I've been speaking with other more informed communists and they've told me that none actually exist. Is this true?
China, Laos, and Vietnam: now notoriously capitalists. Workers work 12+ hours with no protection in horrible factory conditions. Suicide rates are so high that suicide nets are installed. The air is so polluted millions die from lung cancer, especially factory workers w/out basic masks. Corporations dominate
North Korea: Undemocratically ruled by the Kim dynasty. Jong un indulges lavishly at the expense of his citizens, ordering millions in fine wine and trips from Denis Rodman. They might be the most socialist though, as Juche seems to otherwise be democratic.
Cuba: Sanctions have taken a massive toll, but even taking that into account the country still has its own problems. They have massive food shortages and inventory probs and aren't self sufficient after 60+ years. Why couldn't they've use machinery imported from the Soviet Union to develop their agriculture and fishery? The Soviets supported them heavily. They seem to be incredibly mismanaged or corrupt
To answer this question, we have to dive into the meaning of the main terms. What does it mean for a country to be communist or socialist?
To start with the term communist: calling a country communist has meant it's run by a communist party, not that it has implemented communism as a classless, stateless society (which could not exist in the context of distinct nations in the first place, by definition). By this definition, China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam are communist countries.
PS, anyone saying something like "real communism hasn't been tried" doesn't even understand the words they're using and is not themselves a socialist or communist. Instead, they're a confused liberal.
Next, socialist, and the idea of a socialist country. There is actually not a shared and specific definition of what would make a country socialist per se, it's more of a project to deestablish the capitalist class and put the working class in power. Many socialists disagree with one another about whether a given country is socialist, and what is really underlying their thoughts is usually just whether or not they think a country is attempting to deestablish capitalism and/or is making sufficient progress in doing so.
In terms of your specific examples, I'll offer some critiques.
No socialist expects that the country they operate in after revolution will be free of having to work, for there to be no workplace abuses, for there to be no pollution or healthcare problems, or even for corporations to be immediately deestablished. In reality, what is expected is for the ruling party to begin a long process of undermining capitalist relations. One example is to place human needs into guarantees of the state rather than the whims of private corporations. Another is to quell the anarchy of the market through state controls on production. It is expected that the ruling party will rapidly address the key isy that drove the revolution, which has historically been land reform. An example of this in your list is that every person in Vietnam has a right to an amount of land to farm rice for themselves and their family.
You should also consider that these countries do not operate in a vacuum. Instead, they must fight to survive in a world dominated by extreme international violence, typically from capitalist countries. Therefore, countries like China and Vietnam have adopted specific strategies to deal with this intentional influence, i.e. to combat imperialists. China's example is one of economic entanglement and to allow private markets in special economic zones, which will allow tons of capitalist elements and social relations to exist there. This strategy is working out relatively well, however: China has advanced concentrated industry and imperialist countries (e.g. the USA) that usually bomb or sanction their way into countries premised on socialist projects cannot do so without devastating themselves. Vietnam was forced into a similar situation but with less leverage and concentration of industry. This is a result of the legacy of being genocidally bombed by the imperialist powers during their struggle for national liberation. They won that war but arguably lost much of the peace, as the imperialist countries, despite stealing so much from Vietnam, saddled them with large debts as a condition for ending the war. Such debts were used to force more capitalist relations, especially foreign ownership, into Vietnam. This is a common story around the world, where most countries are violently bullied into carrying large debts in order to lose control of their own countries' economies. With all that said, Vietnam is still riledy by a communist party and does distinguish itself from surrounding countries in how it pushes back against capitalist relations and prioritizes its people.
Nearly all of this is liberal fairytales with little basis. The Kims have high roles in the party but don't act like dictators, more like figureheads. The primary challenge for North Korea isn't the Kims at all, it's the continued occupation of South Korea by the imperialists. Did you know that the Korean War is ongoing and that America won't let South Korea end it? North Korea is brutally sanctioned at the direction of the United States, and this is where its poverty originates. NK outperformed SK for decades (SK was a military dictatorship at the time) and only ran into famine conditions when the USSR fell and the US imposed an all-encompassing, genocidal sanctions regime.
