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The Secret Document That Transformed China

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Re: The Secret Document That Transformed China

#31

Post by nextparadigms »

forensic wrote: post #12
tokenadult wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His model of human nature and projections for capitalistic growth were also totally off. Correct. The model of human nature proposed by Karl Marx was demonstrably incorrect, and the demonstration continues in the few countries that continue to proclaim allegiance to Marxist thought. An interesting fact about free-enterprise (Marx might say, "capitalist") economies is that they are based in part on the writings of Ada…

They aren't in competition. They both were geniuses. Smith did not advocate laissez-faire capitalism. He was against any kind of cartel, oligopoly, or monopoly, and wanted the state to be more powerful than corporations, not controlled by corporations. Marx was right about capitalism but wrong about incentives. Both of them should be drawn from in the creation of a next generation economic system.

How do you get a state that is "more powerful" than Corporations? I don't think Government size has anything to do with it. Are you referring to having many strong law enforcement agencies to threaten the corporations? I'd say the US Government already has that, and Corporations still seem to control it. And if you want to give China as an example, that's not an acceptable model.

In a democracy, the best way for the Government to be more powerful than Corporations, is for the people themselves to have more direct power over the Government. The more the people loosen up their grip on the Government, the more one of the 2 things happen:

1. The Government becomes more powerful than both the people and the Corporations.

2. The Corporations become more powerful than the Government, who in turn is also more powerful than the people.

Re: The Secret Document That Transformed China

#32

Post by weekendlogic »

nextparadigms wrote: post #31
forensic wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't in competition. They both were geniuses. Smith did not advocate laissez-faire capitalism. He was against any kind of cartel, oligopoly, or monopoly, and wanted the state to be more powerful than corporations, not controlled by corporations. Marx was right about capitalism but wrong about incentives. Both of them should be drawn from in the creation of a next generation economic system.

How do you get a state that is "more powerful" than Corporations? I don't think Government size has anything to do with it. Are you referring to having many strong law enforcement agencies to threaten the corporations? I'd say the US Government already has that, and Corporations still seem to control it. And if you want to give China as an example, that's not an acceptable model. In a democracy, the best way for the…

1. Democracy allows people to control the government.

2. Corporations are people. (In the US)

3. Corporations are the richest, most powerful, psychopathic people.

It is not hard to see the problem here.

Re: The Secret Document That Transformed China

#33

Post by Fargren »

nextparadigms wrote: post #31
forensic wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't in competition. They both were geniuses. Smith did not advocate laissez-faire capitalism. He was against any kind of cartel, oligopoly, or monopoly, and wanted the state to be more powerful than corporations, not controlled by corporations. Marx was right about capitalism but wrong about incentives. Both of them should be drawn from in the creation of a next generation economic system.

How do you get a state that is "more powerful" than Corporations? I don't think Government size has anything to do with it. Are you referring to having many strong law enforcement agencies to threaten the corporations? I'd say the US Government already has that, and Corporations still seem to control it. And if you want to give China as an example, that's not an acceptable model. In a democracy, the best way for the…

The problem is the feedback loop: the people who work at the government want money, and the big corporations make a lot of money. My opinion is that we should device a system in which money is meaningless to people who make decisions about enterprise. What should matter to them is how their decisions affect the people.

Obviously, I have no idea how to do this.

Re: The Secret Document That Transformed China

#34

Post by icebraining »

learc83 wrote: post #27
tnuc wrote: post #13

The article is well written but a little light on facts. From my bad and distant memory; The terms of the contract stated that you had to give X amount to the collective from your land, anything over and above this you kept. The X amount was originally set to be the same as the previous years harvest. The local collective had to raise the amount X a few times so it would appear that they where role models within the…

>"The officials swore at him, treated him like he was on death row." Presumably since they interviewed him, this is his account of the story, not an American slanted version.

In fact, you can hear him speak on the podcast: https://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/13/145184551/the-fri...

Re: The Secret Document That Transformed China

#35

Post by guano___ »

Interesting article, but I find this part a bit disingenuous:

Within a few years, farms all over China adopted the principles in that secret document. People could own what they grew. The government launched other economic reforms, and China's economy started to grow like crazy. Since 1978, something like 500 million people have risen out of poverty in China.

Though not explicitly stated, the passage seems to imply that the rise from poverty is wholly due to the capitalistic reforms, and a china without these reforms would not have seen any (at least major) similar change. Now this is a china that just decades earlier was destroyed by both the japanese and a civil war. Improvements take time, and these kind of cheap tricks ignore both that and a historical perspective. Sorry for the rant, but these tricks are all too common, and I think we can afford ourselves some more intellectual honesty rather then let things pass with these ideological slants, unintentional though they may be.

Re: The Secret Document That Transformed China

#36

Post by vidarh »

Jun8 wrote: post #2

"Work hard, don't work hard — everyone gets the same," he says. "So people don't want to work." Many people point to this idea as the main weakness (or stupidity, depending on whom you speak) of Socialism as originally proposed by Marx. However, AFAIK (and I'm definitely not an expert on this), Marx saw socialism as a post-industrial step, to be developed in countries like German, France and the UK. On the other hand…

> "Work hard, don't work hard — everyone gets the same," he says. "So people don't want to work." > > Many people point to this idea as the main weakness (or stupidity, depending on whom you speak) of Socialism as originally proposed by Marx.

But it is not a Marxist idea. In a society following Marxist principles, if you choose not to work, you would starve: You're not contributing according to your ability. The much mentioned from each according to ability, to each according to their means, is a social contract: If you don't contribute what you can, you should also not receive.

In fact, the purpose of socialism (as opposed to communism) in the Marxist model is a transition where the working classes put in place measures to gradually deprive the capitalist classes of the means to live off capital and to take away their capital in order to subsume them into the working classes: If you don't want to work, as opposed to if you can't, you will eventually starve.

