Harry's Place

Van Houtryve arrived in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, during a normal work week in February. He found its main thoroughfare entirely empty. “Nobody’s out. No couples with babies, nobody taking a walk,” van Houtryve says. “You could wait 10 minutes before you ever saw a car.” Only a few old Mercedes—the exclusive privilege of top bureaucrats—cruise Pyongyang’s streets. North Korea has just a few hundred thousand cars for more than 20 million people.

I have seen the ecofuture, and it sucks.

Thanks for the link?, this is useful stuff for proving once and for all that North korea has nothing to do with socialism at all:

Improving commodity supply is an intrinsic requirement of social?ist trade. As the great leader has taught, socialisttrade is supply work for the people. In other words, socialist trade is the job of supplying consumer goods in order to meet the demands of the people. Socialist trade is fundamentally different from capitalist trade. Trade in a capi?talist society pursues the aim of exploiting the working people and making money. However, in a socialist society trade serves to pro?mote the well-being of the people and provide them with comfort in their everyday lives. If socialist trade is to fulfil its function properly as trade for the people, as supply work for the people, commodity supply should be continually improved to keep abreast of changing circumstances.

As any Marxist kno, commodities are the form that wealth takes in capitalism, you cannot trade what you already own. If there is commodity production and circulation in North Korea, then it is a capitalist society, albeit of a visciously totalitarian variety of state capitalism.

Cheers.

I see. If it sucks, it musy be “capitalism.”

Thanks, Comrade Deathy!

Mesquito,

no, if it’s commodity production, it is capitalism. If things are produced for sale with a view to raising a profit (even an administered one) it is capitalism.

When Charlie Marx was asked what his goals were, he replied “The emancipation of labour.” Does North Korea look even remotely like emancipated labour?

North Korea looks like a prison camp, which is what tends to happpen when an ideologically fanatical government finds that it’s crimped definition of The People’s Interest diverges with what actual people see as their interests. Oddly, this is inevitable whenever a government adopts Charlie Marx as its lodestone.

Thanks, but I’d rather persist in being exploited by Walmart and Exxon than to take my chances with someone named “Red Deathy.”

Mesquito,

I agree, that’s exactly what happens, Charlie wasn’t talking to governments, and if they try and impose socialism, ior what they call socialism, that’s the fault from the start. You can’t emancipate people by making them slaves.

p.s. unless you work for Walmart or Exxon, they’re not exploiting you…

“p.s. unless you work for Walmart or Exxon, they’re not exploiting you…”

What a relief!

No, you haven’t got it right, Mesquito. Red Deathy, the new [100,00th] great leader, says that if the symptoms don’t look like the paradise Charlie described, then it must be the dreaded capitalism. I’m so pleased that we have Red Deathy as an expert.

North Korea looks a bit like Croydon. Lots of concrete and cowed looking proles.

It’s as if radical San Fransisco anarchists ran Detroit.

I’ve always thought that whereas we take 1984 as being a warning, North Korea took the book as it’s blueprint!

Proles is a very apt description of most of the North Korean population!

This is the most noteworthy bit of information from the photo essay:

Two women work on an assembly line, packaging shirts by the American brand K-Swiss. “I imagine it’s illegal,” van Houtryve says. In Kaesong, the special economic zone on the southern border, South Korean companies hire North Korean workers at wages of $50 a month. The North Korean government allowed the zone’s creation after its near economic collapse and failure to prevent mass famine in the 1990s.

Perhaps Anna Kournikova doesn’t care about (or even know about) this. But the rest of us can take note and care.

Corporation free since 1952! Cosnumerism free workers paradise!

Does North Korea look even remotely like emancipated labour?

Of course it does, if it isn’t actually the living embodiment thereof. Why, look, there’s no commodity production at all! As good socialists, they’re starving instead.

They may not have full bellies, but they have free health care and education….even re-education and for the whole family.

LOL!

Corporation free since 1952!

Completely ignoring my comment above…

Im sorry Gene, I see that they have now worked out a limited Free Enterprise Zone so that the government can make sure the workers wont be exploited by the Corporations.

Imagine my excitement when I heard the North Korean Tourist Board had a new advert out featuring a *topless* Kate Hudson. And imagine my disappointment when I eventually saw it, and discovered it wasn’t Hollywood actress Kate Hudson but instead that other ghastly old moose.