China is the Future

This is a very fine lecture about socialism from one of the foremost socialists of our time, Richard Wolff. China has found the right balance between private enterprise and public policy that the Soviet Union failed to find. In the Soviet Union, the whole economy was rigidly controlled by the government. Private enterprise was feared and suppressed. The Chinese economy is a hybrid system which encourages productive private enterprise but keeps it under public control. The problem in the United States is that private capital controls the government. But when it controls the government, it ceases to be private. The result is not some kind of pure capitalism imagined by libertarians, but fascism. Public policy in China is geared toward productivity for the nation as a whole. By supplying free education and health care, it is able to provide highly educated and healthy citizens for every kind of enterprise, public or private. There is no contradiction between this kind of socialism and industrial capitalism. On the contrary, it is the highest development and perfection of industrial capitalism. it is opposed by a ruling class of financiers who have accumulated vast wealth over five hundred years of colonialism who are doing everything to hold onto their absolute power in a world where colonialism has become impossible.