dude i fucking hate them, every time i see jack ma's face on my timeline i want to set that deformed fetus face on fire in front of his children
we think it's a fucking tragedy that china needs a system that allows these disgusting people to exist. it leaves any dignified person with a bad taste in their mouth every time one of these maggots takes a breath.
but assuming that the chinese have to allow them to breathe, which we think just happens to be the case, then what the fuck are they supposed to do? reject reality? act emotionally and risk destroying what they've built?
there will be a time to put these people on the wall, and by god i wish i'm alive then, if only to watch and cheer at every instance of liberals crying over the "genocide". but that time isn't here yet. it just isn't.
regardless of whether you believe in the CPC or not, if they're actual marxists they won't do it right now, unless they go full stupid. and judging by the last 40 years they ain't going fucking stupid.
so for god's sake, argue about the CPC, but over something valid, like how you think they're doing wrong with their MMT, or how they're not doing enough for workers in the tech industry, or how underwhelming their health care system is. but quit the "dwah china has rich people" shit, it's void of meaning¹ :hexbear-shining:
¹ unless you're not a marxist, in that case i completely understand. but marxists aren't supposed to think reality bends to our will, we're supposed to be materialists not idealists
You dont need billionaries to grow the economy, even under capitalism.
If anything, billionaires are dangerous as they are individuals with a huge amount of personal power and they could easily weaponise that against workers, should they go against their interest. They also hoarde wealth that could be spent on increasing production and purchasing more commodities.
Not only that but China now has more billionaires than the US, and they are producing billionaires faster than any other country in the world.
You could easily stop this by taxing the hell out of them. But for some reason the CPC isn't doing that. Which leaves me to suspect that Chinese billionaires have more political power there than most people on this site are willing to admit.
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Can you explain WHY exactly China needs billionaires to attract foreign capital (besides some vague “that’s how the world works” handwaving)?
Why can’t the party control the factories, the real estate market, the retail chains, the R&D facilities, etc. directly? Do you really think that if the party were to control all of that directly and at the same time still offer the same lucrative manufacturing conditions to western companies, the western bourgeoisie would turn their nose at continuing to profit because of some purist ideological principles?
It would seem way more idealist to hold such positions.
2020 communists are anti-worker and pro-IMF, you should read about the recent Indonesia covid stimulus deregulation law.
Of course, fighting American hegemony and global capitalism is very easy and can be easily done by an impoverished, underdeveloped country with no trading partners. Impoverished countries take IMF loans because they love being enslaved by them. Underdevelopment can be fixed by flipping the development switch and having the peasants magic together some modern industrial tech. I am totally a materialist.
I don't think people are criticizing the countries for taking IMF loans because of COVID, I think people are mostly criticizing the IMF for being incredibly predatory.
It didn't last for 50 years and create the largest capitalist economy in the world.
There has been at least some recent progress on that front:
Chinese capitalists are also excluded from the Central Committee of the CPC just as the capitalist NEPmen were excluded from any real political power in the Soviet Union under their NEP.
Maybe a step in the right direction but don't you think its playing with fire, seeing how the displeasure of the Chinese capitalists at having their profits reduced can lead to outright sabotage and even stronger antagonisms than ever? I mean wouldn't it have been more prudent to have opened their market and their labour force in exactly the same way to the west but without delegating the process to a newly minted capitalist class?
Or they could transform it into the sort of political power that they hold in the US, and over time further devolve China into unfettered capitalism.
They are perfectly content to let consumerism and shit like 'singles day' proliferate too.
growth needs scale and scale means billionaires
besides, if you do plan to expropriate them at some point, as weird as it sounds it's far easier to expropriate a handful of billionaires than a million small business owners. do you not remember the mess that was stalin's collectivization? you think having a small amount of large landowners would have made that job easier or harder?
it's also much more productive as they'll have already set up a large supply chain that you can rely on for the national scale
whether they do that or not is dependent on the conditions set for them by whatever government they're under/over
and under the chinese government that money has mostly been turned into reinvestments on the company, they wouldn't have gotten here otherwise would they?
"willing to admit" assumes i want the CPC to be communists and therefore i force myself to believe it somehow
this is false. it hasn't even been a year since i've stated dumb stuff like "china hasn't been communist since deng xiaoping's reforms in 78", i changed my mind when i realized i was most likely wrong. hell, on the chapo sub i used to make fun of CPC stans. but i was wrong, and that's what i had to admit
as for the power of chinese billionaires: watch this to get a clue, this woman is definitely not a "pro-CPC deluded tankie", and the yale university is definitely not a "tankie hub", so i hope you won't dismiss it as a source
the video is about imperialism, but there's a particular part in it (don't remember exactly when, but you should watch the whole thing regardless) where she delineates 3 kinds of chinese investment in africa: state companies, large companies like huawei, and smaller private firms
when she mentions huawei, she says she interviewed the CEO and mentions how he said large companies avoid exploitation because the party takes a closer look at them, unlike smaller private firms, which can go under the party and do bad shit freely
and this is huawei we're talking about, by far one of the most important companies in china right now
surely the government tries to negotiate, and surely this must be the most common way to do things, but power ultimately seems to lie in the party's hands; most likely because the party has full control over the financial sector
No, scale means you have big corporations with millions of employees. It does not have to mean you have a small handful of people owning more wealth than the entire GDP of Russia.
