Red Patch

The full import of this incredible screed – a revival of the 1943 Stportpalastrede – is only grasped if we compare it to the “expected” attitude of German capital towards China. Marxian Economics 101 holds that in an open economy, imports of Chinese goods depresses the value of German labour (i.e. boosts German real wages) by cheapening the basket of commodities they consume, the rate of exploitation being constant (a phenomenon captured in bourgeois economics as the “disinflationary” “Wal Mart effect”). Where vanilla German productive capital would welcome the rise of China's export economy (barring sectors directly competing against it in the global market, such as automakers, whose troubles are however offset by access to the Chinese market), a revived German imperialism perceives only the eternal Enemy from the East...

Merz is actually being remarkably honest here. The only way in which the capitalists can actually hope to revive themselves in Germany and the rest of the imperialist block is if they dramatically increase the rate of exploitation of the working class. That is the only way that German industry will revive. Merz is signally that he intends to launch an assault on the German working class in order to achieve this. We cannot say that he has not warned us about his intentions.

@Wenitte1 @cecild84 Or "well-behaved."

@cecild84 Not wise more like obedient

🌀 In #Dakar🇸🇳, Ousmane #Sonko criticizes the #IMF policy towards African countries: "What the IMF is interested in is that you remain poor and wise" NE Infos

“Lenin’s government had done everything possible to avoid war between Poland and Russia, [and] without Piłsudski’s march on Kiev there would probably never have been any Soviet march on Warsaw. …Piłsudski, in 1920, was not fighting so much for Polish independence as for the estates of the big Polish landowners in Ukraine, and also to satisfy his own dreams of grandeur.” ~Isaac Deutscher 🇵🇱

And also— I’m not bothered by the Soviet invasion of Poland after learning these lands were ill-gotten by Polish expansionism in the first place, putting millions of Jewish people at risk

Starting to see more why the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact makes more sense strategically from the Soviet POV after reading Why Did The Heavens Not Darken? by Arno J Mayer

@SocialistMMA Plus ça change

30+ years of life and still haven’t been called the n word by a Russian btw ✌🏾

Ukraine supporters are mad that I called Ukraine a nazi state so in order to prove me wrong they immediately went to my replies to call me a n*gger. They truly can’t help themselves. This is why I’m glad every single time a banderite nazi get their shit kicked in by Russia

Marx fully acknowledged this, writing scathingly of the “swindling in exchange” which accounts for merchant profits in pre-capitalist societies and attracts the ire of all pre-modern value systems. Ernest Mandel, in Marxist Economic Theory, catalogues the immemorial hostility of all the world’s civilizations towards merchantdom. Homer speaks of antiquity’s quintessential mercantile and maritime people, the Phoenicians, as “clever navigators, deceitful traders.” In Rome Mercury is the god of thieves, tricksters, and merchants. Ibn Khaldun records the verdict of the Islamic golden age: “trade ... consists in artful tricks.” Mandel concludes: “All folk wisdom repeats the same thing, in all the languages of the Earth.”

This is a great point 👇x.com/i/status/20186… — 士农工商 (shì nóng gōng shāng: scholars, farmers, artisans, merchants) is China's traditional four-class hierarchy with scholars on top, followed by peasants - and merchants dead last, right at the bottom of the social ladder. Merchants were seen as parasitic: they didn't produce anything, they just moved goods around for profit. In fact in later dynasties than the Han, merchants were barred from taking Keju (the imperial exams, which allowed someone to become a government official in China's meritocracy), because China was wary of mixing merchants with political power. This was reportedly the case of Li Bai (China's famous Tang dynasty poet) who couldn't take Keju because his father was a merchant. All in all, it goes to show that China's current suspicion of financial power is millennia old, far older than Marxism or Communism. The idea that money-making must be subordinate to the real economy is very much China's civilizational DNA.

