Ibaitik Itsasora
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Gaza BEFORE Israel showed up
Israel is a criminal state
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1887980771178070396
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Zionists in 2025… “Palestine never existed”
Zionists in 1899… “We will colonise Palestine”
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UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese nails it:
•It is not ‘war’, there are not two armies;
•It is a settler, colonial occupation;
•It is a genocide
Stop arming Israel 
The Hague now
Recognise Palestine 
today before it’s too late.
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1928736174777978972
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Georgian President Kavelashvili confirmed that the West pressured Tbilisi to open a second front conflict against Russia after the Ukraine conflict began EU candidacy was threatened , and US-funded NGOs poured in money to push Georgia toward war
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Leaning on her cane, her bent back tells the weight of displacement… an elderly woman walks away from the north, step by weary step, in search of shelter worthy of what remains of her years.
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1928500741926175203
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Never forget this incredible woman at the Rafah border who confronted CNN over the West’s biased coverage of the #GazaGenocide
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1928770609439281547
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“They shøt my mom in her stomach, she was pregnant” Don’t dare ask me to condemn how he one day chooses to resist.
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1929044893789216879
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Jason Smith – 上官杰文@ShangguanJiewen
US-media to American media consumers:
“China is scary.”
Reality:
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Watch in full on The Russia House with Scott Ritter subscribe here:
[https://t.me/tribute/app?startapp=smnz] posted by @1860rm
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1929180055021719774
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French dock workers refuse to load weapons due for Israel
Dockworkers at the port of Marseille-Fos are refusing to load a 14-tonne shipment of weapons intended for Israel. In a press release, they declared, “We will not participate in the ongoing genocide orchestrated by the Israeli government.”
According to their statement, the containers have been “set aside, and the dockers will not go onto the ship bound for Haifa.” They further emphasised that “the port of Marseille-Fos must not be used to supply the Israeli army.”
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Another blood-soaked hand is raised. For the 5th time since the current wave of genocide in Palestine began, the US has again vetoed a ceasefire in the UN Security Council. For those still claiming that the US is trying to negotiate a ceasefire, your lies are exposed for all the world to see. This is not a mediator. This the gesture of a co-perpetrator, of a genocidaire.
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a fanatical Zionist interrupts Norman Finkelstein as he compares death tolls of Israeli massacres of Gaza, saying that’s horribly unfair to do.
Norman replies: “If Jews are allowed to say 6 million, 6 million, 6 million, we can talk about the number of Palestinian deaths.”
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1930046189803598270
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BREAKING: Ukraine hit planes from the graveyard used for spare pets!
The planes have no engines like on the plane graveyard!
I WAS RIGHT! They have not hit a working A-50 EWACS.
The amount of destroyed jets is low!
Ahaha … the mission preparations were skipped?
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1930304356705866146
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Absolute must-read text by Emmanuel Todd, one of France’s last great “intellectuels”, on what he calls “the Trump revolution“.
As he explains, revolutions are “first and foremost the outcome of internal dynamics and contradictions within the society concerned”, but the initial trigger is often military defeats.
Examples abound: the Russian revolution of 1917 (after a defeat against Germany), the German revolution of 1918 (after losing WW1), the French revolution (after France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War), the collapse of the Soviet system (after losing the arms race, and losing in Afghanistan), etc.
In this instance, he says the U.S. suffered what’s “fundamentally an economic defeat”: as he puts it “the sanctions policy showed that the financial power of the West was far from overwhelming. The Americans had the revelation of the fragility of their military industry. People at the Pentagon know very well that one of the limits to their action is the limited capacity of the American military-industrial complex.”
Interestingly, he believes that the Americans are ahead of the Europeans in their understanding of this: “this American awareness of defeat contrasts with the non-awareness of Europeans”
This is because “Europeans did not organize the war” and they therefore “cannot have full awareness of defeat. To have full awareness of defeat, they would need access to Pentagon thinking. But Europeans do not have access to it.”
As a result “Europeans situate themselves mentally before the defeat while the current American administration situates itself mentally after the defeat.”
The fact that it is a revolution can mostly be seen in the breadth of change at play, what Todd calls “a phenomenon of extraordinary violence, a violence that’s directed on one hand against allies/vassals – the Europeans, the Ukrainians – but which also expresses itself on the other hand, internally, in American society, through a struggle against universities, against gender theory, against scientific culture, against the policy of including Blacks in the American middle classes, against free trade and against immigration.”
More than anything, Todd writes, “the collapse of a system is mental as much as economic. What is collapsing in the current West, and first in the United States, is not only economic dominance, but also the belief system that animated it or was superimposed on it. The beliefs that accompanied Western triumphalism are collapsing. But as in any revolutionary process, we do not yet know which new belief is the most important, which is the belief that will emerge victorious from the process of decomposition.”
He writes that the Trump revolution has some “very reasonable things”, stemming from Trump’s intuitions. For instance, “Trump’s protectionism, the idea that America must be protected to rebuild its industry, results from a very reasonable intuition.” [!!!]
Other example, “the idea of immigration control is reasonable, even if the style adopted by the Trump administration in managing immigration is unbearably violent.”
That being said, Todd writes, “despite the presence of these reasonable elements, I am pessimistic and I think the Trump experience will fail.”
