So, what's wrong with communism?

Great Debates
61

Cosmin:

Simply having a debate about Communism and Capitalism eold not lead to jail in the US.

oldscratch:

During a revolution, Communists will of course support free speech, since they’re fighting against the establishment. But once the Communists become the establishment, suddenly free speech isn’t as valuable.

Under Communism, you could go out and yell anti-Communist propaganda without fear of retribution? I don’t think so!

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But, I don’t have access to the means of production; I don’t have access to the television or radio. Under Communism, since workers control the means of production, workers have much more access to free speech.
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No, the workers don’t have more access to free speech; the government does.

In Capitalism, everyone is paid their worth. That is not theft.

I never said that a government that steals from its citizens can’t exist; I said it wouldn’t be legitimate.

No, in Communist fantasies the workers control the means of production. In reality, whoever manages to seize control of the government controls the means of production.

Citizens produce capital, don’t they? How can they not be means of production?

Not in your original response.

Sure the middle class wouldn’t be exactly the same, but that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t exist at all.

Ah, yes the “Well, I don’t have an argument, but I still want you to waste time reading books by other people” ploy. Sorry, if you have something to say, say it.

So the USSR isn’t Communist?

Yes, but under Capitalism you have the right to pay for your own cure, to pay for a better place.

If that were a legitimate treaty, then why did Russia ignore it once Germany was defeated?

No, there’s a very big difference in trying to keep a group from establishing a government, and attacking that government once it has been established.

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oldscratch:

Communism is the inevitable result of Capitalism? CAn you name a Capitalist country that went to Communism?

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OK then, oldscratch answer my questions. Understanding that you don’t think the Soviet Union practiced “true” Communism, what would be the incentives to perform in a “true” Communist system?

Why should I work harder? I won’t get paid any extra. Why should I knock myself out to invent a widget? I can’t expect any profit from it.

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I can see the theoretical feasibility of a small-scale communal society (although research done more recently than Engels suggests that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were not as communist as is popularly imagined). It would require complete dedication to communal principles, and would still require some sort of enforcement mechanism to prevent people from shirking. (You can’t just posit that people wouldn’t shirk because they’re so dedicated. Eventually somebody would notice that they could get by with doing less, and that will certainly create problems for your society that must be solved if it’s going to work.)

But beyond a certain scale (in either population size or technological complexity), I don’t see how a communist society sustains itself. Maybe this is just a function of my relative ignorance of Marxist economics, but how does development continue after the communist revolution? Okay, the workers overthrow the capitalists, and now owns the means of production. But who decides to build new means of production? Who decides if a new factory is needed, where it gets put, and which workers work there? I find it difficult to imagine such decisions being made through a bottom-up method, where worker councils get together and decide all of this. Assuming that they do, you still have the information problems pointed out by many posters – a market method is still much more efficient.

This leads to a second problem – competition with other societies. Say you have capitalism and communism existing side by side. Given the different efficiences, it isn’t that long before the capitalist society becomes more advanced than its communist neighbor, with a higher average standard of living (although with much higher variance). The citizens of a communist nation must be pretty disciplined to maintain their way of life in the face of other opportunities elsewhere – at least some of them will want to give capitalism a try. And either the communist society adapts, or the people leave – or the state keeps the people there, and it continues to fall behind.

Similarly, the capitalist system faces a challenge from the communist system. If workers are unhappy about the great difference in outcomes possible in a capitalist system, they might desire the security of a communist system. And they can either pressure the capitalist system to adapt, or they can leave, or the state can keep them here and face an ever-more resentful populace.

Pure capitalism doesn’t exist, because we’ve chosen the first path – modifications to capitalism to smooth some of its rough edges. That works because capitalism is flexible, and in tune with our self-interest. Because it fits our nature so well, small changes can keep the system running. Pure communism doesn’t exist, because it conflicts with our nature – and all attempts to enforce it have led to ruin.

