China: do nothing, win

The problem is not so much that they’re doing bullshit jobs. The problem is that when people don’t have an income, they cut back on spending which makes everyone else having less to earn from, and eventually that’s going to affect your income (from a selfish perspective), and the economy goes into recession and even more people lose their jobs. Remember, in order for you to earn money, somebody else has got to be willing to spend. If everyone wants to save, then you don’t earn anything.

This is why you need a Federal job guarantee program that acts as an automatic stabilizer. When people are laid off, the government automatically enrolls them into new jobs with guaranteed income to offset the reduced spending in the economy when people lose their jobs. In this case, the government acts as a spender to keep the economy going.

Already fell below 2000 level (total number of registered marriages):

Not sure why you think wars are bad.

From Lenin: Lecture on “The Proletariat and The War”, October 1(14) 1914:

For a Marxist clarifying the nature of the war is a necessary preliminary for deciding the question of his attitude to it. But for such a clarification it is essential, first and foremost, to establish the objective conditions and concrete circumstances of the war in question. It is necessary to consider the war in the historical environment in which it is taking place, only then can one determine one’s attitude to it. Otherwise, the resulting interpretation will be not materialist but eclectic.

Depending on the historical circumstances, the relationship of classes, etc., the attitude to war must be different at different times. It is absurd once and for all to renounce participation in war in principle. On the other hand, it is also absurd to divide wars into defensive and aggressive. In 1848, Marx hated Russia, because at that time democracy in Germany could not win out and develop, or unite the country into a single national whole, so long as the reactionary hand of backward Russia hung heavy over her.

In order to clarify one’s attitude to the present war, one must understand how it differs from previous wars, and what its peculiar features are.

…

The present war is an imperialist one, and that is its basic feature.

In order to clarify this, it is necessary to examine the nature of previous wars, and that of the imperialist war.

Lenin dwelt in considerable detail on the characteristics of wars at the end of the 18th and during the whole of the 19th centuries. They were all national wars, which accompanied and promoted the creation of national states.

These wars marked the destruction of feudalism, and were an expression of the struggle of the new, bourgeois society against feudal society. The national state was a necessary phase in the development of capitalism. The struggle for the self-determination of a nation, for its independence, for freedom to use its language, for popular representation, served this end—the creation of national states, that ground necessary at a certain stage of capitalism for the development of the productive forces.

…

An imperialist war is quite a different matter. On this point, there was no disagreement among the socialists of all countries and all trends. At all congresses, in discussing resolutions on the attitude to a possible war, everyone was always agreed that this war would be an imperialist one. All European countries have already reached an equal stage in the development of capitalism, all of them have already yielded everything that capitalism can yield. Capitalism has already attained its highest form, and is no longer exporting commodities, but capital. It is beginning to find its national framework too small for it, and now the struggle is on for the last free scraps of the earth. If national wars in the 18th and 19th centuries marked the beginning of capitalism, imperialist wars point to its end.

The whole end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century were filled with imperialist policy.

Imperialism is what impresses a quite specific stamp on the present war, distinguishing it from all its predecessors.

Only by examining this war in its distinctive historical environment, as a Marxist must do, can we clarify our attitude to it. Otherwise we shall be operating with old conceptions and arguments, applied to a different, an old situation. Among such obsolete conceptions are the fatherland idea and the division, mentioned earlier, of wars into defensive and aggressive.

Of course, even now there are blotches of the old colour in the living picture of reality. Thus, of all the warring countries, the Serbs alone are still fighting for national existence. In India and China, too, class-conscious proletarians could not take any other path but the national one, because their countries have not yet been formed into national states. If China had to carry on an offensive war for this purpose, we could only sympathise with her, because objectively it would be a progressive war. In exactly the same way, Marx in 1848 could call for an offensive war against Russia.

And so the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th are characterised by imperialist policy.

