A reminder that as the US continues to threaten countries around the world, fedposting is to be very much avoided (even with qualifiers like “in Minecraft”) and comments containing it will be removed.

Image (of a Jamaat e-Islami campaign rally) and much of the information below is sourced from here and here.

In 2024, the government of Sheikh Hasina, leader of the Awami League, was overthrown in a student-led protest movement which was boosted by US interests. In the interim, Nobel laureate and dyed-in-the-wool neoliberal Muhammad Yunus was made president, and introduced a series of economic and political reforms (e.g. IMF packages and banking sector restructuring) which have sidelined the working class and aligned the country with US financial interests. Regardless of anybody’s personal feelings towards Hasina (who did indeed make many mistakes and caused many deaths), it is now very clear that the reason why Hasina was overthrown was not due to a humanitarian, anti-authoritarian impulse, but because Bangladesh had at least some measure of sovereignty while she was in power, as she accepted Chinese infrastructure investments. Certainly, the US is perfectly comfortable with genocidal dictators if they are allied with US interests.

Last week, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party won over two thirds of parliamentary seats - the Awami League was banned from participating at all, and worker-aligned parties were either disallowed or decided to withdraw from participating due to repression. I haven’t personally been able to nail down what exact economic/foreign policies they want to introduce, but because of what Yunus has set up in the interim, it might not matter that much - the economic stage has been set such that no matter what party took power, they would have to accept a fait accompli. As Vijay Prashad put it, the competition between the parties is reduced to “which faction will administer austerity”?

One of the many upsetting aspects of this election was that the student movement that helped overthrown Hasina have been forced into irrelevance, despite their legitimate grievances. The “Gen Z” protestors, displeased by the prospect of being ruled by the BNP about as much as the Awami League, found themselves with odd bedfellows, and allied with the now-opposition party (the hardline Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami). They are now in a tough bind, lacking much of the necessary left-wing organization to assert a genuine political project.

This is an instructive moment for many people who are desperate for better conditions in countries that are economically struggling, including Iran with its recent protests. If your country has sovereignty from the US, you walk a very dangerous tightrope - how do you organize for better conditions in such a way that it cannot be co-opted by the US to overthrow your government and put something even more terrible in its wake? Shortly after a jubilant revolutionary moment, you are left without influence, power, or even media representation, and now yet further under the repression of Western imperialism. This is one of the many problems that the population of the non-NATO world will need to find ways to overcome.

Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

Please check out the RedAtlas!

The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.

The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine

If you have evidence of Zionist crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA 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.
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.

Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.

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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.

  • seaposting [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    27·
    9 hours ago
    Building Sovereignty from a Tricontinental Political Economy

    There’s one part that really piqued my interest, which was this graph:

    Mapping Contemporary Dependency

    Building on this tradition, I have developed a dual analytical framework built around two indices. The Structural Dependency Index (SDI) measures objective constraints across commercial, technological, financial, productive, network, and distributive dimensions – capturing how contemporary dependency operates through the entire circuit of capital. The State Mediating Capacity (SMC) index measures the institutional resources available to navigate these constraints – from public-sector control over strategic sectors to capital-flow regulation and industrial policy intensity.

    The intersection of these two dimensions generates what I call the Dependency Map:

    A very good article charting the role of the dependency school and it’s relevance in the current multipolar moment.

    what the author says about the graph

    At one end of this map, we find what I call Non-Hegemonic Autonomy – economies like China, Vietnam, and, to a lesser extent, Malaysia that have managed to subordinate their external relations to internal developmental priorities. What makes their autonomy distinctive is that it does not derive from imperial positioning at the apex of the global hierarchy, but from a deliberate political and institutional strategy: what Amin theorised as the condition for autocentric peripheral development. The hegemonic centres – the United States, Germany, Japan – also display low dependency, but for qualitatively different reasons that reflect imperial extraction rather than developmental achievement.

    The most troubling configuration is that of the Subordinate Periphery – economies trapped in high dependency with depleted institutional capacity. Argentina, Chile, Peru, Honduras, Kenya, the Philippines: these are societies where decades of structural adjustment have dismantled the very institutions that might have enabled a different trajectory. The perverse logic here is self-reinforcing – the weaker the state’s developmental capacity, the deeper the dependency, the more difficult it becomes to reconstruct that capacity.

    Finally, the most analytically significant – and politically contested – terrain is what I term the Contested Semi-Periphery. India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Turkey, Nigeria, and arguably Russia occupies this space, where significant state capacity coexists with persistent structural constraints. These economies possess institutional resources that could, under different class configurations, be deployed for genuine developmental transformation. But they remain trapped in contradictory positions: enough capacity to resist full subordination, yet insufficient political articulation to break the structural logic of dependency. It is precisely in this contested zone where the political stakes of the multipolar transition are highest.

    I think why I find the graph particularly interesting is because of where it situates Malaysia, under non-hegemonic autonomy, vindicating the historical experiences of the Malaysian people and indeed my own thoughts of where the country stands. This is definitely controversial (as can be seen in some articles I have shared before), but I think what the critiques ultimately point to is not extractivism and dependency of the Malaysian Political Economy per se but the limits of the capitalist mode of production to unlock and enable further sovereignty and dignity for the people.

    But a key question still stands: how can a capitalist state under a global capitalist economy exert this much autonomy? This, I argue, will be due to the country’s historical development, the state’s class configuration, and present economic structure.

    The positions of various sectors from electronics, O&G, rubber, palm oil, food, construction, steel, pharmaceuticals and automotives (Malaysia being the only country in SEA to have national automotive companies, until the rise of VinFast in Vietnam) showcases not only diversification from commodity-based trade in the colonial-era but intentional pivot to building productive forces and institutional independence. The government’s initiatives on Islamic Financial Capital and Halal Industry is an example of the use of religion to build these alternative structures from the neoliberal consensus, to contested and contradictory results.

    Both ideologically and materially - the state, being representative of an postcolonial national bourgeoisie, incubated during the 1950s-1970s developmentalist era, had charted a course of sovereignty. The task of the left now is to protect these gains while pushing the envelope further for socialist transition.

    • immuredanchorite [he/him, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      16·
      7 hours ago

      i haven’t had a chance to read the article yet, but one thing that stands out about the map is the placement of Germany and Japan as independent centers of hegemony- which I think sort of overestimates their independence from* the US empire- but maybe there is a qualifier in that category I will come across as I read… but Japan and Germany are essentially still occupied countries without true sovereignty and they will destroy their own economies to suite their US masters (see Nordstream Pipeline in Germany and the current PM of Japan destroying relations with China, which is 30% of their trade)

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.mlEnglish
      16·
      9 hours ago

      As autonomous-autonomous trade accelerates, protecting sovereignty seems self sustaining (barring military intervention of course). I can’t even imagine how Russia would lose the gains it has made since 2014 unless they were attacked directly or something.