If communism why has big red button not been pressed?
Comment on Why does China have so many multi billionaires if they are aiming to be a communist country?
Quokka@quokk.au 1 day agoJust a few more billionaires and the state will wither away.
Oppopity@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Why the billionaires though? Sure, you can argue that China needed to adopt a largely market-based economy in order to grow its economic base. But a market economy does not require billionaires. Why couldn’t China do exactly what it’s doing now with worker-owned cooperatives? Why does there have to be one rich guy at the top hoarding all the money?
What’s stopping China right now from instituting a maximum wealth cap?
Oppopity@lemmy.ml 1 hour ago
Why couldn’t China do exactly what it’s doing now with worker-owned cooperatives?
It’s transitioning to that. The government subsidises shares for workers to take ownership of their own workplaces.
Why does there have to be one rich guy at the top hoarding all the money?
There doesn’t have to be.
What’s stopping China right now from instituting a maximum wealth cap?
Nothing.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 43 minutes ago
You’re dancing around my core question.
I’m talking about the past, not the future. I’m specifically asking about the past. I don’t want to hear about all the great things China promises to do. I want to know why they chose to create billionaires. I want to know why China is the way it is now. I don’t want to hear glittering promises about what it will become.
I ask you again. Why the billionaires? Why did a nominally socialist country not design its market economy (which it built from scratch) to be more equitable from the start?
I’m not talking about what China may change into. I’m asking why they didn’t plan this from the start. The CCP has in its ranks literally millions of people formally educated in the theories of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and others. They know class struggle and the inevitable outcomes of unregulated capitalism. It’s not like they couldn’t easily predict that a market economy would lead to billionaires. If anyone could be expected to design their market economy in an equitable way, it’s the CCP. And there wasn’t a class of wealthy businessmen that took over the government and forced them to adopt these economic policies. They created their market economy from scratch; they could have built it on a worker co-op model. They CHOSE the current model.
China’s existing market economy did not evolve spontaneously. The old pre-Communist market economy was destroyed in the Revolution and during the Mao era. China’s billionaires aren’t just the wealthy inheritors of Qing-era nobles. They’re all new money; they made their fortunes in the economy Deng and others created. The post-Mao leaders of China created a market economy from scratch, and they could have made it any way they wanted. They chose a model that allows for billionaires.
I want to know why they made that choice. Why didn’t Deng and others build the new Chinese market economy with hard wealth caps or around worker-owned co-ops?
AppleTea@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I believe the thinking is that you can’t really have the state wither away while capitalist states remain predominant on the planet.
Quokka@quokk.au 23 hours ago
And capitalist states will remain as long as you have capitalists.
AppleTea@lemmy.zip 23 hours ago
Gotta disagree here. You can have capitalists without them being in control of the state. That’s what most of Europe was during the early modern period. Capital existed, but political institutions were mostly still geared around the aristocracy and the Catholic church.