this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
97 points (100.0% liked)

news

24557 readers
561 users here now

Welcome to c/news! We aim to foster a book-club type environment for discussion and critical analysis of the news. Our policy objectives are:

We ask community members to appreciate the uncertainty inherent in critical analysis of current events, the need to constantly learn, and take part in the community with humility. None of us are the One True Leftist, not even you, the reader.

Newcomm and Newsmega Rules:

The Hexbear Code of Conduct and Terms of Service apply here.

  1. Link titles: Please use informative link titles. Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed.

  2. Content warnings: Posts on the newscomm and top-level replies on the newsmega should use content warnings appropriately. Please be thoughtful about wording and triggers when describing awful things in post titles.

  3. Fake news: No fake news posts ever, including April 1st. Deliberate fake news posting is a bannable offense. If you mistakenly post fake news the mod team may ask you to delete/modify the post or we may delete it ourselves.

  4. Link sources: All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. If you are citing a Twitter post as news, please include the Xcancel.com (or another Nitter instance) or at least strip out identifier information from the twitter link. There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance, such as Libredirect or archive them as you would any other reactionary source.

  5. Archive sites: We highly encourage use of non-paywalled archive sites (i.e. archive.is, web.archive.org, ghostarchive.org) so that links are widely accessible to the community and so that reactionary sources don’t derive data/ad revenue from Hexbear users. If you see a link without an archive link, please archive it yourself and add it to the thread, ask the OP to fix it, or report to mods. Including text of articles in threads is welcome.

  6. Low effort material: Avoid memes/jokes/shitposts in newscomm posts and top-level replies to the newsmega. This kind of content is OK in post replies and in newsmega sub-threads. We encourage the community to balance their contribution of low effort material with effort posts, links to real news/analysis, and meaningful engagement with material posted in the community.

  7. American politics: Discussion and effort posts on the (potential) material impacts of American electoral politics is welcome, but the never-ending circus of American Politics© Brought to You by Mountain Dew™ is not welcome. This refers to polling, pundit reactions, electoral horse races, rumors of who might run, etc.

  8. Electoralism: Please try to avoid struggle sessions about the value of voting/taking part in the electoral system in the West. c/electoralism is right over there.

  9. AI Slop: Don't post AI generated content. Posts about AI race/chip wars/data centers are fine.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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 is of a harbor in Tasiilak, Greenland.


NATO infighting? You love to see it, folks.

The latest incident of America's satrapies becoming increasingly unhappy about their mandated kowtowing involves, of all places, Greenland. As I'm sure most people here are aware, Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark with a degree of geopolitical and economic importance - the former due to its proximity to Russia, and the latter due to the proven and potential reserves of minerals that could be mined there. It's also been an odd fascination of Trump during his reign, now culminating in outright demands.

Trump has called for negotiations with Denmark to purchase Greenland, justifying this by stating that it would be safer from Russia and China under America's protection. Apparently, Norway's decision to not give him the Nobel Peace Prize further inflamed him (not that the Norweigan government decides who receives the prizes). He has also said that countries that do not allow him to make the decision - which not only includes Denmark, but also other European countries - will suffer increased tariffs by June, and that he has not ruled out a military solution.

This threat has led to much internal bickering inside the West, with European leaders stating they will not give in to Trump's demands, and even sending small numbers of troops to Greenland. The most bizarre part of this whole affair is that the US already basically has total military access and control over Greenland anyway, and has since the 1950s, when they signed an agreement with Denmark. There are already several US military facilities on Greenland, and B-52 bombers have famously flown in the vicinity of the island (and crashed into it with nuclear bombs in tow, in fact). Therefore, this whole event - in line with his all-performance, little-results presidency so far - seems to be largely about the theatrics of forcing the Europeans to continue to submit to his whims. I would not be surprised if they ultimately do sign a very imbalanced deal, though - the current European leadership is bound too tightly to the US to put up even half-hearted resistance.

