That is a wonderfully contemptuous word for the colonizers: ‘civilization-mongers’! What one wishes to emphasize here is that the writings of Marx and Engels are indeed contaminated in several places with the usual banalities of nineteenth-century Eurocentrism, and the general prognosis they offered about the social stagnation of our societies was often based on unexamined staples of conventional European histories. Despite such inaccuracies, however, neither of them portrayed resistance to colonialism as misdirected; the resistance of the ‘Chinese coolie’ was celebrated in the same lyrical cadences as they would deploy in celebrating the Parisian communard. On the whole, then, we find the same emphases there as Cabral was to spell out a century later: colonialism did have, in some limited sense and in some situations, a ‘progressive’ side, but ‘maintenance’ of ‘nationality’ is the inalienable right of the colonized. For Indian historiography, meanwhile, this issue of the partially progressive role of colonialism has been summarized by Bipan Chandra, our foremost historian of anti-colonial thought of the Indian bourgeois intelligentsia, who is himself sometimes accused of being too nationalistic:
'…most of the anti-imperialist writers would agree with Marx. They all, without exception, accept that the English introduced some structural changes and nearly all of them welcome these changes…Their criticism was never merely or even mainly that the traditional social order was disintegrated by British rule but that the structuring and construction of the new was delayed, frustrated, and obstructed. From R.C. Dutt, Dadabhai Naoroji and Ranade down to Jawaharlal Nehru and R.P. Dutt, the anti-imperialist writers have not…really condemned the destruction of the pre-British economic structure, except nostalgically and out of the sort of sympathy that any decent man would have, that, for example, Marx showed for the ‘poor Hindu’s’ loss of the old world.'...
Three things need to be said about this judgement. First, no influential nineteenth-century Indian reformer, from Rammohun to Syed Ahmed Khan to the founders of the Indian National Congress, was to take so clear-cut a position on the issue of Indian Independence; indeed, Gandhi himself was to spend the years during World War 1 recruiting soldiers for the British Army. Second, every shade of Indian nationalist opinion as it developed after 1919 – from the Gandhian to the communist, and excluding only the most obscurantist – would accept the truth of , including the idea that colonial capitalism did contribute ‘new elements of society’ in India, some of which have a very great need to be preserved.....
As a counterpoint to that kind of indigenism, it might be useful briefly to recapitulate the views of an eminent intellectual of the political Left – E.M.S. Namboodripad, who recently retired from his post as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) –and who has written precisely on these same themes. In the course of a brief intervention in a seminar on Indology, Namboodripad speaks first of ‘the kernel of truth concerning Indian society revealed by Marx’, and then goes on to say, unwittingly shedding some light on the same paragraph which Said, unknown to Namboodripad, interprets in his own way:
'Indian society had, for several centuries, remained in a stage of stagnation and decay; its destruction had come as the order of the day. Since, however, there was no internal force which could destroy the stagnant and decaying old society, the external force that appeared on the scene, the European trading bourgeoisie who came to India in the 15th and 16th centuries, particularly the most modern and powerful of them, the British trading-cum-industrial bourgeoisie, were the ‘unconscious tools of history’. Marx the revolutionary therefore did not shed a single tear at this destruction, although with his deep humanism and love for the people, he had nothing but sympathy for the Indian people who were undergoing – and hatred for the British who were inflicting – immense suffering on them.'
http://maximumred.blogspot.com/2005/02/aijaz-ahmad-on-marx-on-india.html?m=1
Edited by RedMaistre ()
RedMaistre posted:I think politicians should be understood to be like lawyers in so far as it should always be acknowledged that they are working on behalf of clients. They can still articulate certain truths, but they always have an interest which goes above and beyond a theoretical interest in accuracy.
again, i don't agree in any sense that revolutionaries should be seen as mere politicians. marxism and the anticolonial thought it influenced developed the dialectical unity between practical interest and the development of theoretical principles. i don't think your perspective is consistent with a marxist theory of knowledge, which would always privilege the political decisionists over the nonpartisan in the sense of being theoretically productive
RedMaistre posted:Any sufficiently dialectical approach to the past will treat all voices, including that of the Maos of this world, as individually being merely partial perspectives on the truth that is only accessible through ever more thorough approximations of totality. Doing otherwise would be like interpreting King Lear or Hamlet by only reading one character's lines and ignoring everyone else's.
