One area is luxury goods. The USSR was pretty reliable in getting people infrastructure to continue existing, but a recurring theme in the propaganda distributed internally by sabateurs was about the lack of luxury goods. China doesn’t have nearly as hard a time with this.
Also liberalizing their economy without falling the fuck apart and devolving into capitalism seems to be going much better in China than in the USSR.
I understand what you mean here, but I think your point would be better made if you phrased that differently. The Chinese economy can definitely be defined as "capitalist" at this point imo, but whether you would characterize the political system in a similar way is up for discussion of course.
You more or less can't build a more Socialistic economy than China's right now. Unironically.
The Soviet economy produced a lot of social instability and had problems ranging from workers causing meat shortages because high wages + govt subsidies (democratic populism) created unequal exchanges in labor value that let Soviet citizens consume way more meat than their American counterparts, and factories just straight up lying about their production output to accumulate surplus currency. These contradictions, i.e workers maxing out production constantly with their high wages created the fertile ground for scalpers and the black market gangster class like Yeltsin to accumulate and overthrow the Proletariat and its bureaucrats within 70 years.
The tools to actually run an economy based on labor hours are only coming into fruition today and are in their infancy, and it will be very difficult and precarious to transition China's gargantuan economy to that truly socialistic mode of production. The digital yuan and 5G-AI-IOT "4th industrial revolution" are the clear - but tentative - first steps toward that goal.
If the Soviet Union had survived to this day it would have been much easier, maybe almost completely painless, but the contradictions took it down before the technologies could have been developed. Yeltsin and Kruschev should never have been allowed to exist, but in all honesty the timing and other externalities (such as Lenin passing too soon - Kruschev likely would not have been able to denounce Lenin) probably made them inevitable.
Paul Cockshott's videos on the subject are fantastic (he does identify the Soviet Union as genuinely socialist) despite being a giant social reactionary. He also touches on Venezuela and it's government's mistakes in accidentally creating food shortages by giving workers high wages and subsidizing food as an example of the pitfalls and contradictions that socialist worker democracies can face while running on money instead of labor-hours. It also just genuinely illuminates why China is taking the path that it is, and why the DPRK is struggling despite sharing a border with China.
Yeah I think that’s more about this site’s reflexive pushback against calling China capitalist than it is about how I perceive their markets. I frankly don’t care about the labels nearly as much as the material conditions, which seem to be still improving on the whole.
But srly, I’m thinking about your point. On the one hand it makes sense but on the other it can and does reproduce class inequity pretty similar to what the US has.
does reproduce class inequity pretty similar to what the US has.
china was focusing on eradicating extreme poverty first, it's only now that they're actually starting to focus on reducing inequality
that said, i'd say the situation is very different since even with a very bad health care system every chinese still has their basic needs covered; even with rising housing prices, the majority of chinese outright own their homes, including 70% of millennials (which is a huge stat imo); they live with better infrastructure, and so on
all of these are part of what being "working class" means, so i don't think they're comparable situations, especially given that even today america is like 5 times richer
The capitalist class created Yeltsin in the USSR, it's genuinely hard if not impossible to prevent opportunists from accumulating wealth and gaining power without abolishing money.
It's a better set of incentives to let them get rich out in the open away from political power as much as possible (i.e Jack Ma) than to make joining the party the way to get and hoard treats (Yeltsin, Gorbachev).
The Soviets couldn't plan enough of the economy at the time and running worker wages too close production capacity, especially with opportunist-run factories, created the capitalist-blackmarketeer-gangster class that overthrew the Proletariat through Kruschev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and now maintains control through Putin.
It could have been saved but it's easy to see why China doesn't want to play with fire like that and would rather have opportunists turn out like Jack Ma rather than Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
One area is luxury goods. The USSR was pretty reliable in getting people infrastructure to continue existing, but a recurring theme in the propaganda distributed internally by sabateurs was about the lack of luxury goods. China doesn’t have nearly as hard a time with this.
Also liberalizing their economy without falling the fuck apart and devolving into capitalism seems to be going much better in China than in the USSR.
I understand what you mean here, but I think your point would be better made if you phrased that differently. The Chinese economy can definitely be defined as "capitalist" at this point imo, but whether you would characterize the political system in a similar way is up for discussion of course.
You more or less can't build a more Socialistic economy than China's right now. Unironically.
The Soviet economy produced a lot of social instability and had problems ranging from workers causing meat shortages because high wages + govt subsidies (democratic populism) created unequal exchanges in labor value that let Soviet citizens consume way more meat than their American counterparts, and factories just straight up lying about their production output to accumulate surplus currency. These contradictions, i.e workers maxing out production constantly with their high wages created the fertile ground for scalpers and the black market gangster class like Yeltsin to accumulate and overthrow the Proletariat and its bureaucrats within 70 years.
The tools to actually run an economy based on labor hours are only coming into fruition today and are in their infancy, and it will be very difficult and precarious to transition China's gargantuan economy to that truly socialistic mode of production. The digital yuan and 5G-AI-IOT "4th industrial revolution" are the clear - but tentative - first steps toward that goal.
If the Soviet Union had survived to this day it would have been much easier, maybe almost completely painless, but the contradictions took it down before the technologies could have been developed. Yeltsin and Kruschev should never have been allowed to exist, but in all honesty the timing and other externalities (such as Lenin passing too soon - Kruschev likely would not have been able to denounce Lenin) probably made them inevitable.
Paul Cockshott's videos on the subject are fantastic (he does identify the Soviet Union as genuinely socialist) despite being a giant social reactionary. He also touches on Venezuela and it's government's mistakes in accidentally creating food shortages by giving workers high wages and subsidizing food as an example of the pitfalls and contradictions that socialist worker democracies can face while running on money instead of labor-hours. It also just genuinely illuminates why China is taking the path that it is, and why the DPRK is struggling despite sharing a border with China.
This was super informative. Thank you
Yeah I think that’s more about this site’s reflexive pushback against calling China capitalist than it is about how I perceive their markets. I frankly don’t care about the labels nearly as much as the material conditions, which seem to be still improving on the whole.
Fair enough, it's not all that important on here to get the language perfect
But srly, I’m thinking about your point. On the one hand it makes sense but on the other it can and does reproduce class inequity pretty similar to what the US has.
china was focusing on eradicating extreme poverty first, it's only now that they're actually starting to focus on reducing inequality
that said, i'd say the situation is very different since even with a very bad health care system every chinese still has their basic needs covered; even with rising housing prices, the majority of chinese outright own their homes, including 70% of millennials (which is a huge stat imo); they live with better infrastructure, and so on
all of these are part of what being "working class" means, so i don't think they're comparable situations, especially given that even today america is like 5 times richer
The capitalist class created Yeltsin in the USSR, it's genuinely hard if not impossible to prevent opportunists from accumulating wealth and gaining power without abolishing money.
It's a better set of incentives to let them get rich out in the open away from political power as much as possible (i.e Jack Ma) than to make joining the party the way to get and hoard treats (Yeltsin, Gorbachev).
This was my thought as well. The Soviets mostly emphasized heavy industry and I forgot which leader said light industry needed to be developed.
The Soviets couldn't plan enough of the economy at the time and running worker wages too close production capacity, especially with opportunist-run factories, created the capitalist-blackmarketeer-gangster class that overthrew the Proletariat through Kruschev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and now maintains control through Putin.
It could have been saved but it's easy to see why China doesn't want to play with fire like that and would rather have opportunists turn out like Jack Ma rather than Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
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