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OK. I’m going to attempt to clarify as many misunderstandings and answer as many questions as I can. I’m not going to bother with trivial nitpicking. First I would recommend everyone read up on “The Communist Manifesto” you can find countless free versions online, and it’s quite short. There really is no excuse for not reading it if you are going to be debating Communism. There are a number of other works that I would like to suggest and would be quite useful, however they tend to be longer and not as easily available. For a good site of current new go to http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/ or to http://www.internationalsocialist.org/sw.html

**

Good question. First some background. This applies to the argument that you can’t apply Communism “top down”. If I take people as they are and change the Government to Communist (as they did in Cuba) everyone stays the same. Communism has to come from people themselves, the vast majority of people have to be behind it.
Someone else posted that Communism goes against human nature, I’ll address that more later, but for now I’ll say this. Human nature is a very flexible thing. Those who have an interest in defending the status quo have always brought up Human nature. It was said that democracy couldn’t work because human nature wanted a strong monarch. Human nature is not some biblical law set in stone, it is determined by your environment. People raised in different environments will have very different “Human Natures”. Before agriculture, people lived in primitive communist societies, there was no leader, and no one was better than anyone else. People shared everything for the good of the tribe. It has been established that people lived like this once, therefore there is nothing stopping it from happening again.
So we’ve just had a successful communist revolution, the way you view yourself and the world has been completely turned upside down. All of a sudden you realize that you can work in cooperation with those around you to create a better world. Great. It’s known that people aren’t inherently lazy. People enjoy working. Look at the effort people put into Gardening, art, learning to sail or hiking. Look at people who work crappy jobs that don’t pay well, why? Cause they care about people. The means of production are such now that we could have everyone employed working significantly less hours. If your workweek were reduced you could spend much more time on things you enjoyed. This in turn would make you feel better about the work you were doing. Your actual work, you would have control over. Why wouldn’t you want to do a good job on it? Everyone will profit from you creating a new widget that makes work easier. Everyone works fewer hours etc. Hope that answers your question.

Communist societies cannot exist alongside capitalism. That would require competition and the communist society would eventually sink into exploitation of the workers and state capitalism, as happened in Russia.

What actually happens is the people in the Capitalist country revolt and set up their own communist regimes. For good histories on this read anything by Trotsky or Victor Serge.

Again this a falsehood perpetrated by anyone interested in keeping the status quo. It’s to use a mild term, absolute bullshit. Attempts to enforce communism against the wishes of people would and do lead to ruin, I agree with you there. That’s what’s happening in Cuba.

**
You’re trying to be clever again. As I said earlier, no country has successfully existed as a Communist country. I can point out many countries that had communist revolutions, or where people turned to communism to try and create positive changes.
In regards to your other comments, you are nitpicking. They are all disprovable, but I don’t feel like investing the time in being petty. Go read a couple of books on economics and the Russian Revolution. Leon Trotsky’s is pretty good.

**

Yes it could work but, not on a small scale. Communism needs a revolution to work.

You are wrong. True, no government that currently calls itself Communist is controlled by workers. Also no communist government controlled by the workers was able to survive. They have existed though.

A system like that can never survive in the long run. Luckily that is not what communism is about.

No, you had Capitalist governments explicitly stating that they wanted to destroy Communists and taking action on it. I like how you can turn an invasion of a foreign country into an implication that maybe we want to overthrow it. Nothing really seems implied by an invasion.

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Capitalism destroys initiative. Most people in society a

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In reply to just some of what you said, Oldscratch, you point out that pre-agricultural societies were communist, and the coming of agriculture changed all that.

First, I think you overstate the case for pre-agricultural communism. But, assuming it were true, why did every society that wanted to do something more complex than hunting and gathering choose to move away from communism? We’re talking about every society, everywhere on Earth, choosing some means of social organization other than communism.

I would argue that this indicates that communism is unworkable, because cultural natural selection (more successful cultures defeat/absorb less successful cultures, or less successful cultures adopt features of the more successful cultures) has eliminated communism as a viable means of running a complex society. Your response is that sure, because there’s competition. Communism would be the perfect society if only everyone, everywhere adopted it at once. If that is going to be your standard for communism, then I don’t even see the point of being a communist, because the revolution you require depends on everyone being sick of the status quo, and you yourself admit that some people will never give that up.

Let me rephrase that:

  1. Communism and capitalism can’t exist in competition; competition between the two causes the evils associated with communism, and in the long run communism will fail

  2. Therefore, communism requires worldwide revolution.

  3. But, some people will be worse off under communism, and thus will try to maintain a capitalist system

  4. The presence of these capitalists will undermine communism, as seen in point 1.

Unless, of course, you liquidate the capitalists who stand in the way of revolution, and all others who try to buck the system, which gets you back to the evils of communism as we’ve seen it practiced so far. So, I find your “true” communism to be so unworkable as to be almost an impossibility.