this isn't an answer. i'm generally at a loss for your arguments because these points are just uncontroversial truisms. merely identifying the fact that any particular perspective is an approximation of totality isn't saying anything - it doesn't impact whatsoever the claim that the theoretical product of revolutionary struggle is a uniquely privileged approximation and infinitely more valuable than bourgeois scholastics
i don't believe that historians must abdicate any theoretical responsibility either, but outside historical accountancy, historians have no unique position as theorists. historians are obligated to engage from a theoretical perspective but there is nothing that qualifies this perspective as uniquely valuable by virtue of them being historians. that they are inclined to have a better grasp on historical data does not imply or necessitate any greater sophistication in theoretical analysis
RedMaistre posted:Three things need to be said about this judgement. First, no influential nineteenth-century Indian reformer, from Rammohun to Syed Ahmed Khan to the founders of the Indian National Congress, was to take so clear-cut a position on the issue of Indian Independence; indeed, Gandhi himself was to spend the years during World War 1 recruiting soldiers for the British Army. Second, every shade of Indian nationalist opinion as it developed after 1919 – from the Gandhian to the communist, and excluding only the most obscurantist – would accept the truth of , including the idea that colonial capitalism did contribute ‘new elements of society’ in India, some of which have a very great need to be preserved.....
the orthodox figures indian national reform have been almost universally disparaged and condemned by the genuinely revolutionary and anti-imperialist currents within india. the anti-revisionist marxist-leninist perspective has consistently diminished these as figures which rallied for comprador positions in the development of neocolonialism while maintaining institutional residue of colonial administration
and it's further worth mentioning the deeply reactionary role of the cpi-m, who consistently and repeatedly intervened in order to obstruct and suppress peasant organisation in rebellion, facilitating forcible displacement and intensification of capital investment
i don't think it is a matter of coincidence that the figures who have been identified with their nuance in departing from the strict indigeneist perspective have also been the among the most vicious and cruel in their political interventions regarding the indigenous
enjoying sam williams latest on anwar shaikh but laughing that after 11 months, 10 enermous posts and hundreds of thousands of words its like 'ok thats book one of my "review of three books on political economy released in 2016" done, only 2 to go now'
On to imperialism in the 21st century now
Like other dead historical forms, for example Christianity or cinema, liberalism lumbers around zombie-like, continuing to define lives and wield material power.
strong start.
Liberalism, and its preferred governmental form liberal democracy, is collapsing because the nation-state — the concept that animated liberalism and gave it historical force through the European wars and revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries — has transformed from a necessary tool for capitalist development to a hindrance to growth... Neoliberal economic policy has produced growth through a series of debt bubbles, but that series is reaching its terminal limits in student and medical debt. Liberalism today has nothing to offer but the symbolic inclusion of a small number of token individuals into the increasingly inaccessible upper classes.
political diagnosis - good, global.
economic diagnosis - bad, NuYawker.
As liberalism collapses, so too does the left-right divide that has marked the past century of domestic politics in the capitalist world... the political dichotomy going forward will be between a “left” and “right” fascism. One is already ascendant, and the other is new but quickly growing.
Jürgen Habermas and various other 20th century Marxists used “left fascism” as a generic slander against their ideological opponents, but I am using it to refer to something more specific: the corporatocratic libertarianism that is the counterpart of right fascism’s authoritarian ethnonationalism, forming the two sides of the same coin. When, in the wake of the imminent economic downturn, Mark Zuckerberg runs for president on the promise of universal basic income and a more “global citizen”-style American identity in 2020, he will represent this new “left” fascism: one that, unlike Trump’s, sheds the nation-state as a central concept.
The difference between state and nation-state will become increasingly clear as a new fascist politics of total corporate sovereignty comes into view... In America, the right fascists find their base in agribusiness, the energy industry, and the military-industrial complex, all relying heavily on state subsidies, war, and border controls to produce their wealth. Although they hate taxes and civil rights, they rely on American imperialism, with its more traditional trade imbalances, negotiation of energy “agreements,” and forever wars to make their profits. But the left fascists, based in tech, education, and services, do best through global labor flows and free trade. Their reliance on logistics, global supply chains, and just-in-time manufacturing, combined with their messianic belief in the singularity and technological fixes for social problems, means they see the nation-state mostly as a hindrance and the military as an inefficient solution to global problems.
uhhh... ok.
