What's it like to be a worker in a communist country?

well, i wasn't going that far. I suppose the possibility exists that it could make a comeback. Unless you're saying that captalism did such a good job that communism will never rear its ugly head again. Or are you saying that communism is so good that we night yet be saved?

 

lol no, communism wont save us. what do you think could still save humanity for the next generations? people doing permaculture is the only thing I can imagine could save us.

 

IMO permaculture doesn't work in a system that experiences geometric or exponential population growth.

But I am interested to hear what a proponent of permaculture has to say about how such a system handles population growth.

 

Permaculture can produce a lot more food than chemical/machines agriculture but you need more people working in permaculture. In long terms its the only possibility how a soil can rest productive for an unlimited time. Agriculture with chemicals, machines can only work for a limited time. Huge areas of exposed soil get lost and polluted every year because of industrial agriculture.
But there is a limit as well, to solve the problem of exponential groth you need other measures in addition to permaculture.

 

From what I understand permaculture isn't only about food production.
What are those additional measures you mention above?

b/c IMO, exponential pop growth is the #1 reason why our current economic, production, etc... systems are set up the way they are, to keep up w/ this growth.

If this population growth did not exist we would not need an agriculture system that had the means to continually, day in day out year after year create more than the previous unit of measure.

 

I am glad its not me who has to decide on that topic, only thing I contribute is to not reproduce myself
For the agriculture it would help a lot if people eat less meat since much of the surfaces are wasted on inefficient meat production.

 

Again, permaculture can not work in a system that includes population growth, so I'm seeing a disconnect between your statement that permaculture is the only thing that can save us
and that you have no solution in mind to handle population growth.

While the idea of permaculture and sustainability sounds well, sooo perfect, I have yet to speak w/ a proponent of either system that has anything concise to say about population growth.

And I think we know the reason for that.
The reality is that neither of systems will work unless we strip the human right to procreate as we see fit. You simply can not be a proponant of something so ideal as self sustainability and something as controlling as limits on procreation. The 2 concepts are at odds to each other.

I'm sorry but, in other words, on a large scale permaculture and sustainability simply can not work. Sustainability may have a chance, but permaculture?

 

if its not us doing this, then mother nature will take care of the problem if humanity is not fast enough in eliminating itself.

 

humanity and mother nature are both extremely adaptable.
The possibility exists that neither will eliminate the other but simply adapt to a changing environment.

However, I will admit that in the end mother mature is much more adaptable than human nature.
I still stand by my previous comment.
Basically, sustainability w/ no control for population simply does not work.
Whether you are willing to make that desicion or not.

 

Which work, of course?

Soviet system was very comfortable for people of the party. For example, my father, as important military role. For my mother, no. She did work in Komi Republic for 7 years time. Rifle assembly, long hours, poor work and living conditions.

 

Yeah, but if you leave you don't have to jump any fence, and they won't shoot you for it, if you do.

 

...fucking shitty. You actually have less rights as a worker in a country like Cuba than in an capitalist nation with a strong union presence. You can actually be thrown in prison for missing too much work. In East Germany, they built a giant wall specifically to keep the workforce from escaping to West Germany.

If you got on some shit list, the government could make it to where you couldn't get work anywhere else other than some coal mine in Siberia. Black listing was a practice of corporations in the early 20th century in the US that made it hard for union organizers to get work. Really Communist governments are a lot like corporations, only they have a complete monopoly on everything. They really didn't uphold the rights of workers like they said they did. That was just some bullshit they used to consolidate power over everyone else. A lot of the Communist rhetoric was just convoluted clap-trap like the divine right of kings to give the masses an explanation of why a few people had the right to rule over everyone else.

 

In communist countries the state owns you!

China Loved Steve Jobs and He Loved China

Is overtime optional in China?

And whats up with the company dorms? Do they have to sell their souls to the company store too?

 

I knew someone from Belarus; he said that prevailing views in the US are frighteningly similar to those in the Soviet Union before their collapse.

 

Link

BEIJING (AP) — The company that makes Apple's iPhones suspended production at a factory in China on Monday after a brawl by as many as 2,000 employees at a dormitory injured 40 people.

The fight, the cause of which was under investigation, erupted Sunday night at a privately managed dormitory near a Foxconn Technology Group factory in the northern city of Taiyuan, the company and Chinese police said. A police statement reported by the official Xinhua News Agency said 5,000 officers were dispatched to the scene.

The Taiwanese-owned company declined to say whether the factory was involved in iPhone production. It said the facility, which employs 79,000 people, would suspend work Monday and reopen Tuesday.

Foxconn makes iPhones and iPads for Apple Inc. and also assembles products for Microsoft Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. It is one of China's biggest employers, with some 1.2 million workers in factories in Taiyuan, the southern city of Shenzhen, in Chengdu in the west and in Zhengzhou in central China.

The fight in Taiyuan started at 11 p.m. on Sunday, "drawing a large crowd of spectators and triggering chaos," a police spokesman was quoted by Xinhua as saying.

Order was restored after about four hours and several people were arrested, said the company, a unit of Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. It said 40 people were taken to hospitals for treatment.

The violence did not appear to be work-related, the company and police said. Comments posted on Chinese Internet bulletin boards said it might have erupted after a security guard hit an employee.

