The practice of true communism is all but dead in the world today thanks to the fall of East Germany, the Soviet Union and the capitalization of China. Unfortunately just as that has happened the west has taken up the call for socialism/communism anew. The West seems bent on establishing the development of the productive forces that leads to excess abundance of final goods, allowing for distribution based on need and social relations based on freely associated individuals. In the modern lexicon of what many sociologists and political commentators refer to as the political mainstream, communism is often used to refer to the policies of communist states, i.e., the ones totally controlled by communist parties, regardless of the practical content of the actual economic system over which they may preside. Examples of this include the policies of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam where the economic system incorporates doi moi and the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) where the economic system incorporates socialist market economy. There are increasingly fewer true communist principles in practice in China today and more and more of those same principles showing up in the West. You can see clear evidence of this in the USA through socialized medicine, nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and a much, much larger centralized government in the USA than in China. The USA only has 1/4 the population of China and yet its central government has a budget more than TWICE that of communist China. What else can you call that? Evidence of Chinas increasing capitalism is widespread. They allow bankruptcies and failures in sectors of their economies that Americans insist on propping up. GM now sells more cars in China than in the USA. China has a larger and more modern infrastructure than the USA and it is mostly done through private sector financing, not big government.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 16:20:34 +0000
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