Conveniently the moment, large scale spyplanes confirmed the sovjet union was a messy paper tiger, not the industrial science powerhouse it propaganda made it out to be. Ever after that, it was crisis management and containement towards collapse. Before that it was panic and better-this-then-that-negotations with unions. It was a watershed moment back to the gilded age.
Haha. That's hilarious. The negligent hand waving of an enemy states collapse as a banal "realization" is the stuff of pure comedy.
Some proponents of planned economy (e.g. Cottrell) suggest that elected democracy should be replaced by sortition for just that reason. Or perhaps there are technical ways to make planning less centralized, say some kind of federated system with freely available real-time production data, where a new producer can decide what group of existing producers to join.
There are legitimate concerns surrounding the level of surveillance and automation necessary for such a system but they seem hollow from the present sociopolitical context where surveillance and automated decision making is normalized as part of the capitalist system rather than an aspirationally socialist one.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
Anyone who claims that hasn't observed Soviet Union or Russia long enough. The failure was 99% due to "human element" not due to sophistication or not of some planning element.
You are aware of the reality behind the shiny propaganda videos of skyscrapers?
The anti-meritocracy, were beeing born into party aristocracy gives you undeserved jobs, whose lack-of-skills underpaid underlings have to compensate for if you screw up? The reactionary politic changes, that always trigger if things are to late? The absence of any plan beyond keeping the status quo?
Look at the zero covid, were literally a revolution has to happen, for a unfeasable plan and the corresponding corruption to be undone? Literally all initiatives and plans result in this, a surface level placation, corruption cancer growth beneath and suffering by the citizens who made the economic miracle of china really happening - against the ccp resistance.
This is what you want to integrate into western societies? Why?
I understand the utopian, shangri-la projections of the failed western left, but please not on some labor camp..
To be more concrete one specific thing I would like to see more of in the US is some sort of change to the political process that would allow more engineers to get into positions of power. Right now it’s all lawyers, and I think this is a big reason why the US is not good at large infrastructure projects anymore (California high speed rail, building more nuclear plants etc.)
Now China doesn't represent any kind of alternative model that risks replacing the one adopted by western countries, unlike the Soviet Union. Realistically nobody is afraid of being taken over by China. So I think that any kind of impact that China might have in this regard would be quite limited.
Competition from a completely alien culture can generate mobilization, i.e. different societal strata working together for a common purpose. This is what the US is doing with China today, or did with Japan in the '80s.
What the USSR generated was different: it was the fear that the lower classes could band together, overthrow the established order, and actually succeed in running the country. It wasn't an attack from an alien culture, that the establishment feared; it was successful subversion from within. There is no fear of that when it comes to China.
To me the biggest difference between China and Japan is that China is much more likely to challenge the US among all dimensions of power, whereas my understanding of Japan in the 80s is that they simply started to be slightly competitive in an economic dimension.
So I do think that there is a higher likelihood that China’s rise opens up more debates about certain deep assumptions we have in the US than Japan’s did. And some of these may be about the primacy of private property. Private property is not a law of physics but it is a very deeply set assumption we have. The idea that housing is an investment more than it is a human necessity is something that may be worth questioning more and more. If investor owned housing in the US keeps trending up (already around 20%) then at some point it will likely be helpful to have another successful system to point at and learn from for solutions.
If it does, then you need some kind of modern society to keep them relatively happy, or they'll fight for the other side. If you can deploy killer drone robots, then you don't need to worry about what the population thinks as much.
All of this was carefully seeded and very deliberately promoted and funded immediately after WWII. The most obvious example was the Mont Pelerin Society, which was given to Hayek to organise and wasn't just ideologically anti-Marxist, but aggressively anti-Keynesian.
The fall of the Soviet Union accelerated this process by finally removing much of the organised opposition to it. But it was already up and running long before Gorbachev became President.
Yet in my country, we’re healthier; longer living; and yes the average person is wealthier than ever before.
It’s physically impossible for the poor to get poorer every year without a complete societal collapse. Yet people keep repeating this line.