SeventyTwoTrillion

Highest honor of Western propagandists: unable to co-opt you at all but also can't ignore you, another 5 million deaths added to your death toll every year that goes by
Second highest honor of Western propagandists: has to completely ignore you and pretend you never even existed for their theory of history and politics to function. media coverage of you drops off the face of the earth once you hit a certain percentage of radicalism; e.g. more or less the entire labour/radical histories and figures of many Western countries
Third highest honor of Western propagandists: finds it necessary to co-opt you to prevent others from truly following in your footsteps, "I think if the protestors of today used the peaceful, nonviolent methods of Black americans/LGBT activists/Palestinians then they'd get much more done"

From Mandela's "I Am Prepared To Die" speech:

I admit immediately that I was one of the persons who helped to form Umkhonto we Sizwe, and that I played a prominent role in its affairs until I was arrested in August 1962.

In the statement which I am about to make I shall correct certain false impressions which have been created by State witnesses. Amongst other things, I will demonstrate that certain of the acts referred to in the evidence were not and could not have been committed by Umkhonto. I will also deal with the relationship between the African National Congress and Umkhonto, and with the part which I personally have played in the affairs of both organizations. I shall deal also with the part played by the Communist Party. In order to explain these matters properly, I will have to explain what Umkhonto set out to achieve; what methods it prescribed for the achievement of these objects, and why these methods were chosen. I will also have to explain how I became involved in the activities of these organizations.

I deny that Umkhonto was responsible for a number of acts which clearly fell outside the policy of the organisation, and which have been charged in the indictment against us. I do not know what justification there was for these acts, but to demonstrate that they could not have been authorized by Umkhonto, I want to refer briefly to the roots and policy of the organization.

I have already mentioned that I was one of the persons who helped to form Umkhonto. I, and the others who started the organization, did so for two reasons. Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalize and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war. Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the Government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the Government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.

If anti-Zionism is made effectively illegal via anti-BDS and anti-protest laws, then the only way to protest Israel is, by definition, illegally, and thus it will be violently suppressed by police, prompting violence in return. If Labour politicians were serious about any of this (and very few of them are, of course) then they'd have to push back on totalitarian protest laws and allow criticism and protests against Israel without suppression. All of this is perfectly in line with Nelson Mandela's beliefs.

But I imagine they skip past that part of the speech, down to this:

I have great respect for British political institutions, and for the country's system of justice. I regard the British Parliament as the most democratic institution in the world, and the independence and impartiality of its judiciary never fail to arouse my admiration.

The American Congress, that country's doctrine of separation of powers, as well as the independence of its judiciary, arouses in me similar sentiments.

Some wholesome news today: Kissinger is still dead

Every single left-wing movement that has ever and will ever exist is approaching liberation via a set of ideas that was created, developed, and modified by generations of people who lived before them, and sometimes formed even under the conditions of the system that they are rebelling against. Whether that's organized religion, or a vague sense of spirituality, or a belief in freedom, or human/labor rights for the 99%, etc. This includes every single person on this website, including obviously myself. Nobody on earth is 100% rational and objective, all the time (and what "objective" and "rational" even means is itself dependent on the conditions and ideology under which those concepts are described, because objectivity implies something to maximize, like efficiency, or an output - but why should we subscribe to those kinds of Taylorist notions instead of, like, maximizing happiness and chilling out?). I find that many people who describe themselves as "objective" or "rational" tend to be the most ideological and idealistic.

So I guess it's cope all the way down - but that doesn't mean that cope isn't useful. Opium for the masses is very useful when they're in intense pain to keep them trucking towards a better future, and isn't useful when it just leads to hedonistic addiction to treats that prevents them acting towards a better future. Systems can be progressive in some contexts and reactionary in others, they don't exist in eternal stasis.

How do you keep stuff organized or resist the urge to read so many stories? Like I'm having trouble cleaning tabs/skipping stuff

I always have a lot of tabs open, usually at least 50, sometimes 100-200 and on rare occasions I've been at like 500. Comes with the territory.

I've been busy with real life and getting the first major update for the reading list ready so I've only been able to do updates on occasion, but when I was doing them regularly and when I return to doing them regularly, I use Firefox and the Tree Tabs extension, which helps me have a big list of tabs that I can drag and drop into different categories. There are extensions that "get rid" of tabs by putting them all in one window but in my experience, it works best when adding tabs incrementally rather than suddenly collapsing like 300 tabs into a window at once (my mistake).

