Iran has struck Israel.
previous preamble
The continuing fall of the remains of the British Empire is pretty entertaining from the outside: an archaic royal family that is seemingly being smote with disease by God itself for their past crimes; a navy that virtually no longer functions, ramming into foreign ports and under constant repair; and an economy that cannot seem to stop sputtering, fucked whether they’re in the EU or outside it. Watching the impacts on people from the inside is a little more worrying, though.
A fifth of the population is in poverty, including nearly a third of all children. These figures have barely shifted since the Labour government in the early 2000s, aside from a decreasing poverty rate for pensioners. Actually, poverty hasn’t substantially shifted since Margaret Thatcher. Before her, the poverty rate was around 14%, but her catastrophic policies caused a major increase, and poverty levels since then are still 50% higher than over 50 years ago, because neoliberal economic policy since then has not fundamentally changed. Parties and corporations have impoverished the usual vulnerable groups, such as large families, minority ethnic groups (including half of Pakistani and Bangladeshi households!) and disabled people. These differences are also regional, with the North more impoverished than the richer Southeast (but some of the poorest boroughs are in London, so it’s a complex pattern).
With Corbyn’s defeat in 2019 mere months before the pandemic began, the Labour Party shifted back towards the right, with left-wingers purged from the party if they did not kowtow to Keir Starmer. This leaves us with a situation where the only substantial difference between the two parties would be on social policy, but it goes without saying that economic policy is the overwhelming factor that determines if minorities can have a decent life. Worker-oriented movements since then have been largely not under the umbrella of major party leaderships, such as the Don’t Pay movement in late 2022 that arose in the wake of dramatically rising energy prices where 3 million people vowed to not pay them (which did lead to results).
Most notably recently is the major upset in the constituency of Rochdale - the victory of George Galloway - who is the leader of the Workers Party of Britain, which describes itself as both socialist and socially conservative. This took place both in the context of aforementioned economic troubles, as well as anger over Israel’s genocide of Gaza in the British population, especially in British Muslims. It remains to be seen how much of this is an isolated event, especially as Corbyn has, understandably, refused to collaborate with Galloway due to his socially conservative stances. The UK general election will be held at some point within the next 9 months or so, and might well be a shitshow depending on what happens domestically and geopolitically before then; parallels to the current American electoral shitshow with increasing anger over Biden are pretty apparent. The Conservatives are quite likely to lose given 14 years of uninspired rule if current polling is correct, but it truly is a race to the bottom.
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 the United Kingdom! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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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.
It makes complete sense. How can an kind-of-darwinian-but-confounded-by-misaligned-incentives system compete with a command economy that leverages the latest technology and appears to be radically adaptible to new conditions because its direction is centrally managed?
Yes perhaps 100 years ago before the invention of microprocessors that can do trillions or quadrillions of mathematical operations per second and glass fiber network infrastructure that can carry terabits per second of data it was “better” to have a million monkeys and a few really greedy monkeys hacking away at their typewriters but times have changed.
Yeah let’s defend the shit, inefficient way of doing it instead of adopting the obviously better model. What a smart idea. Of course the west’s attempt to do it would be so marred by corruption we’d just end up with Fascism 2 straight out of Mussolini’s “corporatism”.
Yep. The socialist calculation debate is over. We won. I happen to think the Austrians did have a point back back in like the 1920s. You can read all about how much Lenin et al struggled with central planning. I actually think full central planning was maybe possible before the 1920s and then after the 1970s or so. But there’s that 50 year window where you had highly complex economies but not the appropriate computing power to match that complexity for planning purposes.
Alan Cotrell wrote Towards a New Socialism in the early 90s and showed conclusively how there was plenty of computing power available at that time for central planning. Now consider how much more power computers are now versus back then, without anywhere that much an increase in economic complexity.
I think that there were two problems there, both of which I believe we solvable. The first was that the allocation of capital required some decentralized “anarchy” through a form of incentivocracy. Lenin did the NEP for this, China did it WAYYY better, but I think it was totally achievable (except for The Caveat). The second was demand sourcing. Even during Lenin’s time it was clear to many that demand sourcing needed to be decentralized, localized, and highly organic. Instead, attempts were made to predict demand through bureaucracy, which was never going to work. Several contemporaries of Lenin called it out, and proposed solutions, but it never happened, and honestly, likely because of The Caveat.
The Caveat is that Lenin never managed to get rid of the threat of reactionaries and revisionists. And he knew Stalin wasn’t going to be able to it, either. And Stalin proved him right, and he also proved that the reactionaries and revisionists were the key problem through his failure. Despite all of his desperate purges, despite mobilizing the most impressive military defense in history, despite destroying 80% of the most advanced military ever fielded at that point and marching all the way to Berlin, despite all of the adoration that won him domestically, his immediate successor began the counter-revolution within months of taking office.
So, I think it was probably logistically possible for the USSR to have figured it out, but it wasn’t politically possible, and the conditions that made it politically impossible are the exact same conditions that ultimately dismantled the USSR.
To quote @[email protected]:
If there was ever a time when we could hypothetically pretend that we were living in a free market (and any serious economist knows that we never did), that time is now unequivocally over. The benefits of economic planning are too juicy and efficient, and, ironically enough, the free hand of the market cannot resist planning. Both the US and China are “non-market systems,” the US is just bitter that China is using planning to actually benefit the population and society at large, rather than make the easiest profit for the worst parasites in society.
Centralization is so obviously more efficient of course it’s being adopted in capitalism (same thing with the tendency for firms to merge and monopolies to develop) - unfortunately in these cases that benefit to efficiency just means making the rent seeking more efficient and nothing else.
But you’re right, in my original reply I oversimplified and neglected the “capitalist GOSPLANing” as 420stalin69 put it