I don't think discussing Juche or the NK political system in general would mean anything until the core misunderstandings are dealt with.
Socialism is not when a country has no problems. Socialists are ruthlessly locked in on practicalies, not utopian wishes.
This is hardly independent of the sanctions regime and Cuba did not have food security issues for decades until, again, the USSR fell and the US instituted massively broadened sanctions.
They did. Who told you they didn't?
The Soviets traded with them when the imperialist powers were brutally sanctioning them. Cuba was not a client state being provided with alms. It was a recently decolonized country that had just survived a revolution and needed to build in the context of being treated like one big sugar plantation, brothel, and casino for Americans. They had to develop industry from the ground up and they routinely outperform the richest country in the world on health metrics, their healthcare system, and healthcare research.
According to who?
an org they cited has been awarded the Democracy Award and gets funded by the uhhh
the National Endowment for Democracy
lol that's how they get ya. Flooding the English language NGO SEO space with nonsense so that unsuspecting liberals get taken for a ride.
Then we get to deprogram them, kicking and screaming!
But they make it so easy, how did they find a fucking NED funded Korean org oml
I think it really is cynical SEO stuff. These groups write white papers that use very specific terminological tropes that help them pop up if you search for things like:
North Korea Human Rights
Is North Korea Communist?
Is North Korea a Dictatorship?
That kind of thing. Then they boost themselves into Wikipedia by taking to journos or sometimes just literally citing their white papers, which just amplifies the SEO.
We should take lessons from this stuff, lefty orgs can do the exact same thing by just using the right terms, making sites look professional/academic, and making friends with some journalists. Make the first search result for "Palestine is complex" be a site that says, "nope" in 30 different ways.
the problem is mostly google, they can just selectively suppress our articles or just keep making sure the usual are the only ones making the front page
They've rigged the game, although that doesn't mean we can't still try to play, just means we need to cheat somehow
That's true but I bet Wikipedia would be a good vector. Make them choose between suppressing the entire wiki article for a topic vs. showing everyone lefty stuff.
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Can you be more specific about which 10 principles? Bunch of different people claim to have such a thing.
I would head some things off in the last question, though. Why should we want a "normal" society? Shouldn't we fight for liberation, which necessarily falls outside current norms? Shouldn't we allow societies freedom to structure themselves in different ways under a framework of liberation? Imposing a "normal" society reminds me of Residential Schools, the attempt to destroy indigenous societies through Western indoctrination and removal from their families.
The other thing to think about is the meaning of democracy, as the term is laden with a huge amount of propaganda and weaponization of thought patterns. I see Westerners call projects they work on democratic because sometimes people get to vote on parts of it even though power truly rests with, say, the people funding it or the people using interpersonal influence to direct the actual work to the exclusion of the voters. I see those same Westerners use cliches of "authoritarianism" to describe countries that actually respond to people's needs while their own country ignores their own needs but buys their complacency with a limited voting system. I think we should question how the term is used and what we really mean by it, as well as whether our definitions of it mean that a space is actually made better through adopting allegedly democratic practices. Does it involve the people? Does it give them sufficient power? Does it defend against oppression? Is it a tool of oppression? These questions must be answered before a particular idea of democracy can be implicitly considered a good thing.
As an example, I don't remember voting to or otherwise being able to use the existing system to prevent the genocide the Palestinian people, but most people seem to be very comfortable calling the US a democracy. I do remember being taught white supremacist narratives in school as if they were fact - do my peers that got duped participate in a democracy if they have been throughly propagandized? What if they have no time outside of work to investigate anything? Etc etc.
So you do fundamentally agree that democracy is good, correct? And you would be opposed to a society where a ruling class pretended it was sanctioned by the working class, right?
Anyway, here are the 10 principles as they were originally written. How do you feel about them?
I don't think you really read what I wrote, lol. I said that the entire concept of what is democratic should be challenged and questioned.
You'd have to make this coherent with a class analysis. If the ruling class is pretending to have the support of the working class, i.e. is not itself of the working class, then what class is ruling? There is no general answer to this question, you must apply it to a real country with its class divisions.