Photos posted on microblog service Sina Weibo showed broken windows, a burned vehicle and police with riot helmets, shields and clubs.

Phone calls to police headquarters and the Taiyuan city hall were not answered. People reached by phone at restaurants and other businesses in the area said they had no details about the clash.

The company has faced scrutiny over complaints in the past about wages and working hours. It raised minimum pay and promised in March to limit hours after an auditor hired by Apple found Foxconn employees regularly were required to work more than 60 hours a week.

China seems to be losing it's grip.

 

The attached shows city people out harvesting sugar cane in Cuba in the early 60's

Harvest time was a great time to get all of those rich spoiled city profesionals out to the country to wield the machete.

 

I'm pretty sure both sides tore it down with their bare hands.

You go tell people so pissed off they're tearing down a concrete wall with their bare hands that they don't need the stuff on the other side:2thumbsup:

 

The problem that Marx made is that when he correctly identified that Capitalism commodifies everything it touches, creating an inversion where exchange value is greater than use value, he made the mistake of assuming that the market that creates this commodification is a product of capitalism. The truth is that the market is a product of the industrial age. It doesn't matter if you live in a capitalist nation or a socialist nation. In both cases you are dehumanized, divorced from your production, and your value has nothing to do with what you produce or what use you are, but rather an exchange value based on a fluctuating cost vs profitability (though in a Socialist country it is harder to fire you when your value drops). What you really produce is an abstraction--a paycheck. All life then becomes an abstraction, and everything about it has been redesigned on the model of a machine---the factory (though this tends to be more blatant in the drab colors of many socialist countries). The dynamic of the market--what drives it--is to produce profit and excess. But to do this, mankind needs to move at the pace and rythm of the machine.

The difference is that under Socialism, the State replaced the Owners of Capital. The workers are exploited under both systems. This is because the market also divides the individual into two dialectic opposites: Producer and Consumer. As producer we are programmed to work hard, save, and defer gratification into the future. As a consumer we are programmed to spend now, have fun, and seek instant gratification. This creates an ongoing struggle between workers seeking higher wages, management seeking greater efficiencies and lower costs, and consumers (who are all the same individuals as the producers) seeking lower prices. Socialist economies were stagnant to the extent that they did not develop the consumer side of the equation.

A very good book to read on this subject is Alvin Toffler's book, The Third Wave.

But you can see that both sides were subject to the same exploitation, and the same producer vs consumer dilemna. Both Capitalism and Marxism are products of the Enlightenment, and the Modern Age. Marxism did not survive the Modern Age as well as Capitalism, but Capitalism is not the answer either. It is time to come up with a new Post-Modern philosophy. We can benefit from what works with Capitalism, but we need something new. Something that limits exploitation, and brings intrinsic value back to human life and production. It needs to revalue life on something more than profit and excess---if that is ever possible.

By the way permaculture does produce higher yields than traditional or modern agriculture. And it is more sustainable. The problem with modern agriculture is that it pushes the yield limits of the soil---which is dependent on Nitrogen content. This is why the global population growth has a one-to-one correlation with fertilizer production and use. With modern agriculture the only way to replenish and increase nitrogen content is with fertilizer. But fertilizer production is dependent on the diminishing resources of coal and oil. Permaculture does not use chemical fertilizers and we have a hard time seeing it as productive as modern agriculture, because it is not done on such a large scale. I am not an expert on permaculture so I cannot relate too much more than that. But I did not believe that permaculture was all that either, until I sat down with some experts who showed me why it is so important.

If we continue with modern agricultural techniques and run out of the resources to make fertilizer------then yes, nature----Mother Earth----will solve the problem of over-population growth for us...

 

All around brilliant post, but this is my favorite part. I agree totally.

There are a lot of good things about capitalism. It generates a ton of wealth and sparks innovation. We shouldn't, however, fall into a trap where we say, "Oh this system works okay, let's just settle on it and overlook the flaws."

I think we can continue to improve our system by mixing it with more social democracy, but honestly I don't think the bullshit in America has as much to do with capitalism as it does a shitty attitude among its citizens. We're a greedy, entitled, aloof bunch.

So yeah, we can do better than just settling with our current system. But a different set of values would go a long way.

 

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they do... but I think minimum room and board is paid.

Honestly I could enjoy a job where I lived on-site, but for a job like that I'd expect damn good pay.

You can take pride in doing the hard jobs and working at midnight, but you can't do it without fair compensation and the ability to do your own shit, too.

As far as communism, you can't effect real change in leninist type communism because of the party model, you need a party where EVERYONE is a member and you can't just kill people you don't like. That's the problem. Socialism is just fine, but soviet-style communism throws people under the bus for the state, and what the fuck is that? Why have a communist state if you're not more worried about the workers in the first place? How can you kill all the workers to make the lives of workers better?

Yes, it's doable... it's what europe does. You look out for everyone, you have real elected officials, you don't let people go hungry or work for shit wages, you give people time off.... you look out for your workers. It's just not what "communism" as we've seen it does, at all. Being a worker in a leninist or maoist country sucks dick, being a worker in a benign socialist "welfare state" is great, because the state spreads what's needed to account for the welfare of all, without purging your ass or sending you to the gulag if they get tired of you.