Image is from this CNN article.
The DPRK's history has been a rollercoaster, with admirable highs and heartbreaking lows, most notably the Korean War and the fall of the USSR. Its steadfast commitment to Juche, a variant of Marxism-Leninism that focuses on self-sufficiency, has both made the DPRK a target for imperialist genocidal powers, and allowed them to survive these attacks.
Lately, we seem to be seeing a transition from surviving to thriving. China and the DPRK have always had a much more complicated history than Western education and media allows its population to know, with periods of quite strong disagreement - it's not the case that China is somehow the DPRK's master. Russia is the DPRK's other neighour that isn't US-occupied, and while they obviously differ substantially in ideology since the USSR fell, the tsunami of sanctions on Russia has changed things. The stick has been removed from the equation, with Russia facing no possible punishment from the West because they were unable to enact sanctions effectively and used all their ammunition in the first few barrages rather than turning the screws over time (I don't care if we're on the 14th sanctions package, it's all been meaningless for Russia since the end of 2022).
The carrot is also more visible, with an alliance making a lot of sense for both. Once again, Western education and media would have you believe a Parenti-esque reality in which Korea is a massive and unpredictable danger to the world, but is simultaneously so poor and destitute that their artillery pieces are made of wood and their missiles out of paper-mache. The truth is that Korea has innovated greatly in missile technology, with some of their weapons matching or even exceeding those of the Russians, hence the Russians' use of them in Ukraine. Russia also finds it advantageous to invest in Korea to strengthen the anti-hegemonic alliance's presence in the Pacific, countering the US-occupied lower half of the peninsula who has naturally sided with Ukraine. Additionally, Russia is investing deeply in the Arctic sea route. This will open up as climate change continues; is naturally quite defensible for Russia so long as Korea is there to provide further defense at its eastern edge; and is both a faster and safer route for Russia to access China - especially in a world where straits can be blockaded by even impoverished yet determined countries like Yemen. The situation in the Red Sea benefits Russia and China now, but in the coming years, the US may apply the same lesson for their own benefit elsewhere.
It is perhaps this new sense of self-confidence that has let Korea give up on reunification with its lower half via peaceful measures. A new Korean War would be devastating for both sides even if it remained non-nuclear, but with a rising DPRK and with the South falling yet further into hypercapitalist exploitation and misery, and a US that remains non-committal to its "allies" when times get difficult (as in Ukraine and Europe), a reality where Korea may finally hold the upper hand and have the ability to liberate its south may be approaching in the years and decades to come.
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 *the DPRK! 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.
I don't have the time to summarize this at the moment, but this piece from 2021 linked in nakedcapitalism.com on "is the PRC more financialized than the US?" is interesting. I'm curious what our local China heads have to say about this (@[email protected] ?)
Original piece: https://www.cogitations.co/p/financialization-is-it-worse-in-the
Nakedcapitalism commentary https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/04/on-a-relative-scale-theres-a-strong-case-that-financialization-is-worse-in-the-prc-than-the-us.html
This could be an effort post on its own, but once again I have to raise the obvious Marxist objections to financialization. It is bad theory at best, extremely dangerous and straight up nonsense at worse.
First for some context, I already listed the very basics of the refutation some time ago here. The very short TL;DR is lots of people want an explanation, any explanation that exonerates the inherent problems with capitalism and for some Marxists that ignore Marx falling rate of profit. This is not about appealing just to Marx's authority but rather by ignoring these root causes and finding an "evil actor" i.e Wall Street you can propose some very charming solutions like regulations, taxes and even the usual vulgar terms like "industrial capitalism" as an opposite to "finance capitalism".
Ultimately the goal would be to rehabilitate capitalism with a promise that it can all change and it can all get better if only we remove the bad actors or we introduce these miraculous policies.
For the mainstream, yeah? I wouldn't expect Business insider or WSJ to write about how Wall Street is bad actualy but do remember that the entirety of western mainstream critique of American capitalism is now captured by this rethoric and thanks to Bernie the solution is simple, just pay taxes, solve debt and give healthcare, everything will be solved.
But also this is superficial, as I mentioned in my other post, Biden wants to push this "industrialization" plan by bringing some high tech back to the US as if this will solve anything. This is the other facet of financialization, the belief that you can build factories in the US and that will solve American capitalism. This is an anti-Marxist fallacy. Not because factories are bad, no but rather American capitalist is already far too unprofitable and nothing short of a destruction of American living standards(wages) would allow these factories to be profitable now.
So while the MSM wont say "financialization bad" they'll say all the non-problematic things which supports the same conclusions.
Literaly showing the true colors! More regulation = problem solved, get rid of the bad actors and we can save capitalism!
Before going any longer, maybe its just me but most of these data points are 10 years out of date and maybe its just me but isn't this just bad form overall?
From here I can link to MR latest blog post on China. Yves wanted data? MR's post provides more than enough. China’s next decade
I'll compile Yve's quotes here than MR and you decide what actualy makes sense.
Most of MR's post below with some of my emphasis. I'll summarize even further. Worrying about "consumer debt levels" or "the size of the banking sector" is pointless and mostly useless. It is mainstream economic theory realm which is just objectively incomplete and wrong on most areas.