This is because overall, he sees the primary belief driving the Trump revolution as nihilism – a “deification of emptiness” and a “will to destroy” that manifests in attacks on science, universities, and the very structures needed for the policies Trump claims to champion.
One example Todd gives of a “destructive impulse” is that of Trump seeking “to establish customs duties between Canada and the United States“, even though “the Great Lakes region constitutes a single industrial system.”
Another example of what Todd calls a “high-intensity nihilist project” is “the Trumpian fantasy of transforming Gaza, emptied of its population, into a tourist resort.”
But first and foremost, the “fundamental contradiction of American policy”, and the best example of Trump’s nihilism, is his approach to protectionism.
As Todd explains, “the theory of protectionism tells us that protection can only work if a country possesses the qualified population that would allow it to profit from tariff protections. A protectionist policy will only be effective if you have engineers, scientists, qualified technicians. Which Americans do not have in sufficient numbers. Now I see the United States beginning to hunt down their Chinese students, and so many others, those very ones who allow them to compensate for their deficit in engineers and scientists. This is absurd. The theory of protectionism also tells us that protection can only launch or relaunch industry if the State intervenes to participate in the construction of new industries. Now we see the Trump administration attacking the State, this State that should nourish scientific research and technological progress.”
Todd concludes that one ought to be “very pessimistic for the United States.” To state this conclusion, he goes back to fundamental concepts of anthropology (Todd is originally an anthropologist and demographer, at France’s National Institute of Demographic Studies).
As he writes, at its root “the model of the English and American family is nuclear, individualist, without even precise rules of inheritance. Freedom of will reigns. The Anglo-American nuclear family is very little structuring for the nation.”
What was structuring and stood “beside or above this individualist family structure” was “the discipline of Protestant religion, with its potential for social cohesion. Religion, as a structuring factor, was capital for the Anglo-American world.”
However, in his view, “it has disappeared”. He says that he is aware of “these excited evangelists who surround Trump. But all that, for me, is not true religion. It is in any case not true protestantism. The God of American evangelists is a nice guy who distributes financial gifts; he is no longer the severe Calvinist God who demands a high level of morality, who encourages a strong work ethic and favors social discipline.”
He writes that this “zero state of religion, combined with very little structuring family values does not seem to me an anthropological and historical combination that could lead to stability. It is toward ever greater atomization that the Anglo-American world is heading. This atomization can only lead to an accentuation, without visible limit, of American decadence.”
He concludes with these words: “My personal fear is that we are not at all at the end, but only at the beginning of a collapse of the United States that will reveal to us things that we cannot even imagine.”
The full text (translated from French) is in the next post in this thread, together with a link to the original article.
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erabiltzaileari erantzuten
This is the full text, which I translated from French:
“The Trump Revolution
I would like to try to understand the immediate cause of the Trump Revolution.
Every revolution has primarily endogenous causes; it is first and foremost the outcome of internal dynamics and contradictions within the society concerned. However, one striking thing in history is the frequency with which revolutions are triggered by military defeats.
The Russian revolution of 1905 was preceded by a military defeat against Japan. The Russian revolution of 1917 was preceded by a defeat against Germany. The German revolution of 1918 was also preceded by a defeat.
Even the French Revolution, which seems more endogenous, had been preceded in 1763 by France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War, a major defeat since the Ancien Régime lost all its colonies. The collapse of the Soviet system was also triggered by a double defeat: in the arms race with the United States and by the retreat from Afghanistan.
I believe we must start from this notion of a defeat that brings about a revolution to understand the Trump revolution. The experience currently underway in the United States, even if we don’t know exactly what it will be, is a revolution. Is it a revolution in the strict sense? Is it a counter-revolution? It is in any case a phenomenon of extraordinary violence, a violence that turns on one hand against the allied-subjects, the Europeans, the Ukrainians, but which expresses itself on the other hand, internally, in American society, through a struggle against universities, against gender theory, against scientific culture, against the policy of including Blacks in the American middle classes, against free trade and against immigration.
This revolutionary violence is, in my opinion, linked to defeat. Various people have reported to me conversations between members of the Trump team and what is striking is their awareness of defeat. People like J.D. Vance, the vice president, and many others, are people who have understood that America had lost this war.
For the United States, it was fundamentally an economic defeat. The sanctions policy showed that the financial power of the West was not an all-power. The Americans had the revelation of the fragility of their military industry. People at the Pentagon know very well that one of the limits to their action is the limited capacity of the American military-industrial complex.
This American awareness of defeat contrasts with the non-awareness of Europeans.
Europeans did not organize the war. Because they did not organize the war, they cannot have full awareness of defeat. To have full awareness of defeat, they would need access to Pentagon thinking. But Europeans do not have access to it. Europeans therefore situate themselves mentally before the defeat while the current American administration situates itself mentally after the defeat.
Defeat and Cultural Crisis
My experience of the fall of communism taught me, as I have said, something important: the collapse of a system is mental as much as economic. What is collapsing in the current West, and first in the United States, is not only economic dominance, but also the belief system that animated it or was superimposed on it. The beliefs that accompanied Western triumphalism are collapsing. But as in any revolutionary process, we do not yet know which new belief is the most important, which is the belief that will emerge victorious from the process of decomposition.
