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by colechristensen 3566 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform

What the party calls themselves is irrelevant. "communism" as anyone would define it, is not what China's economy looks like today.

1 comments

Indeed. The implied point being that capitalism didn't win either, regardless of what we call ourselves.

In both cases what seems to have emerged from the 20th century as the successful governing model is varying degrees of democratic socialism.

There's a long elaborate etymology and syntax argument I want to make here.

The gist of it is that capitalism and communism aren't exactly two instances of the same class, communism implies a form of government that capitalism doesn't. Likewise communism implies a precise extreme economy where capitalism is more vague.

Most of the world is mostly capitalist. The presence of extensive social welfare programs doesn't really take away from this in the way that adding a market economy and entrepreneurial opportunity takes away from communism.