Imperialism is that state of capitalism when, having done all that it could, it turns towards decline. It is a special epoch, not in the minds of socialists, but in actual relationships. A struggle is on for a division of the remaining portions. It is the last historical task of capitalism. We cannot say how long this epoch will last. There may well be several such wars, but there must be a clear understanding that these are quite different wars from those waged earlier, and that, accordingly, the tasks facing socialists have changed.

When the federal spending falls below an inflection point.

So far the federal spending is still going strong and slightly higher than 2024 yoy: Trump spending tracker

However, it is dependent on the other parameters - if the dollar strength continues to fall (which makes import more expensive), or if the tariff-imposed inflation could not be controlled, then the resultant fiscal drag will overcome the current nominal level of spending. If the federal government does not compensate with increased spending, then there is a risk of going into recession.

Similarly, when the US lowers its interest rate (which it will have to at some point), if the loss of interest income (nearly $1 trillion per year) is not compensated by increased federal spending (where it can reach the people), then total amount of federal spending will drop below an inflection point, with the risk of spiraling into recession.

Trump cannot be doing tariffs and at the same time wanting to cut federal spending if he wants to re-industrialize.

It’s “self-imposed fiscal drag” lol with Trump laying off Federal workers and gutting public institutions.

This is why I simply don’t believe in the “re-industrialization through tariffs” strategy. If you want to play protectionism, you have to expand your domestic workforce in the industrial and scientific base, increase spending to raise the wages of your own workers to compensate for the loss of supply through imports. The absence of an industrial policy shows that this is not a serious attempt at that.

It looks more like finance capital looking to harvest the exporting countries and its own people. And I’m would not be surprised at all if in the end, they manage to replicate the 2008 GFC again, when finance capital went unpunished while millions of people lost their jobs and homes as they could not afford to pay off their debt any further.

Not exactly, it means you give up having a career altogether because of economic outlook, rather than it being a social stance.

As you know, many Chinese youth go to the cities to look for jobs, hoping to earn enough money to settle down and raise a family.

Now, those who already saw there isn’t any hope, simply move back to the provincial towns/villages and live with their parents and stop working altogether. Don’t have to pay for rent and food. Minimize your consumption and spending, don’t go on travels, don’t waste any unnecessary money, and practically spend all the days idling (and instead surfing the internet and play video games).

As the slogan says: 停止进步就是最好的进步 (stop improving yourself is the best form of self-improvement)

Actually, it’s not exactly a bad idea if you can get used to living extremely frugal, although it’s obviously bad for the national economy as a whole since they’re idling labor who can be contributing to the country.

Lol are Americans having their own tangping (lying down) culture as well now?

This is how they’re counting unemployment in China btw. If you’re not looking for jobs, you’re not part of the statistics!

If you’ve been paying attention to news from China, the government is cracking down hard on corruption right now.

Corruption is so ubiquitous that we hear news of some important officials and major financial institutions being investigated and charged on corruption every month if not every week. It’s an open secret for many years and some of these people are just starting to get charged. You really have to ask how could this be allowed to go on for this long - the entire system is rotten to the core and they are just starting to take this seriously.

It is very clear that the government now wants to recover as much money that has been lost to replenish the coffers (when they can just create the money by running a larger deficit) as the economy is slowing down.

So it is not surprising at all that the government does not want people to hide the money somewhere else. Besides, the CBDC (digital yuan) is coming so it’s going to take over the role of crypto as well and directly controlled by the government.

Not really, the two major faults of Medvedev I mentioned likely would not have happened under Putin (or at least we did not see anything resembling that). Putin wanted to forge closer ties with the West but not in this boot licking way.

The current Russian government is actually quite nationalist/soc dem with Mishustin (Prime Minister) and Belousov (former Deputy PM and now Minister of Defense) leaning towards government spending over austerity, and did a good job during the pandemic and the early days of the Ukraine war to prevent Russia from going into recession.

In many ways, they are more nationalist than Medvedev based on track record. The problem with the Russian government right now is that the measures they had taken were ultimately defeated by the central bank’s high key rate (20% for at least two years, and just back to 18%, which is still a ridiculously high rate).

