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2 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

and how on earth is the lived experience of south koreans, north korea? they've never been there and they live in a state with heavy censorship of information about north korea as well as paid CIA sponsored defectors.  that is not their lived experience.  ask some north koreans about communism and you get a different picture

https://i.imgur.com/xBTWlGF.mp4

https://youtu.be/BkUMZS-ZegM

Hey guess what, I’ve been to North Korea twice. They like to show foreigners the best the state has to offer. The best the state in North Korea has to offer pales in comparison to choice and availability of products and services the average South Korean has, and barely competes with what dirt poor farmers in South Korea have. 
You really can’t understand what South Koreans lived experience with communism might have to offer to the conversation? Communists existed on the Korean Peninsula before the Korean War and in fact there were larger numbers of communists in the southern part of the peninsula before the War, so their lived experience isn’t solely with the atrocity of North Korea. 
 

And no North Korean is going to say anything on video to contradict the Dear Marshall, because of the fear of retribution, not only for themselves, but for their family. 
 

I told you before: look up Alejandro Cao de Benos. He shills for North Korea, but he has more minders when visiting North Korea than any other foreigner I’ve ever known who goes there regularly. 

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18 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

all the supercomputers are being used for fucking facebook ad targeting

Jesus fuck man. What is wrong with you. 
 

 

19 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

democratic control over WHAT is produced and over the workers' process of production, their workplace.   youre massively misrepresenting this topic.  what are your issues with central planning? 

My whole point is that the average worker doesn’t know what to produce when. 
My issues with centra planning are well documented throughout this thread, and the sad case of Myanmar is just another example of central planning gone wrong. 
 

The Asian model of growth is not central planning, and like other Asian nations that grew rapidly in the 70s 80s and 90s, China does NOT use central planning to determine production. To say otherwise is completely false. 

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2 minutes ago, chenGOD said:

Hey guess what, I’ve been to North Korea twice. They like to show foreigners the best the state has to offer. The best the state in North Korea has to offer pales in comparison to choice and availability of products and services the average South Korean has, and barely competes with what dirt poor farmers in South Korea have. 
You really can’t understand what South Koreans lived experience with communism might have to offer to the conversation? Communists existed on the Korean Peninsula before the Korean War and in fact there were larger numbers of communists in the southern part of the peninsula before the War, so their lived experience isn’t solely with the atrocity of North Korea. 
 

And no North Korean is going to say anything on video to contradict the Dear Marshall, because of the fear of retribution, not only for themselves, but for their family. 
 

I told you before: look up Alejandro Cao de Benos. He shills for North Korea, but he has more minders when visiting North Korea than any other foreigner I’ve ever known who goes there regularly. 

i wonder why the material conditions in a place utterly destroyed by US bombs and heavily sanctioned are not great

2 minutes ago, chenGOD said:

Jesus fuck man. What is wrong with you. 
 

 

My whole point is that the average worker doesn’t know what to produce when. 
My issues with centra planning are well documented throughout this thread, and the sad case of Myanmar is just another example of central planning gone wrong. 
 

The Asian model of growth is not central planning, and like other Asian nations that grew rapidly in the 70s 80s and 90s, China does NOT use central planning to determine production. To say otherwise is completely false. 

the average worker doesn't know what to produce when? what is this a response to? what is your last paragraph responding to either?

worker control over the means of production does not mean individual workers deciding what is produced and hoping it ends up being the stuff people want.  it means workers controlling their workplaces, and the workers as a whole determining what all the workplaces in aggregate are used to produce

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5 minutes ago, chenGOD said:

Jesus fuck man. What is wrong with you.

care to respond meaningfully?  how much of the worlds' computing resources are being used against people rather than for them?  too much.

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30 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

this has nothing to do with people voting in how many Size A54 Bolts and how many Version 643 Nuts to produce

You have no idea how production actually works, do you?

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5 minutes ago, chenGOD said:

You have no idea how production actually works, do you?

im well aware of how production works at the level of raw material details.  the democratic control over those aspects is not the core of socialism.  there will not be public debates on what threading of screws to use in the bikes.

what will be controlled is how many bikes to make, how many trains to make, how many highways and hospitals to make, how many cars to make, how many cars to recycle in favor of high speed rail, how much energy to put into entertainment services. 

i am responding to your characterization that workers cant understand supply chains and thus they cant control the means of production.  that is NOT what it means.

