DPRK General

had*

Apologize.

Looks like the lovechild of Brezhnev and Mao.

Mate, the GDR did fake counting.

Proofs? The only known case of voting irregularities which is known are the communal elections of 1989, which was during a tomoultous time when the GDR was already dissolving. Still, the amount of ballots which were object to fraud was actually less than the fraud that happens in West Germany all the time; at the last two state elections over 2000 ballots have been thrown away by the poll clerks - more than which was discovered during the GDR communal elections of 1989. It's just that the media never reports about this, and when you ask them they say "actually that happens all the time, this is normal". Please inform yourself properly before shitposting…

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Wew lad, it's not like the west boycotts freedom of travel for North Koreans just as well: You're either a defector or you can fuck off. Complaining about restricted freedom of travel during the extraordinary siege situation North Korea finds itself in is absolutely silly.

Remember that the DPRK has no unemployment, universal healthcare, no rents, universal welfare, no taxes, free education, renewable energy and the cleanest streets you can find. If you were to compare that to another Third World country with the same GDP where you'd probably die in a slum, you should realize that these are great achievements for the small nation - remember that they basically live on another planet, with not much fertile soul (traditionally all the agriculture is in the south) with the entire world boycotting them. It's like you send a bunch of people to Mars and check on them ten years later and be like "What? No McDonald's, no iPhones?"

Smoothly going argument moving from there was nuffin ever wrong with the elections to
lad. I like your posts and they make me trust that you really care about the truth of the matter here. Is this also how you approach western elections?

That's not quite what I said. I said that the general elections were rather unimportant within the political process of the GDR - democracy was more (or less) practiced within the mass organizations who nominated candidates for the Volkskammer - make of that what you will (I don't believe it was was perfect btw and the USSR system was more democratic). Usually during a election for the Volkskammer people wouldn't even go into the voting booth, they would just fold the ballot which implies that they vote for the national unity front, and most people did so (of course dissidents claim they'd get in trouble if they didn't, but these claims are often very vague, since the Stasi archives are open we can conclude that people who continued to vote against the national unity front were surveilled, but not bullied).

It's what we have evidence for, and I've put it into perspective with the irregularities which occur within western elections all the time. It's also worth noting that the last Volkskammerwahl, only one year after the communal election in 1989, didn't have any irregularities - and in this election there was no national unity front but a free election where all parties could independently participate. So unless you buy into the muh freedumz meme it can be deducted that it would have been rather unlikely that manipulation of the Volkskammer elections took place before, since you still had the same guys working at the polls and the same pencil pushers counting the votes. Additionally to that, the success of the PDS (the successor party of the SED) in the state elections in unified Germany also implies that it wasn't all fake.

I'm not sure whether that is currently true, at any rate that isn't anything to brag about. Here is how a state can work without taxes: The state issues a currency and has the right to determine the price of stuff in that currency. And not just in the sense of: if you decide to sell, it has to be that price; but also in the sense of: if somebody is willing to buy at that price, you have to sell. Tadaah, no taxes needed!

I'm sure most people would see enacting that policy as a a spooky semantic/symbolic move, and not something that is in the spirit of how almost everybody thinks about the concept of having low taxes, which they believe to be a concept that goes hand in hand with low involvement of government.

The DPRK has no taxes because it's a planned economy. The profits (not the surplus) firms make are reinvested into the economy, there is no need for a tax collector as a middle men. I'm not quite sure what you are trying to say, you are acting as price controls are necessarily a bad thing. This isn't a market economy.
I didn't brag about it, it's more of a convenience since you don't need to have all that bureaucracy. I also don't know why you doubt it, why would they have taxes? Everybody is employed by the state, why the fuck would you issue them a salary only collect taxes back from it? In my country people who are working for the government don't pay taxes as well.

Yes, it's socialism, fellow prole. The DRPK is how a non-capitalist place looks like!

Autistic INTJ spaz wrote:
Keep jerking off to arbitrary distinctions and word games (it's not a tax if it's a fine and so on).

What fucking fines are you talking about, cuckmeister? You pulled some arbitrary concept out of your ass before which I didn't validate as an operating system within the North Korean economy by any means and also you didn't respond to any of my points.

Not having to do a tax return or not having sales tax isn't a fucking word game idiot. The state doesn't take money from you because the people are the state. It's funny how noone responds to my OP but nitpicks about irrelevant bullshit about wether or not this is a semantic difference.

The way you conceive of the effect of a sales tax is that since the issue is handled by the shop, it is not a burden on the consumer?

