this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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Bulletins and News Discussion from July 14th to July 20th, 2025 - A Golden Age Of Copper
(hexbear.net)
Image is from this article, of a Chilean copper quarry.
Title is a reference to Trump's social media post about copper, which was, as usual, mostly deranged.
Trying to follow Trump's administration is pretty difficult, but as of right now, he is threatening 30% tariffs on Mexico and the EU starting on August 1st, as well as new tariff announcements on a bunch of other countries (including, bizarrely, a 50% tariff on Brazil), and also apparently a 50% tariff on copper, which the US imports half its supply of and is, of course, a very important metal in many applications.
I'm not sure what the plan is to bring back domestic copper production beyond hoping that it just sorta works out, but prominent copper producers, such as Chile and Canada, seem both concerned and confused. Reuters had a line that made me chuckle:
Boric said he was awaiting official communication from the U.S. government, including whether the tariffs would include copper cathodes, and questioned "whether this will actually be implemented or not."
Big mood, Boric.
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.
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 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.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
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.
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In part 4, they mention lenin's "series of retreats", and describe "restoration of small scale industries" "peasant business" "encouragement of free trade" as things that occured in the NEP and constituted as you say "a strategic retreat". All of these points fail to grasp what was actually happening during the NEP and the strategic reasons for this. Restoration of small scale industries happened rarely, and in fact the main thing that occured on the industry side was state owned centralization, which directly leads to why peasant business was critically allowed in order that it would be crushed by the efficiency of state owned industrial planning. They were forced to compete on these grounds and this laid the groundwork for the kulaks to be crushed by stalin. Not merely because one had to make concessions to capitalist production, but because in lenin's genius there was a fundamental understanding of the dialectic between industry and agriculture. there is plenty of material out there on what occurred during the "opening up period" in china, but rather than being a continuation of the NEP it was in fact the opposite, efficient state farming and highly collectivized villages being swung backwards into petty production and commercialized agriculture. Finally to state free trade as what happened in the NEP is grossly wrong, the soviet union had a monopoly on foreign trade in this time. This exact question is the subject of endless deliberation in the socialist 20th century, from albania to china, and is discussed in the tax in kind, why does this writer get the topic so wrong?
I could go on from here but ive written most of this before.
Again, stalin answered all of this in "concerning questions of leninism", its just embarassing this is what passes for modern socialist literature these days.
I genuinely don't see how anything you wrote here is in contradiction with what the Chinese writer is saying.
Of course the NEP was done to set up a future dialectic shift? But it was done instead of just immediately doing that shift, right? And now China is trying out doing that more slowly, and thus not needing any "crushing" . Just because the steps are happening more slowly (carefully, if youre being charitable) is not an argument that it's wrong. State owned centralization happening without needing any mass crushing of classes seems just fine to me, though we all wish faster was easier and more stable.
You act like Free trade has to be defined as only across national borders but I have no idea why you do that. Free trade internally exists too. These are qualitatively different, and those differences must be accounted for, but I don't understand what point there is in making that distinction here.
the chinese author is making false comparisons to the NEP and chinas opening up period in order to create a socialist justification when none exist.
free trade being controlled by government monopoly is a critical component of the NEP, lenin wrote about that extensively in the documents cited by the author. the author has failed to acknowledge why that is important and is justifying the opposite. Deng's approach was to open the country and eliminate that monopoly. This inspires little confidence in the authors understanding of these economic concepts .
The question of "slowly" vs "quickly" is often mentioned, as is the nature of why cant we just be "kind" to the kulaks or other reactionary classes. Again, I recommend returning to stalin/lenin/mao's/gang of 4's work on the basics of chinese and russian capitalism and/or socialism to understand why what you are saying is incorrect.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/zhang/1975/x01/x01.htm this could be a useful starting point regarding true socialist thought in china.
the sort of bottom line I am trying to get across here is you cant just flip the NEP on its head and say "now its our version." Lenin was trying to make the point that market exchange among the peasantry was a sign of backwardness and centralization is objectively superior to a system of petty production. Mao implemented this, and it did lead to inflation eventually but thats beyond the scope of this topic. Deng and the opening up period basically just forced global market competition in order to rationalize both the SOE's and ENCOURAGED rural petty production through TVEs, which is fundamentally backwards. Now not even TVEs exist, as they had to be destroyed to open up the rural labor market. which is why the major innovators of china are all private,Huawei, Tencent, Baidu, Bytedance, BYD, LONGi, etc.
State owned centralization and efficiency are not being achieved, china is chasing profits as a market based economy must.