Honestly, I've very recently been exploring the potential of things like Zettelkastens and systems like it because I think it would be a useful way of having a bunch of info and clutter in a usuable format, but so far I'm still at the stage of trying to figure out precisely what I want to do with it, how I want to set it up, how much information I would put in there, etc. It would be kinda interesting to have a community Zettelkasten as opposed to a wiki (which would just compete for resources with Prolewiki unnecessarily) but god only knows how one would set that up. And HexAtlas is a very cool concept too, which is kinda in that same sphere.

Anyway, you might want to look into that sphere of information sorting/organizing for your tab issues. But at the end of the day, I think quite a lot of the tabs we have open just have to be either bookmarked or ditched entirely. Maybe there's a "does X spark joy" system for tabs or something.

US force is irrelevant. For two years, Ukraine has fought Russia to a standstill, the second strongest military in the world, destroying million dollar Russian tanks with thousand dollar drones. The Houthis are now using drones to threaten shipping in one of the most important commercial waterways in the global economy. The effectiveness of multibillion dollar US missile defense systems is moderate. Meanwhile, US missile strikes from bases, ships, and planes all across the region are worse than ineffective, because they are strengthening rivals and forcing nonaligned countries to realign themselves at a more cautious distance from both the US and Israel.

It's always curious where authors draw the line between Ukraine doing something and the West doing it. If Ukraine were to hypothetically win the war, I'd imagine it would be spun as "Small little Ukraine beats nuclear superpower all by itself, with no help whatsoever!" whereas when they talk about Russia being isolated or whatever, it's always "Ukraine is backed by 40-something countries all around the world, supporting freedom and democracy blahblahblah". I could, and do, argue the complete opposite point of Gelderloos. Russia has fought the combined military and industrial might of the imperial core, including the United States, to a standstill, destroying million dollar American/European tanks with thousand dollar drones; and it seems like they might beat NATO in less time than it took for WW1 or WW2 to play out. Throwing the entire male population of Ukraine into the treads of Russian tanks, while Russia takes an order of magnitude less casualties (and probably less than that honestly) and calling it "victory" or even a "stalemate" is just bizarre. "We're in a stalemate with climate change because we're throwing the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps at it before climate change can really impact us!" No, that's what climate change/military defeat is.

But anyway, that's not really the point of what Gelderloos is saying and I agree with the gist of the argument: modern militaries kinda suck against the threats they currently face.

Instead of projecting force, the US needs to be projecting intelligence, creating solutions to the many crises pummeling the world system. The current US ruling class does not see the actual problems, and is not proposing any real solutions. The chance of a change of guard that pushes the US and European elite in a more intelligent direction is extremely low, based on a glance at the electoral map. From the Trumps, throwing gasoline on the fire at home and abroad, to the Bidens, trying the same old techniques and hoping for different results, the political mainstream is at war with itself. Politicians, technocrats, and investors would receive the kind of proposals actually needed to save the current world system like some bizarre mix of treason, progressive nonsense, and socialistic revolution.

Again, I don't think the difference between Biden and Trump is really that much. We all obviously have opinions of their presentation style (the Twitter President! gasp!), but consider just the trendlines of, say, immigrant deporting, or inequality, or police violence, or military funding, or dozens of other factors, and you really have to strain to figure out where the two differ ideologically. There are battles within the bourgeoisie, even big ones, but there always have been. They only go away when revolution approaches.

In the first edition of the book published in 1994, Arrighi does that bold thing: he makes a prediction. And he gets it completely wrong, saying that Japan will be the architect and leader of the next world system. In a later edition of the book, however, he does the decent thing and acknowledges that he was wrong and that it would likely be China. He doesn’t, however, offer a convincing analysis of what flaw in the theory led him to make that mistake. “Anarchy in World Systems” argues that his mistake comes from Arrighi favoring the materialist side of his own theoretical tool over the anarchist side. Capital accumulation is not the driving force of the world system. It is a necessary fuel, but capital accumulation does not happen without the architecture and the strategic planning of states. We can realize how obvious this should be if we let ourselves see, in hindsight, how ridiculous the prediction was that Japan would be the number one global power. This prediction was based on statistics for Japan’s economic growth, leaving out the non-quantifiable factor: strategic planning and power contests by states.

Japan could not possibly be the next global architect because it had never won a war against the old leader, the US, so it had no bubble of autonomy within which to begin creating a new design. Once Japan challenged the US—at a purely economic level—in the ‘80s, US planners simply turned off the faucet. After the Korean War, though, China did have that military victory, and with it a bubble of regional autonomy.

