Bulletins and News Discussion from July 8th to July 14th, 2024 - Nevertheless, He Persisted
Bulletins and News Discussion from July 8th to July 14th, 2024 - Nevertheless, He Persisted
Trump's victory, and the further mass oppression of minorities, is closer than ever before. May god have mercy on our souls.
previous preamble
The totalitarian capitalist dystopia which was created by the United States in the aftermath of the Korean War has increasingly experienced problems as the multipolar world is being gradually birthed.
Due to the widespread exploitation of the population, long work weeks, and high housing prices, the population growth of South Korea has plummeted, with the lowest fertility rate on the planet, and the highest suicide rate in the OECD. While a capitalist "success story" before the 2008 recession in terms of profit accumulation for the richest at the expense of most others, conditions have grown more dire in the Long Depression since the crash. GDP growth per year has averaged out at 2-3%. For more concrete figures, labour productivity has stagnated, particularly in the service sector. The rate of profit hit a peak when the dictatorship ended in the late 1980s, but has since massively tumbled. These dynamics are not unique to South Korea; they are happening throughout the West.
While South Korea is stagnating, perhaps even falling, its northern neighbour is rising. With Russia already persona non grata to much of the developed world and yet still maintaining fairly good economic growth and continuously albeit gradually moving towards victory in Ukraine, Putin sees no reason to be intimidated by the West's shunning of the DPRK, and Russia is establishing ties as well as military and economic deals. This seems to portend an end to the post-Soviet period of forced isolation due to UN actions forbidding the people of the DPRK to leave the country (which many westerners believe is a policy originating from the Korean leadership due to their propagandized education).
Many in the West are still, regrettably, unable to properly analyze the geopolitical situation of Korea due to their government programming, leading to bizarre takes about imminent collapse, or desperation on the part of Russia or the DPRK, unable to recognize that the DPRK has a powerful military sector all its own, and decades of autarky has created a durable society where limited resources must be used efficiently and effectively. The position of the Korean Peninsula seems likely to be a critical part of the US-China conflict, whether this is an outright war or instead a series of proxy wars. Indeed, Korea's position may soon become very important in global trade routes if the US tries to cut off the Strait of Malacca to Chinese-bound cargo ships, with vital resources like oil and food potentially transported both over land and via the Arctic Route over Russia and through the DPRK to China. Russia's leadership clearly sees the importance of Korea in the future, hence their actions now; and, of course, South Korea siding with Ukraine has also forced Putin's hand to oppose them more openly.
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 South Korea! 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.
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I think these current wars will possibly expose the tendency of world economy going forward.
Since WWII, american capital has developed on the destruction of lesser economies so that land, resources and labor would be taken over by american companies. This has become the condition for the maintenance and perpetuation of this specific form of capital.
But nowadays, struggling economies tend to turn towards not american companies, but Chinese ones. This means that the precondition for american capital is turning into the precondition of Chinese capital. Every time america tries to expand, it expands China instead or along with it.
The interesting thing is that the Chinese strategy for growing further is way different: being an industrial economy, it depends on the other nation being able to acquire their industrial production. In other words, it depends on that nation developing a functioning industry and economy to absorb Chinese products into it, which not only strengthens China, but further weakens the misery-dependent american capital.
On the other hand, that means america will need increasingly devastating wars and coups to keep going.
The interesting thing is that the Chinese strategy for growing further is way different: being an industrial economy, it depends on the other nation being able to acquire their industrial production. In other words, it depends on that nation developing a functioning industry and economy to absorb Chinese products into it, which not only strengthens China, but further weakens the misery-dependent american capital.
This is a good comment overall but I don't know how else to put it but this particular quote goes very much against all the evidence of what the modern Chinese economy actualy looks like.
What you actualy ended up doing was a by proxy regurgitation of the same "overcapacity" argument used by the usual western capitalist propagandists detractors. I'll quote from Michael Robert's excellent take on this issue(China’s unfair ‘overcapacity’) but to summarize, the Chinese economy no longer relies on exports as it used to. The internal consumption is growing steadily and the conditions of the early 2000s are no longer true today.
The rationality of this nonsense is to be found in the Western mainstream view that China is stuck in an old model of investment-led export manufacturing and needs to ‘rebalance’ towards a consumer-led domestic economy where the private sector has a free rein. China’s weak consumer sector is forcing it to try and export manufacturing ‘over capacity’.
But the evidence for this is not there. According to a recent study by Richard Baldwin, he finds that the export-led model did operate up to 2006, but since then domestic sales have boomed, so that the exports to GDP ratio has actually fallen. “Chinese consumption of Chinese manufactured goods has grown faster than Chinese production for almost two decades. Far from being unable to absorb the production, Chinese domestic consumption of made-in-China goods has grown MUCH faster than the output of China’s manufacturing sector.”
I don't think there is much evidence to say China needs some foreign economy to consume their excess production, at best this condition existed some 20 years ago and by the early 2010's was already not relevant. Per the chart above you can see the % of industry tied to exporting peaked in 2006.
China doesn't "depend" on US or any other economy to consume their stuff, though obviously there are strong ties today, the point is China can grow based on their own terms, there is no such dependency that limits Chinese growth.
I generally like Michael Roberts but he is mostly wrong in this case.
Chinese consumption is linked to the increasing private sector and household debt:
Figure 1. Household debt as proportion of GDP.
You can see that the Chinese household debt had doubled from 30% in 2011 to 62% in 2021, and only started to plateau because of Covid (people started saving more/borrow less due to uncertainty about the future).
