this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
41 points (97.7% liked)
Ask Lemmygrad
799 readers
87 users here now
A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The rationale there is that you're still using capitalist mechanics, but instead of the capital being owned by private individuals, it's in the hands of the state. However, the key difference in my view is with the respective incentives created by both approaches.
When the capital is in the hands of private individuals then they're able to use this capital for direct personal benefit. This creates incentives for exploitation of the workers by capitalists in order to get the best return on their labour. The primary goal of labour becomes producing value for capitalists with any other benefits being strictly incidental.
On the other hand, when the capital is owned by the state then nobody is directly profiting from the labour, and the only incentive is to reinvest the capital back into developing the productive forces of the country.
The one valid criticism we can make of state owned industry is in terms of labour organization where it often follows top down corporate structure. However, that is obviously not an inherent problem associated with having state run industry.
I think a good illustration of this is Jack Ma and Ant group, vs Bezos and Amazon (or corporate America in general). Both in their interactions with consumers, and with their governments.
Western governments bend over backwards to help their corporations fleece consumers. Their antitrust operations are pathetic.
Meanwhile in China, the government has helped Alipay and Wechatpay become the de-facto cash currency infrastructure because it's a quality of life improvement for people. But as soon as Ant Group started to step out of line (where being 'out of line' is not putting public interests first) the government broke it. No kid gloves, no appeasement.
Whenever I'm using Alibaba apps the ads are fucking annoying. But when the ad says 'we think you'd be interested in this' it rarely misses because its algorithms are genuinely looking to sell me things I want to buy. In the Amazon app the algorithm is looking to sell me things it wants me to buy. Same with douyin and facebook/ig promoting shit at me. Douyin is eerily accurate because it's looking for what I want to see while fb is weighing what I want to see against products and politics its sponsors & handlers want to show me.
SWCC's implementation of capitalism can look very similar to actual capitalism on the surface, but the heavy regulation and policing of the profit motive is transformative on a very fundamental level. The difference is most noticable crossing the Hong Kong-Shenzhen boundary, where the unfettered Western-liberal capitalism is still quite pronounced on the HK side. Fortunately that's changing, albeit slowly.
Looking at how capitalists are treated in China is a very good indication of what class holds power in society. This is another point a lot of people don't seem to understand about ML theory, the key goal is to ensure that working class holds power and forms the government that represents the interests of the working majority. We recognize that there will necessarily be a transition period where capitalist relations persist. Thinking otherwise is naive and leads to impractical idealism.