The Reasonable in the Trump Administration
I want to clarify that I had no principled hostility toward Trump at the start. During Trump’s first election, in 2016, I was among those who admitted that America was sick, that its industrial and working heart was being destroyed, that ordinary Americans were suffering from the general policy of the Empire and that there were very good reasons for many voters to vote for Trump. In Trump’s intuitions, there are very reasonable things. Trump’s protectionism, the idea that America must be protected to rebuild its industry, results from a very reasonable intuition. I am myself a protectionist. I wrote books about it long ago. I also consider that the idea of immigration control is reasonable, even if the style adopted by the Trump administration in managing immigration is unbearably violent.
Another reasonable element, which surprises many Westerners, is the Trump administration’s insistence on saying that there are only two sexes in humanity, men and women. I do not see there a rapprochement with Vladimir Putin’s Russia but a return to the ordinary conception of humanity that has existed since the appearance of Homo sapiens, a biological evidence on which, moreover, science and the Church agree.
There is reasonableness in the Trump revolution.
Nihilism in the Trump Revolution
I must now say why, despite the presence of these reasonable elements, I am pessimistic and why I think the Trump experience will fail. I will recall why I was optimistic for Russia from 2002 and why I am pessimistic for the United States in 2025.
There is in the behavior of the Trump administration, a deficit of thought, an unpreparedness, a brutality, an impulsive, unreflective behavior, which evokes the central concept of The Defeat of the West, that of nihilism.
I explain in The Defeat of the West, that religious emptiness, the zero stage of religion, leads to anguish rather than to a state of freedom and well-being. The zero state brings us back to the fundamental problem. What is it to be a man? What is the meaning of things? A classic response to these questions, in a phase of religious collapse, is nihilism. We pass from the anguish of emptiness to the deification of emptiness, a deification of emptiness that can lead to a will to destroy things, men, and ultimately reality. Transgender ideology is not in itself something serious on the moral level but it is fundamental on the intellectual level because saying that a man can become a woman or a woman a man reveals a will to destroy reality. This was, in association with cancel culture, with the preference for war, an element of the nihilism that predominated under the Biden administration. Trump rejects all that. However, what strikes me currently is the emergence of a nihilism that takes other forms: a will to destroy science and the university, black middle classes, or disordered violence in the application of American protectionist strategy. When, without thinking, Trump wants to establish customs duties between Canada and the United States, while the Great Lakes region constitutes a single industrial system, I see there a destructive impulse as much as protection.
When I see Trump suddenly establishing protectionist tariffs against China while forgetting that the majority of American smartphones are manufactured in China, I tell myself that we cannot be content to consider this as stupidity. It is stupidity certainly, but it is perhaps also nihilism. Let us move to a higher moral level: the Trumpian fantasy of transforming Gaza, emptied of its population, into a tourist resort is typically a high-intensity nihilist project.
The fundamental contradiction of American policy, however, I will look for it on the side of protectionism.
The theory of protectionism tells us that protection can only work if a country possesses the qualified population that would allow it to profit from tariff protections. A protectionist policy will only be effective if you have engineers, scientists, qualified technicians. Which Americans do not have in sufficient numbers. Now I see the United States beginning to hunt down their Chinese students, and so many others, those very ones who allow them to compensate for their deficit in engineers and scientists. This is absurd. The theory of protectionism also tells us that protection can only launch or relaunch industry if the State intervenes to participate in the construction of new industries. Now we see the Trump administration attacking the State, this State that should nourish scientific research and technological progress. Worse: if we look for the motivation of the struggle against the federal state led by Elon Musk and others, we realize that it is not even economic.
Those who are familiar with American history know the capital role of the federal State in the emancipation of Blacks. Hatred of the federal state, in the United States, most often derives from anti-Black resentment. When one fights against the American federal State, one fights against the central administrations that have emancipated and that protect Blacks. A high proportion of black middle classes has found jobs in the federal administration. The struggle against the federal State therefore does not integrate into a general conception of economic and national reconstruction.
If I think of the multiple and contradictory acts of the Trump administration, the word that comes to mind is dislocation. A dislocation whose direction we do not know very well.
Absolute Nuclear Family + Zero Religion = Atomization
I am very pessimistic for the United States. I will return, to conclude this exploratory conference, to my fundamental concepts as historian and anthropologist. I said at the beginning of this conference that the fundamental reason why I had believed, quite early, from 2002, in a return of Russia to stability, is because I was aware of the existence of a communitarian anthropological foundation in Russia. Unlike many, I do not need hypotheses about the state of religion in Russia to understand Russia’s return to stability. I see a family, community culture, with its values of authority and equality, which moreover allows us to understand a little what the nation is in the Russian mind. There is indeed a relationship between the form of the family and the idea one has of the nation. To the community family corresponds a strong, compact idea of the nation or people. Such is Russia.
In the case of the United States, as in that of England, we are in the inverse case. The model of the English and American family is nuclear, individualist, without even including a precise rule of inheritance. Freedom of will reigns. The Anglo-American absolute nuclear family is very little structuring for the nation. The absolute nuclear family certainly has an advantage of flexibility. Generations succeed each other by separating. The speed of adaptation of the United States or England, the plasticity of their social structures (which allowed the English industrial revolution and American takeoff) largely result from this absolute nuclear family structure.