Not sure why you compare the absence of income taxes for government officials with the handling of sales taxes by the shops, but the matter of fact is it does make a difference because stores the DPRK don't have to issue sales taxes in the first place. I don't even know wtf you are trying to argue - taxes are a mental thing for people, it's because some institution takes part of your hard earned money away, there is a reason why lolbergs and conservatives sperg out about it so much, so I thought it was a point worth mentioning, I know very well that there is no actual change within the individual purchasing power if you have state-issued salaries instead of taxed wages.

Look, a Holla Forumslack advocating open borders.

Do you know what you speak?. Show me a country that doesnt do that. Current EU excluded, because its on purpose.

When right-wingers, liberals, gay Marxist forklift drivers, ANYBODY EXCEPT YOU talks about the burden of taxation, they don't just mean the hassle of paperwork. So if it happens that some country makes all that paperwork automatic or something done by bureaucrats for you, NOBODY from any ideology, from green to pink to whatever EXCEPT YOU would call that abolishing taxes.

This really feels like a "how can you prove you exist if you can only use your senses" type question. Nothing I hear about NK will never ever be objective, as I don't speak Korean and I can't trust any english sources to be accurate. On the other hand I'm doubtful if the entire world, especially random people who go on vacation there and take video with their phones, could continue a hoax about NK being a shithole. It's like, well of course the US government would want to tell everyone we went to the moon, but why would even our worst enemies be complicit in telling their own people if this was a lie? The conspiracy would be way to fucking big to keep a conspiracy for long. Why the fuck would NK purposefully have tourists from all manner of countries recording their hotel room not having any electricity if the country is really so great? It just doesn't make much sense.

Right-wingers don't accept surplus extraction as a real thing, so I fail to see how they'd see a state firm making profit as the equivalent to taxes. Because that's essentially what you argue, right? That whenever the state spends its profits on something it's a tax? Kind of a ridiculous concept, seriously and unironically read Marx' Critique of the Gotha Program.

In my OP, which still remains unaddressed, I never argued wether of not the DPRK is great or not, but if it can be considered socialist. Socialism is not a magic spell that is only done right when everything flourishes, you have to take conditions into account, and they are hazardous for North Korea considering their situation. I'd never argue that quality of life in North Korea isn't objectively better than in Switzerland, for example, but then again, why is that so? What I was trying to argue though is that the quality of life in the DPRK is objectively a hundred times better than in capitalist Third World country with the same GDP, suffering from the same sanctions. Also I'm interested as to what foreigners you are referring to, most travel reports, even the overly critical one say it was way better than they expected, and then they say it was probably just all staged. Sometimes the west has the impression that the DPRK is a country full of actors and Potemkin villages, which is a little concerning - these are real people, with real issues.

I read that text in the original German (native German speaker) and I am the number one person who has been shilling that text on Holla Forums since its inception. It is not relevant to the point I made.

I told you that the way you talk about taxes is not like how anybody else conceives that topic. So that when you tell others NK doesn't have taxation, you won't get an enthusiastic response. If you don't believe that, go try how well your argument works on a forum for conservatives. And if you think they will reject it because they reject anything positive about NK, make the case abstractly. "I have found a way how to abolish all taxes…"

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax

Not having to pay taxes is usually how people define the absence of taxes, faggot. You aren't giving me your magical universally agreed on definition of taxes even though I have built you a golden bridge to do so by formulating what I think you think is taxation. I was referring to Critique of the Gotha Program in that sense that Marx explains very well how someone receives a compensation for his labor during the lower form of communism after the necessary deductions have been made: I guess the right-wing meme is true then that Marxism = heavy taxation lmao

Und jetzt hör auf meinen Thread zu entgleisen du Kasper.

bump

Mate, are you having a giggle or do you have no reading comprehension? The point is not that deductions have to be made for growing production and the disabled and so on; the point is that if you go around telling people North Korea has no taxes, people will think you are playing word games.

Case in point: The way you argue about who has to pay a tax in the way a slimy advertiser would, taking the most superficial position that it means who has to do the paperwork, whereas everybody else cares mostly about tax incidence. If you actually believe what you have been saying here, it is you who needs to read Wikipedia on taxes.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indirect_tax
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence

That's what I thought about you.

I don't see why that's why I was genuinely asking what your definition of taxes is. All three definitions you posted now are useless concerning the topic unless you an actually pinpoint an incident as to where in a state owned planned economy a net extraction from firm A to state entity B occurs - I wasn't claiming that corporate taxes and sales taxes aren't tax incidences, but there is no wealth transfer in a state owned business to the state, because the business is already state owned. Jesus Christ mate, you can't tax yourself. Stop trying to weasel yourself out of this and show me where the net extraction happens, guess what, you can't, unless you broaden the definition so much that everything is a tax, even FALC would have taxes then. Throughout your posts you haven't actually made an argument since the beginning in regards to the topic, or given me an example, and no, "doing paperwork" doesn't mean that there are taxes.

