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Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

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Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#151

Post by beaconstudios »

PeterisP wrote: post #141
beaconstudios wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nobody is trying to scale the communal model with more communalism though - it scales with delegates and democracy and whatnot. My town sends a delegate to your town's delegate to discuss where we can mutually support each other. Maybe our elected delegates form regional councils for more regular or coordinated cooperation. It's all good stuff and is basically how democracy /should/ work. In reality, your local rep d…

Well, that's the thing that it does not scale with delegates in a hierarchical way. A community of a hundred humans will have emotional ties that allow them to cooperate in a way that a community of a hundred sub-communities and their delegates simply does not. If your delegates emotionally treat the other delegates as "their community" then you get essentially a bureaucrat/administrator class that exploits the commu…

if I recall correctly, the Soviet councils were robbed of all authority by the bolsheviks.

Even if a delegate system does devolve into essentially communal trading, that would still be an improvement to capitalism because atomisation at the level of a functional community is less destructive to the human spirit, and more mutually sustainable than atomisation at the individual level.

I'm just talking about ideas I've read about here, and things that seem worth trying - it's not like I've personally experienced an anarchist commune, especially one that has scaled beyond a single personal community. My main point of orientation is that the problems inherent to capitalism are pretty glaring (including, importantly, climate collapse through over-extraction, which will eventually cost us our biosphere) and alternatives need to be investigated. I'm well aware that self-organising systems are hard to build, systems theory and cybernetics are one of my main interests and they're all about self-organisation in nature and technology. But doing nothing is not an option. If I had a magic wand to implement any system I wanted I certainly wouldn't be so clumsy as to assume that something that "sounds reasonable" would work as I assume; experiments would have to be tried with many, many different models. Some experiments have and continue to be undertaken in communes and revolutionary communities around the globe, but nothing on the scale of a whole country outside of state socialism, which was just a red dictatorship. But at the end of the day, we really need to make the switch from competitive, exploitation-based coordination to cooperative coordination that can be more firmly rooted in human values.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#152

Post by germandiago »

jonway wrote: post #78
germandiago wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I don't necessarily disagree with your comment overall but there are a lot of problems with your list and your methodology. 1: Why isn't france or china on the former or currently socialist list? There are many others. 2: Consider the volatility and violent turmoil, war, genocide, atrocities from those former and present countries from the timeperiod of german unification under bismarck (somewhat arbitrarily chosen d…

1. True, France could be considered to some extent socialist. But it was never a communist system AFAIK. 2. In all countries there have been genocides, starting with Germany, one of the biggest economies. There have been genocides in lots of places a lot of times. But the mindset plays an essential role about development IMHO (this is just opinion).

3. True. I do not think a non-socialist system makes countries automatically successful. But I think that a great degree of economic freedom favors much development. There can be other problems, though.

It is difficult to identify those traits, but I always remember something someone important to me taught me since I was young: first fix it, complain later. It is not about it is your fault or not (extend this to any enemy in any society). If you choose crying and not fixing, you will face a bad fate. If you choose fixing, you can complain or not, but if it is fixed, your fate has way more chances to be a good one.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#153

Post by germandiago »

marwis wrote: post #124
germandiago wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I think you're confusing socialism with welfare state. Many of the countries you claim to be socialist are free market capitalist democracies, only with more taxes, regulation and welfare than some would like.

Actually it is not a black or white thing. Actually it would be better to use the economic freedom index and check where those countries fall.

Of course, if there is no private property directly, uh, that is going to be a bad one. The welfare is expensive and it is what is basically destroying my own country in my opinion: we cannot indefinitely hold a 120% debt. Besides that, I really think that it is the welfare of the politicians and many sectors of the public workers, not from the normal people that do not fall in one of those areas.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#154

Post by malermeister »

germandiago wrote: post #140
malermeister wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cuba gives free healthcare to its people and runs the largest medical school in the world [1] for free, with the explicit purpose of training foreign doctors so they can help their underprivileged communities. Meanwhile, in the US, the richest country in the world, people are dying because they can't afford life-saving insulin. [2] Life expectancy is higher in Cuba than the US! [3] It's not all black and white. Every…

> Cuba gives free healthcare to its people I think you do not have basic notions of economy. How can something be free? If it is free, it is because someone is doing the work (the doctors). If the doctors do not get paid a market price they are being exploited (forced to work for less). So that is where it is paid. You get it for free, yes, at the expense of those people that could have a better life and in the name…

I think you do not have basic notions of economy and what you just said is just propaganda.

There's no two kinds of humans - from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. The doctors will get free healthcare too, if they need it. Trying to put market value on medical care is inhumane and prioritizes an economic system over human life.