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13 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

care to respond meaningfully?  how much of the worlds' computing resources are being used against people rather than for them?  too much.

A simple google will tell you that no supercomputing resources are used for Facebook ads. Most of it goes to energy exploration. Some of it goes to nuclear weapons research which is not great. 

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5 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

im well aware of how production works at the level of raw material details.  the democratic control over those aspects is not the core of socialism.  there will not be public debates on what threading of screws to use in the bikes.

what will be controlled is how many bikes to make, how many trains to make, how many highways and hospitals to make, how many cars to make, how many cars to recycle in favor of high speed rail, how much energy to put into entertainment services. 

i am responding to your characterization that workers cant understand supply chains and thus they cant control the means of production.  that is NOT what it means.

How do you know how many bikes to make if you don’t know the cost of threaded screws, the cost to store them, shipping costs, and how all that will impact production capacity?

Does the average worker think about that, or want to think about that, as they produce a bike?

The means of production is the sum of all its parts, and part of it is supply chains.  You have risk management, supply management, Human Resources, facility management, etc  Most people are not equipped to deal with that, and adding more management adds further inefficiencies to any process, which is inherently implied by expanding control over the means of production.

 

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5 minutes ago, chenGOD said:

A simple google will tell you that no supercomputing resources are used for Facebook ads. Most of it goes to energy exploration. Some of it goes to nuclear weapons research which is not great. 

they have vast arrays of thousands of high-spec servers, many with GPUs and FPGAs on-board, with complex routing of invocations of computations and splitting the data across servers which host the appropriate data.  they're supercomputers in every meaningful sense, especially given that they are the deployment zone of some of the most advanced AI humanity has access to, given that they soak up PhD talent with high pay and then have them work on cutting edge applications of university research.  the same can be said for all of these tech companies, google being much worse than facebook

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26 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

I wonder why the material conditions in a place utterly destroyed by US bombs and heavily sanctioned are not great

In the post-Korean War years, North Koreas economy was actually better than the South’s. I wonder what could have changed that?

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1 minute ago, chenGOD said:

How do you know how many bikes to make if you don’t know the cost of threaded screws, the cost to store them, shipping costs, and how all that will impact production capacity?

Does the average worker think about that, or want to think about that, as they produce a bike?

The means of production is the sum of all its parts, and part of it is supply chains.  You have risk management, supply management, Human Resources, facility management, etc  Most people are not equipped to deal with that, and adding more management adds further inefficiencies to any process, which is inherently implied by expanding control over the means of production.

 

you are not at all reading what I'm saying so I won't reply to any of this.  this is the implementation of the means of production.  you quite obviously still need to produce appropriate numbers of screws, how many times to do I have to clarify this?

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1 hour ago, chenGOD said:

The Marxism is for babies thing yeah was a LOL. 
I’m talking about dismissing lived experiences as a valid form of criticism. You often see “just follow the law and you won’t have any problems”, but that is clearly not the lived experience of POC. 
Similarly, “don’t equate socialism with dictatorship”. But the lived experience of many people under socialism is under a dictatorship. 
 

It’s like how so many older Koreans who emigrated to the US are hardcore conservatives that believe in capitalist democracy, because their lived experience with communism is North Korea. 
 

I don’t understand why using an analogy is such a controversial explanatory tool. 

it’s just not a useful analogy imo. we can all understand how experiences* inform our perceptions but idk, I think in the present case it’s just weird to be like “what about blm.” like yes we honor the things people have been through as valid but we can take that to the end of just saying this entire convo is based on zeff’s “lived experiences” and everything is valid as such. 
 

imo Marxism is useful only if it frees cum from the quotidian pace and converts all surplus cum into hypercum as well as, potentially, cum rapid. 
 

*not sure why it’s de rigueur to say “lived experience” lol. I feel like this is being used now days to lend weight to people just expressing their opinions. not saying you are doing this, just that it’s a thing. 

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4 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

you are not at all reading what I'm saying so I won't reply to any of this.  this is the implementation of the means of production.  you quite obviously still need to produce appropriate numbers of screws, how many times to do I have to clarify this?

