pcalau12i

Because socialism is based on big industry and big industry did not even predominate yet in 1921 Russia. There could hardly even be said to be “commanding heights of the economy” because even the biggest enterprises played a minor role in the economy. It was a largely peasant country overwhelmingly dominated by small commodity producers and petty-bourgeois enterprises.

The question arises: What elements predominate? Clearly, in a small-peasant country, the petty-bourgeois element predominates and it must predominate, for the great majority—those working the land—are small commodity producers.

It took time for the size of the proletariat to grow and the size of public enterprise to grow enough so that the public sector could actually be meaningfully said to be the mainstay of the economy. Even the little bit of big industry they had, some of it was stalled due to the war.

That’s literally China’s policies. The problem is most westerners are lied to about China’s model and it is just painted it as if Deng Xiaoping was an uber capitalist lover and turned China into a free market economy and that was the end of history.

The reality is that Deng Xiaoping was a classical Marxist so he wanted China to follow the development path of classical Marxism (grasping the large, letting go of the small) and not the revision of Marxism by Stalin (nationalizing everything), because Marxian theory is about formulating a scientific theory of socioeconomic development, so if they want to develop as rapidly as possible they needed to adhere more closely to Marxian economics.

Deng also knew the people would revolt if the country remained poor for very long, so they should hyper-focus on economic development first-of-foremost at all costs for a short period of time. Such a hyper-focus on development he had foresight to predict would lead to a lot of problems: environmental degradation, rising wealth inequality, etc. So he argued that this should be a two-step development model. There would be an initial stage of rapid development, followed by a second stage of shifting to a model that has more of a focus on high quality development to tackle the problems of the previous stage once they’re a lot wealthier.

The first stage went from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin, and then they announced they were entering the second phase under Hu Jintao and this has carried onto the Xi Jinping administration. Western media decried Xi an “abandonment of Deng” because western media is just pure propaganda when in reality this was Deng’s vision. China has switched to a model that no longer prioritizes rapid growth but prioritizes high quality growth.

One of the policies for this period has been to tackle the wealth inequality that has arisen during the first period. They have done this through various methods but one major one is huge poverty alleviation initiatives which the wealthy have been required to fund. Tencent for example “donated” an amount worth 3/4th of its whole yearly profits to government poverty alleviation initiatives. China does tax the rich but they have a system of unofficial “taxation” as well where they discretely take over a company through a combination of party cells and becoming a major shareholder with the golden share system and then make that company “donate” its profits back to the state. As a result China’s wealth inequality has been gradually falling since 2010 and they’ve become the #1 funder of green energy initiatives in the entire world.

The reason you don’t see this in western countries is because they are capitalist. Most westerners have an mindset that laws work like magic spells, you can just write down on a piece of paper whatever economic system you want and this is like casting a spell to create that system as if by magic, and so if you just craft the language perfectly to get the perfect spell then you will create the perfect system.

The Chinese understand this is not how reality works, economic systems are real physical machines that continually transform nature into goods and services for human conception, and so whatever laws you write can only meaningfully be implemented in reality if there is a physical basis for them.

The physical basis for political power ultimately rests in production relations, that is to say, ownership and control over the means of production, and thus the ability to appropriate all wealth. The wealth appropriation in countries like the USA is entirely in the hands of the capitalist class, and so they use that immense wealth, and thus political power, to capture the state and subvert it to their own interests, and thus corrupt the state to favor those very same capital interests rather than to control them.

The Chinese understand that if you want the state to remain an independent force that is not captured by the wealth appropriators, then the state must have its own material foundations. That is to say, the state must directly control its own means of production, it must have its own basis in economic production as well, so it can act as an independent economic force and not wholly dependent upon the capitalists for its material existence.

Furthermore, its economic basis must be far larger and thus more economically powerful than any other capitalist. Even if it owns some basis, if that basis is too small it would still become subverted by capitalist oligarchs. The Chinese state directly owns and controls the majority of all its largest enterprises as well as has indirect control of the majority of the minority of those large enterprises it doesn’t directly control. This makes the state itself by far the largest producer of wealth in the whole country, producing 40% of the entire GDP, no singular other enterprise in China even comes close to that.

