Image is of Bolivian President Luis Arce (center, with glasses) face-to-face with General Zuñiga (in camouflage) during the coup attempt.
On the 26th of June, while Hexbear was in an 8-hour hibernation, General Juan José Zuñiga marched 200 troops and some armored vehicles on the government palace in an attempt to overthrow the democratically elected government of Luis Arce. This is somewhat reminiscent of Jeanine Anez’s coup in November 2019 where she overthrew the socialist president Evo Morales, but while that coup was due to a colour revolution likely orchestrated by the United States and had at least a tiny amount of political/public legitimacy and “followed the rules” in a certain sense (as Morales was trying to abolish presidential term limits, which is only evil if a socialist is doing it), this was a much more naked attempted seizure of power by a military general.
This coup was quickly terminated without even a momentary transfer of power. Democracy was saved.
Despite being in the same party, Morales and Arce have increasingly been in opposition. Morales champions anti-imperialism, rights for indigneous people, and poverty reduction. This last one especially has been threatened by Arce, though it’s not entirely his fault, as the Bolivian economy is threatened by the same crisis affecting so many developing economies around the world right now - say it with me now - a lack of dollars and mounting debt. The US Federal Reserve is carrying out a bloody offensive against the world’s poor, and this has combined nastily with a rather uninspiring “post”-coronavirus economic recovery in Bolivia, as well as diminishing natural gas production (and thus less exports with which to earn dollars).
While the coup was ongoing, Morales banded behind the government. Afterwards, however, Morales expressed his skepticism about whether the coup was, in fact, genuine, calling for an independent investigation into it, and saying that Arce “disrespected the truth, deceived us, lied, not only to the Bolivian people but to the whole world." This is because General Zuñiga made a series of very interesting statements to his family and colleagues, saying that Arce had “betrayed” him, and saying that Arce had told him “‘The situation is very screwed up, very critical. It is necessary to prepare something to raise my popularity.'" This does check out on the surface level, at least: Arce has suffered increasing unpopularity as the economy has suffered.
Interestingly, Morales’ narrative has been supported by the anarchocapitalist leader of Argentina, Javier Milei, who is currently busy completely destroying his own country and stripping the copper out of the walls to give to American capitalists. Milei said that the coup attempt was “fraudulent”. Meanwhile, those inside MAS opposed to Morales’ accusations of a false coup have accused him of allying with the fascist right and becoming an instrument of imperialism.
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 Bolivia! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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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.
there are quite a few genuine critiques of him. you do have to be careful to not attribute too much to him - analyses of how financialization interacts with capitalism predate him by decades (Lenin was talking about it in his day, for instance) so he’s not the Modern Marx bringing shining new analyses of capitalism to the fore or anything. I think his near-total rejection of the USSR is a big point against him, and he has other reactionary tendencies (he has shown up on fascist websites IIRC - just doing his regular spiel that he does with leftist and liberal people too, as far as I know, but even so).
he also seems to espouse a very iffy view that industrial capitalism returning would be a big benefit in-and-of-itself (or a view that would be effectively equivalent to that, given his trot views), when we shouldn’t lose sight that we oppose capitalism in general, it’s just that we hate financial capitalism because of the landlords and rentierism that brings as well as industrial capitalism for the traditional reasons that big communist figures hated capitalism for. the theory is that a return to industrial capitalism in the West would mean that workers would be more able to seize the means of production because right now there’s not really a lot of like, weapons factories and steel factories etc to seize and use in a revolution, but there’s also the thirdworldist take that no matter what form of capitalism is happening in the West, it doesn’t matter because there’s an imperialist relationship and that relationship must end before revolution becomes viable in the West (and our job as westerners is to weaken our countries from within in preparation for eventual revolution). I guess I side more with the latter take than the former, especially because western reindustrialization seems essentially impossible anyway, so it’s a useless hypothetical
so there’s a lot to dislike about Hudson, I know that Roderic Day and others really doesn’t like him, but I think it is possible to take what’s good and ditch what’s bad. he has takes I agree with on Russia and China, at least, which can be disappointingly difficult to find in the western left.
To be fair, it cannot be overstated how important Super Imperialism was to the post-1971 US dominance of the entire world. It was entirely an accident. Pure dumb luck. The US empire could very well have imploded after the Nixon Shock if it weren’t for Hudson’s thesis that came out in time:
From The Dumb Luck of Dollar Hegemony
K: So talking that super imperialist type perspective, when you wrote the book, did you ever think that it will continue for as long as it has? When you wrote Super Imperialism, did you ever think that this dollar imperialism would last for as long as it has?
M:I didn’t even think how long it would last. I was concentrating solely on how it worked. And I, it looked like there wasn’t any opposition to it. If you can imagine I was a left winger and I’d published in Ramparts magazine and Catholic left wing magazines. But when I began to write it, and especially after Herman Kahn immediately hired me for the Hudson Institute to explain to the defense department and state department how imperialism worked. I soon realized that only the United States was interested in how imperialism works, but they wanted ‘a how to do it’ book.
The last thing I thought I was writing was a ’how to do it’ book. I thought I was writing what people had to do to get rid of it. And instead people use the book, ‘here’s how to make sure it lasts forever’. So all I could do was watch and realize that there really wasn’t a left wing anymore that talked about economic factors.
K: But surely, you, you gave that insight to the Pentagon, you know, and to many insiders in Washington, but was it dumb luck? Or did you have a feeling of who actually was behind the whole systemic change and the process that accompanied that? I mean, surely it wasn’t dumb luck.
M: No, but that, what, what, what wasn’t dumb luck? My being hired? The establishment of the dollar, dollar hegemony. You mean dollar hegemony wasn’t dumb luck? Well, yes, it was. Yes, it was. They absolutely did not understand it. In fact, in one of the newspapers in August of 1971, everyone thought America has dominated the world economy ever since 1950, when it had three quarters of all of the world’s monetary gold.
It was the America’s holding of gold that enabled it to put England on rations, to enable it to dictate economic policies to other countries, because if they didn’t have gold, they didn’t have the backing for their domestic money in order to back the credit, to create capital investment and develop themselves. They were still tied to gold as a commodity basis of their money instead of modern monetary theory or realizing that money could just be created by greenbacks like the United States did in the civil war.
So it was, nobody had anticipated how it would work. And since I was a balance of payments economist, I was able to say, well, what is the balance of payments going to look like and where are countries going to put all of these dollars that are being pumped into their economy? What will France do? Now that France and Germany can no longer cash in the dollars for gold, what will they do? And it was pretty obvious that they were going to buy U.S. treasury securities. And that’s exactly what happened.
Of course, someone else could have discovered the same principles, but it remains a fact that the timely publication of Super Imperialism in 1972 enabled the US empire to transition rapidly into the form of imperialism that we are still suffering from today. Hudson’s very unique experience from working with balance of payments (which wasn’t taught at the time) and working with bank accounting enabled him to come to the conclusion earlier than anyone else.
There is a twist to this story though. As much as Hudson seems to hate on Stalin, we now have historical evidence that Stalin was perhaps one of the first head of states who understood this principle earlier than anyone else, 40 years before the US itself abandoned the gold standard. It allowed the USSR to drive fiscal expansion like never before, despite just coming out of a bloody civil war, paving the way towards rapid industrialization, until Khrushchev declared the USSR to be default in 1957, claiming that “government debt is too high and they can no longer repay the bond interests” that ended the fast paced growth of the Soviet economy and ultimately led to its stagnation and downfall.
