Image is of German farmers blocking the road near the Brandenburg Gate in early January 2024.
The ruling German coalition - the FDP, the SPD, and the Greens - has been in dire straits since the war in Ukraine began due to their steadfast commitment to destroying their country as much as possible in solidarity with Ukraine destroying themselves too. Scholz is deeply unpopular, with a record low approval of 20%, and his party’s approval is even lower.
The German left has been entirely unable to take advantage of this situation, with Die Linke fragmenting due to split opinions on what position they should hold on Ukraine, among other issues. As a result, the major conservative party, the CDU, has gained a lot of voters over the past couple years. Most worrying, however, is the gains that the fascist party, the AfD, has made - from 10% in 2021 all the way to ~20% today. A significant chunk of the vote is likely protest votes due to the lack of an alternative, but a vote for fascists makes you a fascist nonetheless.
Recent controversies with the AfD - including an allegation that they held a secret meeting discussing a plan to mass-deport millions of migrants in an obvious parallel to Nazi meetings planning to remove all Jews from the country - has recently slightly damped approval for the AfD. This meeting generated counter-protests and condemnation from many Germans. It was later revealed that the meeting might not really have happened as alleged, but it doesn’t actually matter, because the AfD’s stance is being increasingly reflected by the ruling coalition, who recently introduced a bill allowing faster deportations of rejected asylum seekers and significant new powers for authorities in that regard, including potentially the criminalization of sea rescue organizations and imprisonment for aid workers.
The German government is increasingly considering banning the AfD, with their anxiety and motivation to do so rising as the AfD maintains and improves its position as Germany heads towards elections in late 2025. There are intermediate steps that could be done, such as revoking state funding, but if that doesn’t work, then the party might well be banned. While I will never argue with fascist parties being banned, this probably won’t fix anything, as the underlying economic and social conditions that are fueling these electoral shifts in the first place are not improving. Germany, the largest industrial power in Europe, is mired in a recession, particularly a manufacturing recession, from which there appears to be no escape. It has so far carefully shepherded its natural gas resources to keep the population as mollified as possible, but this has come at the expense of industry. In a trend starting from July 2022, manufacturing PMIs are still well below 50, reaching 45.5 in January 2024, which indicates decline. I suppose if you wanted to look on the bright side, it’s better than it was in July 2023, where it was a whopping 38.8, so the rate of decline is becoming a little slower.
And this is just the domestic stuff. Germany has also famously sided with Israel to support them during the ICJ genocide case, has kowtowed to Netanyahu as they bond over being Genocide Experts, and maintains its support of Ukraine, continuing to send military gear and money to be converted to scrap metal by Russian artillery - rather than spending money on doing anything about the cost of living. In the face of a historic economic downturn, it has only more fervently stated its desire to remain militarily opposed to Russia for decades.
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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.
Once again you are missing the forest for the trees. Private sector debt absolute matters when we’re talking about consumption and consumer base.
The reason most of these analyses conveniently omit private sector debt when talking about household consumption is because neoliberal economists subscribed to the “supply and demand” theory of lending known as loanable funds, which sees no difference between bank credit creation and (government) money creation. For the neoliberals, it doesn’t matter who creates the money, people borrowing money (which is a liability they have to repay in the future) to consume is no different than people earning net financial income (fresh money created by the government) to consume. That’s why Ben Bernanke famously said in his Essays on the Great Depression: “Pure redistributions should have no significant macroeconomic effects.”
But private sector debt does matter. When your economy is heavily dependent on private credit, a recession will happen when people can no longer afford to borrow. Of course, on the surface you can say that 60% household to GDP ratio doesn’t look that bad, but it is the rate of change of the debt (second-order derivative) that matters. It is the velocity at which the private debt grows that is worrying, which doubled as proportion to the GDP in just a decade. Once the borrowing decelerates (goes negative in the second-order derivative), you are going to get into a recession. What’s more, more than half of Chinese household and corporate debt (private sector debt) are tied up in mortgage and real estate. When the housing price inevitably comes down, a lot of that wealth are going to get deleted. How to maneuver out of this mess is a major issue and needs to be delicately handled by the central government.
This is why a dampening of external demand combined with a rising household debt and property bubble can be dangerous for China. At 3-4% of budget deficit, it is nowhere near enough to offset these detrimental factors to the economy. I’m sure you’ve seen the news of deflation in China - this is when consumers begin to defer their purchases as they wait for prices to go down, which can lead to less spending and borrowing - and once that rate of credit growth turns negative, the economy could be in peril as dwindling demand will lead to downturn in production and the effects can quickly spread across the entire supply chain causing businesses to close down and rising unemployment. That’s when a recession begins.
The easiest way out as I have said in the previous post is for the government money printer to start printing tons of money to grow the household incomes so people actually have money to spend without having to borrow.
I don’t agree with your economics which is essentially neoclassical, but I sort of agree with your proscription. The central government of China has very low debt and should spend a bunch of money. However, I think that people who suggest this miss the problem they have which is that they can’t agree on what to spend the money on. The central committee won’t agree on policies that just give money to people directly, for a variety of reasons some good and some bad, but it won’t happen. In my view the central government could possibly agree to sending money to local governments in proportion to the number of citizens under them, which amounts to the same thing, and relieves the local government debt burdens somewhat. The fact that it hasn’t happened yet obviously implies that there isn’t sufficient agreement on that approach.
In general though I think people underestimate the degree to which the Chinese economy is just fine and needs no intervention at all. If factories start shutting down in a disorderly manner, that is obviously the time to bring down the hammer. But I suspect that there is a good chance it won’t be necessary.