The absolute enormous control over production allows for the state to control non-state actors and not the other way around. In a capitalist country the non-state actors, these being the wealth bourgeois class who own the large enterprises, instead captures the state and controls it for its own interests and it does not genuinely act as an independent body with its own independent interests, but only as the accumulation of the average interests of the average capitalist.

No law you write that is unfriendly to capitalists under such a system will be sustainable, and often are entirely non-enforceable, because in capitalist societies there is no material basis for them. The US is a great example of this. It’s technically illegal to do insider trading, but everyone in US Congress openly does insider trading, openly talks about it, and the records of them getting rich from insider training is pretty openly public knowledge. But nobody ever gets arrested for it because the law is not enforceable because the material basis of US society is production relations that give control of the commanding heights of the economy to the capitalist class, and so the capitalists just buy off the state for their own interests and there is no meaningfully competing power dynamic against that in US society.

China does tax the rich but they also have an additional system of “voluntary donations.” For example, Tencent “volunteered” to give up an amount that is about 3/4th worth of its yearly profits to social programs.

I say “voluntary” because it’s obviously not very voluntary. China’s government has a party cell inside of Tencent as well as a “golden share” that allows it to act as a major shareholder. It basically has control over the company. These “donations” also go directly to government programs like poverty alleviation and not to a private charity group.

I could afford a wife and kids and am not opposed to it, but I am just too unlikable for that to even matter. Lol

I have the rather controversial opinion that the failure of communist parties doesn’t come down the the failure of crafting the perfect rhetoric or argument in the free marketplace of ideas.

Ultimately facts don’t matter because if a person is raised around thousands of people constantly telling them a lie and one person telling them the truth, they will believe the lie nearly every time. What matters really is how much you can propagate an idea rather than how well crafted that idea is.

How much you can propagate an idea depends upon how much wealth you have to buy and control media institutions, and how much wealth you control depends upon your relations to production. I.e. in capitalist societies capitalists control all wealth and thus control the propagation of ideas, so arguing against them in the “free marketplace of ideas” is ultimately always a losing battle. It is thus pointless to even worry too much about crafting the perfect and most convincing rhetoric.

Control over the means of production translates directly to political influence and power, yet communist parties not in power don’t control any, and thus have no power. Many communist parties just hope one day to get super lucky to take advantage of a crisis and seize power in a single stroke, and when that luck never comes they end up going nowhere.

Here is where my controversial take comes in. If we want a strategy that is more consistently successful it has to rely less on luck meaning there needs to be some sort of way to gradually increase the party’s power consistently without relying on some sort of big jump in power during a crisis. Even if there is a crisis, the party will be more positioned to take advantage of it if it has already gradually built up a base of power.

Yet, if power comes from control over the means of production, this necessarily means the party must make strides to acquire means of production in the interim period before revolution. This leaves us with the inevitable conclusion that communist parties must engage in economics even long prior to coming to power.

The issue however is that to engage in economics in a capitalist society is to participate in it, and most communists at least here in the west see participation as equivalent to an endorsement and thus a betrayal of “communist principles.”

The result of this mentality is that communist parties simply are incapable of gradually increasing their base of power and their only hope is to wait for a crisis for sudden gains, yet even during crises their limited power often makes it difficult to take advantage of the crisis anyways so they rarely gain much of anything and are always stuck in a perpetual cycle of being eternal losers.

Most communist parties just want to go from zero to one-hundred in a single stroke which isn’t impossible but it would require very prestine conditions and all the right social elements to align perfectly. If you want a more consistent strategy of getting communist parties into power you need something that doesn’t rely on such a stroke of luck, any sort of sudden leap in the political power of the party, but is capable of growing it gradually over time. This requires the party to engage in economics and there is simply no way around this conclusion.

You people have good luck with this? I haven’t. I don’t find that you can just “trick” people into believing in socialism by changing the words. The moment if becomes obvious you’re criticizing free markets and the rich and advocating public ownership they will catch on.

Trump flubbed the “peace talks” with the DPRK so I don’t know why people trust him to do it correctly with Russia. Trump also is a major reason for the war because Putin was hoping to be able to negotiate with the Trump administration the first time around but all Trump did the first time around was ramp up sanction on Russia. After Trump left office they gave up negotiations.

I assumed they are just using some sort of algorithm to detect me based on how I use the website. I notice if I only post in subreddits I’ve never frequented before on topics I’ve never talked about before I can seem to avoid the block for a bit, but the moment I start posting again in my usual subreddits it’s like something picks that up and recognizes it’s me and then boots me.