I’ll also have more to say on what I meant by “human nature” on Monday, unless someone else here has read “Non-Zero” by Robert Wright and wants to summarize some evolutionary biology here.

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**

We can argue that at some other point. I’m game.

**

You are right. For a good explanation of why they moved away from Hunting and Gathering I would recommend a book called Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. It’s a very readable mainstream book that talks about the development of agriculture and also manages to punch wholes in many racist untruths about history. That doesn’t have too much to do with our debate though, it’s just a really good background book. What it does talk about however is how people moved from Hunting/gathering to Agriculture. Changes in human society don’t randomly happen; there has been a definite historical progression throughout the ages. At the time of primitive communism it would have been unworkable for a society to advance. They had to move to a kind of despotism. You had to have a division of labor to advance. The means of production was so primitive that it would not have worked to have everyone dealing with the same job. You had to have some people work on art, some on craft, some on digging holes. Now, with the amount of technology we have, it is no longer necessary. You can once again have everyone involved in the Government process. I hope this adequately explains it.
The shift to Despotism, from a historical sense was a good thing. The shift from Feudalism to Capitalism was a good thing; it was a progressive change. Like Feudalism, Capitalism has become regressive; it is no longer necessary for the advancement of our species. The next step is Communism.
Communism will now eliminate Capitalism.

**
Yes everyone has to adopt it at once. But, by “at once” I mean within the period of a decade or two, not instantaneously. It took centuries for Capitalism to take over.
It doesn’t depend on everyone, just the majority. The majority of people are sick of the status quo, they just don’t realize they can change it.

**

There were people who opposed the American revolutionary war too. That didn’t stop the founding fathers. Yes people, I am talking about revolution. Yes I am talking about violence. However, I am talking about the violence of the majority against the minority. This is opposed to the violence of the minority against the majority that occurs every single day under capitalism.

**

Till Monday then. It has been enjoyable debating you. I’m glad we have been able to keep this on a reasonable level.

history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce - Karl Marx

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OK, but when Japanese cars got more popular here, the car companies started building factories here. Why, because waste costs money. It is to the benefit of the car companies to eliminate waste. Under capitalism, eliminating waste will save someone money, so it is favored. In order to compete with cars that were made in the U.S., the Japanese car companies had to cut out waste elsewhere in the production.

A large military isn’t a necessity of capitalism. It happens because the world is divided into a number of different countries, some of which have a tendency to attack others. If the entire world was under capitalism, there would be much less need for militaries.

Where did this assertion come from? And when has a capitalist country ever had an economic collapse?

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” - Adam Smith

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Wow… oldscratch really seems to know what he’s talking about :slight_smile:

“Two hands working do more than a thousand clasped in prayer”

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Actually, oldscratch doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about. He clearly doesn’t understand capitalist economy or the real advantages of advertising and competition. He sounds like someone who took a university course in Marxism and swallowed it hook, line and sinker, and therefore never bothered to learn about the alternatives.

I have yet to see a single comment on my message describing why communism will not work in theory, in practice, or in any other way, simply because of the fundamental limits of information theory. It has nothing to do with how unified the people are, how willing they are to sacrifice, or anything else. It’s a simple matter of information transmission through an incredibly complex economy, which makes it impossible for centralized control to function efficiently.

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From my post on page one of this thread:

This point is the focus of the 1950s debates in economics between the Austrian School and those in favour of “market socialism”.

picmr

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**
Sure, Capitalism will cut down on certain kinds of waste. Every type of economy is against waste. Compared to a planned economy Capitalism is extremely wasteful. Under a planned economy they could have built factories here right off the bat. Competition is inherently wasteful. You accomplish a lot more when you have two people working towards a common goal, rather than having two people compete.