If you knew what tax incidence means, you would not have written that nonsensical sentence.

Yeah dude whatever, you haven't actually been able to verify your position as to where a state-owned planned economy supposedly has taxes, so you made a vague snarky comment. Way to go, now please let's not derail this thread any further

From the Constitution of the DPRK:
Article 74
OP will defend this.
Article 75
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Article 78
Is that the Marxist position?
Article 85
Looks like somebody had to meet some quota of articles.

The reason this exists is because China has been complaining about DPRK re-labeling Chinese products. Chinks even built an entire shopping center and Norks replaced the illuminated advertising. Think about it for a second, what practical implications does this actually have? Private businesses do not exist in the DPRK, so how are you supposed to make a profit off a copyright? It's more of a symbolic thing really.

>>>Holla Forums

Housewives are doing a massive amount of unpaid labor in society, recompensating this is part of the liberation of women from the patriarchy. Women are more liberated and emancipated in he DPRK than in most capitalist states and are not sexualized at all.

Pic related is my dog btw.

That would be a trademark issue. You don't know the distinction between trademarks, patents, copyright.

Read The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State by Friedrich Engels.

Questions for OP: Do you speak Korean? Have you ever been to North Korea? Why aren't you familiar with econ lingo and what will you rectify that? Do you not understand that you are making a bad impression?

You're right, but I would still assume that the Chinese investments are the main reason for this article (security of investment is mentioned in the same article, which I would assume includes the protection of trademarks).

I have, Engels literally argues that because of the problem of unpaid housework, a private task allocated to women in the sexual division of labor of capitalism, full women’s liberation can only be achieved with the development of socialism. Compensating housewives for their work, which is what Engels argues is the socialization of housework by the state is mandatory in a socialist society.

I'm still waiting for someone to address my OP, faggot.

Products advertised by the DPRK trade magazine
soviet-empire.com/ussr/viewtopic.php?f=131&t=50718

The party in power never alternates, even at the low/mid level.
The means of production are not owned by the workers.
All transfers of power so far have been hereditary, all members of the same family. By definition, it can't be a republic.
They only control a piece of it.

The DPRK is a meme tier country, a monarchy with fascistic personality cults/military worship that has almost completely discarded even paying lip service to Marxism.

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ultras everyone

Plebbit tier

In my OP I've made a case that both direct and indirect worker ownership of the means of production exist in the DPRK, also owning the means of production in the marxist sense are not bourgeois propertiery rights but rates ones relation to the production as a whole (collective ownership!). Otherwise you'd adhere to the fallacy coops = socialism

I've argued that their leader worship is the specific expression of self-determination of the Korean proletariat which is shaped by the conditions forced upon them. Extreme conditions breed extreme responses.

Daily reminder that we should also support ISIS against burger imperialism

Let's establish a communist world were one half is the caliphate and the other half is NK BK

Does the following not ring a bell?
From an obscure thing called Communist Manifesto
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm

Liar.

(…)
>Among the higher animals the herd and the family are not complementary to one another, but antagonistic.
(…)
Origins of the Family
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch02.htm

Stop bullying OP. Just because he neither knows Marx & Engels nor Korean history, the language, economics, and a couple other things, does that mean that he can't make an excellent case for the DPRK from a Marxist perspective?

Oh, it does mean that? Carry on then.

Fuck off retard. The US supports ISIS.

Stop saying they have no taxes, for fucks sake.

OP, the point that you fail to get, as it is spelled out to you again and again, is that "not having" taxes is not actually a selling point, it is a word game (does corvée labor count as a tax or not and sho on). Or rather, it used to be a word game, as your information which you fail to reason with logically is also out of date. They have taxes now, even if you use a narrow definition.

Currently, NK does tax you for opening a market stand (for operating a stand and differentiated based on what you sell) and of course in the special economic zones they do have taxes for foreign investors. If they did not have taxes on these activities, do you think it would be a plus? You don't know what you are talking about and you frankly sound like somebody on the autistic spectrum in that you completely fail to get what position other people that try to discuss things like adults are coming from.

Nobody needs a Marxist Korea "expert" who neither speaks Korean nor knows the contents of the works of Marx and Engels. Go hang yourself unironically.

stop samefagging you arrogant pick, what's your beef exactly?
source? reading through this thread, so far the only one who has provided information was OP and a guy quoting the 2014 constitution