Wow! So you're telling me that the materialist analysis of Japan was wrong because it failed to consider that Japan was so infiltrated by American capitalists and so unable to go against its whims due to their economic reliance and lack of potential for autarky, like Russia and China could instead manage? ...wait, hang on. Shit. That's just materialist analysis again.

Anyway, I like the next several paragraphs analyzing China, up to this point:

state sovereignty: though China engages in a great deal of ethnic cleansing and should be qualified as a settler state in at least half its claimed territory, and Xi himself could accurately be described as a very nationalist socialist, China does not place emphasis on the nation-state, per se, as an organizing principle globally [...]

...I'm not even really sure what to say about that, to be honest. Unless he's talking about the rights of slavers to keep doing slavery, which I assume he's not, then I guess he's talking about Xinjiang? And Hong Kong? I am unaware of a line of reasoning that reasonably argues that China is a settler-state.

Also presumably, as their military power grows, the Chinese ruling class will support coups and regime change in weaker countries throughout Asia, Oceania, Latin America, and Africa, but they will need to find an effective way of governing or justifying these exceptional actions.

I think this is kinda silly but not totally ridiculous. As in, I think Gelderloos has correctly identified that the coming decades will feature China trying to work through the contradictions of their stated diplomatic ideology, because a system of "live and let live" probably isn't going to work terribly well. I'm obviously of the opinion that the Party will manage to not repeat Western imperialism, and Gelderloos disagrees, and there's nothing we could say to each other to change each other's minds, so I'll just agree to disagree.

I actually agree with like 80% of the paragraphs in this section; I've said for a long time that BRICS isn't going to be the socialist salvation but instead will inadvertently create the conditions for socialists to rise up, just like how WW1 wasn't started with the intention of creating the USSR but it was instead a byproduct of that action which then became perhaps the single most important result of it. BRICS will probably not get rid of imperialism, but lifting the boot off the neck of countries even if they're still weak and in pain will allow them to take meaningful action.

Also, dictatorial power arrangements rarely survive strong leaders. Granted, Xi is not a dictator in the way that Hitler and Franco were. There is a very strong party apparatus behind him and he has consolidated his power in the Party over the last decade.

Well, that's at least encouraging.

In other words, Xi and his advisers can think in a new paradigm, a quality necessary for being able to design a new world system. But part of Xi’s system of governance has required an intolerance for any disobedience or dissent, which will make an effective succession much more difficult when Xi is gone. The critical question is, does robust debate happen in secret at the upper and intermediate levels of the CCP, with a projection of consensus and unity in public? Or does Xi’s governing method breed a culture of acquiescent bureaucrats who cannot challenge a bad idea? If the latter, China might be able to help launch a new world system while Xi is in charge, but they might not remain the dominant member of the system’s central alliance.

Intolerance for the opinions of capitalists is a pretty great thing, I think. Count me in as a Censoring Capitalists Enthusiast. I could launch into a whole thing about how opinions on censorship and journalist freedom are results of the conditions in which we were purposefully raised and educated (and very conveniently align very well with the interests of capitalists!), and these aren't some fundamental good values in the universe and we have to understand why we think the way we think even about things that we think are very obviously good. And thus more opinions doesn't necessarily equal gooder, though it often does in certain sets of material conditions and systems (such as under feudalism or capitalism). Ruthless criticism of all that exists and so on. But whatever.

And the last section is pretty much distilled anarchism, so I have nothing really to comment about on as an ML that hasn't been said by a hundred thousand other people. I don't think regarding the problem as a lack of memory is wrong, I again just think it places cause and effect weirdly.

Only 1 mention of "Stalinist" in the whole article? He's really off his game. (I mostly kid; I like Gelderloos even if I have to sit through his criticism)

Starting from "Which way the world system?", I have no big problems with the first few paragraphs. I tend to sympathize more with Radhika Desai's critique of world-systems analysis which is that it's too focussed on the dominance of that empire, and not focussed enough on the battles and divisions against that world-system, so the fall of these systems can seem a little... underexplained, because you haven't been talking that much about what everybody else has been doing to weaken them. But that's just a nitpick and I 99% agree.

Elsewhere, Russia has suffered humiliating defeats, as in its inability to support Armenia against the expansionism of Azerbaijan, which is backed by Turkey.

