• @HaSch@lemmygrad.ml
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    2 years ago

    Of course, while the US government has trouble thinking beyond the midterms, China’s Five-Year-Plans aren’t even the longest measurement. Every Five-Year-Plan in China is embedded into the larger temporal framework of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, which has goals for 2021 (moderately prosperous society in all respects) and 2049 (modern socialist society in all respects). These long-term goals are already formulated as concrete and numerical economic or ecological metrics, around which the individual Five-Year-Plans are then built.

    I wonder, however, what China is going to do once the 2049 goal is achieved. I hope the orderly dismantling of the global neoliberal order is somewhere on the list, perhaps along with the establishment of a United Federation of Planets sometime down the road.

    One thing is for certain, someone who plans this far into the future is not a big fan of games of chance like wars, what with the interruptions they bring. A society following along and producing according to such a long-term plan is hardly susceptible to Faustian bargains with the military industries akin to the Western military-industrial complex, because weapons are then viewed as a liability rather than an asset, namely in terms of the externality of what could have been produced instead. A nation with even a partially planned economy is one fewer to worry about.

  • Drstrange2love
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    52 years ago

    Ironically, the most profitable business domestically in the US, uses the 5-year plan to show how efficient it is