You've doubtless read the numerous headlines these past few days on how Xi Jinping called for the Yuan to "become a global reserve currency." That's true, he actually said that. But, as is often the case, Western media are missing the forest for the trees. This is extracted from a speech in which Xi laid out a much grander vision of what a “modern financial system with Chinese characteristics” (中国特色现代金融体系) would look like, essentially China's answer to Wall Street. Fascinatingly, and in stark contrast to the actual Wall Street, Xi's main argument is that what matter most aren't the institutions or status that China is seeking to build up - such as having the Yuan as a global reserve currency. Those are secondary. Xi argues that what truly will make or break the system is its moral culture. As he describes it, the Western financial system is nihilistic, counterproductive and ultimately politically destabilizing. Nihilistic in the sense that finance without moral purpose becomes self-referential - it stops serving anything beyond itself. He calls it "脱实向虚" ("drifting from the real economy into the virtual"): when finance detaches from the real economy, it loses its reason for existing. It’s not creating wealth, it’s just moving numbers around. Counterproductive in the sense that it actually destroys the thing it depends on. As Xi explains "if [finance] becomes obsessed with self-circulation and self-expansion, it becomes water without a source, a tree without roots" (无源之水、无本之木). In other words, finance detached from the real economy - like a tree that has severed its own roots - ultimately kills the economy. Lastly, politically destabilizing in the sense that financial elites captured by greed become ungovernable - they corrupt regulators, buy politicians, evade accountability. The Qiushi commentary on Xi's speech is extremely blunt about this (qstheory.cn/20260131/f4889…): they say Xi seeks to "avoid the Western predicament of financial oligarchs hijacking public policy and deepening social division." “Financial oligarchs hijacking public policy” (“金融寡头绑架公共政策”) is remarkably blunt language. It's essentially saying that the West allowed oligarchs to capture the state (not wrong!). To avoid all of this, Xi lays out a vision for - in many ways - an anti-Wall Street: a 金融强国 ("financial powerhouse") that puts serving the real economy at its core. A system that - Xi argues - will ultimately make the Yuan a global reserve currency precisely because, ultimately, a global reserve currency is backed by trust. That's the forest: how you build trust is what matters. In my latest article I break down the full speech, how exactly Xi proposes to build this anti-Wall Street and what it reveals about a question we in the West have stopped asking: what is our financial system actually for? Full article here: open.substack.com/pub/arnaudbert…

“The Economist, that optimist conjuror of all things menacing the tranquil minds of the mercantile community…” ~Marx

The Economist defence corespondent's premise in his response to me below is the very antithesis of the journalistic ethos he claims to represent. Shashank Joshi maligns a reporter for telling us what he has witnessed on the ground in Caracas. Why? Because it discredits the Economist's own editorialising, based on reports from fellow corporate journalists that accord with the Economist's corporate agenda. Joshi's implicit argument is that we should trust only those journalists who work for corporate outlets. This view might hold water if those corporate journalists had a well-documented record of truth-telling. They do not. I have spent years documenting the endless disinformation promoted by the biggest names in our profession. I just did so again last night when the BBC's Sarah Smith spoke of Iran's "nuclear weapons programme" – as if it were an established fact rather than a self-serving and highly dubious claim made by Israel and the White House. Caroline Hawley headlined her own report on Iran with the incredible, evidence-free suggestion that "tens of thousands" of protesters had been killed in Iran – on a par with the dead in Gaza after Israel's two years of carpet-bombing the enclave. This isn't journalism. It is state propaganda. It is what corporate journalists are employed to do. If they didn't do it – and even more importantly, they didn't actually believe in what they were doing – they would be out of their job. I know the stenographic function these people play in corporate media because I saw it first hand time and again in my 20 years reporting from Israel-Palestine. Here is just one example. I was the only journalist who investigated the Israeli army's killing of UN worker Iain Hook in Jenin. I then had to watch dozens of international publications, who sent no reporters to Jenin, regurgitate Israeli military disinformation as if it were the facts. I couldn't even persuade my former employer, the Guardian, to run the investigation. Why? Because the foreign editor told me no one else had reported what I was saying. None of this will make the slightest sense to the Economist's correspondent below because he is deeply immersed in his Manichaean worldview, one that sees politics as a simple battle between Good versus Evil. He is not a journalist. He is what, in less dishonest times, was called a courtier.