**

A military is a necessity of Capitalism. The United States, the largest capitalist country, has the biggest military. Do you think this is chance? The U.S. has frequently sent its army in to defend its economic interests. What about other countries that bicker over resources? The idea that some countries “just have a tendency to attack others” is laughable. Most conflicts in the past two centuries have been between capitalist countries, capitalist countries fighting over resources. War is a natural extension of capitalist competition. Also, the military has frequently saved capitalism. The only thing that got the US out of the Great Depression was World War 2. The vast amounts of money that went into our military helped decrease employment. The depression didn’t end until after the war started. Additionally the huge amounts of military spending that occurred through out the cold war propped up our economy. Under socialism there would be no need for militaries. You’ve got it backwards there.

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This assertion comes from economic facts. Capitalist countries that have had an economic collapse; the US, Germany, South Korea, Russia, Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, Portugal, dozens of other countries around the world.

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Do tell. What is the real advantage of advertising? I’m interested in finding out.

**

Actually, I didn’t comment on this because you made several assertions with no proof. You state that a Central government would decide to make more pencils but not harvest more wood? Why not? Are they a government of idiots? You claim that centralization doesn’t work. What about the large degree of centralization that occurs in corporations and governments today? Also your explanation of a Capitalist economy is dead wrong. When you can describe an actual working economic model I’ll respond to your comments. Capitalist systems are most definitely not stable and efficient. They are cursed with Booms and slumps, periodic depressions, large scale unemployment even during booms, and so on. You state that the hallmark of every Communist country is and alternating glut and shortage of product? That is a feature of the Capitalist system, a good example is oil. Look at the rising and falling availability of oil, and the rising and falling price of it. Sometime in the next day or so, I will post an explanation of how a capitalist economy actually works. Feel free to comment on anything I post that you feel is inaccurate.

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Communism will waste just as much in planning and enforcing its economy. Plus, there is no incentive to cut down on waste. First you have to get the people who are best qualified to decide how to plan the worldwide production of cars to do that. Otherwise, you have worldwide car production run by people who don’t know how to eliminate the waste from the system.

OK, so you’ve got car factories spread perfectly around the world to minimize the waste of transporting the cars. Now, does each factory make the cars everyone wants, or do you have an SUV factory in Bilivia, a subcompact factory in Paraguay, etc.? Are we all forced to drive similar cars, rather than producing waste. In case you hadn’t noticed, not everyone has the same taste in cars. Personally I’d like a Mazda Miata. Someone looking for something very similar in a car might want instead go for a Honda Civic Del Sol. But having a society that produces both would be wasteful. Give me capitalism any day

A military is a necessity of national sovereignty. The fact that the U.S. has occasionally used military might to enforce its economic interests does not make it a principle of capitalism. Yeah, countries bicker over resources. The principles of lassiez-faire capitalism are against the government doing this.

Nazi Germany, North Vietnam, Iraq, North Korea, Imperial Japan, and the Serb Republic were not Capitalist countries. WWII started when Germany and the USSR decided to take over Poland and split it up. When military might is used for economic ends it is NOT Capitalism.

War is a huge waste of a country’s resources. Especially people. While WWII may have provided an influx of money into the economy, it was not a necessity for ending the Depression. Capitalism often involves cyclic economic behavior. The only way to get around having militaries is to have a single government. In which case, you will just need a massive internal police force. Unless you think that criminal activity would disappear in a Socialist society as well.

The US economy has never collapsed. Russia was never a capitalist country, and Germany only has been since WWII. If you try to use these as examples, I’ll start using the USSR and Cuba as examples of Communist countries. The others I’m less sure about, although I don’t seem to recall Mexico ever having a terribly free economy. I’ll grant you that Albania didn’t do too well after becoming a capitalist country, but that was due to the fact that the country didn’t adequately protect its citizens from fraud.

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” - Adam Smith

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Compared to an ideal planned economy, sure. But an ideally planned economy would require an enormous amount of information which would then have to satisfactorily processed and turned into plans for people to follow.

The point is that the information required is large in volume and not accessable by the planners; complex beyond belief to calculate; and it is pretty difficult to get fallible, selfish people to adhere to them. This is before we even ask whether you can get trustworthy people to do the planning.

If you want to say that people would happily provide the required information and behave as asked when there was no material incentive to so do and that planners and public alike would somehow become very cooperative, fine: but you have assumed all the problems society faces away.

