North Korea’s one-percenters savor life in ‘Pyonghattan’

Depends on the area you live, more elite== less power cuts. Some 'priority' areas like the area around juche tower and Joong-gu district get no power cuts, some have private inverters.

Is the US claiming vast swaths of other country's territorial waters and building military bases on artificial islands? No, that's China. The US defends the countries that China is trying to bully that way.

South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, America. Seems like a righteous alliance of free people defending themselves against evil from China and North Korea. The evil of a boot stomping on a human face for eternity.

Edit: Any arguments from the downvoters?

Capitalism is a system of voluntary trade that functions best when force is banished from trade, and is fully compatible with all sorts of variations of representative government (which is why all the most prosperous representative government nations utilize the free market).

Communism is the exact opposite, it can only continue to exist via extreme violence, and relies on that violence to restrict as much as possible all free action and thought by people (which inevitably includes eliminating all rights, including property rights, freedom of speech, and freedom of press; it's also why every attempt at Socialism and Communism has required a military enforced dictatorship).

Capitalist oriented economies have produced standards of living for the poor and median that tend to be a magnitude beyond what the absolute best Socialist example has ever accomplished. There has yet to be a single Socialist nation that has produced a high standard of living at the median in hundreds of years of experimenting; there are dozens of wildly prosperous Capitalistic nations that heavily utilize the free market.

Capitalistic nations: Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, US, England, Ireland, Singapore, Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway. They all utilize the free market mixed with welfare state policies, and not one of them is even remotely close to being Socialistic.

Socialist examples: Cambodia, Vietnam, Mao's China, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Soviet Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, the Eastern Bloc states, Fascist Spain, North Korea

Nothing else could ever need to be said. The closer you get to implementing actual Socialism, the greater the destruction.

First off, I'm not sure you can classify Marx's communism as a "social order"; Marx is envisioning a systematic failure of capitalism as a cohesive institution and pontificating about what might come in its wake. Because Marx doesn't believe that change happens "naturally" but only in violent upheavals, he thought "now is the time for a new social order!" in his own context, sure, and supported a Communist Party, but his analysis in Das Kapital is much more about the failure of capitalism with the increasing mechanization of the means of production.

The point is basically that Marx wants to start every social analysis by asking, "OK, in this society, who is the slave class? And who are the people who own them?" Marx saw that industrialization was increasingly multiplying the capabilities of this slave class, and indeed supplanting them. Marx envisioned that eventually, the slave class would entirely consist of robots of one form or another, with the only humans entering being the ones who voluntarily wanted to do that sort of work -- sort of the model of the CEO who leaves his cushy job because he wants to be a farmer at heart.

It's a very techno-utopian vision of the world, and it's hard to see what the social order that lives atop this is going to be. Marx famously extrapolated that the control of the 1% over the 99% was going to persist into this technological switchover, and that the 99% was going to realize it and lead a revolution-to-end-all-revolutions, because afterwards there would be born a society where every human was guaranteed the basics of everything they need (by the robot slaves and the volunteer slaves) and could pursue whatever artistic calling suited them.

But that remarkably underspecifies the nature of the underlying state, of course. The "nation with no state or laws" is one possibility, an anarcho-communist vision, but there could also be a normal modern constitutional republic, where there would be the normal boundaries in place preventing people from gathering the resources to take over the nation. It's rather hard to say.

If you eliminate capitalism, you just force that inequality to be expressed in non-market mechanisms (ie. politics) which are altogether more corrupt, brutal, and inefficient.

Marx was never very specific about what communism should be. Ironically his writings are 99% a critique of capitalism and 1% a vague proclamation that there ought to be something better to move towards.

For all of the faults of communisms' implementation across the world, there have been a number of clear successes (fastest industrialization, first spacefaring society, defeating the nazis+++, pioneer of guaranteed healthcare, housing and jobs).

These weren't individual successes either - they were successes that the western elites felt compelled to imitate.

>The problem is that it is an idealistic social order that assumes one person won't come along and manipulate the masses into transforming the whole thing into a totalitarian dictatorship

Likewise "pure" capitalist societies without corruption and with much vaunted "free markets" are an idealistic fairy tale.

There are no social orders that are immune from the overbearing threat of dictatorship or that turn off the apparent innate desire for absolute power.

+++ https://qph.is.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-d5f0af668b46f568255090...

Whoa whoa whoa. What's "heavily connected"? Government employees? Welfare recipients? Taxpayers?