You dummy, the reason people don’t commit suicide in aUThOriTAiaN StAtEs because the government would murder them for it.
When you commit suicide there they just call in juche necromancer, resurrect you, give you a poetry book and armed guard yell at you “START WRITING” all the time.
Reminds me of Death & Taxes (I don’t know the game aside from this song)
China is just bribing people to continue living by providing material improvements to their quality of life. That’s cheating 😤
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I’m afraid my brain is just too wrinkly to allow facts and evidence to just slide off it and just imagine that reality is whatever I feel like based on absolutely nothing, like you can.
One of those posts where people who know nothing but have opinions they must speak come together to enlighten the poor tankies. Can we at least drop the white saviour mentality this time guys?
Impossible.
Inb4 “no but they’re commies so they must be lying”
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Neither China nor the DPRK are fascist, are you saying fascists lie about China and the DPRK? I agree, that definitely happens.
TIL China has lower suicide rates than nearly all other developed countries. Honestly thought they’d be higher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
That is a damn awesome result in just 30 years.
In the 90s it was 3 times as much, so the change is incredible.
It is also understandable how they succeeded in that - majority of suicides were young women in rural hukou. With urbanization progress, improvements to standard of living, with having options, just young women suicides dropped 90% (source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6775931/).
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Reminds me of when there were no homosexuals in Iran 😆
It would be great to have the complete unit of measure displayed here. It’s suicides per 100k capita. Does not change the relative proportions, but is needed for the full picture.
If you trust these numbers, you’re a fool.
It’s true, they’re likely far higher in occupied province of Taiwan and occupied Korea.
Oh look it’s you. I should have known, China’s #1 Lemmy propagandist.
mald harder lib
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Why? They are from both WHO and CDC. Instead of spewing shit, you really should check the sources first lol.
Imagine being so naive that you believe the propaganda coming out of countries known for their well-documented disinformation policies.
Edit: Imagine being so naive to think that a statement about one thing is somehow also a statement about other things not specifically mentioned. Y’all must clearly also have trouble with statements like “Black Lives Matter” don’t you?
Yea, imagine believing western countries, amirite?
You must be confused. I don’t trust western propaganda one bit.
I think that’s kind of the problem in general, the real issue is, the firewalls and controls. It’s not about believing the western propoganda, but simply the lack of non-propoganda sources. IE how can you find out if finland’s policies are better than america’s.
Hop into a public chat room, chat with someone from finland, or book a vacation to Finland or maybe find someone from Finland who’s visiting or moved to the united states.
Not something you can really do with North Korea.
You can still talk to exchange students who attend Kim Il Sung university and other visitors to the DPRK. There are also those from the DPRK who work abroad, such as those in China, as well as those who live in New York for UN purposes.
Yes, it‘s truly insane that people trust the West so blindly, even though it’s well documented how the CIA and the West in general used misinformation and propaganda to destabilize communities and whole countries. Why should anyone think they ever stopped doing that? And what is it with their billionaires owned “free press”? Who would trust that?
That’s exactly why I don’t put stock in the insane mythologies put forward by capitalist oligarchies about their enemies.
Well-documented
Can I see some of this documentation?
Can I see some of this documentation?
Sure. Go look it up for yourself. It isn’t hard to find. You don’t need my consent or permission to do your own homework. Nobody’s going to do it for you.
This is just the antivax “do your own research” but for defending the worldview given to you by Epsteinland🇺🇲🇮🇱 before you were old enough to ask questions, which is very on-brand for them.
You made a claim, you back it up. Show me something.
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Go back to reddit you fucking dork
New tagline material tbh
You started with “I don’t owe you my time” and then wrote a paragraph-long crashout when posting evidence of your claims would have taken you five seconds.
Go back to reddit
Definitely, people in western countries rarely leave their bubble of the 5 or so anti-communist media companies that control everything they see.
The irony is palpable.
Like America?
