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- cross-posted to:
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Despite the US’s economic success, income inequality remains breathtaking. But this is no glitch – it’s the system
The Chinese did rather well in the age of globalization. In 1990, 943 million people there lived on less than $3 a day measured in 2021 dollars – 83% of the population, according to the World Bank. By 2019, the number was brought down to zero. Unfortunately, the United States was not as successful. More than 4 million Americans – 1.25% of the population – must make ends meet with less than $3 a day, more than three times as many as 35 years ago.
The data is not super consistent with the narrative of the US’s inexorable success. Sure, American productivity has zoomed ahead of that of its European peers. Only a handful of countries manage to produce more stuff per hour of work. And artificial intelligence now promises to put the United States that much further ahead.
This is not to congratulate China for its authoritarian government, for its repression of minorities or for the iron fist it deploys against any form of dissent. But it merits pondering how this undemocratic government could successfully slash its poverty rate when the richest and oldest democracy in the world wouldn’t.
You can say we are out of touch with reality but that does not make your reality actual reality. To be a communist country you cannot have billionaires. If you have billionaires then not everyone is equal. That is the end of the conversation
Communism mandates a single-party government, which inevitably becomes a corrupt dictatorship that does not follow the idealized plan. But that’s the problem: the plan is too idealistic and doesn’t account for human psychology. So, you can’t just say, “oh, that society isn’t communist because the outcomes aren’t right. Name one example of a communist country that actually produces the results you expect to see.
Communism doesn’t mandate a single-party government though. Single-party government is just authoritarianism. That’s why there are, and have been, communist parties in democratic countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
“Communism (from Latin communis ‘common, universal’) is a political and economic ideology whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered on common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products in society based on need. A communist society entails the absence of private property and social classes, and ultimately money and the state. Communism is a part of the broader socialist movement.”
By this definition, PRC is decidedly not communist as the common people do not own the means of production; products in society are not solely allocated based on need; private property exists; social classes exist; and money exists.
Whose definition of communism are you relying upon?
Basically Marxism says that to reach Communism one must first have to go through the Revolution Of The Proletariat where amongst other things they Sieze The Means Of Production.
Whilst Communism itself needs not be authoritarian, no nation has actually ever been Communist and all nations over the years claiming to be “Communist” were just nation that took the Marxists path to Communism and never went the authoritarian stage of the Marxist path to Communism.
This generates a lot of confusion in those who learned about Communism mainly from Propaganda (from either side: that in places like China is no more honest than that in places like the US, just with a different spin).
Not everything inevitably becomes corrupt. I agree that it is very idealistic for humanity. Greed is far too Irresistible.
Just because there have been no successful forms of pure communism, Doesn’t mean we can start calling China actual communism. That’s changing where the bar is.
China is SINO or, CINO I suppose in this context.
No, see, what you’re doing is making a No True Scotsman argument. Nothing is communism to you unless it achieves the pristine results dictated by the ideal, so any actual attempt that fails, you dismiss as “not communism,” rather than admit that communism is a flawed system that has always produced bad results at scale.
People say this forgetting that ‘Scotsman’ has a specific definition and the analogy of the No True Scotsman does not involve someone just calling themselves Scottish.
What you’re doing is seeing me call myself a Scotsman, seeing someone else say I have no Scottish heritage and have never been to Scotland, and you’re saying to the second person “No True Scotsman!”
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it calling itself a shark doesn’t magically make it a Scotsman.
Or do you think the Nazis were socialists?
So you would say the United States is a Democracy?
No, it’s a republic.
No, they call it a Democracy. So, from your perspective it must be a democracy
That’s not a counter argument. “They” don’t call China a communist state; China does. Nowhere does the United States call itself a straight democracy. It refers to itself as a republic.