Socialism vs. Capitalism

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LKL, a free market has never, actually, been tried...

Well why is this so? How can a government prove how communism; a stateless classless society, would not provide the greatest good for the greatest number?

neither has true communism been tried (see above). We've gotten close enough to both, though, to realize that going any further would be stupid.

The North Korean ration system ran at its most efficient when it was receiving significant amounts of aid from the Soviet Union. As a result, there was a point where it was wealthier than both South Korea and mainland China. The Chinese in Yanji tell stories about people crossing the river to enter North Korea so they could watch television. But eventually the huge subsidies were taken away and the system was revealed to be highly dependent upon them. Everything more or less slowed down and them nearly fatally stopped in the 1990's. I have never been to Cuba but I am told that their economy receives significant amounts of economic support in the form tourism and a large population of émigrés.

This seemed quite interesting:
http://globaledge.msu.edu/countries/cuba/economy



We have been over this previously in the thread. If you restrict your discussion of communism to the utopia it claims it wants to create and have no discussion of how people have tried to implement it, then the resulting discussion will be as vapid as the concept of a utopia that has a population of 0 despite plenty of attempts.

Tourism is a legitimate industry, unless you mean tourists who go to Cuba specifically because they want to check out a Communist country. As for support from emigres, the same applies to pretty much any Central American country. There are shops every few blocks here with announcements for wire services so that the Hispanic immigrants who have come her for work can send money to their families back home - West Coast, so not mostly from Cuba.

I and all the other libertarian communists many people conveniently like to ignore believe it should come from the bottom up. We can either decide to use logic and reason, or we can decide to make it impossible. Liberals and Leninist believe it's possible to fix state corruption, but states are corruption. If humanity is flawed, why should we have states and classes? States allow bad apples to do harm to millions.

Last edited by RushKing on 14 Oct 2013, 8:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Tourism is a legitimate industry but it is not something they really supported prior to the fall of the Soviet Union. The introduction of an industry like that represents a market reform. The key to the North Korean economy is foreign currency, since the local money is subject to significant inflationary issues, people prefer to deal in USD, Euros and RMB (although the clear preference when I was there was for USD). The Government of North Korea has tried to encourage (off and on) the development of controllable sources of foreign currency. A small tourism industry, places like Rason and Kaesong. In Cuba, my feeling would be that foreign currency is also hugely valued. When I went looking at the academic data on Cuba, that was pretty much what I found:

"The Cuban economy suffers first and foremost from a lack of productivity and an overdependence on the external sector. Cuba suffered a significant decline in gross domestic product of at least 35% between 1989 and 1993 as the loss of Soviet subsidies laid bare the economy's fundamental weaknesses. To alleviate the economic crisis, in 1993 and 1994 the government introduced a few market-oriented reforms, including opening to tourism, allowing some foreign investment, legalizing the dollar, and authorizing self-employment for some 150 occupations. These measures resulted in modest economic growth, although the official statistics are deficient and provide an incomplete measure of Cuba's real economic situation. From 2000 to 2009, Cuba experienced a series of severe economic disruptions, including lower sugar and nickel prices, increases in petroleum costs, devastating hurricanes in 2001, 2004, and 2008, a major drought in the eastern half of the island, increasing external debt, liquidity issues, and stagnant or decreasing agricultural and industrial productivity. Significant economic assistance from Venezuela, and to a lesser degree China, has helped keep the Cuban economy afloat.

Living conditions in 2010 remained well below 1989 levels. Moreover, the gap in the standard of living is widening between those with access to convertible pesos and those without. Jobs that can earn salaries in convertible pesos or tips from foreign businesses and tourists have become highly desirable."

North Korea is super poor but they could be wealthier and have the system they do if their military and rulers did not hoard such a huge amount of resources. Kumsusan Palace is just so ridiculously decadent (I spent 40 minutes on travelators just going into the place) and the government so stupid (check out the currency reforms where to fix inflation they just stole everyone's savings). Theoretically they could be more efficient within the framework they have. The best comparison is between the North and the South, where one has a high level of development and a reasonable standard of living to the North which does not have electricity. I mean you can stand in Kaesong and see the light pollution from Seoul. Just because the system could be run more efficiently does not mean its a good system.

You are just quoting objectives to me at the moment. Its all nonsense without telling me how you want to do it.

Without a state "transition" like vanguard parties and state ownership of the means of the production. We do it by rejecting unjustified hierarchy and authority. Creating voluntary horizontal associations that enable currency to become useless.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwk_Ot8orPY[/youtube]

[quote="91"][/quote]
I don't believe there is anything wrong with leadership as long as it's non-authoritarian. There is I difference between being in authority and being an authority. Someone who knows a lot about occupy wall street may be an authority on the subject allowing the person to be a guide. That is a type of authority anarchists are not against. Representative democracy is authoritarian because the representatives don't know and represent the will of the society. Guides are open to questioning while rulers are not. Rulers deceive and control for personal gain, while guides give us new information.

You are equivocating between two very different definitions of authority. Representative democracy might be flawed but it is the best method we have come up with at present. I am open to new suggestions such as increased participation, as I find the increase in technology might allow for more direct say of the governed. However, offices of authority are necessary even if they are only required to organise the collection of the trash. Representative democracy is not, by its nature, authoritarian (although I can think of some examples where it has been), China is authoritarian and the term encapsulates a significant difference between how you exist in that society and how you relate to the structures of power. If you brand democratic states as authoritarian then I think you lose a significant degree of value in having the term. However, whatever perspective or political belief you might have, you must always be against totalitarianism.

That's not libertarian communism, that's anarcho-communism.

@91: you don't need to lecture me on the failures on North Korea. I already agreed with you about it.

That's what that video did. Occupy wall street is organized in a way to reject a specific kind of leadership.

Why do you believe so? Have you heard of direct democracy?

Okay, cool

A garbage collective in an anarchist society may listen to people who are knowledgeable of waste management. The collective may also appoint people who have justified their authority on a specific subject.

More democratic states may be less authoritarian than totalitarian ones, but they are still authoritarian.

"appoint"?
And if the expert in question doesn't want to work in the garbage field?

Joseph Déjacque is the first person on record to call his or herself a libertarian, and he was an anarcho-communist. Libertarian communism is just another way to say anarcho-communism or anarchist communism. I have heard of libertarian marxism though.