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SvennoJ on 31 July 2014
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sc94597 said:
SvennoJ said:
Cypher1980 said:
I remember being told many years ago.

Capitalism succeeds while Communism fails for the same reason. Human Greed

Yet (current) capitalism is heavily dependent on communism, without China's cheap labor how would capitalism look today. Plus it heavily depends on being able to borrow capital to spend itself out of trouble. USA has $60 trillion debt, yet we call that a succesful system. Capitalism is a giant ponzi scheme, who knows how much longer it can work. At some point the cheap labor or cheap oil will run out.

China's economic system is a market socialist system or state capitalist system, whichever terminology you prefer. It isn't a market-less, command-control, socialist system anymore, and it is certainly, never has been, a classless society called communism. 

The cheap labor found in China has nothing to do with communism anyway. It has to do with the natural destitution that most of the world had faced since the start of humanity and which has only been resolved, in anyway, by free-markets. 

Right now the biggest battle is between those who want to  limit production and increase destitution through mercantilism/state-capitalism and those who want to allow for growth to remove scarcity through free-markets. 

Oil's quantity demanded will likely become far less by the time it runs out as we proceed toward other energy technologies. As for labor - all labor that is necessary to maintain cheap costs will likely be performed by automated machines. Plus, there are plenty of third world countries in the world that can benefit from such opportunities ( African countries, for example.) There is a reason why cheap labor exists in China, and not - say - the United States. The poor in the United States have so many opportunities that they can deny such low wages, and this means that corporations will work toward automated technologies to address this shortage in the supply of cheap labor. There are still many jobs that can be done in other markets, which marxists failed to predict, and continually do so. 

That would be a capitalist utopia if the bottom of the pyramid can be replaced by machines running on solar power. We'll likely have decrease of luxury before that happens. Meanwhile cheap transportation and cheap labor is what is providing us with the luxury we're accustomed to. From the gadgets made in China, to the Mexican seasonal workers harvesting the food, to the child slave labour mining coltan for smart phones. Plus the imf ruining local economies to unlock more cheap labor for our lifestyle.

It's always easy to say how great a system is when you're the one benefitting from it which includes the poor of the western world. I'm not saying communism is any better, just seems less destructive, yet maybe that's just because it never manage to thrive.