This is all simultaneously occurring alongside the Canadian Prime Minister's visit to China in which longstanding sore spots in their bilateral relationship are being addressed, with China reducing tariffs on Canadian canola oilseeds, and Canada reducing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, as well as currency swaps between their central banks, among many other things. It seems no accident that Canada's reconsideration of their relationship with China is occurring as Trump has made remarks about turning Canada into the next US state, as well as the demand for the renegotiation of the USMCA.


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.


you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] QinShiHuangsShlong@hexbear.net 50 points 1 day ago (17 children)

I think you are mixing real problems with analyses that are not always materialist, and that has lead you to several incorrect leaps.

First, the existence of corruption cases does not demonstrate that the anti-corruption campaign has “failed.” From a dialectical perspective, the continued exposure of corruption indicates that contradictions inside the Party and state apparatus still exist and are being actively struggled over. Class struggle does not disappear under socialism; it changes form. To expect corruption to vanish permanently after one campaign misunderstands Marxism and treats socialism as a static condition rather than a transitional process.

Second, attributing corruption primarily to “thousands-year-old Chinese culture” is an idealist explanation. Scientific socialism through dialectical materialism does not locate social problems in culture or civilization essence, but in material conditions, institutional incentives, and class relations. 关系 is not some eternal cultural defect; it expands or contracts depending on whether material power and resources are concentrated without sufficient supervision. Similar patronage systems exist in every bureaucratic society. History does not operate through inherited moral DNA.

Third, the comparison between today’s anti-corruption struggle and the Cultural Revolution is not accurate. Mao identified the danger of capitalist restoration correctly, but the form that struggle took in the late 1960s severely damaged the productive forces, and Party unity. Scientific socialism requires not only correct political direction but correct methods. Rectification through institutional discipline, mass supervision, and rule-based governance is not “liberal victory,” but a lesson learned from earlier contradictions.

Fourth, framing current investigations as proof that “the entire bureaucracy and military chain of command is corrupted” is empirically and theoretically unsound. Marxism does not treat individual corruption cases as proof of total systemic collapse. If anything, the fact that senior figures (including those with strong political backgrounds) can be investigated demonstrates that no fixed aristocracy has been allowed to solidify, which is precisely what socialist discipline is meant to prevent.

Finally, reform does not mean abandoning socialism or repeating destructive cycles of upheaval. It means resolving contradictions at a higher level of development. The socialist state must constantly balance centralization with supervision, authority with accountability, and stability with struggle. That is not a betrayal of Mao’s analysis, but its continuation under new historical conditions.

Corruption is real. Internal contradictions are real. But explaining them through cultural fatalism, or assuming that purges alone define success or failure, moves away from dialectical materialism and toward pessimistic determinism. Socialism is not proven by the absence of contradictions, but by the capacity to recognize, confront, and resolve them over time.

[–] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 21 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (8 children)

Still, none of what you’re saying addresses my point, which is that material analysis must necessarily come from understanding the historical progress.

I’ll give you one example: I have heard so many “Western leftists” trying to argue why China should/should not have billionaires and despite all the rhetoric and the flowery language, they never approach it from the historical trajectory itself. They’ll tell you how the CPC controls the billionaires (lol, in that case, why do you need billionaires in the first place), but not the entire economic history since post-Mao reform, the decentralization of the economy, the 1994 Tax Sharing Reform, the privatization wave of the mid-1990s, the end of welfare housing and the liberalization of real estate market under Zhu Rongji in 1998, the joining of WTO in 2001 etc.

Without understanding the historical progress, you cannot understand why we come to where we are today. The system and the policy framework evolve out of such historical events. No amount of rhetoric or flowery language can explain that.

As I have explained before, the Imperial Court Examination evolved out of the emperors attempting to curb the influence of the feudal haozu (豪族) since Emperor Han Wudi’s Northern Expedition, which later evolved into the feudal lords (menfa, 门阀) by the Northern Wei dynasty. Such bureaucratic system for class mobility (a core aspect of East Asian culture) is still very much alive in China today, albeit taking different forms.

As Marx said, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. To understand where we are today, we need to go way back in time and approach history from the perspective of class analysis. How the mechanism for class mobility arose in China, and how that evolved into the deep bureaucracy of the modern Chinese state today.