What?

Changing networks doesn’t work either.

Tried that. Didn’t work. I have tried tons of different IPs with different mac addresses and tons of different browsers and even tried signing up entirely in a virtual machine. At best my account will stay up until I start posting and joining subreddits and it can detect who I am based on how I use the site/what I type.

No I cannot. I am blocked. Not banned.

What makes a social media platform good is, well, socializing, so people are naturally going to flock to where the most people already are. I am only here because I am blocked from r*ddit.

Does this imply the CPC must be a democratic organization?

CPC practices democratic centralism, but why does it even matter? CPC members still have to win their election to actually become a member of the government, and it’s an election everyone has the right to vote in, not just CPC members. Technically, you don’t even need to be a CPC member to run for office, there are independents and members of other parties in China’s government, even in the National People’s Congress. If they had no connection to the people then they would not be voted into office.

In most provinces, direct voting by the masses exists only at the local level

Nation-wide direct voting doesn’t work for a big country, it’s literally physically impossible and always produces oligarchy/autocracy in practice.

Take something like the US national presidential election, most Americans can only name like 2 candidates who run for their national presidential election, and in rare instances 3-4, despite often hundreds running. Why? It’s not physically possible to come to organically know candidates on a national level, if Biden personally talked to every eligible voter for 1 minute it would take over 300 years. That means the only way people can actually learn about candidates is through some sort of media infrastructure, they learn about people like Biden and Trump from the television.

But the problem with this system is that you obviously cannot vote for someone you don’t know who they are, so the television really gets to decide who is actually electable in the first place. The candidates people are more likely to know about can be predicted most accurately based on how much money they raise, because that’s what they use to pay for media slots, and therefore the slate of candidates you get to pick from will always ultimately be decided by the television and it is physically impossible for it to be any other way.

Of course, in capitalist countries, the media is privately controlled, and so money comes from private enterprise, and so the slate of candidates is always pro-capitalist. But you can’t solve this problem just by nationalizing media because then you’d end up handing over who picks the slate of candidates to a shadow government deep state esque clique.

A much better system is a system which always tries to keep elections small-scale. You have local elections in your local area that elect a representative to a higher body, such as a county’s government, and then each of the representatives in the county government elects a representative to the provincial government, and then all the representatives of the provincial government elect candidates to the national government, and then the national government elects the president.

At no point do you end up with a single election that involves hundreds of millions of people or the whole nation simultaneously, so it is always something an individual can grasp what is going on organically, so it more accurately can capture the desires of the actual population and not just the whims of whatever happens to be on television at the time.

only between candidates pre-approved by the CPC

You need CPC approval to join the CPC, you don’t have to join the CPC to run for the government. And the CPC is not a party like in western countries where you just join and do nothing but show up to vote every few years. If you join the CPC you are expected to do real work, they send CPC members out to help during natural disaster relief, they send out CPC members to help with poverty alleviation drives, you sometimes see signs up with phone numbers of your local CPC member to call if you need assistance with anything. They are expected to be actually be active community organizations that help out the public and so obviously you need an approval process for the CPC, it wouldn’t function without it.

What power does the proletariat itself hold over the party’s rule? If the proletariat truly does not approve of their representation, do they have the power to reject it?

Yes. Don’t vote for them. In fact, you have more democratic choice in China than in liberal democracies.

Imagine if you had a system where the CPC really did just pre-pick every candidate and then you had “competitive” elections between their pre-chosen candidates. Would that be democracy? Of course not, but why? Because the same institution picked all the candidates so no matter what the institution wins. That’s how liberal democracy works: the corporate media ultimately nominates all the candidates and so no matter what private corporations always win. There is no “out.”

In China candidates have to get 50%+1 of the votes to win so you can just straight-up reject the nominee.

There is a white paper here that talks in more detail about the whole topic of what people can do to hold the government and party accountable in general.

Money is also not something you outlaw by fiat, it’s not something you pass a law to “introduce a labour voucher system.” For Marx, money is a tool used to exchange products between decentralized enterprises, but not a tool used internally within enterprises which allocates/plans the distribution of resources directly. That means money as money gradually loses its function naturally as a consequence of the centralization/socialization of production. As enterprises grow larger and the proportion of the economy dominated by small enterprises gradually decreases, money gradually circulates less and less between separate enterprises and thus it gradually loses its function as a tool of exchange between enterprises and becomes more and more merely an internal tool of accounting.