This is, in fact, how much of early colonialism worked, with its chartered joint-stock companies running plantation microstates on opposite sides of the world. Instead of the crown, however, there will be the global market: no empire, just capital.
the specific past chosen for comparison is productive but something is missing...
Revolutionaries have to get over their fetishization of both nation and state,...
so just to be clear, 'left-fascism' is libertarianism, which means that we have to do one of those space invaders type scroll where the term goes off screen on the left and reappears on the right. regular fascism is the new left (inasmuch as it is still democratic) and 'left-fascism' is the new right, the true threat to liberal democracy. this is the real problem - regressive populism vs technocratic incrementalism.
the problem with his entire argument begins at the point he thinks Faceberg is an electable entity. Media can make a Trump palatable but to convince people to vote for bots is absurd. Neither do technocrats care about politics enough to run for election - they undermine it with lobbying and funding.
just to provoke, I would say that only a revolutionary after the revolution can give up the fetishization of nation and state. This was the situation for Kojeve as he understood it (according to his 'end of history' theory) so he helped to establish a transnational and apolitical organization - the EU. These are the true 'left-fascists', not those total privatization libertarians. We can shit over belgian technocrats but the fact remains that the EU regulates nation-states on matters that national politics don't touch like information security and environment.
But the EU is crumbling and nothing like it existed on the other side of the atlantic anyway. as NLR would put, the world-historical conjuncture today resembles not of early but of late colonialism. capital without a crown is not a good time for civilians (revolutionaries rejoice!). The 20th century is remembered today as an excessively violent era but what is coming will make us remember the post-war pre-internet time as an idyll. taking over the state remains necessary for everyone but capitalists. however, it might not be enough - there is a case here to be made for link faschismus of the kojevean variety but i am too lazy for that rn.
Rather than simply matching consumers with products that fit existing interests, mass consumer monitoring has led to sophisticated efforts to modify behavior, engineer consumer habits, and intervene upon intimate decision-making processes. This is not, of course, the story that digital advertisers tell the public or regulators. But nor is it a conspiratorial view. Many advertising firms and marketers talk quite openly about these goals—as long as they in the company of clients or industry insiders. Firms boast of their ability to combine data with behavioral science to steer consumers’ decisions. Ogilvy Change, which specializes in applying behavioral science to marketing, declares itself to be “the leading behavioral interventions agency,” though many agencies are vying for this title.
and the political fallout at DAPL,
It’s not an overstatement to suggest that the infrastructure of mass consumer surveillance enables new kinds of actors to take up the work of COINTELPRO on a mass scale. Former Cambridge Analytica employees have said the company internally discusses their operations as psychological warfare.
Cambridge Analytica may not be alone in pursuing these types of psychological warfare tactics. Earlier this year, The Intercept showed that TigerSwan, a shady mercenary firm hired by Energy Transfer Partners to combat communities opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline, used knowledge gleaned from surveillance as part of their own strategy to splinter their opponents. A leaked TigerSwan document declared, “Exploitation of ongoing native versus non-native rifts, and tribal rifts between peaceful and violent elements is critical in our effort to delegitimize the anti-DAPL movement.”
by disclosing its separate holdings of foreign government bonds, asset-backed securities and the specific make up of its cash equivalents — including commercial paper, agencies and money market funds — Apple is, on a relative basis, among the more open about what is in its $262bn portfolio. Other companies, including Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, disclose far less.
corporate america makes apple look good
Apple, for example, warned in its annual filing with the SEC last year that a one percentage point jump in interest rates would hand it a $4.9bn paper loss on its holdings. At Oracle the number is smaller, but still significant. The software group says it could suffer mark-to-market losses of nearly $350m if rates rise by half a percentage point, according to its last annual report with the SEC. Microsoft says it could lose more than $200m in a single day if there was an “adverse” market shock. Cisco estimates the value of its equity portfolio would drop by $171m if the stock market suffered a correction.