Why let them exist in the first place? I get that China is doing capitalism, but they could at least minimise the worst aspects of it. In this case they could absolutely have prevented a class of billionaries and 100 millionaires from emerging but they didn't.
Also collectivisation in the USSR is a bad example because we are talking about big capitalists instead of rural landowners. In every revolution so far, expropriating industrial capitalists hasn't been a problem for the new state.
If the CPC expropriated the wealth they wouldn't have to worry about creating the right conditions for billionaires to invest, they would just spend the money. It honestly seems to me like letting independent entities control large amounts of capital creates more potential problems than it solves.
"willing to admit" means that a lot of people say that billionaires have no influence on the Chinese government when in fact it is likely that they have at least some influence.
I'm not going to watch an hour long video right now but thanks for linking it, I will watch it later.
What exactly does this have to do with billionaires? You are simply saying that larger companies are easier to monitor than smaller ones, which I agree with. But you can have huge corporations without having billionaires at the helm of them.
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perhaps russia should try to grow a bit :capitalist-laugh:
jokes aside, for my first point (how hard it is for expropriating) i have to point out that i see no difference between having a large amount of small companies owned by various individuals and having a small amount of large companies owned by larger groups of people - in the end, both mean "resistance from more people" at the time of expropriation, which is something i want to avoid as much as possible
for instance, i do believe that the homestead acts played a large part in making america such a rabidly conservative/reactionary/anticommunist country, once you give a huge amount of people petty bourgeois status you get yourself a dangerously large reactionary group
that's why i mentioned the collectivization, and i agree it's easier to expropriate in the case of industry, but that doesn't mean you won't have the same amount of discontent
so that makes this point for how i think it's necessary to have the smallest amount of business owners you can
naturally, a small amount of business owners doesn't mean they have to be billionaires, which leads to my second point:
as a quick note, they don't have to expropriate wealth to do any investment as they already use MMT for this - this is how they've financed infrastructure, where capital has usually been pretty shit at doing
the thing is, i agree with marx when he says capitalists are good at one thing, and one thing only: increasing productivity, obviously up to a point where it causes falling rates of profit and makes the profit motive unsustainable/obsolete
so my second point is: i do think these cunts are better than the CPC at doing the reinvestment on their own companies - again, up to a certain point, which places like america have already reached in many sectors (which is why you have aberrations like planned obsolescence - it's just a consequence of "excess productivity" as it relates to profit margins, and one of the reasons why they're migrating to the financial sector and relying on egregious shit like stock buybacks, though buybacks are a bit more complicated than that)
this is what the CPC means by "moderately prosperous" obviously - productive enough that the profit motive is no longer a necessary incentive. but they haven't got there yet, unlike other countries
so, 1) having a small amount of business owners is better, and 2) letting those business owners decide how to use their money is fine up to a certain point (which china hasn't reached yet), which leads to my third point:
the CPC has an extremely tight grip on the financial sector. these guys control a large amount of capital, it's true, and having that capital means the CPC will normally try to negotiate with them rather than outright imposing anything unless their hands are forced (such as in the case of xiao jianhua)
but i think you're overestimating the danger from these guys having a lot of high value assets. it's obviously a tight rope, as is everything, but so far the CPC seems to be using capitalists and not the other way around
so, to sum it up:
the government doesn't need to tax billionaires to fund any investments, so having billionaires doesn't really mean anything here
i think at the current stage, and obviously the previous ones, heavy taxes on wealth would be counter-productive, though they've gone far enough that the need for heavy loans like in the 90s isn't there anymore (this is a criticism i have of how the party relates to the billionaires currently - though they have started to move away from this, they took a bit too long and still do it far too much)
i think you're overstating the power that their asset values give them in china, especially given how tightly controlled their financial sector is, but this is obviously hard to quantify and we'll have to see
Can you explain WHY exactly China needs billionaires to expand its productive base (besides some vague “that’s the only way” handwaving)?
Why can’t the party control the factories, the real estate market, the retail chains, the R&D facilities, etc. directly? Do you really think that if the party were to control all of that directly and at the same time still offer the same lucrative manufacturing conditions to western companies, the western bourgeoisie would turn their nose at continuing to profit because of some purist ideological principles?
It would seem way more idealist to hold such positions.
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You can have just millionaires and not billionaires, it's not like the economy would collapse. Just tax/nationalize anybody's assets above 1 billion dollars.
But why are millionaires okay? Like if it was a growing, hypercompetitive market with no monopolies, would that really be better for workers? Of course you may counter that it need not be competitive, to which I say it will not be growing relative to the west and will be absolutely crushed by the West if it does not abide by capitalist laws of competition - plus I reckon that class of millionaires may get an itching for power, and a governing system which can't just nationalize their shit, even if this project was established and maintained
There's a reason Marx criticized the likes of Proudhon for trying to harmonize the numbers of political economy. There's a reason Marx focused his theories on the class struggle, commodity production, and the value form, not the distribution of money and moderation of markets
Post hog.
What difference do you think it would make if China specifically banned billionaires?
They would have quite a lot more revenue to spend to start off with.
Econonmic inequality would decrease by a lot which we can all agree is a good thing.
And it would prevent them from turning on party and trying to overthrow it should the government do anything that is against their interests.