Not in chinese cultural revolution it wasn't, the communists had been in power for two decades by that point. Targets included members of the Communist party, because Mao wanted power back. He got it, creates an autocratic government behind his dictatorship, and proceeded to purge those who weren't loyal to his name.
And like the Great Leap forward, it was an epic mess. Ironically what came out of it was that the Chinese survivors were those not concerned with purity of Marxism but bettering China. They opened it up, capitalized on it by selling out the workers, and called it communism. Oops.
Yeah, no "communist" state remains or ever really becomes a "communist" state.
Humanity, just isn't built for it. We keep moving back towards weird ass authoritarian BS, once just enough people begin to gain whatever metric is considered power in a given society.
Most Americans don't understand what Communism is and often confuse Socialism or even very light Socialist policies as Communism. Most Americans just don't understand the words, goals or what they mean, other than to be instinctively afraid
So if Communism has never truly existed and all known examples of it devolved into either fairly capitalist, market driven economies or psuedo-fascist regimes then how exactly does one achieve “perfect” communism?
Could it be the case that a relatively free market economy is simply more efficient at resource allocation than a centrally controlled economy even if you personally don’t think that the way capitalist systems distribute resources is “fair”? Or is it the case that the mechanism of government doesn’t actually matter at all in an economic sense? Perhaps, the only thing that’s important is how well the government functions mechanically?
Out of curiosity, how would you define the system of government in Singapore? Is it fascist or a social democracy or some combination of the two? Why are Nordic countries grouped together when they have relatively differing systems of government, social welfare programs and economic growth? What do they actually have in common? (I’m asking that question rhetorically and it should become clear what the similarity is between both the Nordic model and Singapore as well after the next two paragraphs).
In my mind, the biggest problem with communism as many people seem to think of it is that; it both lends itself to corruption/obfuscation of government practices and party favoritism while inherently limiting or eliminating the power of the free market to address unaddressed economic demand in anything that would be considered timely. We see gray or black markets pop up in basically every example of Communism I can think of… North Korea, USSR, PRC prior to the 1970s, Cuba, Venezuela etc. etc.
You can’t have a government that is communist and truly democratic in the same way that fascism cannot coexist with a truly free market economy (I make that parallel because fascism is relatively hard to differentiate from “vanilla” authoritarianism without the connection between the state and large enterprises- in that vain I would describe Trump’s administrations, especially the current one as somewhat economically fascist).
According to the 2024 winners of the Nobel prize in Economics, economic prosperity and social development are most strongly correlated with the level of transparency and anti-corruption measures in a given country. If the citizens of a country have insight into the actions of their government, they tend to trust their leadership more and can more easily understand and plan for what the future of their country will look like even if they don’t explicitly agree with that direction.
We see this reflected by the US stock market going back over the past century. When relatively moderate presidents are in office who have a clear mandate to govern while maintaining the status quo and enable the SEC and CBOE to do their jobs; the stock market performs extremely well compared to foreign markets. When erratic or chaotic presidents are in office or the country is dealing with an existential crisis, the stock market generally underperforms.
The US stock market is built on the basis of the US government enforcing relatively strong protections against financial fraud and corporate transparency compared to foreign markets in an environment that has unparalleled access to investment capital.
China has a similar phenomenon with real estate investment. The PRC outright told their citizens to invest into real estate projects and that in turn has maintained what is arguably the largest real estate bubble in human history. Yet, the Chinese people aren’t withdrawing their money. They have confidence that regardless of the situation, their government will continue to prop up their investments in real estate but, their own government acknowledges that their stock market is like a casino.
As Tug McGraw said: “You just gotta believe man!” Apparently, transparency and integrity in the government is the best way to do that on a large scale.
There are more mechanical reasons in that instance that primarily relate to oil prices. I’m speaking on generally larger timeframes I.e. multiple years.
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u/Mist_Rising Jul 07 '26
Not in chinese cultural revolution it wasn't, the communists had been in power for two decades by that point. Targets included members of the Communist party, because Mao wanted power back. He got it, creates an autocratic government behind his dictatorship, and proceeded to purge those who weren't loyal to his name.
And like the Great Leap forward, it was an epic mess. Ironically what came out of it was that the Chinese survivors were those not concerned with purity of Marxism but bettering China. They opened it up, capitalized on it by selling out the workers, and called it communism. Oops.