What's striking about this description is that a number of would-be Western leaders seem to be looking at the situation and saying, "Wow, that looks great. I want my own."
But can you blame them? For years China's mantra to the West was, "Look at how great our economy's doing! Look at how divided and problematic democracies can be, they are not even that much better than China on human rights! The 21st century is not for idealistic democracies but for China."
Same story about Japan in the 80s, and quite honestly I think they did a far better job at managing their investment driven growth boom. China looks like a total disaster in comparison, and I'm pretty sure they are close to the end of their boom.
I really disagree with you. We have had a couple of dozen communist states, and every one of them has turned out bad. That's because communism is basically an unworkable system. See, for instance, Hayek's argument on information and economic decision-making.
In fact, Marx claimed that capitalism in advanced economies has contradictions that would eventually lead to its being overthrown by the workers, but that has never happened. Instead communism has always been installed through violence on the part of a small group or imposed from without, and usually in states that were not economically advanced.
> I really disagree with you. We have had a couple of dozen communist states, and every one of them has turned out bad. That's because communism is basically an unworkable system.
All of those have been Leninism or its descendants, which break strongly from Marxism. Starting with the required starting conditions.
> In fact, Marx claimed that capitalism in advanced economies has contradictions that would eventually lead to its being overthrown by the workers, but that has never happened.
It's happened in basically all of the countries that were capitalist at the time, where capitalism (that is, the 19th century system that Marx was pointing to) has been overthrown (largely, through democratic means) due to opposition from the working class and replaced with the modern mixed economy which retains some of the basic structures of capitalism, but many features of socialism applied to directly to mitigate the effects of capitalism which can critics from the time the system was named have targeted. (Many of those sytems even call themselves socialist, and the rest of them are labelled that way by their capitalist critics.)
This is going to sound like concern-trolling, but I'd thought that Marx was afraid of the possibility of the Social Democrats winning (i.e., a modern mixed economy forming) -- since this would leave the current holders of property-qua-power still possessing it, while making the workers comfortable enough to no longer desire revolt. But my memory here's faulty, and I suspect it might have been Lenin who was hostile to the Social Democrats -- although Lenin has never struck me as a particularly subtle thinker, to say the least. Did the Social Democrats even exist as a faction in Marx's time...?
(As for the rest: let's hope that the term "modern mixed economy" continues to spread. Calling the postwar Western system "capitalism" has led to a lot of confusion.)
From what I understand, Marx was opposed to reforming capitalism, since he thought it could steer the working class, at least temporarily, from the total revolution he was pushing.
I have read that Social Democracy arose in part from the failure of the working class to revolt and overthrow capitalism. In the communist movement at the end of the 19th century there were two different responses. One, lead by Eduard Bernstein, decided instead to turn to electoral politics and try to move the economy to socialism in gradual steps, and so they joined the other groups that had formed the Socialist Democratic movement.
The other group, lead by Lenin, decided to change the party into an elite group that would lead the working classes to revolution, and this lead to the communism movement as we know it and all the totalitarian states it produced.
Yes, they are mixed economies, but they are a long, long way from what Marx wanted. For instance, there has not been the dissolution of the state that he predicted.
"Communism" in the sense of "stateless, classless, moneyless society" has rarely if ever been achieved in real life. "Communism" in the sense of central planning by an undemocratic bureaucracy with totalitarian power was a fucking disaster.
