Image is from this Black Agenda Report article by the Communist Party of Kenya.
In June, large anti-government protests shook Kenya. President Ruto and his parliament were attempting to pass the new Finance Bill 2024, which, among other things, would have hiked taxes on the population, with a 16% sales tax on bread and a 25% duty on cooking oil, as well as new taxes on financial transanctions and vehicle ownership. There would also have been levies on women's sanitary products and digital goods such as phones, among other measures affecting hospitals.
Hundreds of protestors stormed the parliament building and began to tear the place apart. Shortly afterwards, on June 26th, Ruto announced that he was withdrawing the bill, calling the tens of deaths and hundreds of injuries "unfortunate". A couple weeks later, Ruto then fired his entire cabinet (aside from his foreign minister) and communicated his wish to the nation to form a "broad-based government". Funnily enough, in July, it was announced that the majority of positions were to be filled by members of the old cabinet, while other positions were taken by members of the opposition. This has prompted scepticism among the population, including calls to resign, but there haven't (yet) been any major anti-government events to pressure this outcome. The Communist Party of Kenya has been working to get some of their comrades back after they were abducted by the police during the protest period, and have otherwise supported the protests against Ruto.
The measures in the bill were strongly encouraged by the IMF. Kenya's debt is currently around $80 billion, of which about 10% is owed to China for infrastructure projects (such as a railway linking the capital, Nairobi, to the port city of Mombasa, as well as 11,000 kilometers of road throughout the country). The rest is owed to a combination of the US, IMF, World Bank, and Saudi Arabia. More than half of government revenue is going towards repaying the debt - but despite these massive payments, it has only grown. The most recent round of IMF plundering (and the impetus for current events) began in 2021, when they offered a 38-month programme to "help" Kenya, which would involve the usual warfare on the poor and the dismemberment of any useful societal institutions.
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 Kenya! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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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.
Y'all ever think about how the COVID recovery economic policies pretty much proved the left critique of UBI to be correct?
I think it is even worse than that, actually. The usual leftish criticism of UBI is that landlords will just jack up rent. That happened to an extent, but most of the unemployment + gov cash actually just went to debts, actually propping up the finance sector. This is closely related to real estate and landlords but not exactly the same as price gouging.
If I had UBI I would be off into the woods. They would want to raise rent but I could just leave.
there's now a 0.1 times monthly UBI surcharge for being in the woods
There were also quite a lot of eviction protections during the pandemic. So that probably saved people from a lot of that landlord price gouging. Well, besides the fact that it was like 2 lump-sum payments and landlords would've known they couldn't just raise rents and have people pay the increased amount after...well, a month each time. Not at all comparable to "An N-adult/person family is going to have
$X · Nmore monthly income for the indefinite future" which directly invites landlords to raise rents on housing sized for N people by$X · Neach month.And a lot of the debts were completely made up by companies that coincidentally popped up right as the government handed out free loans.
Go on
The left critique of UBI was essentially that, if you just give people a bunch of money, and there are no restrictions on businesses from price gouging (be that through price restrictions, windfall taxes, etc), then businesses will raise their prices as much as they can get away with in order to maximize profits. Furthermore, price inflation would be greatest among products with the lowest price elasticity of demand (like real estate) and in industries that are highly concentrated.
I was looking at the thread from yesterday about real estate investors jacking up rents and reading some of the newer comments, and it kind of dawned on me that what happened with COVID (and is now happening the real estate market) and the ensuring recovery policies and results are the things that yang gang and other neoliberals swore up and down "wasn't how economics works" lol.
I'd bet that well over 50% of SSI benefits ultimately go to landlords, especially since benefits are significantly reduced ($300, I think) if you live with family.
there isn't an actual shortage of housing (it really depends on where you live) but there WAS a shortage of stuff due to supply chain issues when the gov still cared about covid. not equivalent.
during 2020 the US gov massively increased money supply. there was no UBI at all. some emergency relief funds for people does not equal UBI. it was more of a business and finance bailout than anything else.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT
Government programs to float household finances in the economy such that it results in a higher personal savings rate are functionally the same as an official UBI program.
Landlords and businesses will just raise costs and eat up the government money immediately, so handouts as UBI just effectively become handouts for landlords that drive cost of living up.
My critique of UBI is takes a far longer view, that it’s a bandaid to placate worker unrest during automation and as soon as possible UBI will get stripped back. After all, why feed a bunch of useless non-productive mouths? From the perspective of the bourgeoise it doesn’t make sense. Much better to let them all starve and they can no longer strike or form unions or do any work stoppages because automation has been sufficiently kickstarted
they're only afraid of that until they have their gated and drone protected automated factory cities. then they'll cut the UBI
they need peons to buy things, silly
no they don't, they can easily just simulate fake demand by destroying surplus. Then they can just subsidize that with the infinite fiat money trick. pay the UBI to themselves for destroying their own surplus instead of giving it out to the undeserving useless wretches. Cut out the middle-man
i mean this is feasible as far as techbro delusions would like it to be so but there's a catch-22 without suddenly mass-culling all the poors: you need administration and state control so they don't break in and kill you. and the people are where you get all your administrators, police, and still-needed labor. you need more of them than can be taken from the billionaire class, besides, billionaires don't want to do any of that.