The irony is that a lot of Western social democracies follow policies that Marx' likely would've written off as ploys a la Bismark's "state socialism": Ways of pacifying the working class, and potentially damaging by creating a chorus of people who oppose further socialization by creating systems full of attractive opportunities for those who don't want to work.

This is beyond a lot of the early socialist demand for a right to work, rather than a right to welfare.

A welfare state that pays people unemployment benefits without also putting them to work is petty-bourgeois, not Marxist socialism.

Re: The Secret Document That Transformed China

#37

Post by vidarh »

ryanmolden wrote: post #3
Jun8 wrote: post #2

"Work hard, don't work hard — everyone gets the same," he says. "So people don't want to work." Many people point to this idea as the main weakness (or stupidity, depending on whom you speak) of Socialism as originally proposed by Marx. However, AFAIK (and I'm definitely not an expert on this), Marx saw socialism as a post-industrial step, to be developed in countries like German, France and the UK. On the other hand…

Popper talks quite a bit about this, and how Marx was mostly rebelling against a capitalism that we no longer would recognize, I.e. the cut-throat, robber baron, child laboring to an early grave type. His ideas definitely assumed a more enlightened populous where class camaraderie made people work hard for the good of all, he kind of assumed slackers wouldn't be tolerated or wouldn't exist. As taking advantage of oth…

His idea assumes a population that recognizes they're almost certainly not going to become part of the wealthy elite, and so who recognize that it is not in their interest to support said elite.

While there is a hopeful optimism in a lot of early socialism, Marx scoffed at most of it, and spent a lot of his time criticising what he saw as untenable utopian forms of socialism that assumed altruism and selflessness.

Instead, yes, he assumed slackers won't be tolerated. It is common for people to assume that communism would somehow mean people could just relax and not suffer consequences, but a large aspect of Marxism is to take away peoples ability to live off the work of others other than to the extent society can afford to do so as the result of excess wealth.

The question of why a society following Marxist principles (as opposed to other forms of socialism) would choose to take the means of doing so away from one group of people just to let other people slack off is something that does not seem to occur to people.

I would be inclined to think that if your immediate co-workers see direct impact on themselves based on whether or not you work, their interest in making sure you work would be greater.

Re: The Secret Document That Transformed China

#38

Post by vidarh »

tokenadult wrote: post #4
Jun8 wrote: post #2

"Work hard, don't work hard — everyone gets the same," he says. "So people don't want to work." Many people point to this idea as the main weakness (or stupidity, depending on whom you speak) of Socialism as originally proposed by Marx. However, AFAIK (and I'm definitely not an expert on this), Marx saw socialism as a post-industrial step, to be developed in countries like German, France and the UK. On the other hand…

His model of human nature and projections for capitalistic growth were also totally off. Correct. The model of human nature proposed by Karl Marx was demonstrably incorrect, and the demonstration continues in the few countries that continue to proclaim allegiance to Marxist thought. An interesting fact about free-enterprise (Marx might say, "capitalist") economies is that they are based in part on the writings of Ada…

I'm curious as to what you think Marx' think human nature was like.

I ask, because most people who make this argument make it out of an assumption that Marx argued for a system based on widespread altruism.

But a central part of Marx' argumentation about the workers movement is that the working class needed to learn to understand the nature of class struggle, and reject bourgeois/capitalist morality, which is designed to support capitalist rule. E.g. the capitalist class supports strong private property rights because they have property and its in their interest to perpetuate it.

In effect, he argues that the working classes are too selfless - they in fact today actively support a system that puts them at a disadvantage.

If anything, he thought it would be easier to get people to pay more attention to their own self-interests than what they have been most places so far.

Marxist socialism is what you get if the vast majority pay recognize that they will never be "the 1%" and decide to band together to gain collective advantage.

Re: The Secret Document That Transformed China

#39

Post by Jun8 »

vidarh wrote: post #36
Jun8 wrote: post #2

"Work hard, don't work hard — everyone gets the same," he says. "So people don't want to work." Many people point to this idea as the main weakness (or stupidity, depending on whom you speak) of Socialism as originally proposed by Marx. However, AFAIK (and I'm definitely not an expert on this), Marx saw socialism as a post-industrial step, to be developed in countries like German, France and the UK. On the other hand…

> "Work hard, don't work hard — everyone gets the same," he says. "So people don't want to work." > > Many people point to this idea as the main weakness (or stupidity, depending on whom you speak) of Socialism as originally proposed by Marx. But it is not a Marxist idea. In a society following Marxist principles, if you choose not to work, you would starve: You're not contributing according to your ability. The much…

"If you don't contribute what you can..."

The problem is that this is so hard to measure in practice. I think that in the absence of external motivators, people revert to their subsistence level of output, since they have no incentive to go beyond that.

Re: The Secret Document That Transformed China

#40

Post by Retric »

nextparadigms wrote: post #31
forensic wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't in competition. They both were geniuses. Smith did not advocate laissez-faire capitalism. He was against any kind of cartel, oligopoly, or monopoly, and wanted the state to be more powerful than corporations, not controlled by corporations. Marx was right about capitalism but wrong about incentives. Both of them should be drawn from in the creation of a next generation economic system.

How do you get a state that is "more powerful" than Corporations? I don't think Government size has anything to do with it. Are you referring to having many strong law enforcement agencies to threaten the corporations? I'd say the US Government already has that, and Corporations still seem to control it. And if you want to give China as an example, that's not an acceptable model. In a democracy, the best way for the…

The simple approach would be limit corporations to 1,000 people in size and prevent them from directly owning or investing in other corporations.
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