Ifi crushed by cheap Chinese gear

[Summit]

18 hours ago, GUTB said:

There’s two topics that often get conflated — state-planned economy and class warfare. In the Marxist sense, class warfare is the battle between the workers and the owners, with communism being the end result of the workers winning over the owners, resulting in the destruction of the owning class. State-planned economies are a liberal system in which the government exerts control over the economy which may or may not include an owning class strata of society.

 

 

You have mixed this up. A state planned economy is an economy where decisions on what to produce, how to produce and by who are decided by the government in a centrally managed bureaucracy. Liberalism strive for the opposite that the most decisions should be made by individuals or households rather than by the state or any another government.

 

Adam Smith is the author of The Wealth of Nations and Liberal economic theory (e.g. capitalist market economy). “Smith declared that as long as supply, demand, prices and competition were left free of government regulation, the pursuit of material self-interest, rather than altruism, would maximise the wealth of a society through profit-driven production of goods and services. An "invisible hand" directed individuals and firms to work toward the nation's good as an unintended consequence of efforts to maximise their own gain. This provided a moral justification for the accumulation of wealth, which had previously been viewed by some as sinful.” Though, economic liberalism can accept government intervention in order to remove private monopoly, as this is considered to limit the decision power of individuals.

[Summit]

Communism is a philosophical, social, political, and economic ideology. Just like many other ideologies it’s a collection of normative beliefs and values held by a group of people. And like capitalism, socialism, liberalism or conservatism it’s more of an ideology that stipulate how the world and our society should be formed than how it really is. Communism (the ideology) share some fundamental values and principals with socialism. Some would say that communism is an extreme form of socialism and the opposite of capitalism.

 

Theory and ideology is one thing and practise often another. Even if many countries are supposed to have a capitalist market economy, it’s never in its purest form there everything are self-regulated by the so called market mechanism and without any interfering from big brother, aka the state. The ideology is an idea about how the society should be and is always more or less mixed up with other ideas and reality. So instead of capitalism, socialism, liberalism and conservatism we have social-liberalism or liberal-conservatism and so on.

 

I have no doubt that China under the Mao Zedong regime and the years after was a communist country, because it was sure not liberal or conservative. Today it’s much harder to classify China with its communist political and capitalist market economy.