On one hand, we have Marx' definition, characteristics of an economy and polity: urbanism, bourgeois elites, private property, wage labour. It was good foresight. The world he described di more or less come about. More than at any other time we work in companies, for wages, in cities. Most of the important property is privately owned.
On the other hand, we have anglo-american ideological "capitalism." It's a variant of liberalism. The emphasis is on free markets, and a confidence that these produce an efficient self organizing market. But, the ideals (at least of the philosophers they refer to) are a little bit of awkward fit in 20th & 21st century settings, where the economy is made up of massive companies.
Adam Smith, the American founders, Locke, Hume... and others that form the basis of ideological capitalism... they idealized independent people, usually farmers. Entrepreneurs, maybe 10 person tin factories. Facebook or Unilever... Idk if an economy of mostly these is all that capitalist, by the proponents' definition.
Anyway, I think the ideological lens (neoliberalism, asian-capitalism) might be more obscuring than clarifying. In practice, the economic systems are the same. The ideological differences between the US & China do not impact the stucture of the economies more than (for example) geography or local cultural norms do. The Soviet centralised economies were different, but I'm not really sure how related that is to ideological communism. It's just what they did when all those commune projects failed.
..The actual differences are more in the legal systems and the political norms (which in China are still extremely strict). Here I think we agree.
Joint-stock and separation of capital & ownership. These need to be the dominant structure in an economy, for the economy to "count" as capitalism. IMO, this is a lot closer to Marx' "mode of production" definition (he also saw it as a progressive step up from feudalism) that the "capitalism as an ideology" definition of Neo/Classical/Anglo-liberalism. So... your defining mechanism may have existed at point A but I don't count that as capitalism until that mechanism runs a significant portion of industrial output. ...Also you need to consider all the clearly non-capitalist mechanisms that separate "ownership" from management, like the Byzantine/Ossoman system for example.
The "ideological" definition just makes a lot more sense in a small firms world, where you really are talking about freely transacting individuals.
The private property point is also worth delving into. No one is a feudalist anymore, so no one defends it. But, I think it's worth comparing and contrasting to this (much more long lived) ideological and practical mode of society. It's the one part of the definition both that marxists and capitalists emphasize is a defining feature of "Capitalism." The private property point made by marx is a pretty obscure 175 years later as we lost context. He considered feudal rights and borouise property to be very distinct from each other.
Under most well functioning feudal systems in their prime, there were "welfare-ish" obligations (and obligations generally) of lords to serfs. Emergency grain stores, for example. A lord was expected to house and feed his subjects. These obligations don't come with modern property rights. In fact, there is barely a concept of obligations that come with property or rights anymore.
In some places, these obligations do exist, at least in theory. The German Grundgesetz Article 14, for example, states: "(2) Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good." [0]
Which is often quoted but these days rarely actually enforced/acted upon, the opposite is becoming far more common (privatization of common goods/services or straight up bailing out private companies with public money) like recent pushes to privatize German Autobahn [1] or when the public is bailing out massive private companies, like it happened with the banking crisis of 2008 [2], nuclear waste deals [3] or most recently bailing out German car manufacturers for Dieselgate [4].
[0] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.h...
[1] http://www.dw.com/en/german-autobahns-backdoor-privatization...
[2] http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/subprime-bailou...
[3] http://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-de...
[4] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/manufacturing/disbelief-...
It's a great place to explore the divide though. To the capitalism point though... I think Uber/Lyft dynamics are perfectly capitalistic in a marxist sense. I think that from a ideological-capitalist perspective, a system where drivers transact more directly with passengers would be more capitalist.
A company is owned by whomever is risking their money to finance it.
How is capitalism different from early human tribes? They also needed to work and trade. Things have become much more sophisticated but the basic principles remain. People complain about spending too much time for a company and slaving away - but in earlier times they would have spend way more time on the fields plowing while 4 of their 8 kids died.
Is this rhetorical? I didn't say they could (or couldn't be). If you mean it in a curious way than let's start with 'how can a company...'
How is capitalism different from early human tribes?
It depends on which capitalism you mean, Marx's or Milton Friedman's. Also which tribe. If early human tribes were like modern ones, they had a lot of different ways of doing things.:)
For marx, you could probably stop at "they don't live in cities or work for wages" like they do in capitalist systems.
For Friedman's capitalism, they tribesmens affairs are probably dictated by customs and communal nterests, not private interests.
Idk, though. It's theoretically possible for ancient human culture to be capitalist under Friedman's definition, if their rules are compatible. Under Marx's it doesn't matter what they do, capitalism is an urban-industrial society.
I wasn't referring to specific theories. My point was more about observing how the world is.