You essentially mean you can’t reply to any of it. 
The bicycle factory doesn’t produce the screws themselves. How many times do I have to clarify this. 

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Just now, chenGOD said:

You essentially mean you can’t reply to any of it. 
The bicycle factory doesn’t produce the screws themselves. How many times do I have to clarify this. 

seriously what the hell are you talking about?  if the people want bikes and vote to increase the bike supply to reduce waiting times for bike rations, the process of implementing this in production includes additional resources being put towards producing screws.  this is where either markets or central planning comes into play.  you're arguing against something else entirely which is something I never claimed, some idea that the bike factory produces everything it needs from paint to tires, all on its premises.

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1 minute ago, Alcofribas said:

we honor the things people have been through as valid

Sure didn’t seem as if Braintree was doing that. 

 

2 minutes ago, Alcofribas said:

Marxism is useful only if it frees cum from the quotidian pace and converts all surplus cum into hypercum as well as, potentially, cum rapid. 

It may be useful if it frees me from the lived experience of having gone to see tiesto when the female I was acquainted with expressed her basic human desire to do so. 

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10 minutes ago, chenGOD said:

management, supply management, Human Resources, facility management

 

interesting by the way how you completely left out shareholders, private owners, board of directors from this equation of production.  glad to see you're seeing the truth of production and its necessity to be socialized

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4 minutes ago, Alcofribas said:

it’s just not a useful analogy imo. we can all understand how experiences* inform our perceptions but idk, I think in the present case it’s just weird to be like “what about blm.” like yes we honor the things people have been through as valid but we can take that to the end of just saying this entire convo is based on zeff’s “lived experiences” and everything is valid as such. 
 

imo Marxism is useful only if it frees cum from the quotidian pace and converts all surplus cum into hypercum as well as, potentially, cum rapid. 
 

*not sure why it’s de rigueur to say “lived experience” lol. I feel like this is being used now days to lend weight to people just expressing their opinions. not saying you are doing this, just that it’s a thing. 

I mean, I guess if the post in question was like some dope shit and great critical insights ok great. But just ranting and then being like “lived experience” is kinda meh. 
 

-Alcum

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35 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

interesting by the way how you completely left out shareholders, private owners, board of directors from this equation of production.  glad to see you're seeing the truth of production and its necessity to be socialized

What do you think the etc refers to?

37 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

seriously what the hell are you talking about?  if the people want bikes and vote to increase the bike supply to reduce waiting times for bike rations, the process of implementing this in production includes additional resources being put towards producing screws.  this is where either markets or central planning comes into play.  you're arguing against something else entirely which is something I never claimed, some idea that the bike factory produces everything it needs from paint to tires, all on its premises.

But if screw production is being used elsewhere and some people want bikes, but the state says no dice, those people just go without bikes? 
 

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38 minutes ago, Alcofribas said:

I mean, I guess if the post in question was like some dope shit and great critical insights ok great. But just ranting and then being like “lived experience” is kinda meh. 
 

-Alcum

Sure I guess? Meh

chencun

 

gotta go do bourgeois shit like spend time with fam. 

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15 minutes ago, chenGOD said:

What do you think the etc refers to?

But if screw production is being used elsewhere and some people want bikes, but the state says no dice, those people just go without bikes? 
 

why are you making up fake scenarios where the state overrides the democratic process and tells the people to go without bikes? if this happened, they're suffering some sort of metal crisis if they can't spare screws for making bikes, and presumably they are going somewhere that the people deemed a higher priority, or somewhere that truly is a higher priority like protecting the country from a fascist invasion by building tanks.  socialism does not mean a utopia of having everything immediately.  yes, if there is no metal for screws or no production availability for bikes, people go without bikes.  that's material reality.  socialism is not some utopia

also, in your scenario, how is the state telling people "no bikes sorry" any different from pricing bikes too high for poor people or failing to build robust supply chains to supply bikes? very notably, in the US it has been difficult to buy bikes the entire pandemic.  the richest nation on earth, and capitalist, and it literally cannot produce bikes.  so it's great you brought up this example.

