Caesura109 posted:they’re not betrayers for trying to get medicine for their kids into their country. imo
I know, I support them in doing so, and don't see it as a betrayal. It's just an acknowledgement that all will be subsumed by global capitalism and maybe it isn't such a bad thing to go with the flow and look out for yourself. Eventually it'll fail.
this 'global capitalism will eat everything' doom and gloom rhetoric where there's no possibility of anything going right is really stupid to read and think about.
Caesura109 posted:lo posted:
ah, you've defeated my post by being a pedantic shit instead of clarifying your actual position. farewell,
Sorry. You just came off as moralizing in a condescending way. I should have clarified, I'm not advocating defeatism. I'm also not good with words, so ill probably try to find a better way to express what exactly I mean. I wrote out a long response but it had to many clauses and went all over the place.
well you did the same thing with cars' post on the previous page, you didn't clarify what you actually meant or were arguing for in the original post being responded to.
kamelred posted:dont say "ah"
to further the dialectic through acceleration, I adopt the position "say ah constantly"
rolaids posted:The issue of what a unified Korea would realistically look like
afghanistan, iraq, libya, syria, yemen,
shriekingviolet posted:I mean, apparently the Trump foreign policy circus just threatened to remove all US military presence if South Korea doesn't do a better job of sucking up to their imperial masters, so maybe it would be surprisingly easy. Sure dude, go for it
what did we learn from duterte? the words mean nothing
swampman posted:what did we learn from duterte? the words mean nothing
i don't believe it for a hot second, it's just funny to see them threaten the severe dire consequence of doing the one decent good thing they could do in this situation. just imagine it: an empire threatening to stop occupying you if you won't follow their demands lmfao
We want a chopper to the nearest airport, a jet cleared for takeoff and unmonitored safe passage to the destination of our choice. If you do not comply with these demands, I guarantee you we will safely release all the hostages.
The Duran - The truth about North Korea: it’s booming
A recent article in of all places the Financial Times takes this point much further. It turns out that not only is North Korea far from being a basket case, but its economy is actually growing and at a blistering pace:
Financial Times
... The result, according to North Korea watchers such as Prof Lankov, is “a significant improvement in living standards” and economic vibrancy, most evident in the flourishing number of restaurants and markets. Known as jangmadang, these markets — both official and unofficial — have proliferated rapidly in recent years and are now increasingly the norm for purchasing consumer goods.
According to a survey of more than 1,000 defectors by the Korea Development Institute, a state-run think-tank in Seoul, more than 85 per cent of North Koreans now use these markets for food, compared with 6 per cent who rely on state rations.
Wages have also appeared to increase exponentially in recent years. According to the institute, salaries in the official state sector have increased more than 250 per cent in the past 10 years to about $85 (more than 75,000 North Korean won) a month, while wages in unofficial “side” jobs, such as private enterprises, have boomed more than 1,200 per cent. Lee Byung-ho, then head of South Korea’s intelligence service, estimated earlier this year that 40 percent of North Korea’s population is now engaged in some type of private enterprise.
i'm very skeptical about anything reported from South Korea or defectors but i also know capitalists like to boast when they see any private oriented "progress" being made so it makes me wonder if the DPRK is really headed in the direction of a China/Vietnam type of reform.
Given that DPRK is so cut off from most of the world economy, I think that any sort of privatization in the current environment would look a lot different than the dismantling of other socialists states. More access to consumer goods and more leeway for small retailers or food sellers is probably a good strategic move in lieu of suffocating sanctions and an increasingly bellicose west.
He self describes as a free market conservative.
It doesn't make any sense but I do think its entertaining
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYNiTpus71wQY6ON0s2LWOg
Synergy posted:does anyone know how much of the DPRK is privatized? like i know they have a planned economy but this article by The Duran quotes the Financial Times as saying a large part of it is becoming privatized.
The Duran - The truth about North Korea: it’s booming
A recent article in of all places the Financial Times takes this point much further. It turns out that not only is North Korea far from being a basket case, but its economy is actually growing and at a blistering pace:
Financial Times
... The result, according to North Korea watchers such as Prof Lankov, is “a significant improvement in living standards” and economic vibrancy, most evident in the flourishing number of restaurants and markets. Known as jangmadang, these markets — both official and unofficial — have proliferated rapidly in recent years and are now increasingly the norm for purchasing consumer goods.