Characteristics of capitalism (let's go with the Marxist definition) certainly aren't universal. Not every human economy includes private property, for example. Not every system include a bourgiouse elite, a customary, religious or military elite is more common historicaly.
Equity isn't the only form of capital investment.
> How is capitalism different from early human tribes?
Well, lots of ways, including the thing that actually defines capitalism, the particular model of property rights.
> They also needed to work and trade.
Which is broadly true of every human society, regardless of politico-economic system; such systems differ in the (for instance) distribution of the accumulated benefits of trade, not in it's practical necessity.
> Things have become much more sophisticated but the basic principles remain.
The basic principles that remain the same are not the features that distinguish politico-economic systems from each other.
> People complain about spending too much time for a company and slaving away - but in earlier times they would have spend way more time on the fields plowing while 4 of their 8 kids died.
Yes, technology has improved since ancient times, and, in the domain of politico-economic systems even most critics of capitalism would agree that it represents positive progress from feudalism and other earlier politico-economic sysyems.
It's an easier question to answer these days, when many companies are like Google or Facebook. They don't really have "capital assets." No stock to buy or factories to build. Just people that need to pay rent.
Someone has to pay for the fixed costs. And its most common that an investor does that. Never said it has to be that way, just that it is common and offers many advantages.
> Well, lots of ways, including the thing that actually defines capitalism, the particular model of property rights.
Property rights are just an extension to help the underlying basics I wrote about. If you are a tribe you might life in balance with other tribes and you have control over a river (or whatever) and you might even give something comparable to property right to a member of your tribe. But this is all enforced by society. Property rights are the same thing, just more formalized and generalized. Ofc. there is more insecurity in a autocracy, but that because an autocracy is about exploiting others.
Yes, and, again, equity isn't the only form of investment even within the capitalist system (though, obviously, it's often structurally preferred by investors within that system.) So, even granting, for the sake of argument, the need for capital investment to start firms, that does not imply a need for capital, as opposed to labor, ownership of firms. (See, for a large example even embedded within a capitalist economy, the Mondragon Corporation.)
> Property rights are just an extension to help the underlying basics
That's certainly one of the reasons for formalizing such rights, but “property rights” aren't a special feature of capitalism, what defines capitalism—and this is generally true of each other politico-economic system—is a particular model of property rights. And, yes, in each case they are viewed by defenders of the system to “help” the immutable basic needs of human society.
You go to a bank (or credit union in this instance) with a compelling business plan and a history of success and get a loan. If the company at some point can't make the payments they declare bankruptcy, the company dissolves and the credit union takes ownership of the company's assets (or what ever was used as collateral) which it then sells off.
Same as real estate deals the people who take the loan legally own the property unless they fail to pay off the loan, then and only then does the property change hands to the loaner.
A lot of large infrastructure projects, for example, are funded by loans with very little (or none) equity capital. Risk is borne by the firm, its lenders, or the state. The "owners" are basically they guys who get the deals made.
I have no idea if employee-owned companies will be any good. There were examples (eg Egged) in the past that didn't work well. But it's curious to see them taken as an impossibility for reasons like this, that they don't fit inside of a textbook free market example, with all incentives perfectly aligned. Half the companies in the world weren't started this way. How did Russian oligarchs buy all those state companies? Leveraged buyouts. IE, the banks (does this count as the state?) gave them money to buy (or start) them.
The more interesting questions are around management. How does an employee owned company work well? Answer that with confidence, and I think everything else is solvable.
*coops however aren't necessarily employee owned-- there's a several models-- and ESOP style employee ownership can be pretty weak from an ownership perspective so in addition to being woefully incomplete the lists should also not be taken at face value.
Actually, Adam Smith constantly used independent farmers as examples of inefficiency, and the second paragraph the first chapter of "Wealth of Nations" mentions huge companies "destined to supply the great wants of the great body of the people".
Adam Smith is easier to read than are most discussions of his writing. If you want a sample, read the first three chapters of "Wealth of Nations" - only 20 pages. https://www.ibiblio.org/ml/libri/s/SmithA_WealthNations_p.pd...
Here's a semi-random example from a chapter on wager labour:
"When an independent workman, such as a weaver or shoemaker, has got more stock than what is sufficient to purchase the materials of his own work, and to maintain himself till he can dispose of it, he naturally employs one or more journeymen with the surplus, in order to make a profit by their work. Increase this surplus, and he will naturally increase the number of his journeymen."
or the famous one:
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”
It seems to me that he is talking about a world that is not really capitalist, in a marxian sense.
