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China’s economy is 40% state-owned – compare Lenin’s NEP period, 70-77%
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Soviet state-owned enterprises were designed to make a thing (like the water service, like the post office). Chinese state-owned enterprises are different: they are profit-making players in the market.
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China has enterprises owned by local and provincial government – sometimes they compete with each other! So the state competes with itself on the market!
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They can sell 49% of their stock on the stock market, even to foreigners.
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The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC) is an institution directly under the management of the State Council. It is an ad-hoc ministerial-level organization directly subordinated to the State Council – http://en.sasac.gov.cn/sasacaboutus.html – It’s like the Chinese statist Berkshire Hathaway. In theory, it can control a company as much as a shareholder can.
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Li-Wen Lin & Curtis J Milhaupt write about Chinese corporate structure. They say when direct state industries (like post offices or Soviet bureaux) turned into profit-seeking state-owned things and essentially bought the party off, made it rich.
Isn’t it fair to say anyone who sees their long term lot with the working class a leftist of some stripe.
I think there needs to be a lot more than seeing your lot being with the working class to make one a leftist
I think thats where the spectrum of the left starts, for me this is the most basic base value you have to hold to be on the left, what value or values do you think they are?
Elon musk has called himself a socialist and would probably tell you everything he does is to improve the lot of the working class. I think it takes action or at minimum, some kind of real analysis, not just supposing that when it all breaks down you’ll be with the workers. Plenty of elected Democrats would proudly call themselves leftists, then vote for an increase in military spending and to send more weapons to Ukraine.
In the case of Evans, nobody who has devoted an entire episode (and probably more at this point) of their podcast to making excuses for Azov nazis gets to consider themselves a leftist.
