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207 points jimhi | 6 comments | | HN request time: 1.011s | source | bottom
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germandiago ◴[] No.29829418[source]
This is the sad truth of places like Cuba or North Korea. Everything is forbidden to the point that eating is difficult. So people get corrupted and the guards, etc. just want their part.

None of those things should be illegal. It is really annoying to see how a leader class kills people of hunger and make everything illegal so that now everyone is a criminal for trying to survive.

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FredPret ◴[] No.29829520[source]
Communism is taxes and government regulation gone mad
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thechao ◴[] No.29829740[source]
Communism is the ownership of the means of production by the workers. You're talking about about an out-of-control regulatory state; maybe one with an authoritarian bent?
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1. thriftwy ◴[] No.29830263[source]
Then the USA, where the means of production are owned by workers via pension funds, is closer to communism than USSR which basically had everything state owned.
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2. beaconstudios ◴[] No.29831410[source]
I know this was a snarky comment, but I have to point out - you know pensioners don't work, right?
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3. thriftwy ◴[] No.29832456[source]
You know that people invest in their pensions long before they get to stop working, right? At least how it worked in mid-to-late XX century.
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4. beaconstudios ◴[] No.29832740{3}[source]
OK I'll give you that one - my counter-snark was not well thought out. However, I assume you realise that pension funds do not constitute a worker-controlled economy.
5. germandiago ◴[] No.29833245{3}[source]
In my country the pensions are a poncy system. I will not participate of that as much as possible. I will not even ask for it. I am saving myself.
6. int_19h ◴[] No.29834856[source]
You're joking, but it's actually correct. Insofar as USA is far more democratic and has legal trade unions, the ability of the workers to control the means of production is greater than in the USSR.

When Marx came up with his "modes of production", one of those was what he called the "Asiatic mode of production" (because it was ostensibly widespread in Asia). The idea is that it's basically a society where all property is collectively owned by the ruling class, which uses violence or threat thereof to directly extract surplus from the rest of the population. Whether this accurately describes any historical society in Asia or elsewhere is debatable, but it does seem to very accurately describe the USSR. Which is probably why Stalin personally cracked down on that definition, and had it purged from the Soviet interpretation of Marxism.