Smith does spend a lot of time on wager labour, he does talk about freedom (nonexistent under feudalism) to pursue their own interests and the market forces which create opportunities. But... the economy he is describing is of small scale industry, landlord-tenant dynamics... I don't think Marx would have called this capitalism.
Also, what he regards as "monopoly" (bad) is a much lower bar than we use today. Where he describes larger scale structures like corporations (I think he means guilds and regulators), joint-stock companies (rare then), and such it is usually in a negative light, associated with monopoly or what we'd call "regulatory capture" today.
All of this is arguable. Smith was a long time ago, the world was different, and we can't really know if he'd consider modern capitalism good. But, I do think that what marx was describing and SMith was advocating are two completely different things. We happen to call both capitalism (depending on whether we're for or against it). I think they're tangental or even somewhat contradictory.
I agree with your more important point. Read Smith. It's a great opportunity to read accessible and interesting texts that are important to modern thought, and still easily relevant. Don't try read Marx, only heartbreak will follow. Read Darwin too, for the same reason.
Adam Smith, the American founders, Locke, Hume... and others that form the basis of ideological capitalism... they idealized independent people, usually farmers. Entrepreneurs, maybe 10 person tin factories. Facebook or Unilever... Idk if an economy of mostly these is all that capitalist, by the proponents' definition.
The "Austrians" (particularly Hayek, IMO) do address this world of megafirms a lot more than earlier writers (again, makes sense considering the times). This is getting a lot closer to modern theories, with Hayek directly defending "capitalism" (free market systems, and here we really have the modern ideological framework in a similar form to today's). They (Hayek & Mises anyway) had much more modern, abstract theories.
Hayek described the economy as an information system, with price signals as its source of information flow. This certainly is a defense (one the the most interesting and convincing, IMO) of free markets, but we're back to the modern definition. ..It's fairly tangential to Marx' definition, and harder to argue for from a traditionally ideological/liberal perspective. IE, it's fairly tangential to and disconnected from the "liberals" of the british enlightenment or the american revolution.
There were already mega firms back then (East India Company IIRC ?)
You're right about the colonial megafirms, they were really the forerunners of today's corporate world...quarterly stock price pressure and all. But, they're pretty absent from most examples of that time. Maybe it's because they didn't operate in Europe much.
Modern free marketers can easily disown them on crown issued monopoly grounds. Smith considered them the same as guilds... Even Marxists didn't really pay as much attention to them as they should have, considering hindsight.
Nope, capitalism is an economic system, not to be confounded with other types of Freedom. Capitalism is the ability of freely trade private property, among other things. In the West we tend to think it goes hand in hand with Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Press and other liberties, but it does not have to. However, if Individual Freedom is the goal of your political system, then you will have Capitalism as well (the US is a good case since the constitution is clearly about the ultimate protection of individual liberties, even before the State).
Is it? IDK. There are different definitions.
Part of the problems is that opponents and proponents use different definitions. Opponents describe characteristics, or consequences. On the radical end, they use marxist definitions (really, the original) which are mostly about an urban, company-centric (wage labour) economy. Less radical ones use it to describe the power/wealth inequalities we have.
Proponents generally focus on "free markets," free trade, private property^ and such. IE, you could have bronze-age capitalism if people were free in certain ways. IE, the ideologies of anglo-american liberals (libertarians, neoliberals...and other derivatives).
Exactly -- and all this obscures how those things came to be: with fierce struggle from the lower classes (workers, women, blacks, etc.) in most cases, handed over to the patricians of the state in others (e.g. US Declaration of Independence and so on) and spread more widely later. Not from the system for running the economy.
Heck, Hayek, for one, a champion of capitalism, was in bed with Pinochet.
And one of the things western countries did when they entered capitalism, was to conquer and enslave 2/3rds of the world in their colonies. So much for democracy.
It has nothing at all to do with socialism and the Darwinism rather references Darwin's evolutionary concepts in a "survival of the fittest" way.
Afaik it's nothing anybody would label themselves as.
- Slavery was the norm before western countries got involved with it as well.
- Democracy didn't exist when the west was also active in the slavery market. I do not know too much about the US though.
Not in the scale of enslaving 2/3rd of the world. In fact many nations had put an end to the practice way before colonialism.
And of course those countries didn't pride themselves on their christian or englitenment values, or beings democratic, and having some "white man's burden" of civilizing the world.
>- Democracy didn't exist when the west was also active in the slavery market.
You don't need democracy to abolish slavery.
Not in the scale of enslaving 2/3rd of the world. In fact many nations had put an end to the practice way before colonialism.
Colonization was how slavery was justified, commercialized and gone global, and colonial subjects were treated as an abundant work force for their colonial masters (when they were not hunted for fun, treated as animals, or displayed on "human zoos").