According to a survey of more than 1,000 defectors by the Korea Development Institute, a state-run think-tank in Seoul, more than 85 per cent of North Koreans now use these markets for food, compared with 6 per cent who rely on state rations.
Wages have also appeared to increase exponentially in recent years. According to the institute, salaries in the official state sector have increased more than 250 per cent in the past 10 years to about $85 (more than 75,000 North Korean won) a month, while wages in unofficial “side” jobs, such as private enterprises, have boomed more than 1,200 per cent. Lee Byung-ho, then head of South Korea’s intelligence service, estimated earlier this year that 40 percent of North Korea’s population is now engaged in some type of private enterprise.
i'm very skeptical about anything reported from South Korea or defectors but i also know capitalists like to boast when they see any private oriented "progress" being made so it makes me wonder if the DPRK is really headed in the direction of a China/Vietnam type of reform.
im not too sure what the exact line of this site is but there's some articles here that might be relevant, most of them seem to go with the idea that markets exist, particularly at the local or regional level, but there's not really a true national market and the state is still firmly in control of the overall economy. some of the emergence of markets seems to be linked to the shortages of the 90s when the state wasn't able to supply people with food, goods, etc.
the book mentioned earlier in the thread, 'the cleanest race' was specifically called out as being really bad with it's translations.
xipe posted:The guy who runs the Duran has a conversation on this channel every 2 weeks or so where they talk about how great every global south leader is in the face of western imperialism.
He self describes as a free market conservative.
It doesn't make any sense
imo there a ton of these guys and they're the cynical leftover spawn of the decades of Asian-horde scare articles declaring China or India as the coming global empire of the 1990s, then the 2000s, then the 2010s, etc.
you don't see much of that right now because scary Russia is scary & the usual suspects are trying to exploit that to write about constant upward revisions of GDP forecasts under sanctions that were supposed to batter Moscow into withdrawing support for Republic of Crimea
lo posted:im not too sure what the exact line of this site is but there's some articles here that might be relevant, most of them seem to go with the idea that markets exist, particularly at the local or regional level, but there's not really a true national market and the state is still firmly in control of the overall economy. some of the emergence of markets seems to be linked to the shortages of the 90s when the state wasn't able to supply people with food, goods, etc.
i'm still digging through articles but in the meantime this reddit post from r/communism suggests part of the economy is cooperatives
ComIntelligence Posted:
...As for the workplace, we luckily have a complete summation of what work is like in a state-owned workplace in the DPRK! The system they use is called the Taean Work System, and is outlined in the link provided:
The highest managerial authority under the Taean system is the party committee. Each committee consists of approximately twenty-five to thirty-five members elected from the ranks of managers, workers, engineers, and the leadership of working people's organizations at the factory. A smaller "executive committee," about one-fourth the size of the regular committee, has practical responsibility for day-to-day plant operations and major factory decisions. The most important staff members, including the party committee secretary, factory manager, and chief engineer, make up its membership. The system focuses on cooperation among workers, technicians, and party functionaries at the factory level.
This system has persisted long in the DPRK. In his New Years address at the thirtieth anniversary of the Taean Work System, Kim Il-Sung said:
Taean work system is the best system of economic management. It enables the producer masses to fulfill their responsibility and role as masters and to manage the economy in a scientific and rational manner by implementing the mass line in economic management, and by combining party leadership organically with administrative, economic, and technical guidance.
The DPRK's economy is a dual state-owned/cooperative economy, with workers in the latter constitutionally entitled to ownership of their workplaces. Taken from the Constitution of the DPRK:
Article 22
The property of social cooperative organizations belongs to the collective property of working people within the organizations concerned.
Social cooperative organizations can possess such property as land, agricultural machinery, ships, medium-small sized factories and enterprises.
The State shall protect the property of social cooperative organizations.
