BILLY BOB—China’s planned socialist economy did not allow massive slums to sprawl as they always do as an unwanted consequence of capitalist development and economic growth. Instead, China built hundreds of cities from scratch, including twenty cities that house over a million citizens. China developed the world’s greatest high-speed rail network, they became the world’s leading manufacturer of green energy as well as the world’s greatest user of green energy. China developed a world-class education system that leads the world in the number of patents and published research papers. Perhaps most importantly, China is working with the developing world and offering them a hand up, instead of a knee on their necks (as is offered by the Western imperialists).
Default Editor Patrice de Bergeracpas
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Why are Israel and the West unravelling in tandem?
17 minutes readALASTAIR CROOKE—So why are Israel and the West unraveling in tandem? Well, it is firstly because they have become so inter-connected at the level of power structures (in both U.S. and Europe) to a point that it is difficult to know who has more heft within these power and media structures: Tel Aviv or the White House.
This means interdependency in terms of each’s international standing, and by extension, vulnerability to any collapse in Global standing.
So, whilst the West today ostensibly eschews literal settler colonialism (other than that practiced by Israel), it nonetheless has pursued a form of rent-seeking, financialised colonialism since WW2. That process also has become a permanent framework to the Western political and geopolitical ecosystem.
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BILLY BOB—Despite Mearsheimer’s eminent reputation, the tremendous respect which he commands, and his accurate and scathing indictment of Western foreign policy, his framework is surprisingly shallow and lacking in even a basic grasp of “how the world actually works”. Why do I say this and what do I mean? For starters, Mearsheimer is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal who seemingly has never even heard of the concept of class. There are innumerable instances throughout history of seemingly inexplicable behavior that the lens of liberalism is incapable of explaining. Only when one adopts the lens of oppositional class interests and class struggle does history even begin to make any sense. The same is true regarding contemporary reality.
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FRED REED—Americans are not an historically aware people and so have little idea of how or why they are regarded as they are abroad. Consider Mexico, where I live. People here know of the Mexican-American War (of which, preposterously many Americans have never heard) as well as the bombardment of Veracruz and Pershing’s incursion. Peoples remember their defeats and humiliations as the victors do not. Mexicans know they are powerless against America, resent it intensely. Latin Americans in general know of the almost endless list of invasions, coups, dictators installed, economic exploitation that Americans have never heard of. Today they see the persecution of Cuba, the attempt to starve Venezuela into giving Washington control of its oil, the coups and murder attempts against Maduro, the coup in Bolivia, other attempts in Ukraine and Byelorussia, on and on.
Many countries have endured American manipulation exploitation, invasion. Americans seldom know of these things, but the countries involved do.
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The developing conflict between anti-communist “antifa” anarchists, & the Marxists who align with the masses
22 minutes readRAINER SHEA—What it means is that it would be a mistake to embrace pan-leftism just because these protests are having a positive impact. We can’t interpret the successes of the protests as proof that we can ignore the advice Stalin gave, and trust radical liberals (radlibs) to help lead the struggle. Because these radlibs are capable of preventing the struggle from reaching its next stages beyond these first uprisings.