"carefully" taking those steps over is trite to say when over 300 million migrant hokuo workers are subject to the crushing depredations of capitalist production while an increasingly powerful reactionary chinese middle class is approaching consumption levels that are eating the world, all while the communist party is nominally at the helm.
https://english.www.gov.cn/policies/latestreleases/202407/21/content_WS669d0255c6d0868f4e8e94f8.html from their recent plenum, on increasing the opening up and marketization of their economy and taking state planning backwards.
https://www.stats.gov.cn/sj/ndsj/2023/indexeh.htm
As well as statistics showing the complex rate of return and investment continue to fall from chinese economic bureaus.
-Stalin
happy to talk further
Don't just recommend "reading the basics". You think the real mistake of the millions of ML's supportive of China is forgetting to read fucking Stalin, Lenin, and Mao?
I guess this is why labeling is useful sometimes, you are a defender of the Gang of 4, that could've made this conversation unnecessary. You disagree about strategy, but everything you discuss here is tactical. I don't think you see the strategy, because it's identical to the NEP in most relevant ways. Tactically it looks different, of course, and it looks even less like what orthodox Marxists imagine, but that's just what adapting means.
The strategic argument is that China survived with the ability to be on the offensive because it's retreat was as huge as it was. And it's steps forward are much more careful. It seems blatantly obvious that the US empire would've destroyed China if Deng hadn't managed to implement his reforms. Making oneself not just powerful but entirely necessary for your enemy was the goal, and it will return this century with major strategic wins.
Only cranks unironically uphold the Gang of Four. Even MLMs skip over them by jumping from Mao straight to Gonzalo or Sison. Hell, even Internet weirdos who stan Pol Pot don't care about them. There's a reason why there were mass celebrations in China after the Gang of Four got purged, which tends to happen when you unironically call funerals "bourgeois d*cadence."
I dont think you or the author understand what stalin and lenin were writing about yes. I am trying to identify and show you where you are mistaken on this matter. You cant just throw around terms like "dialectics" and quantitative into qualitative without actually proving the underlying contradictions and defining how a given solution is revolutionary. I laid out how the opening up period and china's current trajectory flip the NEP on its head. Either you think lenin and stalin and mao were brilliant thinkers who moved the project and theory of socialism forward, or you think they were fundamentally incorrect, should probably not be studied and that Deng represents the horizon of socialist thought.
again, from china's plenum which I linked above and recommend reading. "Focus on building a high-level socialist market economic system, give full play to the decisive role of the market in the allocation of resources"
this is absolutely fundamental to understanding of marx, is the market more efficient at distributing resources than state planning? this is a critical component of lenin's work into state capitalism. We can not adopt a gnostic-dengism that presumes china can just press the socialism button whenever they like, we can defend china from imperialist depredations but in a post-october 7th world given china's response any china defender must hold themselves to higher standards and truly question their underlying beliefs. Again happy to talk more.
Your requirement for 'revolutionary' solutions is a bit of a giveaway. You want communism now, not lasting communism when its birth becomes inevitable.
No you, again, are focusing on tactics and individual operational choices at governance and mistaking it for strategy. The Chinese scholars (and Deng of course) understands the contradictions but are willing to allow them to play out longer than previous experiments because of strategic, geopolitical, world-economic requirements. Don't pull some card that 'you're the real representative of Stalin and Lenin, unlike those Chinese fakers'. There are hundreds of millions who both appreciate their contributions and see the steps that Deng took as correct.
What were the goals that Stalin and Lenin, along with the soviets, had in mind when they supported the NEP? And why was the NEP the way to do it instead of immediately, without any retreat, destroying all small scale production and pressing the communism button? Focus on strategy: why is retreating to ensure that you can defend yourself from the onslaught that is coming different based on how big the retreat is? At what point does it cross and becomes it's opposite?
And as a last point: the difference in efficiency between markets and centralized planning/state planning(though any good dialectical analysis recognizes the former folds into the latter in some form always over time) is entirely dependent on material circumstances and specific industries, and malleable over time. Central planning immediately implemented in a feudal society would've been horribly inefficient relative to markets, because the infrastructure wasn't available. Markets are more efficient in many industries right now in China because of a similar lack of infrastructure, but much more importantly, they are more efficient over the long term because it is currently the reason that the CPC even exists instead of having been destroyed. Central planning may be more efficient in the vast majority of industries immediately, but the coups, wars, and internal strife will make it less effectual towards any of the long term strategic goals if done right now. I'm ready to start complaining once we see deterioration of US hegemony if I don't see some good moves, but right now the US is ready to kill every Chinese if they can find enough dissidents and get enough others on their side.
