collective West), indicative of their inability to wean off an export-oriented economy.
In any case, China has been unwilling to challenge the dollar with yuan, which likely is the main reason why the US can continue to prevail in the first place. The US is calling everyone’s bluffs, and the gambit seems to be paying off.
IMO this is actually a good thing for socialism and potentially signals China’s long-term commitment to it. Of course it would also be great if the dollar were replaced, but replaced with what is very important.
If the yuan were internationalized, China couldn’t impose the kind of strong capital controls which have allowed it to develop the economy toward socialism while retaining markets to a (likely necessary) degree. Further, there would be much greater incentive to export capital internationally rather than use it domestically, which could lead to a kind of social imperialism.
The synthesis of maintaining capital controls and dehegemonizing the dollar IMO is that the dollar is replaced not by another single nation’s currency (which is just a different kind of unipolarity, after all), but instead by an international currency like the Bancor proposal.
(A dual-circuit thing like the USSR under Stalin would be better for transitioning away from money itself ofc, but I have no clue how that would work across borders and it seems impossible that any capitalist countries would accept such a system. If the world got to that point, socialism as a world-system would have practically already won)
I used to hold this position for a long time, but now my view has since completely changed.
So many Chinese and Russian economists have worked on de-dollarization over the past two years and it is now clearer than ever that dethroning the dollar is extremely difficult, and having a basket of currencies means more fragility to the financial system. There is a reason we see so little advances on this front - and I’ve been following closely the news on de-dollarization for the last 2.5 years!
I now fully believe that only the yuan has the capacity to defeat the dollar, and only then is it possible to transition into a Bancor-like system. Both require China to give up its net exporter position, and I can see why China is most unwilling to give up the privilege that has allowed it to develop rapidly and alleviate poverty, at the expense of suppressing development in the rest of the Global South.
I love your posts assuming you’re the most recent alt but good lord this is just silly
the banks are fully state owned what the hell are they talking about lmao
My hunch is that it’s the later. It tracks with all the other moves China has made in recent years, where trade with the west is prized over potentially harming that trade with “hostile” moves like de-dollarization.
This whole talk about the optimal time for dedollarization is ultimately cope that anti-imperialism/decolonialization/counter-hegemony will be a largely bloodless affair. If only it were so easy that the US will be dislodged from its throne from fiscal decisions.
Not bloodless, but the least damaging. There is now increasing consensus among historians that if Stalin had invaded Germany in 1937, it could very well have stopped WWII altogether as Germany was still weaker than the USSR at the time. However, Stalin decided not to, and by 1941 the Nazis caught the USSR in the middle of large scale military reorganization after the purge, and inflicted heavy damage on the Eastern Front. Stalin at one point was even naive enough into thinking that they could somehow persuade the Nazis into keep delaying their invasion, but that was never going to happen. So, you either take the initiative when the opportunity arises, or you wait until crisis becomes imminent.
There has been a lot of chat among the “multipolar bloggers” that have somehow deluded themselves into thinking that the dollar will destroy itself, the US will go bankrupt and collapse etc, while ignoring that the US financial system is waging a very active war against all its competitors at the same time at this very moment. If nobody is mounting a strong challenge against the dollar, it will end up shaping the world according to the interests of US imperialism.
The USSR was in the midst of preparing for the invasion that happened. It was the Nazis, not the Soviets, who were surprised in the Eastern Front. At the highest levels of Nazi leadership they thought they would Blitzkrieg and win in 1-2 months. A few weeks in and they began writing letters in awe of Russian production, strategy, and tactics.
The Nazis blitzed across Ukraine with the aid of the landscape and a Red Army that was more than willing to give ground in order to secure better positions rather than get routed by the Blitzkrieg itself, which depended on pushing deep and placing enemy troops in a position to be completely flanked and destroyed or just ignored and useless.
It was this prepared and careful Red Army that defeated the Nazis.
The idea that the USSR was unprepared is a holdover from Kruschev’s bullshitting against Stalin such as his “Secret Speech”.
PS if the USSR had managed to invade Germany despite the countries between them, you would have seen a WWII with the liberal states joining the fascists to destroy the USSR. The liberal states had been hemming and hawing about Nazi expansion because they were moving East, after all, and might take care of the Red Menace for them. They did not expect the Western front.
The USSR could have never been able to invade Germany even if it was a 1v1, Stalin knew the USSR was weak in productive power again Germany who keeped most of its industry, thats why he told france he would join them in the defence of checoslovakia because he knew he could only with with the support of an imperial power and an industrial power (the cheks) against a militarized germany
the USSR had absolute superiority it all categories in 1937, there were more t-26s alone than every armored vehicle germany had in 1937. t-26 & BT models were both superior to panzer Is. the newest german aircraft were better but the soviets had an order of magnitude more
the intractable problem was poland, who would in no circumstances agree without that full backing, and probably strong-arming from the british & french. poland + nazis vs USSR + czechoslovakia would still have been a winning matchup imo but more complicated, riskier, and longer
This is something I absolutely agree with. I’m starting to honestly think the “multipolarity analysts” are basically doing the work of the enemy in a lot of ways by obfuscating how far US empire is willing to go to defend the dollar. Spreading false hope that dedollarization will happen at the push of a button.