They make me feel... bored? They were/are a line taken against perceived discontent factions, with the figure of Kim Il-Sung used as a cudgel to say, "shut the fuck up". I guess they also remind me of the silly things that ignorant Westerners believe about North Korea and of the power of choosing words during translation.
Can you be specific about what fundamental principles of democracy you question? You just said America doesn't really have a democracy, so you were implying that more democracy would be a good thing.
So you don't actually believe that? And if that's the case, why did you signal as if you did? It seems pretty disingenuous to me
I already wrote some out in my first reply to you. Do you have any thoughts on them?
Incorrect on both counts. What I did was say that the language and concept itself are laden with propaganda and selective or incomplete application, raising serious doubts about what it even means.
An interesting aspect to your responses here is that you're repeatedly reading things that I didn't say while not recognizing the things I did say. This is very relevant my attempt to head off simplistic acceptance of, say, "democracy". The point is that there are a lot of propaganda narratives and unjustified (implicit) assumptions that tend to get made and your inability to have a conversation with me is a good example of this. You're clearly trying to slot what I'm saying to you into your existing framework, a precious epistemology, even when it doesn't really make sense. This is another thought pattern you'll have to leave behind if you want to have correct opinions or even just be capable of talking to other humans about politics.
Having made no effort to understand my pretty simple and direct statements, you're deciding to blame me for your confusion, lol.
This situation is fairly simple: you think you're here to "own" your perceived enemies and are now reaching at straws because it's not going the way you hoped. Gotta find some way for me to be the bad guy, eh kid?
Okay, so regarding democracy, when you said you didn't vote to allow a genocide in Gaza, were you saying a vote should have been taken, thus making the United States a more democratic country?
If that's the case, then we agree that more democracy is good. If that's not the case, why did you bring it up?
I was giving an example to challenge common presumptions about what is democratic and what something with that labels can then be used to justify. The idea is to get you to think critically and ask your own questions about what the true meaning of that label is by how it gets applied. It's not about what is simply true democracy and what is not. It's what function the term and concept serves in our societies, particularly Western ones where it is used chauvinistically and is full of contradictions. Nothing can be more "authoritarian" (the other half of this concept's dichotomy) than inflicting mass death and disposession and there isn't even a fig leaf of requiring informed consent from the people of the state that's supporting the genocide you see happening right in front of you. At the same time, the label of "democracy" is used everywhere to justify these dehumanizing, racist actions. Have you ever heard, "only democracy in the Middle East"? Have you ever wondered what makes an apartheid settler ethnostate democratic? What does it really mean?
The goal is to get you to critically engage with the tropes and thought-controlling cliches at work here. Your questions are full of them. It's clear you've never really questioned hegemonic thinking and at the moment you're being combative towards the idea of applying a little critical thinking or, God forbid, answering my questions or statements.
That last question is the only thing you should've said in reply to my first comment. An attempt to understand rather than an attempt to eagerly dismiss what you have never investigated.
I have answered that question twice now, though.
Regarding your complaint about the 10 principles, can you demonstrate that they were not translated to your personal preference? And does that mean, as they are written, you do object to them?
I understand that their existence is extremely inconvenient to you, as you are attempting to fall back on liberal identity politics in order to ignore them. But I would prefer it if you didn't attempt to dodge the question.
I didn't list a complaint. I'm just familiar with the fun that Westerners have with, for example, using the term "worship" when it is just as validly (arguably more valid given the lack of religious implications in general) translated as "respect" or "admire". Westerners are very gullible, you see, and love to think of themselves as superior to the Asian hordes, which includes constructing cartoonish ideas of designated enemy countries.
None of that list is inconvenient for me, lol. You seem to be talking to yourself and hyping yourself up because you think you have a slam dunk and in the process are failing to read or understand what I've written. Remember, my answer to your question of how I feel about them is that it makes me bored. Perhaps you should take a little more time to read what is written before claiming anyone is dodging, lol.
It looks like you're spamming this same question to others, seemingly without it being relevant to what they're talking about. Have you considered addressing anything I wrote in the comment you initially replied to? You didn't actually do that, you know.