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/08/europe...
But even if I was "conflating" the too, that would at best a mistake in the use of words, not a "horribly" (sic) thing to do. Slavery and/or colonization themselves would be actual examples of horrible things to do.
> Well, I would say that, as long-term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. At times it is necessary for a country to have, for a time, some form or other of dictatorial power. As you will understand, it is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism. My personal impression — and this is valid for South America — is that in Chile, for example, we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government. And during this transition it may be necessary to maintain certain dictatorial powers, not as something permanent, but as a temporary arrangement.
A few political parties alternate in government without big changes. More or less, they have the same program, with minor differences. They, both, are part of the Establishment and the owners of everything, normally a few families, can live with them. Democracy it's good. Nevermind the conditions of the rest of society.
For some reason, despise the media being owned by "reasonable" hands, somebody outside of the establishment it's elected. Then, democracy it's not so good, and a dictatorship is needed to restore the power to the correct people, sorry, to "protect the freedom".
When the situation it's stabilized we can go back to the democracy simulacrum.
I would like to see how long would take for a new dictatorship appear if the people in power since always feel their position threaded.
Where? Hayek said basically that there was more freedom under Pinochet than under Allende, which is not the same thing as being a supporter of Pinochet.
> Hayek: More recently I have not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende.
Even if he had just said that, it would have been enough to make him a supporter -- considering that he said that for a fascist junta leader that overthrew a democratically elected leader, and is responsible for thousands of executions, and tons of torture and violence. There was just no redeeming quality.
But Hayek went much further: http://crookedtimber.org/2013/06/25/the-hayek-pinochet-conne...
That is absurd. He supports who he supports. He never claimed to support Pinochet, so he didn't. If I say that Krushchev was better than Stalin, does that make me a Krushchev supporter? Of course not!
>There was just no redeeming quality
Pinochet's reign, brutal though it was, led Chile to become the most prosperous country in South America. If that is not a redeeming quality, I really don't know what is. Hayek also correctly predicted Chile's transition to democracy ten years before it happened. I think most of Hayek's work post-1950 is nonsense, but a correct prediction is the highest standard of scientific demonstration, and this was a big one.
Note that the election was far from being "the majority of electors" and heavily disputed at the time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende#1970_election
Let's not pretend Allende represented the population of Chile at large, please.
Hoover report on before and after Allende: https://www.hoover.org/research/what-pinochet-did-chile
> In 1970, Allende won 36.2 percent of the popular vote, less than the 38.6 percent he had taken in 1964 and only 1.3 percent more than the runner-up. According to the constitution, the legislature could have given the presidency to either of the top two candidates. It chose Allende only after he pledged explicitly to abide by the constitution. “A few months later,” Whelan reports, “Allende told fellow leftist Regis Debray that he never actually intended to abide by those commitments but signed just to finally become president.” In legislative and other elections over the next three years, Allende and his Popular Unity (UP) coalition, dominated by the Communist and Socialist parties, never won a majority, much less a mandate, in any election. Still Allende tried to “transition” (his term) Chile into a Marxist-Leninist economic, social, and political system.
and
> Many on the left had long believed that capitalism and democracy were incompatible. In a brazen demonstration of its contempt for majority wishes, and for the institutions of what it called “bourgeois democracy,” the pro-Allende newspaper Puro Chile reported the results of the March 1973 legislative elections with this headline: “The People, 43%. The Mummies, 55%.” This attitude and the actions that followed from it galvanized the center-left and right, whose candidates had received almost two-thirds of the votes in the 1970 election, against Allende. On August 22, 1973, the Chamber of Deputies, whose members had been elected just five months earlier, voted 81–47 that Allende’s regime had systematically “destroyed essential elements of institutionality and of the state of law.” (The Supreme Court had earlier condemned the Allende government’s repeated violations of court orders and judicial procedures.) Less than three weeks later, the military, led by newly appointed army commander in chief Pinochet, overthrew the government. The coup was supported by Allende’s presidential predecessor, Eduardo Frei Montalva; by Patricio Aylwin, the first democratically elected president after democracy was restored in 1990; and by an overwhelming majority of the Chilean people. Cuba and the United States were actively involved on opposite sides, but the main players were always Chilean.
He wasn't, still, he got a 64,1% approval rate in 1972, which is much more than the actual president (Michelle Bachelet) on her whole second government.
> Main players were always Chilean
Not true, there is evidence that proves US intervention in both elections and government.
The actual democratic representation was against him by 1973, That's what's important.