It's Americans. They're going to roll over and show you their soft bellies while you hollow them out like a tauntaun.
the rest of the world exists
this is a very silly thread
The rest of the world isn't going to implement UBI, it's an idea too stupid to happen anywhere but here.
It’s literally how farming in the US currently works, tons of subsidies to destroy surplus to keep prices at a certain level. You just take that existing model and crank it up to 11.
You will always have your willing agents of the bourgeois state and lackeys. Why are you saying “they would need control of the government” as if that’s a crazy thing? They already have it and will increasingly secure their grip. Plenty of would be compradors ready to sell out for a spot inside the walls instead of outside
they can't get rid of the surplus population that provides the lackeys!
Sure they can, it doesn’t take that many people to administer things at that point in their vertically integrated fiefdoms. They can cull 90%+ of the population if they want to once they have sufficiently automated
Also more to the point of the capitalist mode of production, you cannot accumulate surplus value if you destroy all the labour.
Edit- not to say the point of capitalism is surplus value. It's moreso profit. But the point still stands.
I've been building this future world in my head that's I've thought about turning into a book/short story, and I am of a pretty similar mind. However, my best guess is that they are going to tie getting full benefits (or any benefits) to being sterilized. The rich get to keep having kids (also probably religious groups like Mormons will keep having kids) and the lower classes will be slowly exterminated through economic coercion.
more likely they simply have a number of things disqualify you from UBI and continue to expand that list. much like the privilage of voting in the U.S. or access to state assistance.
drug charge? no UBI. political dissidence? no UBI felony? everything's a felony now so no UBI
LGBTQAI? it's now a mental illness so no UBI
This is how I see it happening too. If anything, having a UBI simplify and unify multiple systems of social welfare will make it easier to means test a single system. More efficient austerity measures. Although on the flip side, it would be easier to build public dissent because people are more likely to show up when everyone's impacted. The current strategy of just fucking over a section of the population is more ideal in a divide and conquer strategy.
you can't just raise prices for no reason (usually). businesses are in competition with each other. as an example, McDonald's is suffering now as it raised prices for greed reasons and people are eating less of it and more of stuff that isn't overpriced fast food. inflation IS and was absolutely terrible starting from around 2020 and that was a result of 1. supply chain issues causing people to raise prices 2. monetary expansion
collusion to raise prices leading to greater profits only works if there's very very limited supply of a certain good like maybe if you live in SF and they aren't building any more houses. your issue there would be with 1. limited supply of housing obviously 2. tech ppl pricing you out with their 500k+ salaries 3. fiat being infinite so line (house prices) essentially always goes up 4. UBI would be absolutely last if it were an actual thing.
the covid supply chain issues caused businesses to collectively raise prices and they aren't coming down without some deflationary event
you are really saying this after we just witnessed massive spikes in rents as soon as we got checks?
There are landlord pricing apps that effectively create an algorithmically driven landlord cartel. These systems are already in place. They just aren’t a formal cooperation.
It's definitely not collusion if you launder the collusion through ~~AI~~ algorithms!
How do you go from "unconditional" to "a temporary incentive that barely covers anything"?
I think a lot of people are not particularly familiar with the pre-Yang grifter UBI platform, specialy on reddit.
The basic argument was that given an unconditional income people would rather use their time to do things that can lead to improving their material conditions. If you have income you can study or take a second job or learn a craft etc. This was supported by the Manitoba experiment and the fundamental point still holds.
The caveats and the left critique is only against the Yang grifter shit. On that I agree its just pipe dreams. But a serious UBI proposal existed before then and it definitely included key points like healthcare reform. From day 1 I think most people understood it would make no point to be given UBI just to spend on healthcare and rent. At that point its not income its a subsidy to those industries.
So considering a serious UBI proposal, as I see it COVID got nothing to do with this. It wasn't unconditional and it wasn't income, it was some temporary stimulus people got. Not only that, during the pandemic people were literaly doing the opposite of having freedom to take other activities. Education and some jobs were temporarily moved online but otherwise nothing changed.
Nobody took COVID checks and were like "guess I don't have to work for the next 5 years now".
I think worse still is pushing this narrative starts to validate mainstream neoiibs economics gaslighting narratives that the problem with inflation was that people had too much extra money and the years the Fed spent trying to control inflation through interest rates targeting "excess savings". Both of these are absolute garbage nonsense theories that only serves to punch on the working class.
At best you're validating neoliberals arguments here, we should be careful, this realy depends on whether you are talking about serious UBI or Yang shit. Its not so superficialy simple like that.
The Manitoba experiment was primarily about studying whether people would drop out of the workforce when given a set amount of money each month. The left critique has never, at any point, been that people would stop working if a UBI program were implemented, so I'm not sure who you are arguing with. That's a right wing talking point, and it's the same one they level against socialism.
