Hacker News Reader

Comment by AzzieElbab | Hacker News Reader

As a former citizen of the USSR, I have to object to linking environmental issues to private property. The Soviets did all kinds of tremendously bad things ranking, from geo-transformation to placing the heavy industry in the middle of cities. From what I read about North Korea, the entire country is ruined by various extraction and industrial projects.

View on HN

Not saying you're wrong, but I'd like to share my own take, which is that one of the clearest, bluest skies I've ever seen was over North Korea. Because they sucked at doing "industry" compared to the South Koreans. In the 90s in South Korea, the rivers ran black and every corner you turned had its own putrid chemical smell from whatever fly-by-night entrepraneur had found a way to make a buck there. But that's an anecdote and I haven't been back to see what it's like now.

Right, but in NK you starved to death at the governments whim as they had little to no ability to feed themselves.

These conversations are barely worth having unless you're willing to go into long chains of explaining the complexity behind the situations.

Sure, but if you stay on topic I'm just saying there isn't a clean 1:1 correlation between political ideology and environmental harm.

Yeah, but ain't it worth it that the last thing you see before dying of hunger is the clear blue sky?

Do blue skies matter when you are blind from malnutrition?

Yes. For many folks there is an intrinsic value to protecting the environment.

I find more and more that even within the NGO and environmentalist community people only care about how natural resources impact people in a utilitarian sense. I can respect that philosophical position, but it makes me equal parts angry and sad that it's taken as a given. I don't believe life on earth exists just to serve human needs.

I think there are two kinds of environmentalist - the purist kind you prefer and the practical kind. The practical kind has the arguments that appeal to most people with things like "let's not run out of oil because it's useful" and "lets not cause climate change because it'll lead to problems for people". But the purist kind is really more of a religious belief that you can't persuade people of in practical terms. That doesn't mean it's wrong - it's just that even adherents don't know why it's right, if it is. Just like religion. You see the purist kind extending to things like "lets not colonize the moon or Mars because we'll damage their natural state." Maybe in a million years, they'll turn out to have been right, but nobody knows that today.

When pointing to another country in a discussion about policies, the point is never "we should be absolutely 100% like them in every single ways". There will never be a path for a country A to absolutely follow country B's path anyway.

In that respect, unless you believe over polluting the environment is an absolute necessity to avoid malnutrition, pointing at NK's economic policy issues in this discussion doesn't help us much.

Out of curiosity, are you from NK? I am fascinated with that country. Wrt South Korea, Koreans I spoke to only complain about the environment when winds blow from China.

The important part is the "complete ownership of those rights". In the Soviet Union, a community had no rights and little power by ways of representative government to defend themselves. It's little different in the case of Chile. Do the nuances of state/corporate ownership of resources mean anything when they are both large, far off organizations exploiting my land with little of my own say?

The problem is when you can externalize problems with impunity. Doesn't really matter what the basic system is. Generally you find that systems that strip individuals or disfavored groups from having any power at all do that a lot. Especially those where pushing back is dangerous.

That's true. The aral sea was even infamous here in Europe. Of course it's now completely gone leaving silted wasteland in its place :'(

Yes and:

One view is private vs public capitalism. USSR vs USA, respectively. Extreme wealth concentration at the expense of everyone else.

Both are anti-democratic.

I think the USSR would object to being called capitalist, since they were one of the major Communist revolutions until their economic collapse.

And in this vein, we shouldn't forget Mao's "four pests campaign" in China under Mao which caused mass starvation by killing sparrows which had been eating insects, leaving them with a literal plague of locusts.

Mao would probably have murdered anyone who called him a capitalist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_roader

It is irrelevant if the object of the calling agrees or not on the name. Otherwise nobody would ever be called anything bad.

That only works if you have some way to justify it to begin with and is rather transphobic to make other people the sole arbiters of one's identity.

Extreme wealth concentration (the original claim) seems pretty easy to prove in the cases originally mentioned by another poster.

I mean, sure, that's what happens literally any time you set up a super-powerful government, necessarily including any government powerful enough to redistribute all of a society's resources. See also: company towns, Pol Pot, the Kims, Mao, or what was happening in that rebellious colony called the USA before the citizens stopped it.

But claiming it fits a bespoke definition of "capitalism" seemingly invented for this particular discussion, despite that being against literally everything they professed, seems a bit much.

They didn't end up with extreme wealth concentration by letting people freely exchange goods and services. That usually happens when people take control of who is able to exchange goods, whether via monopolies or government control.

Your parent didn’t call the USSR “capitalism”, they called it “private capitalism”. I’ve never heard that term before so I’m guessing it was ad hoc.

I’m guessing the public capitalism / private capitalism has to do with where the ownership of property, concentration of human capital is, and there the market making prices are found. In that sense, the public/private dichotomy mostly works. Sure, Communists argue there is more virtue to their system than simply market making and state owned property, but those are effectively downstream / derived qualities.

And Mao murdered tons of people (both directly and the way a mob boss would have) for many different reasons. He probably was the kind of person who might murder someone because he woke up on the wrong side of the bed. I don’t think that matters much in this discussion and I don’t think we should self-censor our thoughts because the ghost of a terrible person might hear us.

That formulation erases any distinction between capitalism and anything else, leaving it as just an empty synonym for badness. I'm calling out the intellectual emptiness of that use as an epithet here.

Ownership, correct. Who gets to the keep the surplus (profits).

Tragically, I biffed. USSR is public (as in the state is the owner) and USA is private (as in you and me).

I wish I could remember where I heard this taxonomy. James C Scott, Richard Wolfe, other? Sorry.

A quick search suggests "USSR is state capitalism" was one of Trotsky's (many) criticisms of the USSR. Wage labor, exploitation, yadda, yadda.

The USSR did call itself democratic. In a sense, since it was central control for all. The USA did NOT call itself democratic -- the preferred term up to the '70s was "constitutional republic". To avoid the flattening that "democracy" was perceived to produce. The argument is that democracy ALWAYS leads to tyranny and collapse.

To quote "Both are anti-democratic". Which I don't understand. Is your claim that both systems (as practiced in the USSR and USA) led to extreme wealth concentration? Did the economy increase during this concentration? If so, do you still consider this "anti-democratic".

Democracy is inherent and implicit in a republic. And I think you're mistaken about "constitutional republic." That term really wasn't used much, though representative democracy and "democratic republic" were terms that were used more frequently.

The entire argument about the US not having a democracy but a republic really stems (in modern times) from the John Birch Society.

You could well be right (I am not American). I do recall discussing the GDR with some USA people... a "democratic republic". Was told, back then, that the term had been co-opted. But then, I don't know much about the John Birch Society.

> Is your claim that both systems led to extreme wealth concentration?

Yes.

> The argument is that democracy ALWAYS leads to tyranny and collapse.

Rather than Plato's mob rule criticism, I'm using the more contemporary capitalism-vs-democracy (winner-takes-all) food fight.

The tension in USA, at least, has always been wealth vs democracy. The "liberal" in the traditional "liberal democracy" was a reference to our economic system of free enterprise. The aspiration was to balance winner-takes-all with will-of-the-people. Basically the formulation of modern Nordic "democratic socialism".

False. We’ve always had a representative democracy.

Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is the reverse.

Tragedy of the commons at scale.

Don't forget Chernobyl too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com