It is easy to look at capitalism and note its enormous failings, but it is crucial to ask the question “compared to what?”. Then try and answer without assuming away the problems.

picmr

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First sorry I didn’t respond earlier. I wrote a response, it got erased and I had to start over. DOH! I guess I won’t be in charge of the future Communist society. :wink:

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Not sure what you mean about wasting as much in planning and enforcing the economy. Why is there no incentive to cut down on waste? Could you elaborate? You don’t offer any evidence for your statements.

**

Two points here. One, under Communism decisions are made by the workers. I don’t know what they’ll decide. It’s up to them. Secondly, most people don’t have any choice in the car they get, they don’t have enough money. Having everyone have the option for a car would be much better than what we have now. Give me Communism any day.

**

Sorry to burst your bubble. In a capitalist society, competition over resources will eventually lead to armed conflict. The principles of lassiez-faire capitalism might be against it but it is an inevitable feature of capitalism. Capitalism is baised on competition; the highest form of competition is war. I think that the fact that the U.S. has frequently used the military shows perfectly why war is a feature of Capitalism.

**

Here is the definition of Capitalism : an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market
The definition of Communism I’m using is a state controlled by the working class in case anyone forgot.
Those countries are most definitely capitalist. Using the military to defend economic interests is a natural outgrowth of Capitalism. North Korea and North Vietnam were state Capitalist. Germany was Fascist. They all operated under the principles of capitalism. For your information WW2 started due to the pressures of the various imperialist governments in Europe. There was competition over resources and they were bickering over the best way to divide them up. Italy wanted more land in North Africa to expand, so did Britain, etc. etc.

**

War is a huge waste of a country’s resources. It is not that WW2 put more money into the economy, it allowed us to “vent off steam” as it were. People were put into jobs where they produced, essentially waste, they could keep producing and producing product and never have to worry about there not being a market for it. Under capitalism you can only produce so much as the market will bear, as we were in the middle of a depression there wasn’t a market for many goods. Putting people into the arms industry meant you didn’t have to worry about it, plus they received money and created a market for more goods, which increased employment in other sectors. Rather ingenious really.
Yes I do believe that criminal activity will disappear in a Socialist society. Crime is caused by poverty, eliminate poverty, and eliminate crime. (This was an oversimplification, but I don’t have time to go into all aspects right now.)

**

What do you call the Great Depression silly? Russia’s economy has collapsed several times recently under the free market. What do you call the Weimar republic? Socialist? Nazi? Read up on your facts. Mexico is a capitalist country, if you want to dispute that; you are in a tiny minority. As for Albania not protecting it’s citizens from fraud, if it had that would have gone against your principles of laissez-faire capitalism.
No you can’t say that the USSR and Cuba are communist, they didn’t have workers control. Feel free to call them State Capitalist dictatorships.

And to picmr. You have raised some good objections. I will respond tomorrow, lest you think I overlooked or forgot about your recent message.

Until next time Comrades :slight_smile:

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Oldscratch asks:

Information transfer, both ways. It allows the producers of goods go inform purchasers of their products, thus allowing purchasers to make better decisions. But just as importantly, it provides feedback to the advertiser as to what consumers desire. If Nike puts out solid-gold aglets for their running shoes, they’ll find out soon enough if the marketplace favors them, by judging response to their ads. This two-way mass communication system allows producers to fine-tune their products.

On Information transmission:

I deliberately chose a simplified example to make the concept clear. Okay, let’s say they increase the production of wood. Do they increase the manufacture of metal, to account for the extra machinery? Do they step up production in wood-making machinery factories? If so, where do those new resources come from? They have to scale back production on something else to free up the resources. So now there’s a shortage of something else. In the meantime, it turns out that wood-making machines require garnet blades, and the central planners, not being experts in arboreal manufacturing techniques, did not know this. By the time that information gets to them, there are already thousands of people standing around uselessly in machine factories waiting for Garnet. So we allocate more garnet to them, but now that causes sandpaper shortages, and housing construction in Moscow falls behind. This causes an increased demand for existing housing, so people are forced to live together. But having twice as many people in an apartment building overstresses the sewage system, so now we need more plumbers. But the government never figured that increasing production of pencils could require an increase in plumbers, so there’s a shortage. The government finally figures this out, so they force more people into plumbing, which causes fewer people to continue their education. So now there isn’t as much demand for pencils, and all those pencils that started this whole thing sit in a warehouse unused.

