It’s a joke
Tell us comrade, what think you of Burma/Mynamar?
Tell us Commissar, how do you feel about being pruned yourself?
Say, has anyone seen Skald the Rhymer lately? Just wonderin’. No special reason.
It is a whoosh. Totally a fraud.
No person that has ever actually visited a “communist” country.
The only success that communism can point to is countries the have adopted capitalism. Cuba and North Korea are a wreck both socially and economically while China an Vietnam are prospering due to their capitalistic initiatives. Read: Vietnam Now by David Lamb. I’ve been to Vietnam 3 times and his book is right on. While you are at it, read “This is Cuba”.
Don’t feed the trolls!
I mover here with my parents following the collapse of the Soviet Union. They were afraid that their job security was in jeopardy (this later turned out to not be the case), and received an attractive temporary employment offer from a respected research university.
I choose not to answer the immigration questions, except to say that no, I am not here illegally.
My mother is apolitical, with socialist leanings but no particular political stances. My father, when he was alive, was a liberal socialist, believing in a Scandinavian-style multi-party welfare state. We had great political debates with him; I miss him a lot. 
I have not yet been to China, though I am planning to do so in the coming year or two. I feel that teaching languages is beneath my level of education, to be honest.
Why do I live here? I suppose because of family commitments, mostly, but also because I have not yet discovered the proper way out. I would love to immigrate to China, but that hardly seems feasible at the moment. Neither my fiance nor I speak Mandarin and, as I said, I do not wish to teach languages.
Laos is poised to follow in Vietnam’s footsteps, embracing capitalism more and more. I was in Vientiane just last month, and there are many new little businesses springing up everywhere. A stock exchange in Vientiane is poised to open, mostly to support a quiet mining and hydropower boom, although I’m not sure an exact date has been set. Expected this year, though.
Tourism revenue is a bigger and bigger driver, especially in the old royal capital of Luang Prabang. You can even now cross overland to Vietnam down in the southern section of the country. The place is really starting to open up, thanks to capitalism, but the one-party system will remain in place for the foreseeable future.
What about it? Its GDP is far less that that of the PRC, so I must assume that you speak of its GDP per capita, which is, admittedly, higher than China’s.
Are you asking why this is? Easy. It is a small country that had the good fortune of having the West plow a lot of money into it following its break with the mainland. It intelligently invested this money in industry, and was able to capitalize on its central location by shipping a whole lot of finished products abroad. Unlike mainland China, it does not have isolated remote regions sucking up funding and bringing per capita GDP down.
Taiwan’s relative wealth does nothing to bolster your argument. Take another look at the per capita GDP tables:
You see all those African nations at the bottom? Yep, capitalist representative democracies. And yet they didn’t receive massive funding from the West, and here they are now… Taiwan is an outlier, not the rule.
Also, notice that Singapore, a fellow island Tiger, is higher in the rankings than Taiwan. And it is basically an authoritarian dictatorship. There goes your entire argument.
So move to the ever so wonderful North Korea.
I am neutral on Myanmar. The junta has done an acceptable job in governing the country, and has demonstrated admirable restraint in dealing with that one obnoxious troublemaker (I forget her name) and her retinue of mindless followers.
Unfortunately, it has not done enough to industrialize and modernize Myanmar. It really ought to form closer ties with the Chinese and try to emulate their model. Also bring in some civilians, turning the junta into a one-party state.
Whatever it does, the junta should NOT allow elections to be held. That is a disastrous course of actions, especially for a developing nation. Mob mentality is the enemy of human progress.
How very presumptious, classist and anti-social of you. You need to be re-educated. Off to Mao’s camps and Pot’s fields with you.
Funny that his level of education does not allow him to recall Aung San Suu Kyi’s name. Brain must be too chockful of other stuff.
But capitalism can’t have been all that bad for Russia, as more Russians are obviously wearing shoes, judging by the socks.
:eek:
It’s always been interesting to me that while communism’s strongest proponents tend to be intellectuals, one of the first groups to be killed off by newly formed communist regimes are the intellectuals.
Curious, that.
I’ve followed this thread out of interest to see where things are going, but I think I’m going to stop now. This is pretty much all I could bear, here.
You, sir, are no Communist, big or little ‘c’. Everything you hold up as a positive example of what your politics represent is a twisted, parodic sham of a genuine democratic worker’s society. Your father was on the right track in many respects as regards his views, whereas you’re so far off it you couldn’t hope to build a railroad back in the right direction under a thousand years of Stalinism.
Should the rest of the usual gang of opposition manage to frustrate you enough to drive you off the board (and given your complete lack of any sort of rigidity to your thought, I’m almost willing to bet on it), they have no reason to consider it a victory against Marxism, socialism, or communism - simply put, because what you’re arguing in support of ain’t it.
The combination of “People’s Republic” and “truly free” made me laugh out loud.
That’s the nice thing about this sort of nonsense – no two communists can agree with each other for long about what communism is. Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Juche, Left communism, Luxemburgism, Council communism · Titoism, Stalinism, Castroism, Guevarism, Hoxhaism, Anarchist communism and a raft of vacuous offshoot anarchisms, Religious communism, Christian communism, Eurocommunism, World communism, Stateless communism, National communism, War Communism. Each pathetic variant is convinced that it is the one true way, and is firm in its belief that it, and it alone, has the right to control entire populations through whatever violent means it choses.
Could you be more specific, my friend? What is it that makes you think that I am not a “true” Communist, whatever that term means to you? You quoted an excerpt in which I criticize popular elections - are you saying that true Communists would embrace them, instead? I think not.
What you see as weakness, I see as strength.
We Communists are heirs to a dynamic, complex philosophy that embraces change and progress. Naturally, many of us will differ in our opinions as to how our political/economic theory ought to evolve.
We are not a cult; we neither seek nor expect to create a single unified theory that can be applied to all nations everywhere. Your thinking is too rigid.
And at no point have I claimed that my theory “is the one true way.” It is simply a way, a potentiality in a sea of other options. I think that it happens to be a good option, but I am neither ignorant nor arrogant enough to claim that it is perfect. I am convinced that it will work better than what you Westerners are currently playing at, with your mob hysterias and your exploitative markets, but it will not be utopian. Not right away, anyway. There is always room for improvement.
And where have you seen me say such a thing in defense of my politics? Furthermore, it’s not like any other strain of political thought is free from such differences of opinion, is it? Should we say that Republicanism is a failed ideology because some of its adherents have had enough of the more extreme politics and have begun to strenuously disagree?
The fact that you hold up China as a model communist society, for one. Upthread I posted a link from 2003 in which I analyzed the Chinese Revolution and demonstrated that it had nothing to do with the working class taking power. In fact, the political structure of China closely matched (and still matches) the political structure of Stalin’s Soviet Union, which was pretty much entirely his creation. So on the one hand you justifiably execrate Stalin for his crimes, yet on the other you hold up a society based on his twisted political visions as an example of communism.
Explain, then, why the Bolsheviks ran for (and got elected to) the Tsarist Duma in the years before the October Revolution.