This year really is just gonna be us swinging from election to election, I suppose. I feel Lenin’s beaming red eyes on me.
Up next on our electoral tour is Portugal. The current government - a coalition of the center-left Socialists and the center-right Social Democrats - has been mired in corruption scandals, resulting in a general election being called a mere two years after the last one. The fascist and vaguely populist Chega party has gained significant support over the last two years due to the economic hardships. Yesterday, the Social Democrats secured a narrow win of 79 seats compared to the Socialists’ 77. Chega, in third place at 48, would appear to be the best candidate for a coalition, though the leader of the Social Democrats has said that they would refuse a coalition with them due to their xenophobic views. Regardless, the fascist surge is worrying, if expected.
Portugal’s economy is going pretty badly even as European countries go, with little growth in productivity or investment over the last decade. The origins of this crisis date back to Portugal making the euro their national currency in the early 2000s, thus surrendering their ability to control their own currency, becoming reliant on investment from Germany and France, and suffering greatly in the 2012 European debt crisis. Unemployment and low wages spurred emigration; in 2013, the youth employment rate was about 40%; this has only come down to 25% recently and is increasing again. The government is heavily reliant on debt for public spending, with a debt-to-GDP ratio skyrocketing to over 100% in the two decades since the turn of the millennium. The capitalist sector is simply not profitable enough and hasn’t been for 40 years, which is only a problem if you are a capitalist economy. For more on the Portuguese economy, check out Michael Roberts’ recent analysis, from which I obtained a lot of this information.
Inside Portugal is the same story playing out across much of Europe. A failing center or center-left political party, unable to cope with the economic troubles of the last few years due to absolute obedience to neoliberal policies. A fascist party rising, but with no alternative economic plan, hoping that perhaps oppressing minorities and going after “wokeism” will make their God, The Economy, rain blessings down on them again.
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 Portugal! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
The bulletins site is here!
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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 think we should be pushing the “soviet union did not collapse, it was overthrown” button a lot more.
Of all the people I have radicalised, about half of them have later come back and said that this specific thing was a major aspect of what flipped them from being a holdout on communism. They had the brainworm that communism failed and does not work. They felt it was good on paper but had already proven to fail.
This button seems to be one of the strongest things to push on with a lot of people. We don’t do it enough. We don’t have enough media on it.
I know some here disagree with talking about the Soviet Union, I’ve seen people say that there’s no point because it doesn’t matter anymore and that it turns people away. But I sincerely think we really should be talking about it more. It sits in people’s minds as having failed and is the thing that holds them back from exploring the left further.
I’m speaking anecdotally of course but I feel like I’ve personally radicalised a lot of people and I really do believe it’s about half of them that this particular thing has turned. I will also say that I think this group of people have all been younger people (16-30) from american right wing families.
What’s a good short summary for people who ask how it was overthown.
The referendum is a good start, including the fact the majority of Ukrainians, by a wide margin of 71% voted in favor of maintaining.
But imo it doesn’t matter, “democracy” is an aesthetic, they’ll say “hurr durr brainwashed communists were forced to vote” and then turn around and justify why going against said vote was cool and good actualy because clearly undemocratic dictatorship shouldn’t exist.
IMO I don’t like citing the referendum because it only shows that people wanted to maintain the USSR, not that they necessarily wanted socialism. At that point Gorbachev (and the party, tbf) had fucked things up so much, things were already in a death spiral. If you want to talk about public opinion though, you can highlight that after the Soviet Union broke up socialist and social democratic parties did so well in the Duma that Yeltsin basically had to strip them of their power and concentrate all the power in the executive.
You could point out the fact that in 1985 or so, no one in the USSR or the US thought the USSR would face an economic collapse (I think there’s some CIA document to that effect somewhere). When people reference “bread lines” or major shortages in the USSR, usually that references the period only after Gorbachev started fucking up - those shortages were precisely because Gorbachev was throwing monkey wrenches into the works. Before then yeah they didn’t have as many blue jeans or dishwashers but major shortages weren’t anywhere near as prevalent.
