Why China dropped communism, implications for future

[Cicada]

In the seventies I saw a little red book selling for a dollar, thirty something pages. It was a speech given at the Chinese Communust Party annual meeting. The head of China, forget who, explained why China had decided to reject communism for capitalism. The argument was that Marx was smart, his analysis was sound, but he could not have forseen one thing, the end of scarcity. With our new ability to mass produce at huge volume economic theory needed to change from communism to capitalism ( or at least incorporate many market mechanisms). I have never seen a discussion of that revolutionary speech.

That idea still has importance but now our mass production is about to produce so much at such low cost that much we buy will become almost free. We need to think about how we need to change our politics to cope with that. The Chinese were smart enough and brave enough to jettison their political world view when it clashed with reality. Soon we will face the end of work because goods and services will be abundant and almost free. We need to figure out what our Plan B should be to cope with that earth shaking reality. That’s more important than Trump or even universal health coverage.

How do we give people meaning in their lives when jobs are gone?

[KT2000]

1. this is one of the reasons

guaranteed basic income is being discussed and tried as an experiment in some countries. The meaning of life will probably be found in the social structure of the family and other tribal groupings.

[HeartachesNhangovers]

2. To me, that's a strange question:

How do we give people meaning in their lives when jobs are gone?

I'm retired, but I never looked to any of my jobs for the meaning of life. I would ask you: "Why should their work define a person?"

I realize that American culture does define people by their jobs, but I always assumed that this was a reflection of the consumerist nature of America, and the idea that your job determines how much money you make, so you job determines how happy you must be in America. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

By the way, China did not reject Communism in the 70's. China has never rejected Communism. The Communist Party is the ruling party and is committed to communism. The Chinese Party has allowed some economic reforms: relaxed collectivization of agriculture and foreign investment, but China is not capitalist in theory or practice.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

4. As I always say:

I work to live, not live to work.

[Cicada]

7. They have stock markets. They have rich guys cruising discos in their Rolls Royces. Capitalists

The little red book made clear that though they kept the lingo the theory of how an economy works was changed, dumping communism.

[Cicada]

8. About the first question we ask: what does he or she do

For better or worse many people see their identity wrapped up in their work. For better or worse the end of work may cause many to be depressed. But we can avoid that by providing new govt or nonprofit work. At 14, in the depression, my dad was in the civilian conservation Corp. his group planted more than a million trees in Nevada. FDR created those jobs, WPA jobs, not just to provide income but also to provide meaning. That is just the way it is in our world.

[lastlib]

3. Deng Xiao-p'ing, maybe?

He was most responsible for China's adoption of limited capitalistic reforms. Though never officially head of state or of the Communist Party, he was the most powerful and influential figure in China after Mao's death.

[Cicada]

9. It was a hell of a brilliant speech, written by someone brilliant

[Hortensis]

5. You can't make people who aren't capable of looking

for meaning and value somehow absorb it from others. We'll still have to provide policing to control those who can't keep themselves occupied without bothering others.

These days are proving the power of personality. Lifetimes spent raised in liberal democratic principles are proven to have failed to "take" by millions, even though they were taught to understand and even revere them all through their school years.

Those whose personalities allow it will look for their own meaning. Because it's in them to do so.

I always found some meaning to the various works I've done over the decades and also satisfaction in being one of the producing workers in the vast interdependent systems that result in potatoes on my plate, clothes on my back, and books on my lap. I'm not a sponge.

But some of the works I found especially meaningful and enjoyable were performed as a volunteer, and those who find satisfaction in contributing to something they believe worthwhile will have a lot more time free to devote to that. There will always be work for those who care to do it.

[Cicada]

11. You are making good suggestions.

[yallerdawg]

6. I like Howard Zinn's vision!

From: "A People's History..."

"The society's levers of powers would have to be taken away from those whose drives have led to the present state - the giant corporations, the military, and their politician collaborators. We would need - by a coordinated effort of local groups all over the country - to reconstruct the economy for both efficiency and justice, producing in a cooperative way what people need most. We would start on our neighborhoods, our cities, our workplaces. Work of some kind would be needed by everyone, including people now kept out of the work force - children, old people, "handicapped" people. Society could use the enormous energy now idle, the skills and talents now unused. Everyone could share the routine but necessary jobs for a few hours a day, and leave most of the time free for enjoyment, creativity, labors of love, and yet produce enough for an equal and ample distribution of goods. Certain basic things would be abundant enough to be taken out of the money system and be available - free - to everyone: food, housing, health care, education, transportation.

"The great problem would be to work out a way of accomplishing this without a centralized bureaucracy, using not the incentives of prison and punishment, but those incentives of cooperation which spring from natural human desires, which in the past have been used by the state in times of war, but also by social movements that gave hints of how people might behave in different conditions. Decisions would be made by small groups of people in their workplaces, their neighborhoods-a network of cooperatives, in communication with one another, a neighborly socialism avoiding the class hierarchies of capitalism and the harsh dictatorships that have taken the name "socialist."

"People in time, in friendly communities, might create a new, diversified, nonviolent culture, in which all forms of personal and group expression would be possible. Men and women, black and white, old and young, could then cherish their differences as positive attributes, not as reasons for domination. New values of cooperation and freedom might then show up in the relations of people, the upbringing of children.

"To do all that, in the complex conditions of control in the United States, would require combining the energy of all previous movements in American history - of labor insurgents, black rebels, Native Americans, women, young people-along with the new energy of an angry middle class. People would need to begin to transform their immediate environments - the workplace, the family, the school, the community - by a series of struggles against absentee authority, to give control of these places to the people who live and work there.

"These struggles would involve all the tactics used at various times in the past by people's movements: demonstrations, marches, civil disobedience; strikes and boycotts and general strikes; direct action to redistribute wealth, to reconstruct institutions, to revamp relationships; creating - in music, literature, drama, all the arts, and all the areas of work and play in everyday life - a new culture of sharing, of respect, a new joy in the collaboration of people to help themselves and one another.

"There would be many defeats. But when such a movement took hold in hundreds of thousands of places all over the country it would be impossible to suppress, because the very guards the system depends on to crush such a movement would be among the rebels. It would be a new kind of revolution, the only kind that could happen, I believe, in a country like the United States. It would take enormous energy, sacrifice, commitment, patience. But because it would be a process over time, starting without delay, there would be the immediate satisfactions that people have always found in the affectionate ties of groups striving together for a common goal."

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html

[librechik]

10. Mao Tse Tung wrote the Little Red Book. But my memory of it is as pro-communism.

Mao is still revered in China, even though they have dropped communism in recent decades, many years after Mao passed on.

[Cicada]

12. There was another small book with a red cover in the seventies

It was stacked on a table, just a buck, I had a few hours free, bought it, sat on the grass that sunny day and read it. It was not written by Mao, it was from a big Chinese Commie powwow earlier that year.