It's telling that the text you quoted has zero actual facts against him, only reports of vague accusations. The name for that is "character assassination".
> only reports of vague accusations.
Where vague accusations? The economic situation of Chile during his regime went from bad to worse and his directives were directly responsible for it (as proven countless times in countries where the same policies were adopted). Check out the wikipedia page on the economy of Chile during his years.
You contested the claim that he was democratically elected. I don't see how this is relevant to that claim.
In any case, I don't see evidence that his former allies were against him. Congress wasn't his ally, and besides - as the text you quoted says - there was an election in between, so they weren't all the same people. His allies were the UP, and as far as I can tell, they still supported him.
Finally, losing support from your allies means nothing. That happen just five years ago in my Western European country, and it might happen again soon. It's an expected development in a country with a diverse polity.
Where vague accusations?
"destroyed essential elements of institutionality" and such.
The economic situation of Chile
Which might make him a bad President, but still a democratically-elected one, which was the point being argued.
The implication there is that economic freedom trumps any other kind of freedom, which is exactly what the GP was trying to say.
If you believe in democratic freedom, you believe in the right of the people of a country to choose whatever they want even if, in your opinion, it's a mistake or too radical for your taste.
Compare that to Pinochet who was choose by the CIA and the Chile oligarchy. Defense of freedom certainly.
Well, that's how Stalin's Soviet became an industrial power that could fend off Germany, and basically how South Korea rose economically under the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee (except that "nationalization of means of production" was changed to "give means of production to subservient businessmen who are rolling in the same bed as the government").
You can't predict a country's future by a few soundbites like "Is it central planning?": you immediately run into problems, like how do you even define central planning?
Within limits. For example, we can't freely trade slaves, sex with minors, powerful weapons, etc, and I'm sure most of us are pretty thankful for that. Most western nations also have limits on trading private property, inasmuch as such trade is taxed. See Ha Joon Chang's books for a reminder that "free" markets aren't really as free as the ideology would have you believe.
I think it is misguided in the short term. Dictatorships are very good at protecting themselves from the hostility of its population. However I think it does work in the long run, that is 30-50 years.
So we just need to be either patient or ruthless with China.
Wrong. Capitalism is about maximizing profits and accumulation of wealth. Free markets are essentially a very hostile environment to that. As soon as big players emerge in a field they will root for protectionism. Less competition leads to more profit. Free markets are something completely different.
“ It's been 4 days now. I look around, everything looks the same, but I know, it's not the same world anymore. He choose to become a dictator officially maybe means nothing to most foreigners, but as a Chinese born and raised in this land, I know it's just the beginning of a series following "1984" episodes, and maybe even worse: Cultural Revolution 2.0. This may not happend in 10 years, but I live here, we live here, someday, something very bad is gonna happen again, and I can't do anything to stop or evade it.
A lot people around me seems calm and quite. Maybe they already learned to "shut up and having fun while you still can", or, maybe they are just like me: too shocked and depressed to think of anything to comment. I feel so helpless and scaried, it's like, how do I put this? sitting in a biulding which is on fire, you watch the black smokes and red flame coming from the bottom, but you can't find a way out of your room, there isn't any extinguisher in the room neither. All you can do is just sitting in the corner, hugging yourself tight, waiting for that momnent to come, in despair and silence.
sorry my English sucks, I tried my best to write in English. As a native Chinese, I can't stop to feel pessimistic about the future, hell, now I know we are doomed, it'll be easier to suffer if just push me off the building instead of letting me watch it burning for decades.“
https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/80xttj/silence_this_...
And another one post from a student in China
"I’m studying in a university in China rn and holy fuck I thought I entered an alternate reality, my classmates were all talking and worrying about the issue on the internet few days ago before they were censored out but after that , no one dares to talk about it in the campus , it’s dead silence , I KNOW everyone cares but everyone is just so afraid , this is pretty much a 1984 scenario in real life and I don’t know what else can we do. I guess they have already won in this point . :("
I grew up fond of Asia: Martial Arts, Bruce Lee, asian food, spiritual ideas, that simplicity in art, architecture, clothing; Japanese culture too.. anyway I was very very positive about her culture.
She responded right away: cool but well you know.. it's not all rose here; with a few mild comments about economy and politics. Then a long silence, followed by panick-ish excuses around the fact that she shouldn't have said this and she disconnected.
Note that this was about the big firewall thing. Surely it didn't help for paranoia. Still it was the first time I ever talked to someone scared about her country as a whole.
----
Recently with the growth of international chinese tech brands, some news about raising wages, using robots instead of armies of exploited people .. I thought China would get a stable and peaceful rise. I did not envision this.