lol
slipdisco posted:also on the surveillance economy beat
Mark Zuckerberg (right)
This opening up of new possibilities seems to be part of George M. Fredrickson’s intention in writing White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History. He wishes to both avoid deterministic narratives that would let South Africa off the hook while at the same time staying away from triumphalist stories which would put the United States on a pedestal. In the second half of his book, Fredrickson successfully shows that white supremacy was much more brutally asserted in South Africa than the in the United States during the period he studies despite the fact that in many ways South African whites had been less successful in establishing themselves as a Herrenvolk (master race) than their American counterparts. The fate of the indigenous population had been far harsher in the United States than in the colonies established around the Cape, making the brutal methods of apartheid unnecessary. Liberalism was far more developed in the United States than in South Africa, in part because in the former there were large areas which could treat the existence of a significant black population as a distant problem. American trade unionism developed in a more democratic fashion in America than South Africa because the creation of an official industrial color line was less necessary in the former than the latter. Finally, Jim Crow was less extreme than apartheid in part because the African population in the United States was a minority rather than a majority
In an eloquent flight into the realm of the counterfactual, Frederickson asks us to imagine a scenario where the Native American population had not died off in large numbers due to disease upon their initial encounter with Europeans and colonists in North America had been less numerous than they actually were. American settlers would have faced the same question that plagued South African whites: What was to be done with a population that was too large to be exterminated and whose labor were necessary for the proper functioning of the economy? Faced with this conundrum, the United States would likely have opted for the elaborate system of social control of nonwhites that South Africa embarked on. One may quibble about the real value of hypotheticals as a way of writing history; nevertheless as a piece of rhetoric this is a very effective point. This argument also shows how Fredrickson is not arguing for the innate moral superiority of America in comparison to South Africa. The greater development of democratic norms in the former was dependent on the thoroughness of the founding conquest.
In White Supremacy, liberalism is portrayed as being historically better established in the United States than in South Africa. In Fredrickson’s account, both the American South and the American North gain by comparison with their equivalents in South Africa. Frederickson emphasizes the Boers relative lack of sophistication when it came to the defense of their domination of blacks in comparison to the planters of the Old South. The former, according to the author, had no equivalent to Thomas Jefferson or the other founding figures whose profoundly ambiguous words could be used to articulate an antislavery form of republicanism. Nor were the Boers’ crudely ethnocentric self understanding opened to the influence of universalist discourses like 19th century evangelical Christianity, liberal constitutionalism, or civilizational progress in the way their Southern counterparts were obliged to be by their intimate participation in the rising world system of commerce and ideas. Further, while both the British colonial authorities and the Northerners of the United States were, compared to their opponents, relatively benevolent towards people of African descent, the latter group was much more radical in its application of egalitarian principles. There was no equivalent to Radical Reconstruction in 19th century South Africa. The Cape Town liberalism that was eventually extinguished by rising Afrikaner nationalism only ever extended the franchise to those classified as Coloreds who had a certain amount of property and education. Further, while the results of the American Civil War enshrined colorblind legal equality at the level of constitutional law, South African liberalism was by comparison more local and provisional. What Jim Crow was to the United States, the experience of Cape Town was to South Africa: a tolerated legal exception to the general principals of the dominant society. Later scholarship may wish to emphasize more the extent to which the North engaged in de facto segregation but Fredrickson’s argument has at least prima facie plausibility.
Fredrickson argues that the United States, unlike South Africa did not have an industrial color bar. This was in part because America was far more committed to a laisse faire attitude when it came to economic affairs. Businessmen were resistant to committing themselves to hard and fast rules about whom they could and could not hire while the American Federation of Labor preferred to keep the government outside of disputes with management. By contrast, South African enterprises along with the state were far more willing to bend to white working class demands that “their” jobs be protected from nonwhite competition. The closest equivalent to this situation in the United States was the successful closing of the country’s borders to Chinese immigrants. Yet, even this effort did not go so far as to ban nonwhites from participation in certain professions. Further, the security of American white predominance over minorities made certain populations of workers more open to cross-racial solidarity. U.S. trade unionists in the 1930s opened up their ranks to African Americans in part, White Supremacy argues, because ghettoization was deemed sufficient to make bonding with blacks as fellow laborers safe. Finally, Fredrickson makes the argument that the moral legacy of the American Civil War prevented the United States from completely betraying the dream of equality. This is an interesting idea, but unfortunately he does not cite any sources to back up his theory. In addition, those who have studied the use of convict labor in the late 19th century South may say that Fredrickson overstates his case when he asserts Americans opposed all forms of resuscitated slavery.
