- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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.
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).