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Comment by Lutger | Hacker News Reader

The Chinese point system is exactly what this reminds me of. It is ironic that unrestrained capitalism actually ends in a variant of communism where it are the corporations, rather than the party, that rule society.

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There’s nothing ironic about it, much of cyberpunk is an exploration of the totalitarian nature of hypercorporatism.

It’s also not a variant of communism: first, in the Marxist-Leninist interpretation the purpose of the single party is expression of and progress towards the dictature of the proletariat, the single-party state is not communist (they claim socialism instead) and the ultimate goal is self-abolition (turns out all other issues aside it’s difficult to make such a system abolish itself).

Second, Libertarian Marxist as well as Trotskyists oppose the use of a transitional one-party state and “democratic centralism”.

> The Chinese point system is exactly what this reminds me of. It is ironic that unrestrained capitalism actually ends in a variant of communism where it are the corporations, rather than the party, that rule society.

That's not what happened in China.

The revolution in China was a _Communist_ one. Maoism is "Communism with Chinese characteristics". That's when 10s of millions of Chinese men, women and children were murdered to further the Communist utopia.

After Mao's death, Deng instituted many reforms and it would be arguable that it was no longer Communist -- but it would be rubbish to call it Capitalism. The government runs _everything_. Where they don't own corporations outright, they install party members to oversee them or own them "individually".

Look at what happened to Jack Ma to see exactly how NOT capitalist the country is.

There is no unrestrained capitalism. This is the doing of the managerial class, and they managed to get so much power because of central banks. Especially after 2008 the major central banks have bought assets on the stock market and financed all kinds of projects without a second thought. They print money and make companies like amazon huge. This is 100% government 's doing. Total fake economy. In a free market there is no limited liability, but even if there was companies are subject to profit and loss. The profit and loss mechanism has bren destroyed by goverment, companies now operate based on incentives derived from what's fashionable among the managerial class, not what serves customers and make money.

Also I would not exclude that these companies can be put in their place by using already existing laws. No need for new laws, it's a matter of political will.

>There is no unrestrained capitalism. This is the doing of the managerial class

Who precisely do you think has 90% of the power in 90% of businesses? And before you say 'the shareholders, duh', the venn diagram of the PMC and shareholders of these massive corporations is a circle. The ruling class is the PMC. They run the corporations. How could it be any other way?

The managers have power. They are helped by corporation status (a State creation) and by the fact that when they screw up the central banks print some money and write them a check (of course some schemes are used to hide this process a little bit).

This last bit is the most important. Even if you don't want to blame the managers, profit and loss mechanism is gone, so we are not under capitalism but in a command economy

> It is ironic that unrestrained capitalism actually ends in a variant of communism where it are the corporations, rather than the party, that rule society

Communism is when all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs.

So pure communism precludes corporations that are owned by private individuals.

Perhaps you should explain what is the difference for the 99.99% of people that don't own the big capital.

that's definitely not communism.

Some sort of capitalist-imperialism, maybe, but definitely not communism.

They meant actually-existing communism, not communism-in-theory. (Not that I favor one definition or another, but different people use words in different ways.)

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