But beside or above this individualist family structure there was in England as in the United States the discipline of Protestant religion, with its potential for social cohesion. Religion, as a structuring factor, was capital for the Anglo-American world. It has disappeared. The zero state of religion, combined with very little structuring family values does not seem to me an anthropological and historical combination that could lead to stability. It is toward ever greater atomization that the Anglo-American world is heading. This atomization can only lead to an accentuation, without visible limit, of American decadence. I hope I am wrong, I hope I have forgotten an important positive factor.
I unfortunately now find only one additional negative factor, which appeared to me when reading a book by Amy Chua, a university professor at Yale who was J.D. Vance’s mentor. Political Tribes. Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (2018) underlines, after many other texts, the unique character of the American nation: a civic nation, founded by the adherence of all successive immigrants to political values transcending ethnicity. Certainly. This was very early the official theory. But there was also in the United States a dominant white Protestant group, itself derived from a rather long and quite ethnic history at bottom.
This American nation has become, since the pulverization of the Protestant group, really post-ethnic, a purely “civic” nation, in theory united by attachment to its constitution, to its values. Amy Chua’s fear is that of a reversion of America to what she calls tribalism. A regressive pulverization.
Each of the European nations is fundamentally, whatever its family structure, its religious tradition, its vision of itself, an ethnic nation, in the sense of a people attached to a land, with its language, its culture, a people anchored in history. Each has a stable foundation. Russians have that, Germans have that, the French have that, even if they are a bit bizarre at the moment on these concepts. America no longer has that. A civic nation? Beyond the idea, the reality of an American civic nation but deprived of morality by the zero state of religion leaves one dreaming. It even gives one chills.
My personal fear is that we are, not at all at the end, but only at the beginning of a fall of the United States that will reveal to us things that we cannot even imagine. The threat is there: even more than in an American empire, whether triumphant, or weakened, or destroyed, going toward things that we cannot imagine.”
This is a link to the original text (in French: https://emmanueltodd.substack.com/p/bons-baisers-de-russie) which is actually much longer than this, as it touches on more topics than the “Trump revolution”.
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Brazilian activist Thiago Ávila sings a song called break the siege aboard the Madleen, as he joins 12 fellow activists, in the Freedom Flotilla’s mission to deliver humanitarian aid to #Gaza and challenge the ongoing blockade.
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1930244104782299326
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One Million People in NYC for Palestine
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1930354612973735938
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Historic shift in Germany. 
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BREAKING: THE ULTRA-ORTHODOX SHAS PARTY JOINED FORCES WITH UNITED TORAH JUDAISM TO DISSOLVE THE KNESSET AND BRING DOWN NETANYAHU’S GOVERNMENT
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The more things change, the more they stay the same:
The US’
lone, blood-soaked hand raised at the UN Security Council yet again, to prevent the industrial slaughter of Palestinian men, women, children, and babies by Israel.
These photos will be in the history books to be damned by future generations, as the green light for the world’s first live-streamed genocide to continue.
The US is now isolated more than ever, in an international community where the global majority continue to be repulsed, and horrified by what the US’ weaponry and political support does to a besieged, starved, and brutalised population in Gaza.
Aipamena
Afshin Rattansi@afshinrattansi
Eka. 4
BREAKING: The US has vetoed yet another UN Security Council Resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and unhindered access to aid.
The bloody hand of the US rises again to shut down another attempt to stop the genocidal barbarism. Even the UK and France, traditional
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Extremely dangerous! Israel-backed warlord & gang leader (responsible for looting aid under IDF protection) has just announced establishing a concentration camp in Eastern Rafah on Egypt’s borders & is calling on Gazans to move there if they want food & safety
He posted phone numbers for Gazans to join his mercenary gang & claims to represent “a legitimate Palestinian authority“
This heavily armed gang is a proxy for the IDF, they operate in an “extermination zone” area that any Palestinian tries to access is killed on sight
Abu Shabab had disappeared with his entire gang during the ceasefire. They reemerged now conveniently at the very moment Israel was pressured to allow aid into Gaza & is now facilitating the IDF’s declared objective of pushing all Gazans into Rafah (for mass expulsion).
Last week, Hamas released footage showing the Abu Shabab doing recon & surveillance operations in Rafah on behalf of the IDF
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1930167419302973519
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The Western political class is hostage to its own propaganda! Professor Alfred de Zayas
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Palestine Highlights@PalHighlight
Pro-Palestine protesters stormed the stage during a speech by Navy Secretary John Phelan and Palantir’s Head of Defense, holding a banner that read: “Palantir kills in Gaza, surveils at home.”
Follow: http://T.me/presstv
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1930463073636130913
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Kim Jong-Un says North Korea confirms its “unconditional support” for Russia in its war against the “terrorist Kiev regime.”
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‘I was running an operating list and everyday at least half of the people on it were under the age of 11.’
British surgeon Victoria Rose speaks about the cases she dealt with during her recent three weeks in Gaza.
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1930336862532493667
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Brazil President Lula: “It’s an army killing women and children... And then they come and say it’s ‘anti-semitism’?
The victimhood mentality needs to stop.
We understand the following: what’s happening in the Gaza Strip is a genocide.”
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1930101361879736784
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BREAKING:
The United Nations FAILS TO ADOPT the resolution calling for an IMMEDIATE ceasefire, the release of the hostages, and unrestricted humanitarian access in Gaza
The U.S. vetoed the resolution
Votes:
14 in favour
1 Against
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‘Israel is systematically bombing Gaza’s population, indiscriminately, whilst systematically starving them.’