And if one cannot understand that, one cannot understand why Mao felt the need for a Cultural Revolution. Remember that Mao himself claimed to have read Zizhi Tongjian for at least 17 times (!!), I’m sure he knows very well how the deep bureaucracy of the Chinese society works.

(To be clear, I am not on board the CR stuff like the ultra-left, but I am starting to grasp the thinking behind it after re-reading a lot of Mao Selected Works lately lol).

There is no need to downplay the purging of all the highest ranking generals in the CMC. We know these are serious problems. If you think this is just removing a few leaders at the very top and that the core integrity of the chain-of-command is somehow going to remain unaffected, then I don’t know what else to say. This isn’t some mid ranking officials, these are the people commanding vast influence over the military corp.

EDIT: Just want to add that I don’t expect everyone here to exercise the same academic rigor as I do (which isn’t much, to be honest, since I’m not trying to publish in an academic journal), as this is a fringe shitposting forum, so having as much fun as possible while learning from real world events should be the priority.

But understand that flowery language, while nice for propaganda purpose, is both non-materialist (not rooted in class-based analysis) and ahistorical (does not confront historical evidence).

Anyone can say “China is working towards achieving socialism”, but the statement in itself is meaningless from a dialectic materialist standpoint.

If it succeeds, I can say “see, I told you so”, and if it doesn’t, I can also say “look, I never said when it will happen, there are many twists and turns before we get there”. It doesn’t help you abstract the core contradictions from a historical materialist perspective, does not provide any explanatory power for the current events, nor does it serve anything useful for material analysis as it doesn’t involve concrete and specific examples of historical evidence.

So, while I don’t pretend that everything I say is correct, I try to approach my analysis with these criteria in mind.

[–] truly@lemmygrad.ml 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

As Marx said, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. To understand where we are today, we need to go way back in time and approach history from the perspective of class analysis. How the mechanism for class mobility arose in China, and how that evolved into the deep bureaucracy of the modern Chinese state today.

And if one cannot understand that, one cannot understand why Mao felt the need for a Cultural Revolution. Remember that Mao himself claimed to have read Zizhi Tongjian for at least 17 times (!!), I’m sure he knows very well how the deep bureaucracy of the Chinese society works.

Please can you correct my understanding: Modern day China has a bureaucratic class, Mao has noted the tendency toward a new bureaucratic class, Ancient China had a bureaucratic class, we have not seen the system sustain itself without a cultural revolution.

While, yes, the bureaucratic tendency is real, are we not witnessing the system attempt to renew itself? We are having a discussion over an unsubstantiated article, all we know for sure is that they were removed as part of corruption investigations. We must simply wait and see.

[–] immuredanchorite@hexbear.net 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What does “bureaucratic class” mean exactly? Like, I see this term bandied about a lot, particularly among trotskyists and ultraleftists as a critique of the socialist state- generally as a way to offer high-sounding criticism. I have seen it used too, personally, in communist organizing when ultra-leftist types are trying to abrogate leadership bodies and avoid accountability. Bureaucratism is of course a serious issue that can eat away at the working-class character of socialist/revolutionary institutions or groups, but this is exactly what Democratic Centralism seeks to address: balancing the efficiency and power of centralism with participatory (and at times informal) proletarian democracy. Confusing process with justice and assuming the means must be justified without sight of the end is liberalism that we are aiming to do away with.. But is there really a “bureaucratic class” under socialism… or any system? Is that truly a distinct class in terms of a group and their relationship to the means of production? Is a bureaucrat from a socialist system the same as a bureaucrat from a capitalist one? Do they serve the same ends? How about under feudalism? Antiquity? This “bureaucratic class” label being leveled seems like it is using a non-marxist definition in order to appeal to marxists through simulacrum. If this class exists, is it antagonistic to our class? If we are going to create a new class distinction, it really ought to be coming from a well conceived and justified place, not just anger at formalism and centralism within the system- labeling everyone who serves the state within a socialist system as a bureaucrat, with a distinct class that may be in opposition to another class, seems only to de-legitimize the socialist project itself.

[–] truly@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 18 hours ago

That's fair, I was trying to engage with xhs's ideas.

load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments (13 replies)