This circumstance, then, arises from the material character of the particular labour-process, not from its social form. In the case of socialised production the money-capital is eliminated. Society distributes labour-power and means of production to the different branches of production. The producers may, for all it matters, receive paper vouchers entitling them to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labour-time. These vouchers are not money. They do not circulate.

— Capital Vol 2

For example, the USSR had no laws introducing a labour voucher system, but they did nationalize most enterprises. This meant for the majority of cases, the ruble did not actually function as money because it did not circulate between enterprises. It functioned more as a tool of accounting within the state plan, to keep track of resources given to different state-owned enterprises. The function of the ruble as a merely a voucher, a tool of accounting, arises inevitably as a result of the gradual socialization/centralization of production independent of any sort of law to implement it, i.e. from the change in the material conditions of society as a result of the development of the forces of production.

Soviet socialism, particularly following the introduction of the first five-fear plan under Stalin in the late 1920s, introduced a new and non-capitalist mode of extraction of a surplus. This is somewhat obscured by the fact that workers were still paid ruble wages, and that money continued in use as a unit of account in the planned industries, but the social content of these ‘monetary forms’ changed drastically. Under Soviet planning, the division between the necessary and surplus portions of the social product was the result of political decisions. For the most part, goods and labour were physically allocated to enterprises by the planning authorities, who would always ensure that the enterprises had enough money to ‘pay for’ the real goods allocated to them. If an enterprise made monetary ‘losses’, and therefore had to have its money balances topped up with ‘subsidies’, that was no matter. On the other hand, possession of money as such was no guarantee of being able to get hold of real goods. By the same token, the resources going into production of consumer goods were centrally allocated. Suppose the workers won higher ruble wages: by itself this would achieve nothing, since the flow of production of consumer goods was not responsive to the monetary amount of consumer spending. Higher wages would simply mean higher prices or shortages in the shops. The rate of production of a surplus was fixed when the planners allocated resources to investment in heavy industry and to the production of consumer goods respectively.

— Toward a New Socialism

Of course, the ruble still at times did circulate, such as internationally or between the state sector and the kolkhoz sector, so it did not function purely as a voucher but that was its dominant characteristic. Dialectics teaches us not to think in puritanical terms, as Engels had written, everything in nature is connected by an infinite series of interconnected steps and there are no hard-and-fast lines between anything and as a result everything is always in gradual change to something else, containing internal contradictions from the previous and new system with it simultaneously. As Mao said, no system is pure, all systems always contain some aspects of the old and alongside some aspects of the new.

Dialectics thus defines systems not in terms of purity but in terms of their dominant characteristic. One kid having a private lemonade stand in a society that is overwhelmingly dominated by public ownership wouldn’t suddenly make it not socialist even though it is true that private enterprise contradicts with socialism. No, that kid would have to get their land and lemons from the public sector and would ultimately have to sell the lemonade back to the public sector since there would be no private buyers (only individuals with “money” provided to them from the public sector), and so the public sector would control both the lemonade stand’s supply and its demand, it would control both its input and outputs, so even though it is “private” it would still be under the control of the public sector due to that private enterprise operating in a country overwhelmingly dominated by public ownership.

The same is true in the reverse, things like public enterprise and worker co-operatives in capitalist societies dominated overwhelmingly by private capital end up taking on a capitalistic character. The reason Marxists say “socialism isn’t when the government does stuff” is not because public ownership doesn’t play a major role in socialism, it is just that public ownership in a society dominated by private capital will operate at the behest of private capital interests and thus would not have a genuine public and social character given that the state would ultimately be captured by capitalists.

Whether or not we will ever get to a point where truly speaking all money functioning as indeed money ceases to exist, some pure form of planet earth, is debatable. It’s hard to imagine that nowhere on the entire planet there isn’t any commodity being traded as a general commodity, but maybe that’s just a limit of my imagination. Although, at the end of the day, it really does not matter, because Marxism isn’t about reaching absolutely pure states of society. As long as this becomes the dominant characteristic of society, as long as money generally speaking doesn’t circulate as money but is largely just used as a tool of accounting, then we would have already achieved a moneyless society in a dialectical sense.