That's not to say there aren't contradictions within the DPRK's economy or that it is a "worker's paradise" (whatever that nonsense means). We cannot exclude the dangerous influence of the Special Economic Zones, which contain within them the possibility of reactionary infection. Though these economic zones are miniscule compared to the ones in the People's Republic of China, they are nevertheless a possible threat to the socialist forces within the country and they should be considered critically whenever we analyze the DPRK.
In 1945, the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) was created. Kim Il Sung, later the leader of the DPRK, described this process very simply, noting that people’s committees controlled the country before the establishment of a government formally, proving it wasn’t a “dictatorship”: "...Meanwhile, the people’s committees protect the property of the national capitalists and encourage the business activities of individual entrepreneurs and traders…"
Kim Il Sung has a bunch of cool quotes in that article but the above one caught me off-guard since it gives random praise to capitalists out of no where. am i missing something here? what's the deal with this line?
The following year (1983), the DPRK’s government announced a joint-venture law where there could be capital investment from foreign nations in the country, and possibly farmers to have private plots, which some bourgeois analysts saw as an “admission” that the self-reliant posture of the country was not working.
With the full-throttled embrace of Western capitalism and fanatical revisionism, the Soviet Union ceased giving aid to the DPRK, leading to a faltering economy, like in many states across the world which benefited from good-natured Soviet aid. Even so, the DPRK stuck to their beliefs despite claims they were “opening up” to the West. This was a strong statement because the Soviet aid going disappearing hurt the DPRK badly because they were dependent on the Soviets for “the supply of large amounts of crude petroleum and coking coal,” leading to problems in the country. The socialist state dealt with this in later years by “opening a limited area to foreign capital and securing a supply of crude petroleum and coking coal from China” and trying to build Nuclear Power Plants.
In July 1998... The new constitution gave more authority to the National Defense Commission, abolished the post of President, and asserted a continuing strong direction of the socialist state. After this, Kim Jong-il removed 16 of the country’s “23 main economic bureaucrats,” approved plans for “economic reforms that were finally implemented in July 2002” and the SPA passed legislation on “special economic zones, copyrights, arbitration, foreign direct investment, and foreign trade.”
In March of the following year... the DPRK seemed to “open” its economy to foreign investment, with details not exactly clear.
That year, the elite Council of Foreign Relations claimed that the DPRK’s government had begun to “introduce aspects of capitalism into the economy.” While they made this conclusion, they also admitted that whatever they considered these reforms, they were barely anything.
the 2006 report they're referring to says this:
The government has lifted some restrictions on investment, reduced some wage restrictions and government subsidies, made internal travel easier, created small, semi-private markets and shops, phased out a decades-old food ration system, and allowed farmers to own small gardens and sell their products at local markets.
they also say 600,000 people starved to death in the 1996 famine, the DPRK can't survive without the UN food program and collapse is imminent so who really knows what's accurate
back to the main article
Two years later, in March 2009... The new constitution, the Shogun Constitution... encourage “joint ventures and business collaboration between the organs, enterprises, and organizations… the establishment and operation of various forms of enterprises in special economic zones,” among many other aspects.
not a lot to go on so i went back to what lo posted and pulled this up from one of the articles on that site
Local and Limited: The Sociopolitical Implications of Segmented Marketization in North Korea
Philo Kim sets out his theory of segmentalized marketization. First, he argues that the Kim Jong-il regime sought to use markets as a means of fostering regional self-sufficiency. The July 1 Economic Measures (7.1경제관리개선조치) were part of this strategy, as was the May 5, 2003 Cabinet Directive with respect to the Operation of General Markets which stated that one or more general markets should be established at the local level. (p. 106) Individuals, state companies, and cooperative organizations were thus able to utilize markets, which were controlled by Market Management Offices (시장관리소), instead of the state-run distribution system. (p. 107) He acknowledges that distribution has become extensively liberalized, with prices set by markets, and the use of cash between government institutions now accepted, institutionalized practice. (pp. 107-108)
Next, Kim asserts that while trade within localities is indeed marketized, trade between regions remains dominated by government institutions and is thus only partially marketized. Leading commercial entities (상업지도기관) receive instructions from state planning institutions, with distribution managed by state haulage and postal services. (p. 108) He also states that the state monopolizes foreign trade, and central state foreign trade companies control the purchase and distribution of most imports through their regional branch offices. (p. 108) Kim also notes the fact that because residents cannot move beyond their locality without permission, there does not exist a national market for labour (p. 109).