Finally, White Supremacy argues that apartheid was far more total than Jim Crow because it was dealing with a population that was the actual majority in the lands making up South Africa, not a vulnerable minority surrounded by a hostile society. South Africa insisted on the pretense that whites and blacks were members of different nations, a notion that was alledgedly impossible to believe in the United States. Segregation in South Africa was a straightforward case of whites imposing barriers to their own advantage, while in the American South, Fredrickson argues, blacks took the initiative during Reconstruction to create separate institutions of their own. Even the frequency of lynching in the American South is judged by Frederickson to be a symptom of the relative weakness of the Southern racial order. Extra-legal violence was, in this view, necessary to reinforce divisions that were not and could not be asserted in many facets of ordinary life.
One perspective that Fredrickson constantly poses himself against is the Marxist approach, or at least the “conventional” version of the same. He is clearly bothered by the notion that racial oppression is an inevitable part of the unfolding of a capitalist society. At one point he openly throws down the gauntlet:
"Industrial capitalism may be a major cause of social and economic inequality in the modern world, but it makes little historical sense to view it as the source of the ideologues directly sanctioning racial discrimination.”
He goes on to say that it has already been established earlier in the book that color prejudice was the product of premodern attitudes. The presence of racism in modern societies was a result of the persistence of the “old racial” order finding new ways to perpetuate itself rather than the innovations of capitalist progress itself. “Dominant political groups” are not simply economic actors but are also “carriers of prevailing cultural traditions.” This line of reasoning seems to partially contradict his earlier narrative that what has come to be known as white supremacy was originally constructed around the Christian/non-Christian binary and later became reformatted into a white/black paradigm due to the exigencies of economic production.
While Fredrickson is certainly not setting up a mere strawman, it can be argued that he is still positing an opponent that is a bit too easy to defeat. Before and since the publication of his book there has been a rich Marxist literature which acknowledges the relative autonomy of race in social history. It is instructive to compare Fredrickson’s approach to that of Zine Magubane in her book Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa. She makes a compelling argument that capitalist expropriation and racialization went hand in hand. Magubane does not distinguish between the “true” capitalism of the free labor type from the “backward” systems of exploitation used in areas that fall outside the rising industries of the core. Instead, Magubane believes the development of the periphery and the metropole went hand in hand with each other not only on the level of commerce but also on the level of ideology through the discourse of race. The forcing of Africans into wage labor was justified on the basis of stereotypes concerning the work habits of people of color. These same notions of antiblackness were imported back into the imperialist center for use against populations closer to home in need of discipline. In addition, Magubane uses Marxism to articulate a sophisticated theory about the role of gender in colonial history. By contrast, Fredrickson does not do much to center the experience of women in his historical account.
It may also be argued that Fredrickson replaces one form of crude economic determinism with a determinism centering around demographics. Instead of showing that differing cultures produced different results in the U.S. and South Africa, White Supremacy leans towards making such ideological variations epiphenomena of the ratio of settlers to indigenous. Racial competition seems to replace class as the ultimate explanation for social change, leaving little hope for humane and rational political action. This seems to be the opposite of Fredrickson’s intention, but it is the position that his emphasis on the fate of Native Americans leans towards.Through ceding ground to the counterfactual, the text falls into the trap of making the apparent destiny of racial difference all the more real as a social factor.
Fredrickson draws on a wealth of secondary sources, albeit now of a somewhat dated type. In contrast to Magubane, there is a relative absence of primary source voices, white as well as non-white. What may be more deliberate is his lack of interest in theory, Marxist or otherwise. He is setting himself as a “non-ideological” perspective dealing with a highly controversial subject.
The differing evaluations of South Africa and the United States, though not entirely unfounded, lead to conclusions which seem somewhat dated in light of recent events. Near the end he says blithely that “the trend in the United States is for blacks and whites to participate on a more equitable basis for a common society.” By contrast, Fredrickson enters into something very much like an Old Testament prophetic mode concerning South Africa’s whites, saying that if they do not willingly give up their privileges “they may end up in the same situation in which nonwhites now find themselves --- as disenfranchised aliens in the land of their birth.” No such ominous words are addressed to the Caucasian inhabitants of the United States.
Since the publication of this book, apartheid in South Africa has been broken and African majority rule has become the new norm. The most pressing issue is now how to govern a multiracial society where wealth is still disproportionally in the hands of the settler minority while many nonwhites long for a better life. At the same time, the United States has had both its first black president and the chauvinist reaction represented by the election of Trump. It would be interesting to read what Frederickson would have said about the present state of the two countries he studied. In particular, today he could have focused on how South African and American whites have dealt with their relative loss of status. From the perspective of the longue durée that he was attune to, he might have injected a note of optimism to the present political environment, to the extent that it would be appropriate for a historian to provide such comfort. In any case, Fredrickson’s scholarly efforts were and remain invaluable contributions to the discourse surrounding the role of race in history. It may very well be that, by learning from the past experiences that have been reconstructed by works like White Supremacy, the whites of both South Africa and the United States will find a way to deal with their new status which will go beyond both self-flagellation and racist revaunchism.