Dr. Victoria Rose, a British plastic and reconstructive surgeon, speaks to MEE after returning to London from a 3.5-week medical mission at Nasser Hospital in Gaza
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1930260790612820193
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URGENT APPEAL: I call on all Israelis of conscience, and all diplomats and NGOs present in the oPt: STAND with the Palestinians and the few Israeli activists risking everything to protect them. They are fighting an impossible battle for survival. We cannot leave them alone.
Aipamena
Yuval Abraham יובל אברהם@yuval_abraham
eka. 4
NOW: Settlers are invading No Other Land director Hamdan Ballal’s village again and building a new outpost inside the village directly in front of his house.
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Declassified UK@declassifiedUK
BREAKING: Gaza has become “an abbatoir where starving people are lured out through combat zones to be shot at”, says Kit Malthouse MP.
“If the situation were reversed, we would now be mobilising the British armed forces as part of an international protection force”, he adds.
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1930256577958650288
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Corbyn has just sent Starmer and Lammy to The Hague
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1930296621603963246
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Furkan Gözükara@GozukaraFurkan
IDF openly expressing they are planning to sink flotilla and murder heroic civilians on the boat
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1930202757006262551
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We have not been witnessing a war.
We have been witnessing a genocide, live-streamed all over the world.
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1930341502355669039
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BREAKING: Canadian police launched criminal investigation into Israeli soldiers with Canadian citizenship for crimes against humanity in Gaza.
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BREAKING: COLOMBIA appoints first Ambassador to PALESTINE after CUTTING TIES with ISRAEL.
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A prisoner in the United States donated 17 dollars 74 cents to residents of Gaza, which he earned from 136 hours of cleaning in prison
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German foreign minister promises *more* military aid and weapons for Israel. Germany openly aiding and abetting genocide and illegal occupation. Brazen complicity. Ignoring the International Court of Justice. Ignoring the International Criminal Court.
deutschlandfunk.de
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The doctor walking towards Israeli tanks that destroyed everything around him.
This should be the short clip that defines our time here.
A man who’s life’s work is to save lives, being forced to surrender to men who’s life’s work is to take lives.
If Time magazine had a spine this would be on the cover.
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1930224092830912715
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Iran: No nukes. No invasions. Signs treaties.
Israel: 400 nukes. No inspections. Repeated attacks.
Yet the West calls Iran the threat. Why the lies? Why the hypocrisy?
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1930183218566766819
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Today, the israelis kill beautiful child Lian Wael Qadih, targeting Hanawe School, in Khan Yunis: she joins her father Wael Khairy Qadih
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Germany exported over half a billion worth of weapons to Israel since October 7, 2023
The German government admitted that it has approved at least $550 million in arms export licences to Israel between October 7, 2023, and May 13, 2025.
Citing a Federal Constitutional Court ruling, it released only limited details, arguing that further disclosure could compromise Israel’s military secrecy and harm Germany’s foreign relations.
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A cruise ship carrying 1500 Israeli visitors arrive in Crete today (weekly). The 
government has been turning a blind eye to the genocide in Gaza but the locals are making their opinions clear. The being what they are haven’t won any friends with their rudeness or arrogance
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1929911832573050893
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“We have to look into the tearful eyes of the children of Pal€stine orphaned by American bombs & say, ‘No, never again is now, never again for anyone.’”
—American actress Hannah Einbinder
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1930236912565919834
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“If this was 1944, 1945, when we discovered the horrors of Auschwitz, would we be contacting Heinrich Himmler for his take on the genocide?”
Irish Actor from Game of Thrones @liamcunningham1 on the Gaza Flotilla and BBC News and its excuse for impartiality in covering Gaza
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1930408322676732010
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Looks like we’ve reached a boiling point when it comes to ICE.
Today in Minneapolis, a militarized federal task force raided the beloved Lake Street taqueria, Las Cuatro Milpas—and the community was not having it.
Agents from ICE, the DEA, FBI, ATF, IRS, and HHS rolled up looking like they were ready for war. And Minneapolis PD was helping them. Why are local cops backing ICE raids?
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1930094538284249555
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Extraordinary scenes here today with thousands and thousands of people surrounding Parliament during #PMQs in protest that our government is still arming Israel.
@ChrisNineham on today’s Red Line for Palestine
Bideoa: https://x.com/i/status/1930238917409673446
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France sends Israel 14 TONS of Weapons
They can recognize and talk as much as they want. Means nothing
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They found a “PERFECTLY INTACT COPY OF MIEN KAMP” allegedly found on the body of a Hamas fighter… in Gaza.
They recycle the same scripts because they worked once, and they assume the world is too dumb or too distracted to catch on.
It’s not just the absurdity of the “evidence”…it’s an insult to our intelligence.
Bideoa; https://x.com/i/status/1930160774330114477
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Robert Cauneau@robert_cauneau·
“#MMT: Historical and Logical Foundations” – an article that challenges our beliefs about the State, money, and the market ! The authors show that the State precedes societies and markets. Money ? A “creature of the state” and its public monopoly !