Therefore, segmentalized marketization is a process in which markets have come to exist within only a certain segments of the economy, i.e. individual localities, and a national market remains absent. Kim also points out that the concept of market socialism that has been applied to North Korea by other writers is compatible with his framework as the planned element of the economy still exists at the national and regional levels.
there's probably some truth to these claims but without more independent/leftist research it's hard to determine what's actually going on.
edit: another article on that site says:
Yang argues that North Korea today is a country of two economies, one parasitic and one productive. The market economy generates profits, economic growth and productive employment, while the state increasingly parasites off of it for its survival, officials seek to leach off of productive workers and business people.
and now i'm finding a bunch of defector stories and other anti-DPRK propaganda on there... so idk
Edited by Synergy ()
it's basically about a neo-nazi group that somehow came to idolize the Kim family/DPRK and after sending a bunch of letters and stuff to North Korea they became recognized as an official support group from the NK government. the leader John Paul Cupp was invited to visit the country (you can see pictures in the article) and apparently North Korea published articles from these members praising Juche and the Kims. this went on for years until:
In August of 2008, Cupp wrote numerous public screeds extolling the mass killing of all Jews, support for suicide bombers, Saddam Hussein, Sirhan Sirhan (the assassin of Robert Kennedy), and various calls for a new government to replace the U.S. authorities with a nation populated by an Aryan race.
CUPP DRAWS PYONGYANG’S DISSAPPROVAL
Cupp posted many of these screeds on the official North Korean U.S. Songun Politics Study Group which was disseminating propaganda sent by and on the instruction of Pyongyang.
The content of his political manifestos were extreme enough to draw the pointed but gentle rebuke of Pyongyang directly.
In an email from North Korea to Cupp on September 15, 2008, Pyongyang wrote instructing Cupp to pull non DPRK provided political propaganda from the U.S. Songun Study Group’s website and refrain from posting DPRK material on Cupp’s incendiary white supremacist anti-Semitic web pages.
“Dear comrade CUPP,” the North Korean message began “We would like to make a comradely suggestion to you on the matter of publishing the great Juche and Songun-related photos and articles, great leaders’ works, etc, on the internet. Could you please publish those materials exclusively on the US Songun website and the US Solidarity webpage and not post non-DPRK materials on this, and not post those Juche-Songun and DPRK photos and articles on your?”
“That’s only for the sake of the dignity and prestige of our great leaders and the DPRK. We hope you who sincerely and ardently follow and revere the great leaders could understand what we mean and soon rearrange the materials on the internet, please. We’re waiting for your reply in this connection and the good news of your better health. With our sincere and comradely regards, Zo Il Min, Representative of the Pyongyang Mission of the AINDF, September 15, Juche 97 (2008), Pyongyang, DPRK.”
On September 15, Juche 97 (2008) John Paul Cupp replied to Pyongyang requesting him to tone down his virulent extremist politics.
“I will most certainly, as always, comply with the dictate given to me, and all these articles will be removed and I will comply with the request by this by Sunday… I do believe in…fulfilling the tasks assigned to me. I never ever even remotely wanted to disparage the DPRK in any way, shape, or form… what brought about this concern? Did someone complain? Am I in trouble? I wish to tell you that I have never stopped in my reverence to the DPRK leadership.”
Cupp concluded “We are the most open and honest about not bowing to the Jews and hating America and supporting all international and national violence or other means to stop them….this is a major security issue attempting to wreck our ties to the DPRK (and the DPRK has known we support Saddam, hollowcause revisionism, reject ‘Israel’ and detest Jews for several years now and sided with us privately on most of that).”
if this is true (the pictures show the visit at least) i just don't understand why the North Korean government would want to promote a group like this. were they not paying enough attention or does the DPRK hold some racist views i'm not aware of?
Petrol posted:has anyone made a Ready Player Un joke yet
on it
