You can develop a country without extracting its wealth.

Can you? When our economic system's only driver is "extracting wealth", can we actually develop a country without it? The extraction of wealth isn't some unfortunate byproduct, it's a central cog in the machine of what makes it operate. Money is invested for returns.

	▲	ahhhhnoooo 18 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You two are using different definitions for "can". You are using it in the "is it probable or realistic to expect it" sense and the parent poster is using it in the "is it mechanically possible" sense. I think it's possible to imagine a way in which a country could be delivered money and expertise to develop with no expectation of return on investment. (One needs only read conquest of bread to see I'm not alone in believing such a thing is mechanically possible.) But I also agree it's vanishingly unlikely.
	▲	throwaway27448 17 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Yes. It's misanthropic to expect returns and has driven decades of unnecessary war and violence.
	▲	watwut 17 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What you described is not "developing the country". It is "colonization and extraction of wealth".

▲

WarmWash 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, not really. Developing the country is effectively a service being performed, and a wildly expensive one at that. Never mind the high instability greatly increasing the risk of investment. And the ROI is likely decades in the future, during which time any tyrant can come to power and seize all your stuff for their state.

So if the people of Sudan wanted to buy "country rebuilding service", the only way they could finance the loan to pay for that would be by offering their resources to skilled foreign enterprises to convert to usable resources. Then run the risk numbers and you get a crazy interest rate, that will last decades.

If all goes well, Sudan gets a functioning society with a skilled workforce, the foreign players get a nice ROI and made whole for the service they performed, and everyone comes away happy.

The problem is, that places like this are so chronically unstable, and the people so in tune with living in unstable, that it is practically guaranteed to go sideways.

▲

cucumber3732842 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So work for free?

Who would invest in facilities, develop workforces, etc, without a payoff?

▲

ahhhhnoooo 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would. I regularly do.

One of the underpinning core beliefs of anarchist theory is "wellbeing for all". Every human deserves the best conditions we can collectively give each other, and we should all be working not for our individual enrichment, but for the enrichment of us all.

Some people genuinely believe that helping others get bigger quality of life is more important than helping themselves get rich. It's not impossible to believe that such a community, if it grew large enough, would extend that belief to spaces like factories and workforces.

▲

WarmWash 16 hours ago | parent [-]

It's a great idea that never works. Never. Inevitably you end up with people who do the absolute bare minimum to qualify for "the communal take" and a small cadre of power players who carry many multiples of their weight. Eventually the strong players get sick of carrying, and the whole thing collapses.

You can have pockets of like minded individuals who understand the give and take, happy communes (which also seem to inevitably collapse, but I digress), however it is comically naive and foolish to think that it can scale to a societal default. Unless you start killing all the detractors and dead weights. Which is where it often goes...I'll stick with an economic democracy based system (people independently vote with their dollars for what they like/want).

▲

throwaway27448 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's hard to say if it never works if all you know is greed and incompetence

> Inevitably you end up with people who do the absolute bare minimum to qualify for "the communal take" and a small cadre of power players who carry many multiples of their weight. Eventually the strong players get sick of carrying, and the whole thing collapses.

What are you citing from? It seems like you're just describing our current model of society rather than the one you say you're criticizing

▲

ahhhhnoooo 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I've fed and housed people for decades, provided transportation, donated skills, and rehabilitated wild lands. The people who receive the benefits from that didn't do anything to get them. They simply needed them. If I have extra and you need some, you can have some. Simple as.

Most people want to contribute, pay it forward, or give in their own way. Almost no one wants to do nothing to give back. (Usually, the people who do are the people who have been stepped on their whole lives, and by receiving aid it buys them a chance to rest. Once they've rested, they tend to help out where they can.)

I guess I'm going to believe my decades of lived experience with mutual aid over some stranger telling me things I've observed sustaining themselves are impossible.

▲

WarmWash 14 hours ago | parent [-]

OK, that's great and respectable.

But you don't address the core problem which is "How do you handle the people faking (often even faking out themselves!) the need for selfish gain?" and "How do you handle the people who see others lying for gain, and they themselves convert from the helpers to the helped"?

Most people just sweep this under the rug, because it is an obvious and fatal flaw in the system. It's also ideologically uncomfortable that powerless people (have nots) can be just as shitty and morally awry as powerful people (haves).

The world shouldn't be a place devoid of charity and helping out those who need it. In fact it's critical to maximizing society for everyone. But building a system with those ideals being the center pillar is backwards, because it puts the rewards before the work. A side spoke of support? Sure. But the center framework? Doesn't work, and there are ample examples, because every kid votes to get cookies first with the promise of eating their veggies later.

	▲	ahhhhnoooo 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's really important to differentiate mutual aid from charity. They are very different. Mutual aid is about building community and then sharing your excess with that community. My extra food is not going to random humans, but rather to people I know. Maybe not well, but we know each other. Charity goes out to strangers. You are giving something away, but not building community. Charity doesn't build resiliency, imo, the same way mutual aid does. I eat the same food I'm serving alongside the people I'm feeding. This is precisely to build that community - I'm not just a faceless person, I'm someone they know. And how do I cope with people taking more than their fair share? You accept inefficiency. I cannot tell you how many times I've watched someone take food, and immediately walk to the trash and throw it away. Feels bad, but I've got more to share, and because that's a member of my community and not a stranger I can ask them, "Hey, what's up, bud? Didn't like the food, or...?" And when someone goes to take a huge pile of food, they often look around and realize, "Wait, all the other folks nearby need this food too. Maybe I'll just take a few, because I know who I'm leaving an empty table for." But you know what? It's really pretty rare. I've seen it, usually when new people show up, or when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis, but whats much more common is people looking at each other and going, "You got enough, brother? Can you share? Sure, let me grab one for you." You are accurately describing difficulties with charity, imo, though others might disagree with me on that of that. Add community to it, and the calculus changes quite substantially.
	▲	throwaway27448 13 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Again, it seems like you're describing capitalism. We can only carry parasites for so long before people realize they contribute nothing to society. One must work to earn their bread! Most of us on this forum distinctly do not

▲

throwaway27448 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sane humans? The payoff is a functional country and less conflict.

▲

cess11 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How does China approach this?

▲

achierius 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Clearly they don't. They don't tend to occupy other countries, not outside of immediate territorial claims like Tibet (if you think that constitutes an "other" country)

▲

cucumber3732842 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They finance projects with terms that drive business to Chinese companies. The Congo gets a highway. A Chinese construction company makes a buck. The financiers make a buck. Business relationships are created and the people who get the highway use that highway to import Chinese goods.

That's how it's supposed to work, when it works. I'm sure it's gotten better with time.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/486/992/0f8...

	▲	throwaway27448 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The congo is basically the worst possible example you could have found for this—china notoriously doesn't invest in local infrastructure. There are literally hundreds of better examples across africa and south and central america and central asia and southeast asia.