Since moneyless is a consequence of the centralization/socialization of production, then naturally to achieve a society where money ceases to generally circulate as money would require a society where enterprises are generally centrally planned and not decentralized on a market, i.e. it would require achieving the developed stage of socialism. You cannot get rid of money as long as you have markets, so it’s unavoidable in the socialist market economy.

It doesn’t really make much sense to implement a voucher system in a country that still is largely driven by markets because then people will be given certificates that can only be exchanged with public enterprises despite being surrounded by small commodity producers which they will not be able to trade with using those vouchers. It would be a disaster and lead to big resistance from the population, iirc I think in very early-stage Soviet Russia they did experiment with such a thing but abandoned it precisely for that reason, it had a huge amount of push-back because the vouchers were incredibly restrictive.

Personally, I don’t think it really makes economic sense to “implement vouchers” because if your country is dominated by money, that means it contains a lot of small producers and so introducing vouchers would be heavily restrictive on the population and have huge push back. However, if your economy is not dominated by small producers, then it also makes no sense to “implement vouchers” because people would already generally not be trading with small producers anyways, so the law would be redundant as you would just be implementing something by law that already is being carried out on the ground naturally.

If you want to reduce the usage of as money as money, to move more towards a voucher system, then the only real policy that should be done to achieve it is, in the words of the Manifesto: to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Long before the Chinese revolution, indeed, even long before the Bolshevik revolution, the Marxian economist Rudolf Hilferding I think did a good job in explaining in a bit more detail what a socialist economy in practice would actually look like.

Because you cannot dispense of the market sector entirely since much of it is still dominated by small enterprise and self-employment, you cannot plan the economy completely from the ground up, at least not in the current era. Rather, you would plan the economy indirectly by nationalizing all the biggest enterprises. Since the smaller enterprises are all reliant on these larger enterprises, then the entire economy could be planned indirectly without having to nationalize all the small businesses.

The socializing function of finance capital facilitates enormously the task of overcoming capitalism. Once finance capital has brought the most importance branches of production under its control, it is enough for society, through its conscious executive organ - the state conquered by the working class - to seize finance capital in order to gain immediate control of these branches of production. Since all other branches of production depend upon these, control of large-scale industry already provides the most effective form of social control even without any further socialization.

A society which has control over coal mining, the iron and steel industry, the machine tool, electricity, and chemical industries, and runs the transport system, is able, by virtue of its control of these most important spheres of production, to determine the distribution of raw materials to other industries and the transport of their products. Even today, taking possession of six large Berlin banks would mean taking possession of the most important spheres of large-scale industry, and would greatly facilitate the initial phases of socialist policy during the transition period, when capitalist accounting might still prove useful.

There is no need at all to extend the process of expropriation to the great bulk of peasant farms and small businesses, because as a result of the seizure of large-scale industry, upon which they have long been dependent, they would be indirectly socialized just as industry is directly socialized. It is therefore possible to allow the process of expropriation to mature slowly, precisely in those spheres of decentralized production where it would be a long drawn out and politically dangerous process. In other words, since finance capital has already achieved expropriation to the extent required by socialism, it is possible to dispense with a sudden act of expropriation by the state, and to substitute a gradual process of socialization through the economic benefits which society will confer.

— Finance Capital

This is basically how China ended up structuring their model in practice, despite this being written decades before the Chinese revolution. The public sector’s focus is on very large enterprises that the most companies rely on, things like heavy industry and infrastructure. If the Chinese state controls oil companies, well, most companies rely on oil, your local bouncy ball producer needs oil to make the rubber for the bouncy balls. But nationalizing a small business making bouncy balls wouldn’t achieve much in terms of economic control because no other enterprise relies on bouncy balls as an input.

This is why it is misleading when you see some left anti-communists simply quote GDP ratios of the public vs the private sector to “prove” China is not socialist. It doesn’t matter as much the proportion of the GDP, but the input-output relationship between enterprises. Not all enterprises are as essential to the economy in the sense of their outputs being the inputs for many other enterprises. The Chinese state controls enterprises which almost every enterprise relies on directly or indirectly: they control land, banking, a significant portion of heavy industry, etc. This allows for the planning of the economy indirectly.