I'm not sure why you're talking about rich people here, but because you brought it up - the accumulation of capital is what's truly exploitative.

Value doesn't come from speculative markets, but from the sum of labor put into it. Rich people realized that if they use some of their capital to provide the means of production, they can skim off surplus value from the workers putting in the labor.

In other words, even though they don't do anything productive to create the value, they still take value that others created. That is exploitation.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#155

Post by opportune »

pc86 wrote: post #109
darkwater wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed to clarify that tourists use pesos convertibles which are artificially tied 1:1 to USD (1USD, 1 convertible) and that are basically what casas and taxi drivers accept. But you can totally go to local restaurants as a tourist (we did it a few times during our 3 weeks stay). And yeah, it can be sad to see how people lives there, and many try to flee but as you said makes you think about the real, deep impact…

Serious question, not trying to start a debate. How does abject poverty in an openly communist country make you think about the "deep impact of consumerism?"

Well one thing about going to a poor communist country is you still notice that a lot of people are doing regular people things like sending their children to school or dance lessons, having weddings, playing music, dancing, and drinking alcohol. The corollary to random consumer goods being in constant shortages is that other things are much more “affordable” than they’d be in a market economy.

Cuba is not really in abject poverty so much as they have a command-control economy (so some things are subsidized to be much cheaper than in our economic system, and others aren’t) that is pretty corrupt. They are definitely not a rich country on average or at p50, just not in abject poverty. According to some sources I found on Google their nominal/PPP GDP is actually pretty middling, which is likely due to what I mentioned about a lot of high-standard-of-living services being available despite low availability of goods.

The shortages of things are definitely bad. But the lack of variety in consumer goods really isn’t, and is probably what the parent comment was pointing out. There are not a million different things to buy as seen on TV/Instagram, but that in itself doesn’t appear to have a huge impact on life.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#156

Post by ModernMech »

fallingknife wrote: post #128
ModernMech wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true though. Communism isn't about communal ownership of all things, it's specifically about ownership of the means of production . Communism doesn't preclude ownership of personal property. You can still own your toothbrush under communist philosophy. However what you can't own is the steel plant. You can't own the roads. You can't own the Internet. You can't own the school system. You can't own the heal…

But all of that is allowed under our current capitalist system, so then you have to answer the question of why steel mills have owners. Why is it that to have a "workers collective" or whatever, seems to require heavy handed government intervention to prevent competition with privately owned businesses which seem to just spring up and thrive all on their own.

> Why is it that to have a "workers collective" or whatever, seems to require heavy handed government intervention to prevent competition with privately owned businesses which seem to just spring up and thrive all on their own.

Let's investigate this claim a little bit. First of all, when I think about heavy handed government intervention, I think about the use of lethal force. Labor history in the United States is replete with instances of the US government using lethal force to quash labor movements. For example:

[0] The Battle of Blair Mountain was the first aerial attack on US soil, when the US Airforce attacked striking workers with leftover bombs from WWI.

[1] The Homestead Strike, where the PA State Militia was brought in to put down a steel worker uprising.

[2] The Great Railroad Strike, where national guard troops and police killed over 100 workers in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, Michigan, and Illinois.

[3] The Lattimer massacre, where almost 20 unarmed striking workers were slaughtered by county police.

[4] The Memorial Day massacre when police opened fire into an unsuspecting crowd of assembled striking mill workers and their families, killing 10, maiming 9, wounding dozens more.

I could go on but I think I've made my point. I could literally list at least 10 more incidents of state-sanctioned violence being used to quell worker uprising, and if you haven't heard of the above events, I encourage you to do a deep dive into the history of labor movements in the US. (It's worth noting that it's not surprising that you may not have heard about these events, because they are not taught in schools. I wonder why?)

My charge to you: can you find a single instance of the state using this kind of violence against the owners of corporations? Of the police shooting plant owners and their families in the back? Of the US air force raining explosives down upon mine owners? Of the national guard being deployed to stop worker exploitation and wage theft? It seems to me that the exact opposite of what you claimed is true: heavy handed government intervention is done at the behest of owners against workers movements.

  "[O]nce emotions had died down, [PA Governor] Pattison felt the need to act. He had been elected with the backing of a Carnegie-supported political machine, and he could no longer refuse to protect Carnegie interests. [1]"
Meanwhile workers movements seem to spring up all the time and they must be put down by the state or corporations before they take root. Because corporations know what workers movements do; ultimately, all of these deaths and spilled blood that occurred in the 20th century at the hand of the American government and corporations earned us the 5 day workweek, worker safety regulations, paid overtime, healthcare, a minimum wage, and more.