In other words, you would have a problem with the country telling its people to worship a strong man, but you wouldn't have a problem with a strong man in general being put at the head of a state?
Do you believe the working class, in general, requires paternalism in order to correctly flourish?
Do you believe vocal criticism of a country's leader should be allowed or not?
"Strong man" is another thought-terminating cliche used to denigrate designated enemy countries, or at least ones at which Western chauvinism is to be directed. Do you believe in Iraqi WMDs and justifying the US war of aggression there? Because you sound like the people who said "they hate us for our freedom", and so on. The point I keep making is that a more critical and informed approach must be taken in order to understand these topics.
I reject the premise of your question.
I don't know what those things mean without a concrete grounding in real situations, like an example country. I've said this before, actually, and you didn't respond to it.
I think such questions serve to obfuscate rather than clarify precisely because they rely on abstractions into which hegemonic biases can be inserted.
Sure why not. Do you have any real questions about things?
never has, never will, socialism hasn't had such a thing in its history. unless you change the definition to whatever you want.
no not if people like you are doing it. Make an actual criticism instead of being a chauvinist .
weren't these made during a liberation war?
That's weird they wrote em in English
No, what's weird is you won't answer my question.
Perhaps you know that on one hand, if you condemn these, you will have become an apostate in the eyes of North Korea stans...
Condem what?, I have no idea what this is, or how it applies to DRPK governance. Some of the language is kinda sus but again its just standing alone out there, translated by whomever, and most importantly not written as legal language. Next you'll be wanting me to condemn the word authority or some such nonsense. You keep posting this like it's some sort of gotcha. The us constitution read uncritically seems nice but it is real shit.
Here read this for some commie law writing:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/12/05.htm
Unless you are admitting to not reading any of the previous posts before you replied, you know exactly what it is.
Instead of deflecting, let's talk about the 10 principles and whether you find them acceptable or not. I understand this might cause some discomfort for you, because for some reason, many leftists like to treat the doctrine of many countries like holy scripture that must not be condemned, or must be interpreted in a certain way. I'm not that kind of religious person, though.
It looks like you copy and pasted something from Wikipedia. If you could link the full translated legal document I'd be happy to look at it. Like the constitution I linked you, that's a document ratified by a Democratic body. The whatever you pasted is not anything really.
The ten principles of Communism as I know them are as follows. Spoiler cause its long:
spoiler
Why would you expect them to answer your questions? I was talking to you, not them.
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can you stop being a bleating goat or will you finally grow your own brain?
I understand that you use the same logic as Sartre describes in other bigots, so I don't expect you to engage with the 10 principles and simply attempt to deny them, deflect from them, call the sources Zionist propaganda, etc.
Would you like to engage in good faith, or am I 100% correct in my assessment of you
im a trans woman but yeah sure im a bigot because some white toddler got his politics from a youtube video and apparently the CIA
Im not a nice one, im here to call you a bitch.
Why are you bringing up your identity?
Since you want to do that, would you rather live in a country with LGBT policies like Russia, or one more like Sweden?
you seem to be casting my identity as a bigot, I responded.
Russia isn't socialist, Sweden has a terrible record for handling autistic people, of which I am among.
Oh... So you believe Blair White is not a bigot.
We can talk about the CCP and how it disappeared one of its most substantial LGBT activists. Or the laws against girly men on TV.
Oh... So you believe Blair White is not a bigot.
We can talk about the CCP and how it disappeared one of its most substantial LGBT activists. Or the laws against girly men on TV.
Oh my God fuck off back to reddit nerd
Drone, you multiplied, please clean yourself up
lmao I can't imagine getting paid to post shit this terrible and if you're freelancing get a life
Oh... So you believe Blair White is not a bigot.
We can talk about the CCP and how it disappeared one of its most substantial LGBT activists. Or the laws against girly men on TV.
Please be more specific, and remember to engage in good faith
No, you obviously haven't, so I won't. Renounce the citation of the CIA and we can discuss again.
How do you feel about the 10 principles? Are they something that a normal, democratic society would adopt?
Did anyone leave behind a child? We've got a lost kid here, very confused and scared.
you're doing the thing again, you aren't clever, come back here
cum