It may be possible one day to have complete economic planning, but implementing it by fiat is not Marxist, and the CPC is a Marxist party. In order for that day to come to pass, Marx’s prediction that all sectors of the market economy will centralize on their own has to come to pass, which could take hundreds, of years, maybe more.

That’s why the CPC introduced a distinction between what they call “developed socialism,” which is the notion of a version of socialism so developed that all enterprises can be nationalized, and “the primary stage of socialism,” which is the notion of a version of socialism that is not so developed and so it still relies heavily on markets. Note that his is not the same distinction as what Marx made between the first and higher phase of communism, but these are two stages within the first phase of communism.

The modern CPC is heavily critical of abandonment of classical Marxist theory in order to rush towards developed socialism by fiat for moralistic reasons even when it made no economic sense. You can justify it as something temporary that the Soviets needed to do to prepare for war against Germany, but after the war there would inevitably become a time of reckoning when they had to revert back to a model more inline with Marxian theory of development.

Sadly, corrupt officials in the USSR took advantage of this process to destroy it internally. The process of economic transition is necessarily a precarious one and so it requires the strengthening of the socialist state prior to the transition to survive it. However, Gorbachev instead weakened the socialist state prior to attempting an economic transition, which ultimately led to a restoration of capitalism, while in China, Deng had doubled-down on strengthening the socialist state and communist party leadership prior to the transition.

2/2

Despite common misconception, China’s socialist market economy is actually more inline with classical Marxism than historical economic systems. A lot of westerners are brainwashed by their media to believe that socialism = the Stalin Model of the USSR, that “true Marxism” is whatever Stalin wrote and because most socialist countries abandoned the Stalin Model, therefore “they abandoned Marxism and it’s a thing of the past.”

However, this isn’t actually true, but in fact modern day China is more directly what historical Marxists like Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Hilferding had openly called for rather than the Stalin Model. To understand this, you have to understand the basics of what Marxian theory says, so let me give you a brief rundown.

Marxism is basically the idea that human societies are material things just like anything else so there is no reason we cannot study them as a material science. If we study human societies scientifically, we can gain an understanding of how they develop and evolve. If we know this, we can use it to inform our politics, kind of like how you can use biological science to inform medicine.

But how do you actually develop a science of how human societies develop? This is where historical materialism comes into play. Historical materialism is the notion that the direct connection between humanity and nature is through production: the transformation of nature into the means of subsistence to propagate the continuation of that society. Human society thus naturally structures itself around production, and the structure of that society will depend upon the available productive forces at the given time.

The productive forces are just whatever plays a role in the production process: infrastructure, technology, education institutions, etc. Marx once gave an analogy as to how when firearms were invented, the whole structure of battles had to change, because you could not use old battle tactics in an era with new tools of battle. As the productive forces develop (new infrastructure, tech, institutions, etc) it gradually leads to a change in how society structures itself.

Engels once compared historical materialism to Darwinian evolution but for the social sciences. The comparison here wasn’t meant to draw attention to the natural selection part, but to the gradual change part. Over many centuries, how human societies organize themselves can gradually change (due to gradual improvements in the productive forces) to the point where society today looks incredibly different than how society was organized a few hundred years ago. Marx, for example, credited the dissolution of the feudal system largely to the industrial revolution, because the feudal organization of society was centered around agriculture and it required the industrial revolution to break free of agricultural-centric production, thus rendering the feudal system obsolete.

Marx also believed that eventually, too, human society would change so much that capitalism would eventually become obsolete as well. Why? His argument was effectively that if you follow any sector of the economy, it has a tendency to become dominated by larger and larger enterprises over time, what he called the laws of the centralization and accumulation of capital. Free markets are always temporary and if you follow any sector of the economy long enough it will eventually become dominated by monopolistic corporate giants. Interestingly, Marx made this prediction in a time where this hadn’t yet occurred to a high degree, but it’s obvious today it is true.

The capitalist system is based on private property, which makes sense in a world dominated by small enterprise. But as small enterprise centralize into larger and larger enterprises, capitalism becomes a less effective model. A small number of big private enterprises inherently implies an enormous stark contrast in wealth inequality, and huge wealth inequality means a huge power imbalance, i.e. as capitalism develops there will be more social instability because fewer and fewer people will control everything while the overwhelming majority of people have less and less political influence. On top of this, capitalist enterprises don’t have really any incentives to continue developing once they reach monopolistic status.