The Soviet economy absolutely had problems, but so does the current US economy. There’s always some problems going on in every economy. They don’t all collapse. That’s where part of the “overthrow” comes in. The problems in the US economy haven’t lead to a collapse because the US is in a hegemonic position - no one is “pushing” our economy to collapse. For the USSR, the economic pressures placed on them by the west can only be described as “total war”. Especially in regards to military spending and nukes.
If I want to be as charitable to as possible to Gorbachev, I would paint him simply as a loser and a coward. I think he saw the military and nuclear buildup of the US and figured there was no way to catch up; and that eventually, the US will start a nuclear war that could jeopardize all life on earth. However, instead of rising to the challenge, he capitulated. There’s some letter he wrote to the US State Dept I think (which they didn’t even respond to) where he basically said “ok, what kind of government do you want me to have?”. I really think all of Soviet leadership deserves blame but it’s hard not to pin so much of it on Gorbachev when he was such a pathetic little worm.
But honestly, all of this is details. I think the best response when people say that socialism in the USSR “didn’t work” is to give them the Parenti response: that socialism in the USSR did work. It took a poor, mostly pre-industrial society and transformed their economic capacity to be able to get tens of millions of people out of poverty and up to a standard of living nearly up to the west in an unprecedented time frame, all without the imperialism that the UK and US needed. For the vast majority of Soviet citizens, socialism did work. Of course, there’s a minority of people for whom they definitely would have been better off materially in the west (business owners, highly skilled professionals and managers, doctors, etc) but we only ever hear their perspective in the west, not the perspective of the overwhelming majority of workers. That is intentional.
You have to look at the overall arc of Soviet economic history. After the civil war, socialism took a completely broken, already poor country and in less than 20 years put their productive capacity on par with the fully industrialized west. So much so that the USSR was able to save the world from fascism. In the process though, they lost much of that industrial capacity and 25% of their people. No big deal, Stalin had them back on their feet and in fighting form in less than a decade. From there, despite the intense pressure and the poor economic leadership under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the Soviet economy still grew like gangbusters well into the 70s. There was a slowdown from then on but growth was still basically fine, it was just less than previous. Essentially the socialism in the USSR delivered decades of incredible growth, only to be punctuated by a few years of intentionally fucking things up. The pressure on the USSR meant unlike capitalist countries in the west, they had a lot less space to try and work out those problems.
It seems like by the late 80s the USSR was ready to be toppled without much effort. If the Soviet system was so successful why weren’t there groups of people working on keeping it going and safeguarding it from Western meddling? The story of it’s fall is usually told as though it was all because of Gorbachev’s mistakes or Krushchevs or Brezhnevs but isn’t the whole point of socialism that the fate of a country shouldn’t be in the hands of one man? Why wasn’t there a civil war when the USSR dissolved? I’m just asking I have no idea there’s probably good answers to this
A key thing to understand - and this applies to countries like the GDR too - is the populations were definitely fed up with the political parties that led the country (the SED in the GDR and CPSU in the USSR), not necessarily the systems. It’s not that the people didn’t like socialism. See the above fact about socialist / socdem parties in the Duma. Or in the GDR, there are polls from the time of the end of the GDR that show the people overwhelmingly wanted socialism, but they didn’t want/trust the SED to implement it. Probably similar in the USSR.
While you’ll get no argument from me that the Eastern Bloc could have done much more to build up the masses in understanding of socialism and Marxism, I don’t think you can see the lack of will to preserve the USSR as the people just giving up on the project of socialism, but instead see it as the culmination of a lack of faith in leadership (and - this is my conjecture - for leadership not delivering on the promises of socialism)
Assume I know nothing except US propaganda… What would you say to me to educate me on how the soviet union was overthrown, and didn’t collapse.
Couldn’t agree more I would echo that sentiment. Re-evaluating the post WW2 era and the fall of the Soviet Union was an important part of my pipeline
It’s just so very clear that tonnes of sympathetic people have this “communism is nice in theory but doesn’t work” mindset. This only comes from the USSR and only education about it can change that.
Word. “In the only referrendum in Soviet history almost everyone voted to keep the Union” is a hell of a brick to throw at a liberals head.