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22 novembre 2022 Robert Cauneau
MMT: historical and logical foundations
(https://mmt-france.org/2022/11/22/mmt-historical-and-logical-foundations/)
by
Robert Cauneau – MMT France
Ivan Invernizzi – MMT France / Rete MMT ItaliaAugust 16, 2019
The contribution of the historical dimension to a theory, monetary or otherwise, is undoubtedly not sufficient in itself to demonstrate the correctness of this theory. But it does shed light on the underlying dynamics and the way in which they are articulated. It helps to identify the chains of causality that serve as a basis for the construction of a coherent body of theory, and it helps to eliminate arbitrariness in reasoning. It also helps to falsify certain ideas, such as the idea that bartering preceded the appearance of money, or that the market and real exchange predate money.
The main objective of this article is to show that MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) is based on solid historical facts and on the use of logic. In particular, it explains that coercive power is absolutely necessary for the emergence of monetized societies, and that the market is an epiphenomenon of the State 1 , while unemployment is a social construction of the State, which itself has a monopoly on currency. Finally, he presents the specificity of MMT thinking compared to all other monetary approaches.
1. On the origin of societies2
A good understanding of the potential of MMT can only be obtained if we have a good knowledge of the origin of societies. A return to the past shows us that they never appeared spontaneously, but always under the pressure of an authority exercising a strong coercion. It also shows how the need for money came about.
With rare exceptions, history teaches us that societies can only emerge where there is a political authority, that is, a system in which there is a part of the population that does not work to produce its own food, and which can unilaterally obtain the good produced by other parts of the population in a systematic way. There are no large spontaneous human groups living together, showing systematic interaction, without political authority, without coercion. The great civilizations, in prehistory, long before history, before the invention of writing, which already had formalized and articulated accounting systems, conveyed differently than by verbal language, were always connected with a military and political power of coercion over their population. The constitution of civilizations has always been based on the control by a military force.
It is important to note that when a civilization disappears, the reason is in most cases the fact that it can no longer sustain such coercion, probably because its social organization does not leave sufficient economic resources to sustain military forces. The reasons for the disappearance of the Roman Empire are essentially the fact that, at some point, it became too large to be able to organize systematic coercion. This made it very difficult to maintain control over these troops of barbarian origin, who obeyed their military hierarchy more than that of the Empire. And it is interesting to note that the Middle Ages, which followed, in the western part of the ex-Empire, did not see any monetization with the Roman currency of the west, which had therefore disappeared. This period then saw the emergence of the seigneuries, which allowed the development of an economic system still based on coercion, but without currency. These were closed economies, the only goods exchanged being marginal, absolutely not necessary for the survival of the community. It is interesting to note that in this region, from the sixth century to the beginning of the tenth century, the division of labor led to the disappearance of the currency, which in turn generated an important decrease in cultural, scientific and technical production. This is an interesting example of how the disappearance of political authority and the control of force led to the disappearance of the currency, as well as the market economy.
Related to this, although potentially not necessarily replicable in all situations, for a community to develop beyond small groups, there must be sufficient division and specialization of labor to produce the social and material infrastructure. One cannot build, for example, large water systems, aqueducts, or communication routes, for systematic exchange, to provide the physical capacity to reach other individuals, without having some level of division of labor. Farmers are not engineers. So, in order to have this division of labor, there is a need for the population that produces the primary goods to make them available to those who, while playing an important role in society, do not produce them, such as engineers, people with technical know-how and intellectuals. There is also a need to direct production towards that of maximum calories and to solve storage problems. And this type of evolution is by no means natural. Only the coercive force of military power, which itself conditions the emergence of political power, can allow it. Indeed, coercion is necessarily needed to oblige those who produce primary goods to provide a part of their production to those who do not. There are therefore no social classes a priori3 of the State
It follows that the concept of « social contract » has no historical basis. No State has been built in this way. For most of its history, human beings have lived in groups of more or less twelve people. It is plausible to consider that there is a biological basis in groups of this dimension. In mammals, the natural size is usually a few dozen at most. Beyond that, the groups break up. And only the human being has been able to go beyond. But for the developed mammals closest to us, there are no societies of billions of elements that would have been created spontaneously. If we look at human history, societies are not something natural. They are constructed entities, which require artificial structures in order to be maintained.
2. On the origin and nature of money
The origin of money is closely linked to that of States.
Money predates the market and real exchanges. « It is not a creature of the market. It also appears as a social mechanism of distribution by an authority of power. Money can be said to be a ‘creature of the State’ that has played a key role in the transfer of real resources between parties and in the distribution of economic surplus. »5,
A historical journey through the origins of money indicates that it is first and foremost a social relationship. More precisely, it is a credit-debt relationship of power, in which the indebted party issues a liability that is held by the creditor as an asset. Behind this social relationship lie various social power relations that codify human behavior in the specific historical context and the cultural and religious norms that govern the social procurement process.