Convenient that this is the COTW, huh? As I said in that megathread preamble, I think this is mostly cherrypicking. I'm also not even sure I'd technically call it a defeat. Or at least, not fully a defeat. Russia just seems relatively noncommittal about Armenia now, and it's hard to blame them in retrospect. On a moral level, obviously Russia should have done something to help the people inside Nagorno Karabakh, just as China should start landing supersoldiers on the shores of Tel Aviv, but on a geopolitical level, it's a messy situation given Russia's frenemy situation with Turkiye and, as Gelderloos mentions, Turkiye's conversion to non-aligned-yet-technically-in-NATO position.

c) people increase their ability to fight back against the State and we win a global revolution, destroying the world system and preventing a new one from taking its place

Obviously I don't share the total mistrust of the state, or at least its potential under socialism, that anarchists do. But even so, I feel like "winning a global revolution" would be a pretty long period, perhaps a human lifetime, due to the necessary wars and changes in material conditions and class structures which would cause different countries to erupt at different times. During that time, a new, strange, non-imperialist (or at least substantially less imperialist) world-system might be established, possibly by China in our current situation.

The foreign and economic policy championed by Bush II and carried on in some ways by Trump and in other ways by Biden, has probably destroyed any chance the US has of restoring the global architecture that it put in place on the heels of its triumph over the Nazis.

The fact that no one in the US or British political elite seem aware of this fact only reconfirms it. And though the level of self-defeating ignorance is astounding, it should not be surprising, as capitalists usually only understand capitalism at a superficial level, and statists usually only understand the State at a superficial level, similar to sports commentators going over the latest plays.

Ouch! Aside from that last quip, yes, 100%.

By unilaterally invading Iraq twice and killing millions of people, by flagrantly overthrowing social democratic (but capitalist!) regimes that didn’t favor a handpicked list of Western investors, by protecting Israel from any slightest slap on the wrist to the point where nearly the entirety of Israeli society now feels entitled to commit genocide—not out of view, the way the US sometimes does, but in front of the cameras, and they’re the ones holding the camera, smiling and cracking jokes—the US and UK have destroyed the legitimacy and functionality of their own political instrument. The US (and under its protection, Israel) flagrantly ignores UN resolutions whenever it wants. It acts like a “rogue state” within the interstate system that it designed, and designed to its advantage. And this cowboy attitude has always characterized US foreign policy (except, arguably, under FDR), but it accelerated under Reagan and especially Bush II.

Not to take this quote out of context, because Gelderloos does talk a little about how the American Empire transitioned from one more based on industrial might to one based on financial might and exploitation of colonies indirectly (compared to, say, the British Empire physically sending troops to walk the streets, and declaring territories to be colonies, and such), though not in those exact words - but I feel like this is kinda putting the cart before the horse. America has always committed heinous acts, and it hasn't "destroyed the legitimacy and functionality of their own political instrument" before. Vietnam didn't really do that, nor did Korea, nor the genocide of indigneous Americans nor the slavery+genocide of Africans and those same indigneous people. The reason why America is actually facing consequences for their actions now, consequences that directly strike at their empire and not just proxies (though it also is very much doing that), is because of how their empire has changed materially. They cannot produce enough weapons; their navy is weak to hypersonic missiles; their bases are weak to drone technology; their sanctions were effective until they put Russia and China on that list as well.

Even progressive electoral victories in Greece, Brazil, Argentina, and elsewhere let the capitalists know: nothing to worry about here. And the democratic states have proved capable of dismantling actually fascist movements like Golden Dawn in Greece before they proved too much of a threat. But the rightwing white populists like Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán, and Johnson not only eroded the functionality of democratic governance, they also threatened the stability of the technocratic status quo, scaring the hell out of investors who had been living in a Candyland made just for them, and they burst the assumed durability of key political formations like the European Union or the US-European alliance.

Did it? Has it? I'm not sure I agree that Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban, or Johnson meaningfully threatened those things at all. Western democracy is no democracy at all, obviously, so there was nothing to break other than perhaps conceptions of it, but if you asked the average Westerner "Who is more democratic, us or China/Russia/Iran/Bad Country?" then I think I know what they'd say. And the technocrats might be a little peeved, but I don't think any of them have actually lost any sleep. The newest wave of populists - your Mileis and Melonis and such - have almost hilariously bent the knee at record pace to technocratic governance and the almighty authority of central banks. It seems to me that Gelderloos thinks that the order of events was, to simplify: empire at apex -> stagnation and financialization -> discontentment in general public -> either useless quasi-leftists and socdems OR right-wing populists who disrupted society/technocrats -> further breakdown of empire. Whereas I think that the right-wing populists were instead the avatars of the current stage of neoliberalism. They weren't an outside force, they were an expression of the exact same capitalists that have ruled throughout the newest stage of imperialism (say, since the 70s, or perhaps 40s, depending on where you like to draw lines). They weren't disrupting Western democracy and neoliberalism; they were Western democracy and neoliberalism. They were the mosquitos born in that fetid, stagnant pond and changed very little about it.

