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Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

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Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#231

Post by int_19h »

germandiago wrote: post #213
opportune wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of things in the US are subsidized too. We still have taxes that pay for “free” things like using public roads. I am just describing the structure of the Cuban economy where market forces are less involved in how many of something gets produced for consumption. I don’t think it’s great either because it leads to food shortages. Just pointing out (having been to Cuba myself) they aren’t in abject poverty and in s…

The market is the will of people. Any alternative thing is going to be more incorrectly adapted to the demand from people.

The market is one-dollar-one-vote. If you start with an equitable distribution of wealth, then sure, it's the will of the people. But if you start with wealth being disproportionally skewed towards a very small class - as is the case in every real-world developed economy today - the result is oligarchy, not democracy.

The problem with mainstream economic right is that it ignores that, or assumes that markets will eventually equalize naturally somehow. The problem with mainstream economic left is that it wants to strangle the market instead of freeing it from oligarchy.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#232

Post by int_19h »

perl4ever wrote: post #201
malermeister wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

>the accumulation of capital is what's truly exploitative When I think of "accumulation of capital" in modern society, semiconductor fabs are the ultimate example. I can't imagine disagreeing that the building of such factories encompasses most of the world via supply chains and most of the exploitation in it. But I feel like there's an ambiguity and I don't understand what is to be our goal. Should we not have "accu…

Accumulation of capital is in the context of ownership, yes. Capitalism is a system in which ownership of capital is indistinguishable from any other property, which makes it possible to accumulate it indefinitely. The end result, in the absence of some countervailing force (such as anti-monopoly legislation), is its concentration in the hands of a few oligopolies. Which translates to concentration of power, and strangles democracy.

Corporations are also "collective entities" (of shareholders). The real question in this case is who effectively controls the entity. If the entity represents thousands of people, but is controlled by a few, you still get oligopolies and concentration of power. Something like a co-op is another story, although even there it all depends on how its governance is structured.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#233

Post by int_19h »

thechao wrote: post #32
FredPret wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

> Communism is the ownership of the means of production by the workers.

Even according to the communists, that's not true. Socialism is the common ownership of the means of production. Communism is the hypothetical post-scarcity classless society into which socialism is supposed to evolve eventually.

No "communist" country that ever existed actually claimed to be communist; they claimed to be building communism. Which, as the popular Soviet joke went, is always on the horizon - which is an imaginary line that recedes as you try to advance to it.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#234

Post by int_19h »

fallingknife wrote: post #63
x3iv130f wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your definition is the correct one for what Communism strives to be. A communal ownership of things. It's unfortunate that such a sensible idea only becomes justification for kleptocratic oligarchies which is what the other poster was going on about.

It's not unfortunate, it's built in. "Communal ownership" requires that you can't freely buy and sell things. A government powerful enough to enforce that is necessarily totalitarian.

You missed the crucial word in that definition - communal ownership of the means of production. Which means that freely buying and selling things is perfectly fine; it's freely buying and selling capital that's somehow limited.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#235

Post by int_19h »

beaconstudios wrote: post #163
lobocinza wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe I could cooperate with other workers and form some kind of... Cooperative. Free markets allow people to organize the way they like. Other systems don't. Cooperatives are cool and I have nothing against them but there's a reason for them being so few. They go bankrupt more often than other business. > I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate Me neither but trust isn't scalable. O…

> Free markets allow people to organize the way they like. Other systems don't. Free markets are not absolute freedom, and private property still restricts the action of people without money. Poor people can barely do anything because they're too busy trying not to become homeless. The wealthy, on the other hand, can do what they want. That's not a very free system. More free than some Soviet dictatorship, 100%, but…

Free markets are orthogonal to shared or non-shared ownership of capital; you can have one without the other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-market_anarchism

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#236

Post by int_19h »

germandiago wrote: post #47
beepbooptheory wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... if you can't believe in something that hasn't yet existed, how does anything come to be at all? Or do you deny that there is any theoretical thought behind communism at all? Is it just something people suddenly found themselves doing, and it failed and that was that? How does someone dream of things that are better? How can you have faith in anything at all? Is not the love you feel towards your friends and…

Quoted post unavailable.

Thing is, all of these are ultimately spawns of the same strain of Marxist socialist thought that originated in Russia with the Bolsheviks. Other, less authoritarian varieties, didn't make it for the simple reason that it was suppressed by either capitalists or by authoritarian socialists - like Luxembourgists in Germany, or like anarchists in USSR and republican Spain.

So the only conclusion that can be derived from this is that "Marxism-Leninism" inevitably leads to totalitarianism and poverty. Which is fair enough, but it doesn't really say anything about other varieties of socialism, especially the non-Marxist ones. Are you familiar with the Zapatistas, for example?

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#237

Post by int_19h »

germandiago wrote: post #222
the_af wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the only capitalist in Argentina you know is Milei (far right, self-proclaimed "libertarian", worked under a known criminal of our military dictatorship) then you're out of touch. Really, consider how you're shifting the goalposts: you only consider far right libertarians as capitalists. The rest of the world disagrees with you. Anyway, I live in Argentina and you don't. You are wrong. > That is not capitalism. Ca…

Far right is the label you put to degrade Milei. Milei is a libertarian. If that looks to you like "far right" it is your call. For me those are very different things. Apart from this comment: capitalism is free market and low regulations. By that measure, how capitalist is Argentina? As much as this in the economic freedom index, which could be considered an index of "how capitalist" a country is (position 148): htt…

Social democracy is capitalist. Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. It has nothing to do with free markets and economic freedom in general, or with high taxes. The only prerequisite for a capitalist system is the ability to buy and sell capital without any limits - that's why it's called capitalism, not free-market-ism or whatever. Free markets predate capitalism.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#238

Post by Sebguer »

germandiago wrote: post #138
Sebguer wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America has killed far more people in the name of various regimes than Cuba has.

Quoted post unavailable.

Right, because I'm the kind of person who posts on HN and has an incredible amount of privilege.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#239

Post by int_19h »

thriftwy wrote: post #45
thechao wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Then the USA, where the means of production are owned by workers via pension funds, is closer to communism than USSR which basically had everything state owned.

You're joking, but it's actually correct. Insofar as USA is far more democratic and has legal trade unions, the ability of the workers to control the means of production is greater than in the USSR.

When Marx came up with his "modes of production", one of those was what he called the "Asiatic mode of production" (because it was ostensibly widespread in Asia). The idea is that it's basically a society where all property is collectively owned by the ruling class, which uses violence or threat thereof to directly extract surplus from the rest of the population. Whether this accurately describes any historical society in Asia or elsewhere is debatable, but it does seem to very accurately describe the USSR. Which is probably why Stalin personally cracked down on that definition, and had it purged from the Soviet interpretation of Marxism.

Re: Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

#240

Post by int_19h »

ModernMech wrote: post #95
beaconstudios wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, state socialism doesn't work, that much is exceedingly obvious. That doesn't mean that we should just give up and accept capitalism as "the best we can do" as a species. It's just clear that authoritarian means are funnily enough not the route to a less authoritarian future.

People forget that there are many axes of the political compass. I think political scholars count over a dozen. Who knows how many there are, but it's definitely not a simple linear left/right dichotomy. One other important axis in this context is the authoritarian/democratic dichotomy. We know that the left/authoritarian (Soviets) quadrant of this space doesn't work, just as we know the right/authoritarian (Nazis) q…

For more reading on this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism

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