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Who told you that NK “sucks”, and why do you trust them?
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100% of the time this is code for “you’re not going to be satisfied with my answer.”
Then why say anything at all?
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Oh god even the mods, oh fuck they’re gaining power we need to call the nazis in to kill them in the name of democracy
To be fair, that’s something a person who realizes that the western system is a failure, but still uncritically guzzles propaganda about western adversaries would believe.
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Ok there genius, explain to me what a just leader who isn’t corrupt would be doing differently? https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/north-korea-economy-success-e80f7062
What specific actions by Kim Jong Un equate him to Trump? The reason I ask is because, through cultural hegemony, we are trained in an almost Pavlovian way to immediately associate anything related to the DPRK as bad. We are not “free thinkers,” the way we think is shaped by the ruling class in society. We have to be cognizant of this and constantly question whether we believe what we do based on facts, or “common sense,” which is in reality ruling class ideology.
Being able to name specific, concrete policies by Kim Jong Un you believe to be bad would help make this a more objective judgement. For example, how do you feel about the 20x10 policy? Is it harmful, beneficial, too ambitious, not ambitious enough? For Trump, it’s very easy to point to the war on Iran, embargo on Cuba, expansion of ICE, etc. as actual problems, but when we think of Kim Jong Un, what policies actually come to mind as negative?
It doesn’t matter which country I live in, I will still want to not exist on earth.
the moon?
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Source?
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Neither source seems to point towards fudged numbers, more towards an increase in suicides as a societal issue to be tackled. Nobody said there’s no suicide in China.
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I’d need to see evidence of this, all you’ve done is list suspicions.
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All countries have a political interest in showing themselves as better, though. I’m aware enough of China’s history to know that your allegations are just that, allegations.
Is this the data you’re looking for? I don’t have a voice in this argument, I just thought the idea that you can’t look this stuff up is interesting, so I did a single Google search. Sorry if this isn’t helpful.
https://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/doi/10.46234/ccdcw2023.109
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when google is blocked at the troll farm
Genuine question, is North Korea considered a monarchy (or monarcho-socialist), considering the Kim family has ruled it uncontested for generations? I know that a lot of stuff you read about North Korea in mainstream news is misinformation/propaganda so I’m curious
No, every political position held by members of the Kim family is open to anyone else. They don’t have a competition based electoral system, and instead do consensus building before approval voting.
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No?
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complete with castes and borderline feudalism
Just making shit up whole cloth
source: cryptic symbolism in my dreams
but seriously: are the bougies paying you a commission to go around spewing bullshit, or you just enjoy running your mouth about places you know less than nothing about?
No I’ve read extensively about how the DPRK works. I stand by what I said before I had the KGB man coming around to bash it with a heavy object.
And before you all start screeching lib I actually think China is leading the world currently and while a bit on the authoritarian side for my taste is clearly pioneering a superior system to the west in general.
sure thing bud
☝️🤓
Whenever I see one of these threads, I go inside. “Removed by Mod”. 90% of the time, based on the replies and comments around it, it looks like the removed comment just said some dumb shit or was heavily disagreed with.
Why are we removing people we disagree with from the discussion? There are like eight people were had all their comments stripped from this thread. WTF is going on?
Removing racism and chauvinistic shit is a good thing. This isn’t a debate class.
After a while you get tired of reading “Chinese bot, Russian orc, wumao CCP shill, everyone is North Korea is dead, communists killed everyone on earth, Hamas is terrorists, Iran killed eighty trillion people in 3 days, you are a communist because you are mentally defective, vote blue no matter who.”
@RiverRock @Omnipitaph It’s probably people who don’t even have critical thinking
mostly because these comments are almost always racist and xenophobic
You know what, that’s fair. Its just so often! I sometimes forget that Lemmy is fringe and attracts all kinds of people, and not all of them are polite.