Seems like just different bubbles, actually. I'm somewhat skeptical of taking at face value the opinions of a population subject to authoritarian information controls. Even in such a case, you're likely to get very different opinions of a government like China's in Xinjiang or Tibet than you will in Beijing. Both groups are only able to form their opinions of the whole from the very limited pieces available to them.
I think the most interesting perspectives come from people with a foot in both worlds. I have friends who don't want China to become a democracy, at least not right away, because they're afraid of what it would do. The CCP has kept the necessary civil society weak, and encouraged popular nationalist sentiments that could be very dangerous if put into action.
The Chinese leadership knows too well what a complete trainwreck Mao and the Cultural Revolution have brought on the country. Their priority is always on developing the country further. They are way smarter and more pragmatic than some western media/elites want to imagine them to be (e.g. imagine them to be some Kim-esque figure who only cares about personal enjoyment and leaves the population dying. That's absolutely not the mentality of the current Chinese leadership.)
What if that guy was told that in Germany, UK etc. there are practically no limits on how long a head of state can serve, as long as they are re-elected? Substitute the name for China. Would they change their rhetoric 180 degrees around? All just ideological nonsense with no substance. Yes, Xi's reforms could fail. The power struggle could become so intense that it spirals out of control and harms the populace somehow. But it could also be the case that Xi truly realizes his vision and became the leader to make China the most powerful country for a long time to come, a la Lee Kuan Yew, Ataturk etc. It's all hugely uncertain at the moment. Talking as if China is doomed from now on exactly shows how ignorant and far from reality this person is.
Personally I hate the fact that China is becoming like another US on so many aspects of the society. But really, that is a totally separate matter.
These countries still have a version of capitalism that is not as aggressive as the Anglo-Saxon model, and a democracy that is far more permissive than the East Asian (barring Japan) model.
Indian or South African growth may not be glamorous, but it might be sustainable. (And the population growth in both places is far less alarming than generally thought.)
While I doubt that's the case for either (them being sustainable), you raise an important point.
What we call "success" (economic, and so on), might be in fact a liability (environmental, societal and democratic debt), and countries doing worse than US, Germany, China, Japan, and so on, might be much better in actual sustainability and future-proofness.
The problem is we talk about "progress" without ever mentioning progress towards what. More GDP, more consumer gizmos, more productivity, etc -- but rarely we talk about preferred ways of life, maximizing happiness, inequality, democracy, and so on.
Both India and South Africa were British colonies who had some elements of British politics & liberty passed onto them. The freedom of these peoples, if they maintain it, will be down to their history.
Other nations, particularly in Africa, are looking keenly on at China's economic miracle, and realising for the first time in history that liberalism is not a requirement for a thriving market economy. For decades, if not centuries, this has been the established rule. What's so dangerous about China apparently breaking the rule is that every leader, autocrat and downright despot with a population hungry for a better life will now realise that there is a path where they can give their people a better life but they can keep their own power. Before, it was clear that liberty, at least to some extent, went along with prosperity. If and when when African nations get their feet out of the mud it will shake the foundations of the global order. I desperately want to see their power and authority granted and restrained by free and equal peoples. If they follow in China's footsteps that certainly won't be the case.
Do it wrong, however, and you can end up like Zimbabwe.
The track record of the South African state in the past decade has been depressive. After they booted Zuma there is probably a chance to do better, but it's not obvious everything will go well from now on.
One thing to keep in consideration about the South African situation is that land reform in South Africa is not new; it's written into the constitution. What's new is that South Africa is dropping the requirement to recompense the owners. This could be a problem, not just for the white South Africans but for black South Africans as well as it could drive the middle and upper class out of the country.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reforms_by_country
The dearest to me, however, is what was done in my native country, Finland, in the 17th and at the turn of 19th and 20th centuries which created the basis for our current national wealth.
To simplify a bit too much: a succesfull land reform looks like splitting the ownership of land which produces agricultural output or timber from few large owners to many dedicated ones. This distributes the revenue from capital among the population using a " market healthy" method. Rather than spread the revenue from the capital, spread the capital itself. This is a solid foundatuon for creating a wealthy middle class - which has been identified as one of the key parts of a healthy modern economy.
Zimbabwe just took the land from it current owners - which were already spread among a fairly large population - to complete people who could not tend it as well, and not utilize the capital as effectively.
England is an easy place to start because the common language leads to an extensive Wikipedia article, but you'd find similar ones for any European country in their own language, especially since most experienced the upheaval of revolutions, conquests or occupations. The US had common trends but different details for each state.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_English_land_law
[2] Failure to redraw maps had meant that sometimes one landowner was the constituency behind a seat in the commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1832
For example, abolishing serfdom made your land less valuable if there were no longer people that belonged to it. Or, confiscating monasteries and abbeys, then gifting them to favored nobles is a form of land reform. Similarly creating the conditions that the large manors dissolved later is another form of land reform.