The global finance system is no less dangerous and no less weaponized than the 800 US military bases around the planet.
there is really two large camps im noting in the ‘multipolarity’ camp, that being socialists just noting the changing hegemon as a way to advance socialism, and ‘national bourgeoisie’ enthusiasts who are analyzing current events to find some different places to put their money.
the critical window has not arrived yet. every other cycle of accumulation has undergone a gradual geographic transition of the core only after the extant capitalist system was thoroughly in the process of collapsing in on itself, heralded mostly by a withering in overall trade volume and corresponding with widespread conflict and a retreat into everyone’s respective national economies
so basically, we’re waiting for the us to sanction/declare war on china
in the meantime, so long as the powers behind the us political classes remain incapable of formulating a new framework of hegemony, the dollar will only continue to decline, taking the world economy along with it
Or there is the simple fact that China allied with the west during the cold war and is viewing America’s sudden interest in domestic chip production as a quiet preparation for surrender of Taiwan.
there was never a “critical window” imo, it was always going to be a gradual process just like the transition between the sterling and the dollar was. and even that wasn’t a process of linear gains; things went the dollar’s way until the Great Depression fucked it over and then it seemed like the pound might be there to stay, and then WW2 starts and things turn against the pound again, etc.
honestly I should write something up at some point about how the pound sterling (and the gold standard, once you reach the 1970s) fell once I’ve completed more reading, I think it’s a fairly comparable process. hell, maybe something on the whole British Empire.
I have recently finished Radhika Desai’s chapters in her book Capitalism, Coronavirus, and War: A Geopolitical Economy where she mentions a brief history of the fall of the Sterling. I’m sure you’ve already read it being the news-guy, so I’d definitely be excited to read a follow up on those chapters or the sources she has cited - especially since finance goes over my head and I’d like for it to make sense.
This tracks. Deeply unfortunate and sad.
Sanctions are basically equivalent to WMD’s and should be treated as such.
This is entirely expected, but it wasn’t a “mistake”. The entire dedollarization rhetoric is a relic of 2022 when it was looking like China was actualy willing to take an independent and adversarial stance against the west. This meant BRICS could have been a viable alternative for a multipolar world under Chinese leadership. Maybe if China continued on that path and decided 2022-2025 would be the time period to settle the Taiwan question using BRICS as their defensive bloc.
Instead of course we get the opposite. The west complained, a Pelosi humiliated them and the media called them “wolf warriors” then everything took a 180 turn. China since then reassured the west that they wont even try to use BRICS as their own bloc/platform and that they only want “collaboration” and “peace”.
I’ll quote MR way from April '23 where he basicaly confirms all these “difficulties” with dedollarization(putting it mildly)
spoiler
Ouch
Since the stupid embarrassing Xi-Biden meeting in Nov '23(which happened over a month after Oct 7th and after everyone knew what the Gaza genocide looked like), China says US bad for everyone that wants to hear. Then they turn around and literaly welcome the same people we call nazis here. They are following through with what they say, like it or not.
I think dedollarization is still possible but it requires commitment to creating a crisis for the global economy and sadly nobody wants that. Sadly atm there is not much to look forward to, there is no indication China will change their stance.
glad to get another dose of anti-hopium from the mega
Personaly climate change is still the main issue. The data showed the COVID lockdowns were similar to what would be necessary to avoid 1.5C.
At the bare minimum if you wanted to be “civil” about it, we would need global governments to completely enforce a survival mode only economic system, no economic activity beyond the stritcly necessary.
On that front China should absolutely be praised as they’re literaly the only ones improving massively, but unfortunately its not enough, the longer we take the more drastic measures would be necessary. Crazy to think but its 2025 already and literaly all projections followed the “worst possible” or “Unexpected” projection lol.
A large part of my frustration is that our past revolutionary comrades never predicted or had to deal with such a hard deadline. Lenin, Mao or Castro etc, none of them were told “if you fail humanity will die in less than a generation”.
And it is this lack of urgency that is worrysome. I realy couldn’t care less about Chinese or Soviet “diplomacy” towards the US if the year was 1955 and all we fantasized was FALGSC in the year 2000.
Instead its 2025 and we count how many different climate disasters are going to happen within the next 10 years.
we are on our ‘its so over’ arc
Unabated genocide, check
anti imperialists choosing to coexist with imperialists, check
Any hope at a shift in the status quo being steadily erased, check
American liberalism is back in fashion utterly kneecapping the only smidgen of resistance since 2020, yerp
That’s right, it’s news time
Its saddening to see china pass up this opportunity to challenge the west and just continue to cooperate with them
i was really hoping that this could be it, where russia and china could use their combined power to at least destablize american hegemony by pushing. Russia capitulating fully to socialism is a pipe dream that is completely unlikely, but theyve engaged directly through war with ukraine. China has let me down though. They probably know something I dont, maybe they aren’t ready, or america is still too strong they’d lose even if challenged?
Capitalism still is the strongest on earth and nothing seems to change that. Socialism is gaining ground too slowly…