Get the point? After only a couple of levels of cascading interactions, the permutations of a central command become computationally intractable. It’s not that the people running the country are stupid, it’s that there is NO WAY to determine beforehand exactly what result a command decision will have. Think about chaos and the butterfly effect, and you have a good analogy.

I didn’t say it wouldn’t work - I said it is less efficient. And that’s true of our government and large corporations. But even the largest corporation doesn’t come within orders of magnitude of the complexity of even a medium-sized central economy, primarily because large businesses are generally focused on a specific area of expertise. The large companies that are diverse, like GM or GE, have voluntarily split themselves into business units with a large amount of autonomy, precisely for the reason of managing complexity.

They are not perfectly stable and efficient - they are MORE stable and efficient than the alternatives. Those cursed booms and slumps are part of the natural corrective cycles that maintain long-term stability. As for ‘large scale unemployment’, I don’t consider 4% unemployment to be ‘large scale’ especially since it tends to be transitory in nature (i.e. the 4% unemployed today are not the same 4% unemployed next month).

Those rising and falling prices are the exact mechanism which transmits information about the relative scarcity of oil, and are necessary for efficient use of it. If you fixed the price of oil by fiat, you would have a glut of it when supply is high, and a shortage of it when supply is low. In the meantime, when supplies are low you would not have incentive to search for new supplies, and when supplies are high you would not have an incentive to scale back production. The capitalist system of changing prices IS stable. A ‘controlled’ price of oil will lead to wild instability in supply. In fact, this is what has always happened when the government has tried to control either supply or price of a product.

[/QUOTE]

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Could you explain again what makes a factory worker in Moscow an expert in the transportation needs of fishermen in Minsk? Exactly how are the workers supposed to micromanage this economy?

Let’s say that there is an increased need for trucks in Siberia due to construction of a new power plant. How do I, the people’s representative for the Siberian plant, communicate my needs to workers in Moscow? And how do they know that my needs are more important than the needs of the farmer’s co-op in the Ukraine which wants the same trucks? How are these workers in Moscow supposed to make the most efficient decision, when they don’t understand technical requirements of power plants or farms?

So there’s something magical about Communism which will provide a car to everyone? What if the economy isn’t strong enough to support that? Who decides who gets one and who doesn’t? Who decides what the tradeoff should be between production volume of cars and say, environmental controls? Which person in the car factory makes the evaluation that the amount of river effluent coming from the factory is acceptable to the people in the Farmer’s co-op down the river who have to drink it? If the co-op owners don’t agree, who settles the dispute?

It’s really easy to defend Communism if you give it magical powers. The root of all economies, both Communist and Capitalist, is the management of scarcity. Not everyone can have everything they want. The trick is to figure out how to balance desires with reality. Communism is a total, utter failure at this. For the reasons mentioned above, every attempt to implement it has led to oppression and human misery.

Even the Russians and Chinese have figured this out. The only place Communism has a home any more is among certain ‘intellectuals’ in the freest country on Earth. How ironic.

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One minor point:

The U.S. does not have the largest army in the world. That honor goes to China. The old Soviet Union also had a larger army than the U.S. In terms of manpower, and percentage of GEP.

Second, it seems that many of the pro-commmunist people in this thread discount the failures of communism by claiming that the countries practicing communism weren’t “really communist.” That’s Convenient.

Also
Stalin: At least 20 million killed
Mao: At least 50 million killed
Pol Pot: Approximately 2 million killed, 1/3 of Cambodia’s population

Oh wait, these weren’t “really” communist. Perhaps someone will come up with an example of a functioning “real” communist government.

Sure, Capitalism has its problems. Sure you might argue that more government intervention in the economy might be a good thing, contrasting, say, Denmark with the U.S. These are arguable positions. But full blown utopian Communism has shown time and time again that it leads to suffering and death on an unbelievable scale.

Perked Ears indicate curiosity - Know Your Cat

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Defense spending 1997 - US$ billion - (Percentage of GDP)

U.S.A - 267.18 - (3.4%)
China - 9.80 - (1.1%)

(Official figures from each nation)

Active Military Manpower - (Percentage of Population)

U.S.A - 1,500,000 - (0.5%)
China - 2,500,000 - (0.2%)

(Estimate, shouldn’t be off by more than 10-15%)