When people started to borrow more to buy more stuff, of course consumption goes up! But there’s the latent danger of a credit-fueled consumption economy: what happens when people can no longer afford to keep borrowing? Consumption goes down, demand goes down, production goes down, recession, unemployment, etc.
Although not quite at the level of Western neoliberal countries, the private sector is in a position not to dissimilar to Japan’s private sector during the late 1980s and 1990s, with high level of bank lending to drive consumption and asset purchase, leading to a property bubble runs a huge risk of bursting.
This is why China’s property bubble is so complex because it is also tightly linked to consumption. Too many people and corporations have borrowed to invest in real estate market, which I remind you did not exist in China before 2008! Huge flows of investment went into real estate and infrastructure building in the wake of the 2009 global recession as consumer demand from Western countries went down.
So, if the Chinese government lets the property bubble bursts, a lot of people are going to lose their money, that means they’re going to cut consumption, spend/borrow less, and that directly affects the domestic economy.
The solution has always been to raise the wages of the people rather than making them borrow from banks. However this could jeopardize China’s position as a world’s leading exporter because it has leveraged on its low labor wages to gain competitive advantage on the global export market. Raising wages will make Chinese goods become more expensive, and hence less attractive to importers.
But this transition has to be made. There is no way out of it. Chinese policymakers have been trained and indoctrinated with neoclassical ideology, which means they are very conservative about budget deficit, and this is reflected on their annual budget:
Figure 2. The scale of China’s annual budget deficit (in 100 million yuan, bar, right y-axis) and proportion to its GDP (line, left y-axis).
You can see that China’s budget deficit never went above 3%, except during Covid and last year (3.8%, not included in this figure). This is a very conservative stance on spending (not that much different from a neoliberal government to be honest, except that China has huge export revenues to make up for it), and this means that much of the spending on Chinese economy is still largely relying on export revenues, not from fresh money creation from the Chinese state bank.
This is how we can easily tell that China has far from transitioned into an internal consumption model yet. Because there is no way that 3% of deficit spending can make up for the vast amount of the consumer demands needed to drive productive industries geared toward internal consumption. It has to come from credit lending and export revenues.
This has strong Kaplya energy word to word tho they are @droplet now and your account is older. weird
Either way, how do Chinese households borrow to consume if both their savings growth, their income growth and the consumption growth have been comfortably and sustainably larger than HH debt growth? HH debt can also be a bunch of things not related to most aspects of consumption so unless we have some ready to go data we cant know where that debt went and its a huge leap to call China's consumption growth "debt fueled". Like HH have to borrow to be able consume but also HH savings are at the same time growing faster and higher than HH debt ? They get in debt to be able to sustain their consumption but also they are able save up more than the debt they get into ? Doesnt pass the smell test.
Also the aggregated debt figure compared nominaly against the GDP may tell us absolutely nothing about how distressed the average household balance sheet is given the income and regional inequalities in China in the last decade and the economic activity of different groups. Its much more likely that upper middle housholds and individuals leveraged too much on the property market and speculation (irregardless of their returns) and on the average household level i would imagine most debt figures have accumulated from the explosion of car purchases and payments that foundementaly add a bunch to HH debt calculation no matter how healthy peoples balance sheet is. So Its less of an issue if HH debt going up mostly as a function of mortgage penetration for higher income earners but not coming at the expense of savings or consumption (but also not financing those things) for the average houshold.
Also as far as the real estate sector bubble popping/delevareging goes that is already a reality for almost 3 years now. Sector has already dropped as a % of gdp by a notable margin, prices depending on city tier have droped from somewhat to a bunch . If that was to have any major impact on HH consumption we would have seen it by now. But HH consumption numbers follow the same trend and growth regardless. Connected to that is the fact that , yeah many people invested on real estate beyond buying their first house, but many for China is still a small minority of the population and concentrated in urban upper-middle class people. But how many Chinese people do you actualy think have invested in real estate and/or stocks? 30 million ? How many people borrowed to invest even , which is something you throw out with such certainty ? Many can be 4 million but are you sure thats an impactfull sum for China?
Ok lets imagine that. These 30 million people do contribute a lot in chinese consumption since they they make up a large chunk of upper middle class people like i said. And their grivances get disproportionate coverage both inside and outside of China. But the future of chinese society and economy isnt for them. Its for the 300 million class people moving up the ladder to a middle class lifestyle. The vast majority of these people didnt speculate on real estate or stocks and the deleveraging of the property sector not only doesnt hurt them but it actualy opens up the road for more affordable housing and as a result more disposable income for consumption. And thats what we have been seeing. From income to consumption to savings the YoY growth for that bracket has outpaced both GDP growth and that of upper-middle class chinese. Chinese govt does not in fact consider the pains of people who’ve already made enough money to gamble on stocks or speculate on real estate beyond owning the house they reside in as determinal to the engeneering of a future economy more fair and benifiting for the much larger working class people in lower economic brackets.
Thanks for the info and link, it'll be my weekend reading 😸
it depends on the other nation being able to acquire their industrial production. In other words, it depends on that nation developing a functioning industry and economy to absorb Chinese products into it
ah yes, the very-different method of exporting capital to peripheral regions
Capital itself isn't some sort of evil energy. It is the ownership of capital that dictates the result of its accumulation and development.
Chinese capitalists are just as beholden to their class interests as American or British ones and so far there's no sign the Chinese state (despite being legitimately much more democratic and effective than western states) has any interest in not replicating imperialism for their own benefit (obviously without the settler-colonial peculiarities that have made the British-American empire so tyrannical)