I mostly agree that China should do more for Gaza, and I think that can even be analyzed as resulting partially in the intertwining of Chinese and Western economies. That's a fine critique and I also haven't been convinced of why that contradiction is allowed to play out in that way. I can't deny the possibility that it's seen as a shameful retreat that is still necessary at the moment and that I don't see the whole picture.
not a very comrade-ly comment at the top but we can let it slide
your reference to the supposed benefits of the opening up period to the average individual in china are references to bourgeoisie statistics and various propaganda outlets.
the truth is murkier and less clear as to what exactly took place. but your confidence in speaking for the 100's of milliions of hokuo workers as well as workers in africa who supply the raw materials at poverty wages is notable. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2023.2217087
what you are referencing in the final comment was known as war communism and would be another thing entirely. the NEP was due to the backwards state of rural russia after the civil war. The decision to collectivize afterwards was the topic of intense debate in the 20's but by the 30's stalin and trotsky and others all agreed that collectivization was the way forward. Modern chinese analysis on the maoist period likes to associate it with "war communism" but such analysis does not stand up to actual analysis on the breakthroughs and advancements that were made during that period.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1929/12/27.htm
again please read these sources I am sending, I fear we will not be speaking on the same page otherwise.
capitalism is not the only system that can industrialize. the soviet union and maoist china are critical examples of this. the most basic postulate of socialism is that it is superior system of productive relations. that was the core of the NEP, enabling these systems to battle it out, and the less productive one lost. And at the same time the party could strengthen its grasp on power. Nothing of the sort is happening in china today, and the reverse happened to agriculture and industry during the opening up period. Again please read the plenum I sent earlier from 2024 and grasp what china is saying nowadays and how they are continuing to prioritize the market and privately owned enterprises. They are not retreating and consolidating their forces, they have no plans to change the current system. The recent BRICS meeting further reinforces this point given the nature of their speeches there and overall contentedness with the state of the world.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1928/11/19.htm
regarding your question about capitalist encirclement, fortunately stalin has once again anticipated this.
two presumptions about the need for rapid industrialization
speedy industrialization is not ideal but somehow necessary because of extreme conditions
Fascism is extreme and requires extreme action are both veils for revisionism. Both are used both by you and the chinese writers here to justify chinas path as a return to the NEP. First point, socialism is superior and concessions to kulaks are only necessary when socialism is weak. Please review the chinese TVE system and explain why it was destroyed to justify dengism. Rapid industrialization and collectivization are good should be implemented. decollectivization must be justified on its own terms and china has failed to do so(because the implicit reason of opening a reserve army of labor to keep wages down in china is kind of not really socialist of them). Secondly, if fascism is extraordinary, then was , the lack of fascism after the second world war an indicator that peaceful coexistence was not only justified but good for development (or worse, that the social fascist USSR necessitates cooperation with the bourgeois democratic USA)? Taken to an extreme, differentiating between the forces of bourgeois democracy and fascism within bourgeois politics would become the main task of non-revolutionary times, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1927/12/02.htm additional reading here
and to put a final cap on it and raise a few questions https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/polemic/peaceful.htm https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sino-soviet-split/cpsu/openletter.htm should provide two points on encirclement and peaceful coexistence that should be useful to anyone further defining their thoughts on the matter. When is peaceful coexistence possible? what are the limits? what defines the line between rightism ultraleftism and the correct line? I will leave this for people reading this comment to chew on, but its non trivial.
It is worth mentioning at this point, that technically the NEP was barely considered by the architects of the chinese opening up periods. much more considered were singapores opening up, eastern europe's reform period, and others. the post-hoc justification with the NEP is another propaganda tool. http://sg.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/jbwzlm/xwdt/200711/t20071129_2016862.htm
Again happy to speak further but I am requesting you spend a little more time reading these documents, defending dengism in circuitous ways is not a productive use of our time here.
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii130/articles/joel-andreas-paths-not-taken "Weber argues, in response to popular anger at growing corruption among party officials, profiting from their role as gatekeepers in a semi-marketized system. Liberalizers argued that all-out privatization would do away with profiteering bureaucrats altogether. In 1988, Deng himself took up the banner of radical price reform, and this time central authorities actually took the first steps. The August 1988 Politburo meeting at Beidaihe announced the liberalization of all prices. The immediate result was runaway inflation—soaring from 12 per cent in July 1988 to 28 per cent in April 1989—exacerbated by panic buying and bank runs. Within weeks, the pragmatic Deng backed away. Chen Yun was called in to reverse the liberalization and impose stabilized prices on key goods. China had escaped full-blown shock therapy by a whisker, Weber argues, yet Deng’s aborted 1988 price-reform push came at a high price: its destabilizing effects helped to catalyse the political crisis that culminated in the massacre of June Fourth. "
and chapter 8 of escaping shock therapy might be of interest to you in the realm of dengism
I don't have time right now to reply to everything, and I don't think it's worth our time to continue because we are talking at very different abstraction levels (tactical versus strategy). But your argument that the Chinese based their opening up on Singapore is that a diplomatic speech given in Singapore recognizes the parallels of economic situations between the 2 nations? Absurd. Even if that speech said 'you are 100% the reason that we decided it' I would still put that up to flattery.