In Egypt, as in Mesopotamia, money arose as a unit of account out of the need for the ruling class to keep accounts of agricultural harvests and accumulated surpluses, but it also served to account for the payment of taxes, foreign tribes, and tribal obligations to kings and priests. According to Henry (2004), money was of no use to them before societies could produce a surplus. Indeed, a substantial transformation of social relations from an egalitarian tribal society to a stratified and hierarchical society was necessary before money emerged. Once agricultural developments generated economic surpluses, taxation was used by the authorities as a method of transferring some of these surpluses (real resources) from the population to the palaces. The central authority (the king) levied taxes on the population and determined how to settle them by establishing the unit of account used to designate all debts to the State (Henry 2004). Henry (2004: 90) adds that money cannot exist without power and authority. Human populations organized around hospitality and exchange simply did not need it5, whereas in a stratified society, the ruling class is obliged to devise standard units of account that measure not only the economic surplus collected in the form of taxes, but also the royal gifts and religious duties that were imposed on the population concerned.
In ancient Greece, as in ancient Egypt, the emergence of money was closely linked to the need for religious authorities to control the flow of surplus. In other words, money becomes a public mechanism for the distribution of economic surplus and justice.
3. The market is an epiphenomenon of the State
History shows us that there has never been a generalized system of exchange without money. Contrary to what most economists think, exchange is not in the DNA of human beings. In fact, it appeared 200,000 years ago, while the market has only existed for a few thousand years. Thus, in pre-Columbian societies, which certainly succeeded in developing both in terms of culture and urban planning of cities, based on a real social stratification and specialization of work, there was no currency. This was invented in the Afro-EuroAsian zone, but the American continent did not then have this type of mechanism for distributing economic surplus.
The generalized system of exchange of goods and services develops thanks to two elements, private property and the division of labor, which serve as the basis for political authority. This system generates the need for currency, in order for the political power to try to obtain a part of the production of the economic system emanating from its territory.
Thus, if we base ourselves on logical reasoning, we realize that there can be no market without a currency, that there is no currency without a State, and therefore that the market is an epiphenomenon of the State. This process is based on the taxation by the State of agents who are thus obliged to demand this currency, by all possible means, and thus to offer goods and services in exchange for currency, in order to pay the taxes.
The supply of goods and services in currency is created by the imposition of taxes. For example, when the British arrived to colonize Ghana, there was no currency in that country. In order to put the population to work in the coffee fields, they decided to tax their houses, with the threat of burning them down if they did not pay. The Ghanaians were thus obliged to provide themselves with the currency of the English, and thus to offer their work in this sense. This is a system created by force, the logic of which is unilateral supply by the political authority.
4. Unemployment is a social construction of the State
Unemployment is the fact that people who offer work in order to obtain currency cannot find anyone to pay them in that currency. Therefore, there can be no unemployment without currency.
It is also important to note that there can be no supply of labor before the State has created the currency. In nature, there is no labor supply. In tribal societies, there is no unemployment, because there is no supply of labor. The word work does not exist there. In fact, work is not separate from the rest of human activity. It is the currency that makes this demarcation6 . Everyone is busy. Men must spend their days performing the tasks essential to their survival, except in special cases, even before they have money.
Unemployment can indeed exist only in monetized economies. It is not an a priori phenomenon of the State. It is in fact a phenomenon that requires both the State and the currency as preconditions. Unemployment is the fact that the State creates a demand for currency, with taxation, and then a situation in which all the demand for currency is not satisfied. Unemployment is therefore a monetary phenomenon.
Approaches other than MMT tend to interpret unemployment as an endogenous phenomenon, which is the consequence of domestic dynamics only initially within the private sector, which has nothing to do with the State. For them, the State intervenes a posteriori.
On the other hand, for MMT, if there is a market, if there is a labor market, if there is property, it is because there is the State. The results of the markets are a responsibility of the State because it is the State that imposes the rules at the base, that defines the conditions of the game of monetized economies, including capitalism. If the State does not satisfy the net demand for currency savings, either by not spending enough for the given level of taxes, or by not lowering taxes enough, there will be unemployment. And this changes the balance of power in private society. The same is true for the definition of the limits of the market. For example, the end of child labor was imposed by the State. It is not the result of the goodness of mankind. So unemployment is exogenous, which does not mean that there are not private dynamics, that policies should not be in response to the private sector. The same are within a framework that the State has put in place. They are always completely compensable by the State itself.
But there are no autonomous private dynamics. In itself, the monetary structure is the starting point and the condition for the realization of the labor market and all its variables. Unemployment is a supply of labor, and therefore a demand for currency, that is not satisfied. It can only be satisfied by lowering taxes or increasing public spending.
It should be pointed out that the main reason for the current impossibility of full employment is the consequence of the fact that unemployment creates exploitability, among workers, and thus creates power relations within the private sector7 that would not exist with full employment. This benefits one part of society, and not the other.
In totalitarian States (Nazi for example or the Stalinist Soviet Union) there is no unemployment, because it is not needed to create exploitability. Other means are available to create it. Similarly, during wars, there is always full employment, including for women. The problem of the ruling class is then to win the war. The class relation becomes secondary.
5. For MMT, the currency is a public monopoly
We can thus see that MMT analyzes the currency as a public monopoly. The State is the precondition of the currency. But it can also be said that it is the precondition of capitalism, which is, in fact, only a particular case of monetized society. Capitalism can thus be considered as an epiphenomenon of the State.
Thus, contrary to many other heterodox approaches, which consider that money can be explained on the basis of the market or of capitalism8 , and therefore that it represents something completely different under other political regimes, MMT considers that money has common bases shared by all categories of monetized societies. For it, the State intervenes a priori, and not a posteriori, to stabilize the situation, to fix the problems of a supposedly spontaneous market.