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2 hours ago, chenGOD said:

Yeah freedom and democracy can flourish, not that it’s an essential part. 
 

im reading that first linked article:

A democratic say in how to allocate resources, to which I have to ask, does the average person have an idea of how commodity supply chains work? Take any craft product you enjoy: beer, coffee, bicycles, local publishing, what have you...think about all the components that go into the manufacture and sale of that product. 
Do you understand that complete process and can you conduct cost analysis on all those discrete components? I don’t.


Markets are not anathema to socialist economies, and yet I see very little understanding of how markets work from many people (so called free marketeers and marxists alike). 
One of the arguments I often hear against capitalism is that managers create inefficiencies. This can be true, certainly I’ve worked with bad managers. 
But doesn’t the idea that there should be a democratic decision-making process to resource allocation essentially turn everyone into a manager? After all, a managers job is to manage resources in order to complete a project. Do we really want everyone to be a manager?
 

That article goes on to say:

Which is not an argument against markets, but more of an argument for good regulation of markets with actual enforcement. As we have seen in so called “communist” countries, government actors and state-owned enterprises also have the ability to bend markets, even more than corporations, as it the government who writes regulation and legislation. 
 

At the end of the day, I’m not saying that there doesn’t need to be strong protection for workers, universal healthcare, etc. 
Based on my education, work experience, and general life experience in different countries around the world, I do not think that at a large scale, the type of production the article refers to is the best way to achieve those goals.  

Our discussion is about the definition of socialism. It has a definition. I looked it up and you can, too (*infomercial music*). Whether it's effective or not is not what we're discussing. You guys go real deep in the weeds with your logical fallacies these days.

55 minutes ago, Alcofribas said:

it’s just not a useful analogy imo. we can all understand how experiences* inform our perceptions but idk, I think in the present case it’s just weird to be like “what about blm.” like yes we honor the things people have been through as valid but we can take that to the end of just saying this entire convo is based on zeff’s “lived experiences” and everything is valid as such. 
 

imo Marxism is useful only if it frees cum from the quotidian pace and converts all surplus cum into hypercum as well as, potentially, cum rapid. 
 

*not sure why it’s de rigueur to say “lived experience” lol. I feel like this is being used now days to lend weight to people just expressing their opinions. not saying you are doing this, just that it’s a thing. 

It's comparing apples and doorknobs. This guy doesn't know what socialism is and labels it as authoritarian because the party has the word 'socialist' in it and then surmises that anything with the name 'socialist' must be authoritarian. That is the logical fallacy here.

52 minutes ago, chenGOD said:

Sure didn’t seem as if Braintree was doing that. 

 

It may be useful if it frees me from the lived experience of having gone to see tiesto when the female I was acquainted with expressed her basic human desire to do so. 

His lived experienced wasn't the topic of debate. The definition of socialism is, which will persist with or without his lived experience.

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his lived experience is very relevant as is the lived experience of all the proletariat.  if he would share more information of his life experience it would be a great contribution to the thread.  whether it is evidence of socialism being represented by his country and his country being a refutation of socialism is another matter entirely

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https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/6/rich-countries-drained-152tn-from-the-global-south-since-1960

>Rich countries drained $152tn from the global South since 1960

>We have long known that the industrial rise of rich countries depended on extraction from the global South during the colonial era. Europe’s industrial revolution relied in large part on cotton and sugar, which were grown on land stolen from Indigenous Americans, with forced labour from enslaved Africans. Extraction from Asia and Africa was used to pay for infrastructure, public buildings, and welfare states in Europe – all the markers of modern development. The costs to the South, meanwhile, were catastrophic: genocide, dispossession, famine and mass impoverishment.

>They were right. Recent research demonstrates that rich countries continue to rely on a large net appropriation from the global South, including tens of billions of tonnes of raw materials and hundreds of billions of hours of human labour per year – embodied not only in primary commodities, but also in high-tech industrial goods like smartphones, laptops, computer chips and cars, which over the past few decades have come to be overwhelmingly manufactured in the South.

>This flow of net appropriation occurs because prices are systematically lower in the South than in the North. For instance, wages paid to Southern workers are on average one-fifth the level of Northern wages. This means that for every unit of embodied labour and resources that the South imports from the North, they have to export many more units to pay for it.

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35 minutes ago, Braintree said:

Our discussion is about the definition of socialism

Which, if you read the wiki portal link, is varied. 
the link you provided merely said it CAN flourish, not that it is a necessary condition.  

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