Public outrage is mounting in China over allegations that a major state-owned food company has been cutting costs by using the same tankers to carry fuel and cooking oil – without cleaning them in between.
The scandal, which implicates China’s largest grain storage and transport company Sinograin, and private conglomerate Hopefull Grain and Oil Group, has raised concerns of food contamination in a country rocked in recent decades by a string of food and drug safety scares – and evoked harsh criticism from Chinese state media.
It was an “open secret” in the transport industry that the tankers were doing double duty, according to a report in the state-linked outlet Beijing News last week, which alleged that trucks carrying certain fuel or chemical liquids were also used to transport edible liquids such as cooking oil, syrup and soybean oil, without proper cleaning procedures.
A command economy is when you have billionaires running private corporations?
Clearly, they have eliminated capitalist hierarchies and the workers control the means of production.
Oh wait…
https://www.forbes.com/lists/china-billionaires/
You Tankies are hilarious.
May I suggest another article about China’s billionaires?
China has been a so-called communist country for over half a century and the number of private billionaires has grown, so this whole “billionaires happen during the gradual transition to communism” argument doesn’t really work when you start with zero billionaires with Mao and now have 814 billionaires.
Or am I to believe the number of billionaires keeps going up and up and then -bam- elimination of market economies?
But I’m sure Roderic Day, who appears to have no academic credentials, can find all kinds of explanations.
And in 20 years when there are over 1600 billionaires in China? Communism is just around the corner, baby!
This is such an oversimplified way of critiquing the world it defies response. Pack it in everybody, Flying Squid has determined that when a society gets many times wealthier than it was prior to the communists taking over, if they can’t successfully micro manage every single yuan to ensure that that wealth is perfectly evenly distributed then the communist project is a bust and the working class has been betrayed. Turns out it doesn’t matter which economic class controls the flow of Capital within a country, communism is when everybody gets the same paycheck.
Do tell me which workers control Nongfu Spring Water’s means of production. Because as far as I can tell, the control rests in the hands of Zhong Shanshan, China’s richest man, and not the company’s 20,000 employees.
But I’m sure if we wait another half-century, at least two workers can control the means of production at that company.
(Now it’s your turn to tell me that the workers controlling the means of production is not something that helps define communism.)
Who controls Zhong Shanshan? The Communist Party, which is the highly popular and effective representative of the workers. If he breaks the rules he gets punished harshly, if he tried to flee the country his Capital would be seized. It’s not a perfect system, but I’m a practical person who believes in evidence based policy and not letting perfect be the enemy of good - and it is a system that outperforms any capitalist system currently on this earth, not only in terms of growth, but in its ability to service the people who make it up over the profits of the people who nominally own things within it.
Prove it.
Which… also happens in capitalist countries.
So, let’s review all of the features of communist countries we have discussed so far:
Wait a second… you said something…
Capital… capital… where have I heard that word?
Oh right!
Another feature of communist countries:
But the government is very popular with the workers. Unless you’re a Tibetan or a Uyghur worker. I’ll give you that.
Instead of arguing with me over every single little point, I suggest you read The East is (Still) Red: China as a Socialist State for a more comprehensive overview that cites multiple western and eastern academic sources.
I’m going to be at my actual job for the rest of the day, so I won’t be able to argue with you further.
Oh, I don’t think I need to argue with you on every single point since you’ve made it explicitly clear that capitalism is a feature of communism.
Good read, if a bit long if you’re not expecting it. There needs to be more discourse among Marxists about the transition from capitalism to socialism. Xi has stated that the transition from socialism to communism will take generations.
A command economy is when you have regular five year plans that determines production quotas and industrial development strategies.
Have you confused Communism with Anarchism?
And how do billionaires fit into that model?
In their willingness to faithfully implement the central economic plan, just like every other economic participant.
“Capitalism is when people have different amounts of money” is definitely a take, though.
Please do show me where in Captial or the Manifesto Marx approves of the existence of private owners of corporations to get extremely rich. You can just quote a passage or two. I don’t remember any of that from when I read them, but perhaps you can fill me in on how the workers are controlling his means of production.
You might as well be talking to a wall. There’s no way in hell you’re going to change a tankie’s mind… I live in China and everybody here knows it’s a capitalist society. The five year plans exist mostly on paper. The government will implement it in the sense of making specific grants available for specific target industries.
As a result you’ll have a ton of startups in that field popping up, and then slowly burning through the funds over the next 4 years, rinse & repeat. A few companies make it, most just take the cash and die.
They also change the plans often enough, in reaction to the markets. You know, just like any capitalist regime would.
Oh I know, I just like watching them twist themselves into pretzels trying to make these silly claims.
China is an interesting model.
Not explicitly, but implicitly it’s in the link from SSJMarx.
Marx from the “German Ideology:”
And Engels from the “Principles of Communism:”
You do know they wrote those passages in the 1800s, right?
So how long, exactly, was it supposed to take to eliminate the multi-billionaires that didn’t exist yet and didn’t even exist in China until relatively recently?
It takes as long as it takes. There is no timetable for social change.
Got it. As long as China eliminates the multi-billionaires and private companies within the next three billion years, it will not be a capitalist country.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm
Am I supposed to read the whole thing to find the defense of the billionaires that didn’t exist when he wrote that or do you feel like quoting me a relevant passage rather than make me waste my time to see something that isn’t there?
Not just that chapter, either. You should read the whole book.
In other words, you can’t quote the relevant passage where an ever-increasing number of billionaires who control the means of production is a feature of communism.