@SocialistMMA But comrade The Telegraph is scrupulously correct, the past century having witnessed stunning military breakthroughs. 😏

Very weird way to spin NATO losing to Russia

“The ideology and program of fascism ... are merely an intensification of attitudes which have already been shown to be characteristic of imperialism. ...Foreigners and racial minorities are blamed for misfortunes the nature of which is not understood. So far as internal economic and social problems are concerned the program of fascism is a mass of ill-digested and often mutually contradictory proposals which are notable chiefly for their unmistakably demagogic character. ... What gives to fascism coherence and vitality is its stress on nationalism, its demand for the restoration of a strong state power, and its call for a war of revenge and foreign conquest. It is this which provides a firm foundation for rapprochement between fascism and the capitalist class.” ~Paul M. Sweezy

“Lacking common interests and a common organizational base, the middle classes are peculiarly unstable and become easily attached to vague ideals of national greatness or racial superiority, a propensity which is magnified by the difficult position which they occupy between organized capital and organized labor... The nation or the race becomes the substitute for the solidarity of class interests which their isolated position in society denies [them], and at the same time it offers to them a kind of psychological escape from the frustrations of their everyday life.” ~Paul Sweezy

Bitch, American West Point military academy teaches Sun Tzu

“The basic structure of fascist violence (...): it is organized, not elemental; brutal, not wildly passionate; it aims not merely to wipe out the enemy but to subject him to physical humiliation and moral defamation; it even attacks, immediately and directly, the very cornerstones and shrines of [civilized] life—justice, science, and art—whenever they seem to jeopardize [the fascist cause]; it always comes post festum, when the enemy’s first wave of attack has subsided; it represents revenge and “a punitive expedition” rather than [self-defense].”

they shot him 11 times AFTER He was disarmed the US is a Fascist Police State

🚨🇺🇸 BREAKING — ICE Agent CELEBRATES Shooting of Minneapolis Man, Dancing and Clapping with Joy.

One of the greatest achievements in bourgeois gaslighting (or greatest failure of Marxist pedagogy; take your pick) has been this massive conflation in our political imaginary between personal property (individual claims on use values) and capitalist property relations: persuading normies that the (faceless, sinister, hivelike, foreign) “Reds” are itching to bust down their door and confiscate/collectivize their dog, their coffeemaker, their potted plants, their picket fence, their Playstation, or their favourite pair of slippers. The only form of property which revolutionary socialism seeks to “abolish” is the kind (over productive apparatuses or “fixed capital”) that dispenses its owners from having to perform labour, while allowing its owners to claim a share of the value produced by other people's labour. Put in these terms, it’s obvious that 99% of us have absolutely nothing to fear from “the abolition of private property,” and as for the 1%, well, they can be dealt with by other means than persuasion. 😏

America is what you get when you give capitalists full power of the state for over a century while brainwashing the public to be afraid of the only ideology that has ever given power to the people: Socialism.

I sometimes wonder if the Chinese learn “too much” from history (in the way that we in the West are said to learn too little). Bethune’s idealism, the 250 million bushels on credit during the famine, or Pierre Trudeau’s principled gesture of recognition are dangerous forms of “knowledge” when dealing with the hyena-headed raptor Canada has become.

