Comment by throwawaypath
Comment by throwawaypath 4 days ago
>Maybe capitalism was a failure.
China is hyper-capitalist. They're living proof that capitalism has won.
Comment by throwawaypath 4 days ago
>Maybe capitalism was a failure.
China is hyper-capitalist. They're living proof that capitalism has won.
It's more effective at depressing wages and at shovelling other people's money at whoever the politicians want to win. They are also much better at hiding debt -- in manufacturing companies, in banks, and in provincial governments. A lot of their successes lose money but they are awesome at hiding it and they might well outcompete Western companies and thereby cause a lot of harm.
What do you mean “hiding it”? Are you suggesting Chinas manufacturing capacity is entirely fraudulent or cooking the books? Or that the state is providing subsidies? Because if its the latter… have you seen the brouhaha over Amazon HQ2? Or seen the number of tax credits/incentives doled out by US cities to companies that “promise” jobs but don’t even deliver them? (but keep their subsidies).
China is capitalist on a state level, that's where they are winning. The US lets things get mired in red tape and special interests because nobody wants to take responsibility for growth.
In China, I imagine that if your company does something relevant to the five year initiative then you get a lot of red tape cut for you.
> China is capitalist on a state level, that's where they are winning. The US lets things get mired in red tape and special interests because nobody wants to take responsibility for growth.
i.e. in China, the government controls capital; in the US, capital controls the government.
> CPC controls and owns production, policy, finance and even consumption levers.
These terms are useless for distinguishing anything -- what you said can be said about literally any capitalist state.
> China is one party system
This is also relatively uninteresting. There have been many countries where a single party has nominally remained in power for about as long as the CCP has. That Deng Xiaoping's coup occurred without nominally dismantling the party makes the "one party system" distinction a superficial one.
> These terms are useless for distinguishing anything -- what you said can be said about literally any capitalist state.
CPC mandates and gets seats on highest boards of companies, combines IP research across civil military, is both producer and consumer of products etc. Look at China's civil military fusion policy on the latest iteration of how they are doing this. In china there is no separate 3-4 branches of govt like in most places. CPC controls all legislative, executive, judiciary, military and private company boards and financial capital.
Again, just about everything you said applies to the U.S. state and its relations to private firms. Regardless of all that, profits accrue to private owners, investment decisions are determined by profit, and labor is hired and disciplined via market relations. All of the political relations you listed only marginally modify capitalist relations; the law of value still operates.
It's not like US is not capitalist in anything: it's still state-of-the-art in software, which preoves that the problem is not with capital markets.
It just probably overregulated hardware manufacturing out of existence with unionizing and other too strong regulations.
China is a mixed economy with some capitalist parts and some socialist parts just like us. Their mix is just a bit more effective than our mix than our mix and they have higher scale.