Friday, August 26, 2005

At Last, a Marxist Prediction is Right, but not as Marx envisaged it!

Apparently the Chinese Communist government is allowing hundreds of state companies to begin selling shares in their (often loss making) enterprises to the public. This could raise billions of dollars for the state’s coffers.

It’s as likely to set millions of workers and their families on the road to relative prosperity, albeit from a near poverty level after 56 years of communist planning, not so much from the profitable enterprises that may result as from the widening of freedom to make their own decisions, take risks, select the ‘best’ options of them as they see them, and move on without State interference in the right decisions for them (and the wrong ones – where incentives are to operate at their most powerful, there must also be penalties too).

Interesting point, as the www.fee.com site points out: whereas the Marxist theory used to assert it is not so much a case of Marx’s prediction that under communism the ‘state would wither away’ (a hopeless hoax under actual communism from 1917 onwards, and Cuba, North Korea today) it is the communist state withering away in favour of capitalism, abandoned in 1949 by the Chinese Communist Party, and after some 30 millions died in various state-caused famines.

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