You have been indoctrinated with the attitude that everyone’s opinion is equal and fools must be suffered. This is a community, not a street corner.
Well yes, that is how a democracy works. If someone says something stupid, publicly, they get it kicked right back up their ass. I’d rather participate in kicking the stupid back up a person’s ass than wade through pages of a one-way conversation. Maybe that’s just me.
Does a community get to decide who is a part of it? Who is the ‘demos’ in your democracy?
Who are common people of the memes@lemmy.ml state? Everyone here who is engaging in the community, and that is how public online forums work. “A community” is a broad categorization and does not have a standard structure of organization or common practices. “Public Online Forum” does in fact have a standard set of practices and organization, with precedent set since the 90s. That precedent is that moderators and admins get to choose who gets to participate, thus my original comment.
Any other weirdo accusations or loaded questions you’d like to spitball?
Any other weirdo accusations or loaded questions you’d like to spitball?
I haven’t even read the main paragraph here but I will tell you right off that the derangement on display here is that which you brought yourself.
Go ahead and await my reply for I logged on kinda on a whim and wasn’t expecting an epic showdown of words (it is after work and I do not work tomorrow and I am drunk)
Depends on which instance is doing the removing but around here it’s usually just racism and orientalism getting removed on this kind of post.
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Amazing how .ml deleted you for being honest with reality, that checks.
China is a socialist country. The commanding heights and backbone of the economy are overwhelmingly publicly owned and planned, within a state controlled and dominated by the proletariat. The existence of private capital is in petty bourgeois sole proprietorships and agricultural cooperatives, as well as in medium and highly competitive industries. The purpose of this decision is the Marxist analysis that marketization accelerates the socialization of production and distribution, thereby preparing the material base for widespread collectivization.
As for the DPRK, it certainly isn’t a utopia, but it is an existing socialist state. Like China, public ownership is the principal aspect of the economy, and the working classes control the state. It also has free or low-cost housing, free healthcare and education, low working hours, and the economy is doing better than ever before, with even car ownership rising in major cities like Pyongyang despite intense trade embargo.
Cowbee coming in spitting facts let’s go
🫡
There should be a bot commenting that every time a lib mentions China or the DPRK tbh
There is, the bot is named Cowbee and they are paid in ruble.
*Rubble
is not ruble?
That article is 4 years old FYI…
This means it’s worse than rubble now!
Why not yuan 🫠
Send an e-mail to KGB and make a better deal
Would definitely be useful.
Ya they have an excellent track record of supporting unionization and labor rights.
Literally yes. Housing is a human right in the DPRK
Yep! The ACFTU is the world’s largest federation of trade unions.
Definitely, that’s one of the best things about the PRC.
Workers rights
- The real wage (IE the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. The US real wage by comparison is lower in 2019 than it was in 1973.
- Workplace democracy in action in the CPC.
- US Life expectancy peaked in 2015, is on the decline, and is now lower than in China. 2
- Wages themselves are forced to rise in the private sector by the CPC (+16% every years, +400% since 1980) who force the capitalists to accept the presence of CPC chapters who represent the interest of the workers, increasing workers control even in the capitalist parts of the economy.
- Eliminated Urban Poverty. On track to eliminate all poverty within a decade.
- CGTN documentary - China’s war on poverty
- Trade union laws of the PRC.
- The west views China as one big sweatshop, but the actual working hours aren’t much more than anywhere else. The average for a migrant worker (most vulnerable to exploitation as they are traveling from the countryside) is 8.8 hours, little under an hour more than a typical working day. Labor strikes are rarely suppressed, and usually get the support of the PRC.
- The workplace safety standards of China are better than in the capitalist countries of the West like in Australia who have an higher rate of work related death despite having a GDP per capita 3-5 times higher.
- /u/cheezicle - My experience as a factory worker in a Chinese “sweatshop”
- 70% of Chinese millenials own their own home, and 91% as of 2021 plan to buy their own home within the next 5 years.