In California, you can look at the title histories that trace back to large ranchos from the Mexican period and before, and look at how ownership changed hands. Most owners were legally entitled to retain ownership, but any number of tricks were used to get them to lose their claims.
The same goes for changes in ownership of water rights, mineral rights, air rights, or new limitations on what types of commercial activity are permitted.
The measures can be beneficial or not, but it seems extremely common for changes in public policy to alter property rights.
Kerala.
Not sure this would work for ZA though. Namibia is only 2M people, it's not the same scale.
How convenient, as the end of apartheid was less than a generation ago (1994). What's done is done, right?
Everyone is worried land appropriation in South Africa is going to kill agricultural productivity like it did in Zimbabwe, where the farms were seized and given to individuals that had no business being farmers.
¹ https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/96949469861953126...
And that is how China can take over the world without firing a single shot.
Laugh now, but let's revisit this idea ten years from now and see if you're still laughing.
Democracies don't have famines.
Also the article, while well written, takes a very naive view of China's use of hard and soft power, which was very irritating. The USA constantly uses it's economic and military power in countries to ensure an 'America First' direction. On the front page of HN today, America accused a Latvian bank of money laundering and bypassing American sanctions so it shut it out of the FedWire service which eventually killed the bank within a matter of weeks [1]. Also see America's economic embargo of Cuba, invasion and occupation of Iraq, NATO's no fly zone over Libya in 2011, etc. All countries with enough power use it for their own benefit. This is neither a China-only nor a USA-only issue.
When China has smog issue many in the West point and wave fingers. The truth is, that pollution is The West's. We're just too naive to admit it.
Regardless, the point is, China's env regs are MUCH more lax. So chances are good Product X made in the USA was made with less pollution than the same product made in China.
Yes, pollution is a shared "resources." But some countries are less concerned than others. China is one of those coutries.
The "bonus" is, politicians in the West can claim they cleaned things up at home. Lol. Oh hell no. When the jobs left, so did the (direct) pollution.
Some (Walmart, Apple, HP, Dell) want it as cheap workforce.
Other (Boeing Airbus, GM), want to sell things there.
Some in academy/press wish China can be democratic society.
Some in Military would like to see a strong opponent for another cold war style military build up.
China was able to see all them and sail / leverage along all the competing interests for their own benefits in the last 30 years.
He may still be right, but time is running out.
The question is, how long can that ruse continue.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/america...
Yes. The source is left-leaning. None the less, plenty of smoke to ID a fire.
Regardless, the point isn't what some other gov does or doesn't do. The point is the US is being sold snake oil. That doesn't need any comparison. BS is alway BS. Lip stick doesn't make it any less so.
Doesn’t seem like much of a ruse to me.
And regarding “doesn’t matter what other countries do”, come on! This is a thread about the west’s relationship to China in the context of Xi consolidating lifetime rule.
It’s explicitly a thread about our relationship to other governing systems. So your attempt to say people in the US have no standing to criticize China based on some individuals in the US feeling disenfranchised seems like the non-sequitur to me.
Yes. It's a republic.
No. There's no effort to communicate that to those most effected. At some point the friction from the disconnect will manifest itself in "weird" ways. Trump being a prime example.
Is that best for the republic?
What is so good about those Asian capitalism that those countries, after adopting this model, are all on course of their national suicide? It is clearly this model cannot even sustain itself, the prosperity it demonstrates is probably just a intermediate state before impending, pro-longed decline.
What's "asian values".
> But I don't share the hope of my liberal friends - give them ten years, [and there will be] another Tiananmen Square demonstration
It's been 30 years since tiannamen square demonstrations. There won't be another tiannamen square unless there is economic issues within china. And the same applies not just to china or "asia", but everywhere. Economic stress is what drives protests and societal chaos.
> no, the marriage between capitalism and democracy is over.
When was there ever any marriage between capitalism and democracy? One isn't linked with the other. Democracy precedes capitalism by millenia. You can have democracy and no capitalism. You can have capitalism and no democracy. You can have both or neither.
The quote appears to say a lot but says nothing. It makes a host of false assumptions and runs with it.
A lot of the rhetoric in the past went the other way: freedom is good because capitalism requires it.
As a former and still sometimes libertarian who once read a lot of Ayn Rand and still thinks she made some good points, I personally get a big case of the "flying saucers didn't come blues" from this.