This is why you see today that Amazon is even using the same firm [5] that Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick used against their workers last century! That's not an accident!

Just as a final point, private property does not ever "spring up and thrive" on its own. Private property as a concept only exists as long as that property is defended by the state using its monopoly on violence. When someone trespasses upon your property, you call the state to forcibly remove, arrest, and imprison that person. If the state doesn't show up, you can only own as much property as you can personally defend.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike#Arrival_of_th...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattimer_massacre

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Memorial_Day_massacre

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#157

Post by germandiago »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #82
nradov wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I deny that there is any meaningful or worthwhile theoretical thought behind communism. It was all just made up with zero connection to objective reality.

An extremely bold claim! In your mind, the communist project is one of the greatest and relatively most successful conspiracies to date. Do you think that all those books people have written about it, both for and critically against, are just filled nonsense, and the writers and thinkers just had to count on the fact that nobody would actually read them? And that I, who have read a small portion, am somehow hypnotize…

If communism was a real thing, it would have worked as predicted. It did not happen.

I think one of the worst contributions of marxism (as in incorrect) is the theory of objective value (translating from spanish, I hope I am doing it right), which basically says how much you are being stolen. In fact, there is no such thing as objective value and this is very easy to demonstrate in the experience of any of us. It is just absurd.

Yet there are people that still seem to believe it but I do not think they really think it is correct. This theory is the foundation of how much the employer steals to the worker. And that sets up a very conflictive mindset instead of a cooperative one. I believe more in cooperation. I do not deny an employer and an employee, both parts always want more. But both win together.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#158

Post by dragonwriter »

fallingknife wrote: post #128
ModernMech wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true though. Communism isn't about communal ownership of all things, it's specifically about ownership of the means of production . Communism doesn't preclude ownership of personal property. You can still own your toothbrush under communist philosophy. However what you can't own is the steel plant. You can't own the roads. You can't own the Internet. You can't own the school system. You can't own the heal…

But all of that is allowed under our current capitalist system, so then you have to answer the question of why steel mills have owners. Why is it that to have a "workers collective" or whatever, seems to require heavy handed government intervention to prevent competition with privately owned businesses which seem to just spring up and thrive all on their own.

Capitalism is heavy handed government intervention to favor a particular class and model of ownership.

That's where the name comes from, in fact.

Why it takes a significant deviation from that base to permit alternative forms to operate on a level playing field should be obvious.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#159

Post by perl4ever »

germandiago wrote: post #137
perl4ever wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a comment and then thought "I should really look up where the term consumerism comes from". Because I didn't know and maybe I should. I spent half my life unaware of the origin of "capitalism". In the early 20th century, "consumerism" was supposedly used to mean something like "consumer protection". But in the mid 20th century, it was apparently adopted as a preferred term to "capitalism" in order to contrast…

BTW, some misconception here that I see so often: capitalism is not consuming a lot or too wildly. In fact, capitalism is not possible without saving, literally. In order to raise our lives level there were previous savings that were reinvested in process improvement, which eventually kept raising our life standards. Capitalism is exactly about that: same product at better price or higher quality products. We humans…

The use of consumerism as a euphemism for capitalism is a (alleged) historical fact.

From what I read, consumerism did not have the negative connotation mid-century, whereas capitalism did.

I don't know how it happened, but seemingly "consumerism" acquired a similarly negative connotation, which is a Sisyphean cycle with euphemisms.

As I understand it, "capitalism" was an invention of the writers of the Communist Manifesto, while ironically "communism" was not. When a concept is developed purely for oppositional purposes, it can and often does attract people to defend it.

But in some sense, I feel like it doesn't really exist due to its origin. It amounts to the status quo, plus a word that lets people feel like they are opposing (or supporting) some one or thing rather than fog.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#160

Post by voidfunc »

friedturkey wrote: post #106
hunterb123 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

The embargo has had zero positive effect. Why pointlessly punish the people and strangle their economic livelihood just because you hate the government? We don’t do it to other countries with equally bad or worse governments. After reaching half a century it’s pretty clear it was pointless torture. And besides, I’m not sure if there’s a single case of such actions truly helping the people. Authoritarians thrive when…

Its called “making an example”. The Cuban people mostly suffer for their government’s alignment with the Soviets and deciding to put Nukes 90 miles from Miami.

We dont care that they are communists. We deal with all kinds of fucked up regimes around the world but the key difference is none of them have ever dared challenge us militarily with Nukes right off our border.

Cuba is basically perpetually fucked as punishment for that decision and its done as a warning to anyone else that might get in bed nearby with one of our existential enemies (Russia, China).

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