China's modern history is almost uniquely characterized by Marxist-Leninists successfully extricating the country from the clutches of the most malignant treacherous murderous fiends humanity has ever produced. They know that Canada is now and has always been nothing but a

“On one side a worn-out engine [i.e. the election cycle] which, turning incessantly in its vicious circle, is never able to move a single step forward, and the impotent process of friction by which all the official parties gradually grind each other into dust; on the other, the advancing mass of the nation, threatening to blow up the vicious circle and to destroy the official engine.” ~Marx

Why would the Democratic party listen to its voters when its voters tell them they will vote for them no matter what. This is the reality under the duopoly and meaningful change will never happen until we ditch both parties and fight for a better system.

@pawelwargan Bourgeois hot take: “I refuse to study the cosmos, because chaining yourself to ‘theories from the early 20th century’ is a lazy way of dealing with reality.” 🤡

This reflects an unfortunate tendency to build a straw-man out of Marx in order to then dismiss him. Marx’s writings are not a dogma, nor are they a canon. Rather, they provide a methodology for the study of social life which is rooted in the primacy of contradiction, and which draws on a materialistic rather than idealistic interpretation of natural phenomena. It is the closest humanity has come to a scientific conception of history and society. It provides us with the tools to understand concepts like the origin of wealth, the value of money, the inequality between nations and peoples, and the relationship of wages and profits outside the straightjacket of liberal economics. Despite continued efforts to bury it, Marxism remains alive and well. It is found in the rich field of “Chinese modernization”, which concerns the theories and practices underpinning socialist construction in the PRC. It is found in the Venezuelan communard movement, which is seeking to mount a direct challenge to the metabolism of capital based on theories developed in the latter part of the 20th century. It is found in the decision of students in Lahore, Pakistan, to shun liberal activism and build a party from within the poorest neighbourhood in their city — equipped with the theoretical weapon of class analysis and the historical inheritance of those who wielded it before them. Rejecting Marxism in this way is often simply a thinly-veiled regression into idealism: a denial of contradiction, a denial of class struggle, and a denial of imperialism. At the end of the day, it is an untenable position that seeks to grasp at the threads of philosophical traditions that have outlived their day — that Marxism has superseded. You can distance yourself from Newton or Darwin, but you cannot change that the world we live in is governed in many respects by principles that they described. The same is true of Marx.

@cecild84 Has the sordid history of colonialism ever produced a more disgraceful scene? Defeated African chiefs, forced to prostrate themselves before their pith-helmeted conquerors, retained more humanity and dignity than this insufferable handmaiden of empire.

Norwegian politicians described Maria Machado award of her Nobel Peace prize to Trump as "absurd", whilst the Nobel peace center responsible for issuing the prize says as follows: “a medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel peace prize laureate cannot”.

The problem with “Tax the Rich” and all such other reformist-style policy positions and slogans that fall short of articulating Marx’s Labour Theory of Value is that they lie vulnerable to all the classic right-wing tropes about “welfare bums,” “taxation as theft,” socialism as “running out of other people’s money,” and so forth. Objections which are smashed to smithereens by the insistence that we have created this wealth, that it has been stolen from us. There's no halfway, “reasonable” solution to this zero-sum conflict to be found in the realm of polite debate. Either they are the parasites – or we are.

We need a better, more ambitious message when it comes to taxation. The rich *do not* fund our public services. We do. My latest for New Internationalist. "Now, once we understand that the main fiscal purpose of taxation is not to fund public services but to reduce excess demand, we can have a clear view of who should be taxed: the rich. The problem with the rich is that they demand too much of our productive capacities. Their money translates into massive purchasing power (and also enables them to increase their investments and ownership of production). So we are then required to use our labour and resources to produce things like mansions, private jets, sports cars, estates, luxury goods and so on. This facilitates elite consumption and accumulation but it does not benefit society – it is wasteful, ecologically destructive, and it should be curtailed so that we can undertake production that does benefit society. Taxation can be used to help achieve this in two ways: a) tax income and wealth over a certain threshold, and b) tax damaging and unnecessary goods. Ultimately, we do not need to tax wage labour at all. If a key purpose of taxation is to reduce excess demand and consumption, then it is reasonable to implement a very simple and straightforward tax rule. All income below a certain minimum threshold (the level needed to acquire goods and services necessary to live a good life) should be taxed at zero per cent, and all income above a certain maximum threshold (a level beyond which additional consumption is clearly unnecessary and destructive) should be taxed at 100 per cent. The response from some on the right might be that under such a tax system the working classes would be contributing nothing whereas the rich would be contributing everything. But remember, taxation does not fund public services. The rich are not ‘contributing’ at all. Rather, we are preventing them from using too much of our productive capacity so that we can use it ourselves, for other purposes. So who is contributing? We are, in the form of our labour." newint.org/equality/2026/…