This is the most fundamental point of MMT, which is different from the starting point of other monetary approaches, which do not recognize the currency as a monopoly, i.e., the State is the only one that can create net financial assets9 in its currency. This is the most important demarcation between MMT and other schools of economic thought that analyze unemployment as an endogenous phenomenon, i.e., one that emerges from dynamics internal to the private sector and that is therefore a priori of the State.
MMT is therefore different from other approaches, both orthodox and heterodox, whether they are Marxist or post-Keynesian, including circuitists. Concerning precisely Marxism, which has the great merit of being not only an economic approach, but a holistic approach to society as a whole, it presents a serious limitation, insofar as it interprets the evolution of society as guided by a tension of social evolution, of social contradiction leading to the emergence of different forms of economic system. Here, the State is a product of society, not the essential element for understanding the economic dimension. So, for Marxists, social classes exist a priori of the State, which itself is in fact a superstructure with respect to the economic structure. And social classes are defined as population groups distinguished by the type of relationship they have with the means of production.
On the other hand, if we look at the State through the prism of MMT, there can be no social classes a priori of the State in the sense expressed by the Marxists. For MMT, private property does not exist a priori of the State. Also, there are no capitalist social classes without the currency, because, to achieve a labor market, it is necessary to have the currency. So there is no proletarian class without currency. It is interesting to note that we find in Adam Smith this basic idea that social classes and economic structure are something a priori. Marx and Smith are in fact classical economists. They therefore have a lot in common. For them, capitalism is in a way a possibility that exists in the DNA of human beings.
6. Conclusion
It is clear that MMT is not a simple contribution, not only to economic thought, but also to the whole of the social sciences. It is a profound questioning of it, in the sense that it lays down bases common to all social classes, and therefore contains a theoretical value that goes far beyond the economic dimension. Indeed, by providing an explanation of the foundations of society, it presents itself as a possible starting point for understanding the macro level of the social sciences as a whole. It thus suggests the possibility of a transdisciplinarity allowing to lay the foundations of an integral social science, not only to realize bridges between the conclusions of the social sciences, but rather to lead to an organization of the knowledge concerning them. And this possibility, which has not yet been fully expressed, suggests how potentially very influential MMT is.
Notes
1 By « State » we mean a structure broader than that of the modern State, which could include the American State, or Switzerland, but also the Mongol empire, the Roman empire, and the Greek city-state.
2 By « society » we mean a socio-economic system of a certain size, much larger than in the tribal system, in which there is division and thus specialization of labor, thus in which not all the population is assigned to the primary sector, with a systematic development of agriculture that becomes a fundamental system, and thus, as a result, a social stratification that makes the emergence of cities possible. What is called society here could be called civilization elsewhere. The « tribal society of hunting, gathering and agriculture » does not enter into the definition used here as a society. It is what, in history, is called civilization, as a social structure, with these functions and roles that are distributed, and a whole that is different from the sum of its parts. So we see here the emergence of properties inherent in complexity.
3 The expression « a priori » is used in the article to express a logical, but not temporal, causal relationship.
4 Tcherneva, P.R. « Money, Power and Political Regimes », http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_861.pdf
5 Tcherneva, P.R. ibid
6 Breve storia del lavoro / Melvin Kranzberg e Joseph Gies ; traduzione e cura di Giuliano Canavese e Umberto Livini. – Milano: A. Mondadori, 1976.
7 Kalecki M., « Political Aspects of Full Employment », 1946, https://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~mshalev/ppe/Kalecki_FullEmployment.pdf
8 Society in which there is ownership of the means of production and a labor market.
9 MMT prefers to focus on net financial assets in the national currency of issue rather than on « money » because this orientation allows us to understand the intrinsic nature of the monetary monopoly.
Bibliographie
- Tcherneva, P.R. « Money, Power, and Monatery Regimes », http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_861.pdf
- Mosler W. 1997–98. “Full employment abd price stability ”, http://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Full-Employment-AND-Price-Stability.pdf
- Mosler W. Soft Currency Economics »[1993]
- Mosler W. White paper
- Mosler W. A General Analytical Framework for the Analysis of Currencies and Other Commodities
- Rethinking Civilization – Crash Course World History 201 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyzi9GNZFMU
- Henry J.F. 2004. “The Social Origins of Money: The Case of Egypt.” In L.R. Wray (ed.) Credit and State Theories of Money. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
- Bill Mitchell, When twhttp://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=41133o original MMT developers get together to discuss their work
- Kalecki M., « Political aspects of full employment », 1946,
Illustration : wikipedia.org
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Geure herriari, Euskal Herriari dagokionez, hona hemen gure apustu bakarra:
We Basques do need a real Basque independent State in the Western Pyrenees, just a democratic lay or secular state, with all the formal characteristics of any independent State: Central Bank, Treasury, proper currency1, out of the European Distopia and faraway from NATO, maybe being a BRICS partner…
Ikus Euskal Herriaren independentzia eta Mikel Torka
eta
Esadazu arren, zer da gu euskaldunok egiten ari garena eta zer egingo dugun
(Pinturak: Mikel Torka)
oooooo
1 This way, our new Basque government will have infinite money to deal with. (Gogoratzekoa: Moneta jaulkitzaileko kasu guztietan, Gobernuak infinitu diru dauka.)