Freedom and free enterprise were supposed to go together. Then Singapore and China proved that you don't need freedom for capitalism and that it might even be a liability.
Markets love a kind of pragmatic totalitarianism that acts proactively to restrain any genuine "disruption" and much more importantly to prevent panic selling and crashes. Investors can feel confident in the market if there's a totalitarian backstop in place that will spring into action to prevent a market panic. Markets work great if they're just not allowed to go down.
Controlled societies are great for capitalism. Real freedom means the freedom to do things that do not increase GDP and behave in ways that disrupt or distract from corporate culture. Turn the world into an office park. We can see this mentality spreading to the West.
The lower classes can safely be ignored, drugged/entertained, or distracted by pitting different races and cultural identities against each other.
If the upper classes (upper middle class, technicians, academics, the "lower rich") get politically uppity or have moral reservations you can just flatter their sense of superiority and entitlement. Make them think they've been brought into the fold. Invite them to rub shoulders with the real elite. Give them a false sense of freedom through consumer choice and BoBo pop libertine indulgence. Take the hedonism pioneered by the counterculture and strip it of its rebellious and spiritual undercurrents. Tinder is a great example: a meat market night club without the music, dancing, or art. Create pseudo-free gated enclaves where the upper middle classes and the rich can enjoy custom tailored lifestyles optimized for the consumption of high-end goods and the production of intellectual capital that ultimately benefits the real aristocracy.
Edit:
To all the leftists and anarchists right now who are wagging their fingers at us libertarians saying "we told you so," please hold back a little on the schadenfreude. This future is absolutely not what we had in mind.
Edit #2:
In all seriousness though... independent of whether or not capitalism or markets are good things I think it's important to advocate freedom in and of itself as an independent moral, ethical, and political goal. Freedom is not good because it makes this or that work better. Freedom is good because human beings must be treated with dignity and deserve personal autonomy.
There are positive points to be taken from many political philosophies (including libertarians and communists alike), my personal outlook is to never attach too dogmatically to one side though. :)
Capitalism and basic freedoms are indeed separate entities, but I do think it remains an open question whether China can become a knowledge / innovation powerhouse, while at the same time heading backwards on basic freedoms as they seem to be now. This is more the key that I see has been historically linked together. Controlled societies may be just fine for the nuts and bolts portion of capitalism, but one can point to countless examples in history where suppressed / tightly controlled knowledge ended up holding societies back, severely suppressing innovation.
I sometimes compare Rand to Marx. Both were very astute critics -- Marx of capitalism and Rand of socialism/communism. Unfortunately neither had practical ideas of what to do about it. Both advocated some version of "put certain ideas into practice and then (magic happens here) and then the evil state withers away." The magic is what doesn't happen. We're now able to see that the real world endpoint of communism is mafia rule and that the real world endpoint of capitalism is techno-feudalism.
Rand's heroes all look like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. People like that are notable because they are rare. Most of the ultra-wealthy more closely resemble Rand's villains.
Real creators are too busy creating to play the kind of dominance games that most often lead to political and business success. You can succeed by creating, but doing so is many orders of magnitude harder than succeeding through manipulation and so you get a smaller pool of people who can pull it off.
Edit: Also, China is a very capitalist country compared with, say, EU.
That is patently false. In China it is impossible for foreign companies to compete on a level playing field. There is a huge amount of protectionism and anti-competitive practices, the currency is manipulated to favor exports, and it's basically impossible to make it big without ties to the CCP.
Yes, like the 74% Steel tariff the EU imposes on China
Or how about solar panels from China which are hit with 65% tariffs unless they are sold at a minimum price (which is higher than average EU equivalents)?
The EU not being protectionist is a widely believed meme.
In the EU you can start your business wherever you are a legal resident, the regulations are a known quantity and essentially you just have to mind your own business. This is not so in mainland China, your applications can be arbitrarily denied, and if your business does too well, you will get a knock on the door asking if you are a "good comrade". All big businesses there are tied to the CCP one way or another.
Filial piety followed through to its logical conclusion as the leader being the father of the nation, risking dictatorship, while forgoing personal freedom for the sake of society leads to censorship.
I claim if we do nothing we will gradually approach a kind of a new type of authoritarian society. Here I see the world historical importance of what is happening today in China. Until now there was one good argument for capitalism: sooner or later it brought a demand for democracy...
What I'm afraid of is with this capitalism with Asian values, we get a capitalism much more efficient and dynamic than our western capitalism. But I don't share the hope of my liberal friends - give them ten years, [and there will be] another Tiananmen Square demonstration - no, the marriage between capitalism and democracy is over." - Slavoj Zizek