• spectre [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    without ... devolving into capitalism

    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.

    • vccx [they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      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.

    • ImSoOCD [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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.

      • spectre [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Fair enough, it's not all that important on here to get the language perfect