Europe—long a valuable container for cultural and political legitimacy, given the white supremacy at the heart of the world system—has for the first time in nearly a century had to consider its separate interests, and this is already showing up in a markedly different approach towards China. In the US, the political elite already consider China an adversary worthy of a new Cold War, whereas in Europe, China is considered a partially reliable strategic partner. If something does not change quickly, the US will be relegated to the same status. And without reliable US support, the EU will have to bring itself up to war readiness, able to dissuade Russia from further invasions. In order to find a balance that Russia won’t risk upsetting, that may mean abandoning Ukraine to a permanent partition.

There are obviously battles within the European elite about what the hell they're gonna do about China, but I doubt that the US will ever be relegated in their relationship. I mean, they literally blew up a pipeline and started a war on their doorstep which has plunged the continent into an economic depression after a period of stagnation following the financial crash in 2009, and they seem to be buying more weapons from the US and getting more involved. I will eat an entire car if AfD is elected in Germany and proceeds to change their relationship with the US by one iota, and I don't even need to make bets about the left gaining power in Germany and doing the same, because it'll never happen.

July 2023:

An increasing number of countries are repatriating gold reserves as protection against the sort of sanctions imposed by the West on Russia, according to an Invesco survey of central bank and sovereign wealth funds published on Monday. The financial market rout last year caused widespread losses for sovereign money managers who are "fundamentally" rethinking their strategies on the belief that higher inflation and geopolitical tensions are here to stay.

Over 85% of the 85 sovereign wealth funds and 57 central banks that took part in the annual Invesco Global Sovereign Asset Management Study believe that inflation will now be higher in the coming decade than in the last. Gold and emerging market bonds are seen as good bets in that environment, but last year's freezing of almost half of Russia's $640 billion of gold and forex reserves by the West in response to the invasion of Ukraine also appears to have triggered a shift.

The survey showed a "substantial share" of central banks were concerned by the precedent that had been set. Almost 60% of respondents said it had made gold more attractive, while 68% were keeping reserves at home compared to 50% in 2020.

2024:

Nigeria repatriates its gold.
Ghana repatriates its gold.
Egypt repatriates its gold.
South Africa repatriates its gold.
Cameroon repatriates its gold.

I've seen rumors that other, larger countries are also doing so but these claims are generally not sourced so I won't repeat them. Though, even the above claims are only present in a couple independent media outlets, there's nothing in the MSM. Whether that indicates that these articles are mere rumors or something more insidious going on, I don't know.

Take as long as you need, comrade. This news mega wouldn't be the same without you

Not sure about that; hit the power plants, desalination plants, offshore gas platforms, and docks and you've got yourself a collapsing society regardless of how bloodthirsty the Zionists wanna be. Israel isn't some giant self-sustaining juggernaut like Russia which can be cut off from the world and be fine, it's a pretty tiny country which is half desert anyway with a population of less than 10 million people, and you don't need bleeding-edge missiles to strike anything Hezbollah wants to strike. The two big reasons Hezbollah hasn't done so yet is that Hamas hasn't asked them to, and that it would mean that Israel starts carpet bombing Lebanon; it's not a problem of not being able to fight off Israel. Hezbollah proved that they could do so in 2006, when they were a fraction of their current strength.

I understand the calculus being done here by Nasrallah. If Israel can be dismantled without the potential deaths of tens of thousands more people in Lebanon and Syria, and if Hamas seems willing to attrit Israel's military inside Gaza anyway like they've prepared decades for, then they might as well try that before escalating to dangerous (perhaps even nuclear) levels. It's not a pleasing calculus, I've seen the same footage of Palestinians being bombed and dead children as everybody else has, but Israel is a desperate, dying animal that has to be carefully brought down to avoid everybody getting mauled.

It'll be go-time when Hamas wants it to be go-time. They're in communication about these things and will coordinate a response if and when it's deemed necessary, and I trust Sinwar's and Nasrallah's judgement.

I'm curious to see precisely what Ansarallah is gonna do in regards to Mediterranean shipping now, though, given the problem of distance.

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