Edited by RedMaistre ()
and The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings
by Ludwig R.R. Feuerbach
Edited by swampman ()
I think this is pretty inspiring, the head of state of a country comprised of a billion people celebrating Marxism. I’m pretty sympathetic towards China, but I could not really present a case defending the CPC, so I was wondering if anyone knew of any 21st century books defending China? Or criticizing it if it’s not shitty but that’s the common position, at least in the West, so there’s a plethora of lazy arguments. What does the rhizzone think?
Edited by swampman ()
A recent opinion piece in telesur: https://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/China-A-Revolutionary-Present-20171004-0015.html
edit: also https://monthlyreview.org/2013/03/01/china-2013/
is science..
real
capitalist: socialism kills innovation!
— Ajit (@aparajito_) October 6, 2017
socialist China: *turns deserts into forests*
(Research paper: https://t.co/orrdirKhNG) pic.twitter.com/lrxaA8brDm
Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:william hinton
toyotathon posted:How To Read Donald Duck
https://fadingtheaesthetic.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/33788991-how-to-read-donald.pdf
Thanks for sharing this it's pretty cool.
Fuck Pinochet
it's a bit like reading nakedcapitalism bc it lays out all these problems and is like well i guess we shd be more upright then
levoydpage posted:Any suggested reading materials on Czechoslovakia?
all the stuff i have is viciously anti-Moscow in a dishonest way if you're able to work through that... it's pretty hard for me to find material on the topic that isn't, for a lot of probably obvious reasons
cars posted:levoydpage posted:Any suggested reading materials on Czechoslovakia?
all the stuff i have is viciously anti-Moscow in a dishonest way if you're able to work through that... it's pretty hard for me to find material on the topic that isn't, for a lot of probably obvious reasons
Sounds about right. I am just trying wrap my head around what happened. Watching that scene in Grin Without a Cat before the tanks roll and at the end of the party meeting everyone is standing and applauding themselves for trying to all figure out what to do, very moving.
English versions of Ivan Svitak's books are still pretty cheap. A lot of Karel Kosík is supposed to see a new translation in the next couple years (<- Trots) but in the meantime, https://www.scribd.com/doc/63512206/Kosik-Karel-Dialectics-of-the-Concrete is a good start for learning about Marxist humanism in the country. Which frankly sucks imo but there it is.
anyone know if this is good? bruce cumings recommended it...
cars posted:
Right on. Just trying to catch up and acquaint myself with instances of note, but there are so many.
I started Dialectics of the Concrete and immediately Kosik starts bringing up 'essence' which is funny, cause I also just tracked down a pdf of "Willing Slaves of Capital" (anyone bothered with this one?) which seems interesting to put along side this. The Spinoza>Hegel>Marx connections seem to come up a lot in between the lines.
Anyway, thanks!
asking because it seems more & more countries are divesting from this system ... which seems good
Edited by tears ()
A 1974 agreement between US President Richard Nixon and Saudi King Faisal meant Riyadh has been accepting dollars for all its oil exports.
However, recently, countries like China and Russia have been looking to exclude the greenback from bilateral oil trade. Russia and Saudi Arabia are the most significant exporters of oil to China, alternating in top spot.
China has already said it wants to start a crude oil futures contract priced in yuan and convertible into gold.
my gut feeling is that washington will literally blow up the world before they let this happen but whatevs
Dimashq posted:I think this is pretty inspiring, the head of state of a country comprised of a billion people celebrating Marxism. I’m pretty sympathetic towards China, but I could not really present a case defending the CPC, so I was wondering if anyone knew of any 21st century books defending China? Or criticizing it if it’s not shitty but that’s the common position, at least in the West, so there’s a plethora of lazy arguments. What does the rhizzone think?
chickeon posted:crow made some real good posts about china i meant to dig thhose up
if you have an fbibook, i highly recommend joining Leading Like Communist Organization (Argument Archivist Shock Division). crow and a lot of other people interested in ML pro-China views have posted a lot of articles on the subject. if you'd like i can repost some of the articles here?