Marx did not believe in the liberal solution that you can just “bust up” big enterprises forever. Yes, sometimes enterprises become big due to bad monopolistic practices, but sometimes they become big because what they are producing is big. You can’t start a smartphone manufacturing plant in your garage, it takes hundreds of millions in capital to even begin producing smartphones. “Busting up” one of these big companies will actually destroy their ability to continue production.

Hence, Marx believed highly-developed capitalism with very advanced productive forces actually begins to outgrow the utility of the capitalist model and that there is nothing you can do in the framework of capitalism to salvage it. You have to change the framework by nationalizing the big enterprises, to change their incentives and to resolve social instability by handing the power back to the people.

You have to understand this to understand China’s model and why classical Marxism is more inline with the Chinese model than historical models. You see, the point of nationalizing private enterprise is not a moralistic one, it is not because “private property = evil and bad.” Marx was not developing a moral philosophy but a scientific analysis. The point of nationalizing private property is to resolve the contradiction between big enterprise and capitalism (between “socialized production” and “private appropriation”), because the capitalist system is simply not suited for big enterprise.

Hence, in a classical Marxist framework, it only makes sense to nationalize big enterprises. It is actually in contradiction to classical Marxian economics to try and nationalize the whole economy, and in fact most early Marxists all in agreement on this. For example, if you even read the Manifesto, you will see that when Marx actually put forward policy proposals, he only suggests an “extension” of enterprises owned by the state and that the rest could come “by degrees” (gradually) alongside the development of the productive forces.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible…the following will be pretty generally applicable…Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State

— Manifesto

The reason he says gradually alongside the development of the productive forces is because if Marxian economics generally holds true, then over time all sectors of the economy will become dominated by big enterprise and ripe for nationalization given enough time. But this of course takes a very long time, small business sector is still very large in even very developed countries.

Marx/Engels were openly opposed to simply nationalizing small businesses because in a Marxian economic framework they have to develop into big enterprises as a result of market forces. So they have to remain on the market sector as long as that sector is dominated by small enterprise.

Free competition is necessary for the establishment of big industry, because it is the only condition of society in which big industry can make its way…Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke? No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.

— The Principles of Communism

In fact, even Lenin agreed with this. He had said repeatedly that it would be “suicide” for any communist party to try and disperse the small producers by force and that we have to learn to live with them.

What is to be done? One way is to try to prohibit entirely, to put the lock on all development of private, non-state exchange, i.e., trade, i.e., capitalism, which is inevitable with millions of small producers. But such a policy would be foolish and suicidal for the party that tried to apply it. It would be foolish because it is economically impossible. It would be suicidal because the party that tried to apply it would meet with inevitable disaster. Let us admit it: some Communists have sinned “in thought, word and deed” by adopting just such a policy. We shall try to rectify these mistakes, and this must be done without fail, otherwise things will come to a very sorry state.

— The Tax in Kind

The abolition of classes means, not merely ousting the landowners and the capitalists—that is something we accomplished with comparative ease; it also means abolishing the small commodity producers, and they cannot be ousted, or crushed; we must learn to live with them.

— “Left-wing Communism”: An Infantile Disorder

Yes, China has a private sector, but half the private sector is self-employment, and the other half is almost entirely dominated by small enterprise. It makes zero sense in a Marxian framework to nationalize that sector, and the only justification of nationalizing it is a purely moralistic one: “private property bad.” The problem is that Marxism is a science and not a moral philosophy, and Marxian economics tells us that we have to sustain the market sector in order to maximize development. The moralists were the Gang of Four who said that they would prefer to be poor than to have a market sector.

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On the surface, it does seem like there is a similarity. If a particle is measured over here and later over there, in quantum mechanics it doesn’t necessarily have a well-defined position in between those measurements. You might then want to liken it to a game engine where the particle is only rendered when the player is looking at it. But the difference is that to compute how the particle arrived over there when it was previously over here, in quantum mechanics, you have to actually take into account all possible paths it could have taken to reach that point.

This is something game engines do not do and actually makes quantum mechanics far more computationally expensive rather than less.

Over 90% of homes are under an HOA and often the HOA dictates what you can have in your yard, and sometimes at least the front yard the HOA will maintain it themselves. My parents got in trouble with their HOA for planting a tree and fought with them for awhile for they finally let them keep it.