Additionally, the primary result of the Manitoba experiment with regards to education was that teenage boys dropped out of high school to get a job to support their family at a lower frequency and got better grades, not that they were retraining or getting post-secondary education at a higher rate. The latter runs dangerously close the neoliberal narrative that the reason people are poor is because they aren't educated enough.
The left critique of UBI isn't that more money for the working class leads to inflation. The left critique of UBI is that it will lead to inflation when there is no government pressure on prices/profit-seeking behavior, and that it cannot work as a broad program under neoliberalism specifically because such government intervention is anathema to neoliberalism.
"Excess savings" started decreasing 6 months before the Fed even raised interest rates. It started doing so because the pandemic aid stopped and a mix of supply chain issues and "pricing strategy" increased inflation. The Fed doesn't even target excess savings. Again, this ties back to what the criticism of UBI is: the profit motive incentivizes businesses to raise prices when they know their customers have more disposable income, and their ability to do so is subject to the demand elasticity of the product(s) they sell and the concentration within their market. UBI as a broad program can only work such that there is state intervention to prevent price increases, and that state intervention is incompatible with neoliberalism.
I think a lot of the critiques against UBI are critiques that can also be directed at other material improvements for the working class as well. Of course capital is going to try and appropriate it through price gouging, they already do that with wage increases. Of course the reactionary forces are going to try and use UBI to argue in favour of slashing welfare services, they do this with every material improvement for the working class. Look for instance at how Margaret Thatcher used working class home ownership, a good thing, to create generations of deranged chuds.
Replacing welfare payments with an UBI could have the possibility of making punishing the poor a little harder for capital. Services for the poor ends up becoming poor services and there is a very different political cost to slashing something for the lazy racislised poor and then slashing the check everyone receives each month.
UBI is not going to make sweeping changes in society and abolish all poverty and exploitation, only idiot liberals thinks so. It could, however, arguably be a reasonable reformist improvement over the means tested alms for the poor it would replace.
The other criticism of UBI, and one that the Manitoba experiment didn't address, is that the realistic goal of UBI under capitalism would be to use it to do away with guaranteed services (Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, libraries, etc). Fairly standard government privatization scheme but even more markety. This is how a person like Hayek can promote it - under his ideology the guaranteed government services wouldn't exist.
UBI would then be under the same pressures as the minimum wage and social security payments. Which is to say, kept as low as possible in the interests of capital even as prices rise. Whereas before you might have guaranteed hip replacements, now you have a guaranteed $900/month and the insurance you can afford will only pay for half. That kind of thing.
I mean it wasn't real UBI but I think the strongest left critique of UBI as how it relates to socialism is that it does provide you more freedom but it's freedom INSIDE the market and also that leftists who are honest have to admit that having UBI and public services AT THE SAME TIME is politically unfeasible, there is already a lot of pressure to privatize all that shit NOW imagine if everyone was getting a check every month, no one would accept funding public services, which reinforces that UBI is still very market friendly in fact Anton Jager's book about the history of UBI as an idea and real policy (you can kinda call the grain dole in Rome UBI) is called "Welfare for Markets"
I don't think so. A real UBI would be disastrous for capital I think. The ability to abuse low wage workers drops down super low as they can just dip if you are mean. So you actually have to take care of them. If the left critiques of UBI were true capital would be pushing it though. They want that money, sure. However they are more dedicated to their class interests than that.
The bourgeoisie isn't a unitary organism. There are ideological camps within it. The reason they haven't done UBI because it doesn't benefit them currently. The creation of things like social security is proof that they will create such programs when the downsides of not doing so are worse for them. There is no consensus among the various camps right now because the risk isn't great enough, so instead you get these fights over whether or not people deserve anything at all, instead of how much do they need to give in order to reasonably avoid getting their heads chopped off.
if it's so disastrous, why do a ton of billionaires support one?
Do they? They support getting their taxes cut and they bribe congress and their taxes are cut.
They say they support this. Howver I don't see them bribing senators and getting it done.
elon musk, thiel, bill gates all support it
So a specific section of the bourgeois class who's work has no material relation to anything in general. Who then also have no specific interactions with low wage persons possibly allowing them to understand them in an abstract way that the tradional bourgeois cannot. That is an interesting divide. However I think that does support my idea that it is against bourgeois class interests.
Elon Thiel and Gates want a flat tax and see UBI as the Trojan horse to get that done
Whatever you need to tell yourself to trade ultimate defeat in class war for short term treats
not at all. UBI doesn't say expand money supply and give free loans that will be forgiven to businesses. which is what happened.
oh yeah and because of supply chain issues supply of stuff dropped and prices went up. can't really blame that on UBI or I believe what we're referring to is the total of $2.5k (???) in direct payments to US citizens.
Supply chain shocks/interuptions have been over for the vast majority of industries for the past two years. There's a reason that the Democrats added an anti-price gouging initiative to their platforms. Profit margins have been expanding over the past two years in a number of sectors, and that is largely due to pricing strategy.