03-28-2021, 11:00 PM
(03-28-2021, 07:53 AM)David Horn Wrote:(03-27-2021, 03:22 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(03-25-2021, 03:34 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(03-24-2021, 04:28 PM)Einzige Wrote:(03-22-2021, 04:57 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: It has been 173 years since Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto. Name one nation where capital has been abolished and your version of Marxism has been implemented and established.
A whole three full generations for an entire social logic to work itself out! You've really got me there.
I wouldn't give up yet. If the Chinese Communist Party insists on not listening to the people, something like a proletarian revolution could yet occur. Expecting the result to mesh with the Marxist ideal? Well, maybe you should give up.
Worth remembering: the Commies' predecessor, the Kuomintang, began as a left-wing Party and went to the Right, too
This may be the right time to mention our WEIRD-ness, and how different and rigid the Chinese model is and has been for centuries. I doubt we will be subsumed by the East, nor will we crush them. The US-Soviet duopoly was much less logical than the emerging one, but a manifest China isn't going to happen either.
Ultimately I see Japan, which is the closest nation in eastern Asia (half of Korea is under an ultra-reactionary society degenerating from an early-industrial level of economic development; Taiwan still styles itself as the Republic of China) to being WEIRD much more dangerous to America's superstitious, reactionary, authoritarian types. Like Classic X'er, whom I can imagine doing horrible things to people whom he cannot recognize as Americans because they believe in or are something very different from he. Japan does much well, such as elementary education, science, and commerce... many Americans would chafe under the Japanese legal and penal system. In most countr5ies, organized criminals tend to go to more prosperous countries to ply their dreadful trade; the Yakuza emigrates to poorer countries that don't put offenders on a fast track to long prison terms for violent or property crime. Many Americans could live with that, though, and they are not entirely of East Asian origin.
The People's Republic of China abandoned Marxism except as symbols... but maintained the dictatorship. Such is good for material prosperity as China has never known, but it is still soulless.
Despite being much poorer than America, Japan beat the crap out of the USA for almost a year, and lost its war with the USA and China due to the brutality of the gangster regime. Switch the role of criminality and decency in the Second World War, and Japan beats the crap out of America to the extent that some Japanese military official dictates terms in the White House. Let's see... Alaska becomes a prefecture of Japan; the Philippines becomes semi-independent; Japan annexes Guam outright; Hawaii has its former royal family restored the West Coast of the United States becomes Canada-style dominions of Japan. (OK, that is part of a hint on an alternative-history novel in which the Axis wins WWII, The eastern United States gets recovery under the "Rommel Plan" that fits the Christian Democratic ideal of the German CDU. The word "Dekluxification" (German Entkluxifizerung" ) takes the role of "denazification" in the real world. That's different from the plethora of novels in which the bad guys win.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.