When you talk about these things in the western context, its not that the finance sector is growing therefore things are bad. Rather "things are bad(profitability)" therefore the finance sector is growing.
MR's post
Despite this evidence, every year the Western ‘China’ experts (and even many in China itself) predict stagnation, given the huge debt levels in all sectors. China is going to stagnate like Japan has done in the last three decades. The only way to avoid ‘Japanification’, say these experts, is to ‘rebalance’ the economy from ‘over-investment’, ‘excessive savings’ and exports to a domestic consumer-led economy as in the West and reduce the state control of the economy so that the private sector can flourish.This year on the occasion of the NPC, Martin Wolf, the Keynesian guru of the Financial Times, returned to this theme, echoing the arguments of other Keynesian China experts like Michael Pettis. According to Wolf, China’s growth will now slow to a trickle as in Japan because it overloaded with excessive debt and because it has not rebalanced the economy towards “the consumer”. China needs to get its consumption share up to Western levels or it will not be able to grow and so stay locked in a ‘middle income’ trap.
China generated 28 per cent of total global savings in 2023. This is only a little less than the 33 per cent share of the US and EU combined. This is all wrong, say Wolf and Pettis. What is needed is a shift from ‘excessive savings’ to consumption. There is over-investment in property and infrastructure, instead of handouts to households. China will only grow from here if consumption leads, not investment.
But how can anybody claim that the mature ‘consumer-led’ economies of the G7 have been successful in achieving steady and fast economic growth, or that real wages and consumption growth have been stronger there? Indeed, in the G7, consumption has failed to drive economic growth and wages have stagnated in real terms over the last ten years, while real wages in China have shot up. Moreover, these consumer-led economies have been hit by regular and recurring slumps in production that have lost trillions in output and income for their populations. The irony is that China’s consumption growth rate is way higher than in the G7 economies.
China has not had a contraction in national income in any year since 1976, while the consumer-led G7 economies have had slumps in 1980-2, 1991, 2001, 2008-9 and 2020. Much has been made of China’s ‘disastrous’ zero COVID policy. But apart from saving millions of lives, China still did not enter a slump in 2020, unlike all the G7 economies in 2020.
Yes, China has the highest ratio of gross investment to GDP among the major economies. But this supposedly ‘over-invested’, ‘excessive savings’ economy has grown more than four times faster than the consumer-led OECD economies and 40% faster than India as a result. What this suggests that if China were to ‘rebalance its economy towards the consumer and reduce investment; and reduce the public sector and ‘free up’ the private sector (the sector that provides most consumer goods in China), growth rates would fall even more than they have done in recent years.
Moreover, the arguments of the Western experts 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 are just not empirically valid. Is China’s weak consumer sector forcing it to try and export manufacturing ‘over capacity’? Not 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.”
What the Chinese government now needs to do is take over these large property developers and bring them back into public ownership, complete the projects and switch to building for rent. The government should annul the developers’ debt to foreign investors and only meet obligations to small investors; and end the mortgage and private finance system permanently. The unproductive real estate sector has got so large in China as a share of investment and output that it has seriously degraded growth. This is where the economy does need rebalancing. There needs to be a switch to productive investment in technology and knowledge industries. If the words of the Five-Year Plan mean anything, it seems that the current Chinese leadership is aware of that.
Once again, Roberts doesn’t know what he’s talking about, at least when it comes to China.
Yes, China’s consumption has gone up, so it doesn’t have a weak consumer base, right?
Except that both household and corporate debt have also gone up exponentially for the past decade:
Figure: Household debt to % of GDP, which more than doubled from <30% in 2011 to 62% in 2021
People are borrowing to spend, and although this is still nowhere near as bad as in Western neoliberal countries, it’s not a good trend to persist. Going too far and your economy eventually becomes one that is fueled by credit, and that means if people stop borrowing to spend (because they can no longer repay their debt), then the economy is going into recessionary spiral. This is why writing down debt or cancelling them altogether is so important.
And ironically, China’s real estate problem today came precisely from the huge investment spending after the 2009 financial crisis. China spent 4 trillion RMB to stimulate its domestic economy that followed the global consumptive slump of 2009, and while it did its job in stabilizing the Chinese economy and prevented a recession that was occuring elsewhere in the world, that huge investment was also itself a problem. Why? Because while exports are down and domestic consumption continues to be weak, where do you think all the investment money ended up? In the real estate sector, precisely. When the real economy could no longer drive growth, the virtual takes over. Property market first emerged in China after 2008 and all the money went into that part of the economy because that’s where your asset value can go up.
Local governments found themselves unable to finance their own government because of the global financial crisis, so instead of investing into the real sector that was not growing, they raised cash instead by selling land and allowed the property market to proliferate - uncontrollably - to make up for the loss in GDP from the real economy. Then they used that money to repay their old debt to the financial institutions, and in turn taking out more new loans from the banks to sustain their local development activities.
As you can see, really, the only way out for China is to build a strong consumer base that is not fueled by debt, but through increase in real wages and net assets (and hopefully, not the housing assets that are bound to crash at some point).
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.