- In a typical example of proletarian police accountability, the CPC sentences a police officer to death for killing a pregnant woman in a restaurant in southern China.
- The US is losing to China: “Washington is actually far more corrupt than Beijing. If you want to get something done in Washington, you do what you do in Jakarta: just slip some money to the right people.”
Thanks! Bookmarked all of this! 😭❤️
I was joking lol, sorry.
A centralized union controlled by the government is not what I think most people would consider a “union”
They do not have the legal right to strike. http://www.bhrdw.gov.cn/Content-1771.html
I don’t understand how a union can advocate for its workers without that.
I have not read through your sources yet but thanks for including them, will go through them. Rising wages is more than I can say for the West, but I’d be careful to equate that with labor rights.
Workers in the PRC absolutely have the right to strike, there are hundreds of cases a year.
Wrong. The PRC is a mixed economy, where the socialist, publicly planned sector predominates, and a smaller capitalist
The DPRK is similar but has effectively no capitalist sector.
Is China State Capitalist?
- The backbone of the economy is state ownership and socialist planning. 24 / 25 of the top revenue companies are state-owned and planned. 70% of the top 500 companies are State-owned. 1, 2 The largest bank, construction, electricity, and energy companies in the world, are CPC controlled entities, subject to the 5 year plans laid out by the central committee.
- Workplace democracy in action in the CPC.
- Is modern day china communist? Is it staying true to communist values?
- Didn’t China go Capitalist with Deng Xiaoping? Didn’t it liberalize its economy? Is China’s drastic decrease in poverty a result of the increase in free market capitalist policies?
- Is the CPC committed to communism?
- The Long Game and Its Contradictions. Audiobook
- The myth of Chinese state capitalism. Did Deng really betray Chinese socialism?
- Tsinghua University- Is Socialism with Chinese Characteristics real socialism, or is it state Capitalism?
- Isn’t China revisionist for having a capitalist sector of the economy, and working with capitalists? Why isn’t it fully planned like the USSR was?
- Castro on why both China and Vietnam are socialist countries.
- Roderic Day - China has billionaires.
- What is socialism with Chinese characteristics (SWCC)?
- How is SWCC not revisionist? How is it any different from Gorbachev’s market reforms?, 2
- Domenico Losurdo - is China state capitalist?, 2
- Did Lenin say anything about Market Socialism, or productivism?
- Vijay Prashad - Is China capitalist?
- Why do Chinese billionaires keep ending up in prison? Why are many billionaires and CEOs going missing? China sentences Ex-Chairman of a major bank, guilty of embezzling ~$100M USD, to death in 2019.
I don’t think it makes sense to classify the private sector as the “capitalist” sector, and the public sector as the “socialist” sector. The same would be true in the US Empire, with the military and whatnot as the “socialist” sector of the economy. The actual identity of an overall economy is in the principal aspect, and this is crucial because the rest of the economy, even if it isn’t within said principal aspect, is constantly either reinforcing or working its way towards said principal aspect.
This, I think, is the most useful way to explain to newcomers why China is socialist. It isn’t about ratios of public to private, nor about being mixed, as nearly all economies are de facto mixed, even if de jure they are not. We can instead identify and explain this principal aspect as a use of dialectical and historical materialism.
Awesome sources though!
I agree that the “principle aspect” as you say, or which class is holding power and ultimately controls both the economy and the political system, is most important. I’d argue though that the primary difference in these sectors is who is in control of the surplus, and whose benefit it goes to. In the PRC and even in Cuba, there are still private capitalists who effectively control the surplus generated within those companies, and use it as they see fit. They’re severely limited of course, but they still function differently from the socialist sector whose surplus is worker-controlled via 5 year plans.
The only “socialist industry” I can think of in western countries, outside of tiny examples like coops, are things like state-run natural resource and energy companies. The US military is just the enforcement arm of capital, planned and controlled by capital. Even state-run social services shouldn’t really be thought of as socialist, since they produce no surplus value, and are funded via other ways, and are overall capitalist-planned.