There were others like Sergey Glazyev who was even more nationalist and promoted a Stalin-esque war economy to revive the Russian economy under severe sanctions, but his timing was all wrong and they already got rid of him lol. The libs are pretty much regained control of the Russian economy after the initial waves of purging the oligarchs.

I saw the /s but seriously doomerism would imply there is no solution (like climate change, which is a legitimate issue for much of the world).

The problem with the American left is that nearly a decade after Bernie Sanders first became a well-liked public socialist figure, they still seemingly have not learned anything. There are arguably some small progress here and there, but I am surprised they still haven’t managed to organize a mass movement properly.

It is fragmented as ever. What exactly is their strategy to take power? Do they even want to take power? I don’t know the answers and I doubt they know it either. Compare that to the early 20th century socialist movements and you see a stark difference there.

The DPRK benefited greatly from the Sino-Soviet split, as neither side wanted the DPRK to lean towards the other and so it received a good deal of resources and assistance from both sides to maintain its neutrality.

Most people don’t know that even after being bombed to hell during the Korean War, Japan and the DPRK were the two Asian economies hailed as the rising stars in the 1960s with very high level of industrialization and living standards, even before the rise of South Korea and Taiwan in the 1980s, and later in the 1990s, China.

It’s just the perpetual struggle between the government and the IRGC, two bodies of a country that want to go down separate routes.

I believe the IRGC controls the oil economy though which makes them a very powerful force but the reformist government is wrestling for control as well. Maybe someone who knows better about Iranian politics can elaborate better or correct my statement.

If we’re being honest, no country other than China has been the greatest supporter of the dollar hegemony, and China has certainly reaped the most benefit from the neoliberal status quo. The two countries running huge trade imbalances sharing the most benefits from the arrangement, at the expense of the rest of the world. Even the American working class suffered because of the de-industrialization, as only their bourgeois ruling elites gained the most from the neoliberal free trade order.

The concentration of industrial capacity into China allowed the US empire to expand its imperialist claws into the rest of the Global South countries, who have been robbed of their productive forces as global industrial base was concentrated into a single country, and thus rendered their economies susceptible to foreign capital influx and the subsequent takeover and privatization of their public assets by US finance capital.

If you ask me, I do agree that China has a duty to redistribute its own productive capacity to the rest of the Global South. However, this is not the world we live in. I simply do not see China caring that much about the world when a rapproachment with the US is still the preferred solution (which is what they’re doing right now). You would have thought that China has learned the lessons in Ukraine just a few years earlier, but time has proven that’s not the case here.

China and BRICS are not the USSR. It has no ideological component behind it. It’s mostly business transactions.

To be fair, while this is mostly people arguing on a niche internet leftist forum that holds zero weight on what is actually happening in the world, the question of reform or revolution is a perpetually unresolved issue for the left that dates back at least a century. And I believe they argued even more fiercely back then when the world was at a critical juncture - choosing the wrong path could cost your entire movement and years of effort that went into it.

Arguing over whether to go the reform path or the revolution path is already baked into the consciousness of every left wing movement, hence the split of the Third International from the Second.

First as tragedy, then as farce.

The farcical part is that a century later, Western internet leftists argue over the question of reform vs revolution when they don’t even have an organized movement like they did a century ago, and most unwilling to arm themselves. Is this even a serious movement? There wasn’t any debate to be had, until they actually get serious about organizing and rallying people behind their cause, and have formulated strategy to take power like what Lenin and Mao did.

I’m not so sure about this take to be honest.

Medvedev has been the bigger pro-US liberal than Putin throughout his entire career up until February 2022. He’s NOT a hardliner lol.

It was Medvedev who back then wanted to lick Obama’s boots so much that he promised to purchase an entire fleet of Boeing for Aeroflot, which directly killed off the Russian domestic aviation industry.

It was Medvedev who caved to the NATO invasion of Libya (UN Resolution 1973) and had his first public feud with Putin over the Russian media on this issue. Again, licking Obama’s boots.