“Finance capital does not want freedom, but domination… It needs a politically powerful state which … will ensure respect for the interests of finance capital abroad, and use its political power to extort advantageous supply contracts and trade agreements from smaller states; a state which can intervene in every corner of the globe and transform the whole world into a sphere of investment for its own finance capital. Finally, finance capital needs a state which is strong enough to pursue an expansionist policy and the annexation of new colonies… The old free traders believed in free trade not only as the best economic policy but also as the beginning of an era of peace. Finance capital abandoned this belief long ago. … The ideal now is to secure for one's own nation the domination of the world, an aspiration which is as unbounded as the capitalist lust for profit from which it springs. Capital becomes the conqueror of the world, and with every new country that it conquers there are new frontiers to be crossed. These efforts become an economic necessity, because every failure to advance reduces the profit and the competitiveness of finance capital, and may finally turn the smaller economic territory into a mere tributary of a larger one. They have an economic basis, but are then justified ideologically by an extraordinary perversion of the national idea, which no longer recognizes the right of every nation to political self-determination and independence... Instead the economic privileges of monopoly are mirrored in the privileged position claimed for one's own nation, which is represented as a 'chosen nation'. … An oligarchic ideal of domination has replaced the democratic ideal of equality.” ~Rudolf Hilferding

It's not hypocrisy, it's capitalism. The bizarre behaviour of Western states and leaders often seems to betray a moral double standard. But in fact it is all perfectly consistent with a single standard, namely, the objective of maintaining the conditions for capital accumulation in the core. On Iran, they tell us they "support the protestors". But of course they violently brutalize protestors at home, and never support protests against the governments of their often brutal client states. They say they support "women's rights". But of course they actively support a genocidal regime that has massacred tens of thousands of women, live-streamed to our screens. They say they want to see "freedom" and "democracy". But of course they prop up several repressive dictatorships in the Middle East. They say they value international law. But they violate it regularly, in spectacular fashion, as easily as they breathe. They say they want to see "liberation". But their explicit objective is to impose a puppet monarchy with zero real sovereignty, permanently subordinated to the US and Israel. Why? Because they want to maintain the conditions for capital accumulation in the core. This requires a massive flow of cheap labour and resources from the periphery. To keep it going, they do everything possible to crush any state or movement that seeks real sovereignty, because sovereign development in the South means that the South produces and consumes more for itself, so their resources and labour are less cheaply available for accumulation in the core. This is why they are going after Iran. It's the same reason they are going after Venezuela and Cuba... it's the same reason they fantasize at going to war with China... it's the same reason they invaded Libya and Iraq... it's the same reason they assassinated Lumumba and Sankara. It's the same reason they prop up Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It's the same reason they support Israel's genocide. The narrative of "double standards" presupposes that they have at least some shred of morality. But they do not. For them there is but one standard: the law of capital. And in the interests of this standard they will very gladly spit on every human value. They will not shrink from genociding civilians by the tens of thousands - peasants and workers and children; they will not flinch at killing half a million people each year with illegal sanctions; they will rape the earth and doom our collective future without a qualm. It is fruitless to appeal to capital, to imperialism, in moral terms. The objective is to defeat it.