I agree that social surplus is appropriated by capitalists, be they capitalists within capitalism or socialism. Regardless of the overall system, capitalists definitionally appropriate surplus. My bigger point is that in capitalism, both the public and the private sector reinforce and support capitalists, while in socialism both the private and public sector support and reinforce the proletariat. As you said of capitalism, even state-run social services shouldn’t really be thought of as socialist. My point is that the reverse is true of marketization in socialist economies, as they ultimately are under the control and dominance of the proletariat through the socialist state, and are employed for their progressive utility in socializing the productive forces, preparing the base for more developed socialism.
Ultimately, though, this is largely semantics. Capitalists exist in China, and they profit immensely. They differ from their western counterparts, however, in the fact that they have no political power, do not form an organized class, and are constantly working towards their own erosion as a class as they centralize and socialize the productive forces. This is the mirror of how state-services in the US, including the military and welfare state, both ultimately prop up imperialism and protect the rule of capitalism.
Still, I suppose it might be helpful for those entirely unaware of dialectics to simply see them as “socialist” and “capitalist” sectors, but I do think that this deeper nuance is required to establish why reformism and simply expanding the public sector in capitalism is not socialism, and why marketization was not a move towards capitalism but towards higher developed socialism in China.
publicly planned sector predominates, and a smaller capitalist sector.
https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202504/30/content_WS6811c4e7c6d0868f4e8f2372.html
I am not sure China agrees with you. 92% of businesses in China are fully privately owned, and they make up over 60% of GDP, and most people (80%?) do work for fully private businesses.
Unless of course you meant something else by that statement?
You also have major DPRK brainworms. Here’s some resources to learn:
On North Korea / the DPRK
- Is north korea a totalitarian dictatorship? Are they all really required to get the same haircut? A short documentary.
- South Korea boosts reward for defectors to $860k USD.
- Are north korean defectors really paid to lie by the south? A short documentary.
- What is everyday life like? A conversation with a North Korean Citizen.
Is north korea a totalitarian dictatorship? Are they all really required to get the same haircut? A short documentary.
TIL I did a thing is a leftist
I wish I had the confidence of people like you to talk so arrogantly on things you so clearly have no understanding of.
To be fair none of these countries is socialist or even communist. And we hardly have accurate statistics about north Korea. Not that I disagree with the underlying point.
to be fair, you should spend some time actually learning what socialism is before forming opinions
I did but i would be genuinely interested what you mean. Maybe I should have frased it as genuinely socialist or fully socialist I admit that.
Socialism is a transitional state between capitalism and communism, where the working class holds power in society but existing social relations have not been abolished. This is precisely what you have in China and DPRK. Both are genuinely socialist.
I think its not entirely false but more complicated. But this discussion is quite old. As I said i don’t disagree wit the underlying Point of yours.
Both countries are run by ML parties following revolution and would therefore be designated both socialist and communist based on like 100 years of precedent.
The WPK is Kimilsungist-Kimjongilist, technically, though ML is accepted as the basis of Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism, just with the juche idea added on top.
Both China and the DPRK are socialist countries. Public ownership is the principal aspect of their economies, and the working classes control the state.
the working classes control the state
X to doubt.
Doubt all you like, but both the WPK and CPC are overwhelmingly proletarian parties in states where the commanding heights and backbone of the economy are publicly owned at a minimum.
Public ownership + a proletarian ruling party ≠ the working class controls the state.
State ownership is not automatically worker control. Even if a ruling party genuinely represents the working class, that does not by itself establish that ordinary workers possess meaningful power over the state or over the party leadership.
You’re drawing a hard line within a class, which is more of an obfuscation of class analysis than a coherence towards it. Further, yes, both the WPK and CPC do engage with and are representative of the broader working classes.