Also, he loves watching Netflix. He’s the bigger lib than Putin lol. I don’t know who he thinks he’s fooling with his “nationalist” rhetoric but his entire career has a consistent track record of ceding to Western liberalism.

Gotta push the comment count up to 1k before the end of the week, folks. I blame the rest of the news mega posters for slacking.

I never said Mamdani cannot win. The question you originally asked was:

if Zohran is elected do you believe he’ll crack down on pro Palestinian protesters to the same extent as Adams or Cuomo?

I answered. I remind you that this is the position of a mayor, who will be responsible for keeping the city running while making sure it is operating under the budgetary constraints (not to mention having to pay off its billions of overhanging debt), so there are many ways to force the hand of the mayor to throw the pro-Palestinian cause under the bus when faced with hard choices. This is simply how the system of your own country works. The United States is not a Confederacy, my friend.

And I remind you that this is a city where much of its economic strength comes from Wall Street finance capital and the landlord class - both of whom have vested interest in introducing as much obstacles as possible to see him fail. Are you going to pretend that the city of Wall Street is simply going to let a socialist mayor do his thing without any resistance?

Taking out such virtual capital, NYC itself, as does most of the highest GDP cities in America, does not have the real economy that is strong enough to sustain the current nominal level of its economy. Don’t let the notion of the “greatest city in the world” cloud your vision. It has great culture, no doubt about it. But removed from its artificially boosted virtual capital, you will have to endure a rapidly deteriorating living standards. Even 50% of California’s tax revenue (the wealthiest state in the country) comes from capital gains tax (stocks and bonds), and that should tell you much about the structure of the American economy.

You seem to deny the possibility that a failed socialist mayor can also have detrimental impact for the rest of the left wing movements across the country.

This is a distinct possibility that you have to consider. I even provided the case that you need to have a strong organized mass movement to back him up in order to ward off the challenges coming from the establishment, but you continue to subscribe to the wishful thinking that he alone will be so powerful that the establishment won’t be able to do anything to curb his authority and his ability to deliver on his campaign promises.

Well, if he cannot deliver on his promises, he will be voted out or forced to resign.

Having said that, I am cautiously optimistic, but the lack of deeper analysis about what could happen post-election betrays a naive idealism and blind optimism. I hope Mamdani’s team and those that actually organize in the US understand that better than what I’ve seen here.

You confused me with whoever the “doomers” you’re describing. I never dogged on Mamdani, and if you want to accuse me of doing so, please provide at least the evidence.

You asked a question, that how could Mamdani be forced to throw the pro-Palestinian cause under the bus as a mayor of NYC, I provided the answer.

Look, I have no dog in this internet forum fight, but if the American left is serious about winning, then you better understand how the system of your own country works.

the most powerful metropolitan entity in the United States, this statement proves you all have totally lost perspective, New York City is a nation-state unto itself, what are y’all talking about?

Outing myself a little here, but I did spend more than a decade in the US, and a couple years living in NYC. I loved the place, but come on, it’s not the center of the universe that many of you think it is lol.

Truly some American exceptionalism brained take here. Taking aside the power of Federal government, do you seriously think the most powerful entity in NYC, Wall Street finance capital, supports Mamdani’s cause?

Explain how this is gonna be accomplished without engaging in voting or protests?

As I wrote in another comment, 21st century American leftists truly cannot imagine a future without electoralism, just like how 16th century French people could not imagine a future without monarchy.

Instead of changing the game itself, they chose to play by the rules set by the others, and get mad when the rules get changed without their consent and cause them to lose every single time.

Semi-related, since it’s been a while I followed Malaysian politics, but how is the new Anwar government doing compared to the previous BN rule?

I know that the socdem DAP has been completely neoliberalized, are there any left wing forces within the Pakatan coalition government these days?

My understanding is that Anwar himself used to be the NED candidate and supported by the US during his political imprisonment by Mahathir, so he’s very much a neoliberal, but has since “rebranded” himself as a repentant opposition leader.