while we're on china, let me hit you with a bit of my amazing new take on political/economic taxonomy. i think we might say that the current chinese state combines the best features of maoism and corporate capitalism: it's all devoted to generating maximum cash and putting it on a barge. destination: the very top of the hierarchy. and yet it also attempts to bestride the earth, stomping that ass with the iron boot of collectivist totalitarianism. now, your basic taxonomy of political and economic systems or ideologies would regard this as an incoherent merger. your conventional political scientist is just going associate capitalism with john locke and adam smith and democracy: 'liberalism,' i suppose. (the political scientists on the far left do right at least to be seeing through this as partly a falsification.) on the other hand, if we socialists or whatever reject free enterprise and engage in grand redistribitivist schemes, then of course we're going to need a big, extremely powerful state. (then once you're done with the redistribution, the state either withers away, or deposits your entire country in theiir leaders' swiss accounts and absconds; i forget which.) so for a long time people (it even trickled down to bush etc) thought of the chinese system as combining opposed or contradictory elements. at a minimum, i'd say no one is so sure anymore.
we should think instead of the chinese state as a provisional culmination of both state socialism and corporate capitalism. in ideology, they are opposites. but we don't live in the textbook for your course on political ideologies. we live in a world where, from the outset, corporate capitalism completely depended on state power, and the basic practical thrust of left statism was annexation of the economy. the soviet union was a variety of monopoly capitalism. and the modern american state is a variety of state socialism. (but leftists are still trying to pit the state against the corporation, while rightists are still trying to pit the corporation against the state. this is all occurring only in their imaginations: pitting chase against the treasury department is a very odd concept and no you're not going to be pulling them apart later on, because resources always flow toward political power, and political power always flows toward resources (little crispy's big law).)
we're all headed in this direction together. it is the culmination/nadir of history! which isn't over, btw. but still i am its hegel, marx, and fukuyama. what gives me pause is how terribly mistaken they all were. and how laboriously they all wrote.
anyway, what went wrong in our thinking is that we believed the account these ideologies gave of themselves. but the scrim of philosophy, theory, ideology, the rhetorical flourishes that they laid on the reality were always thin on the ground. they were designed to rationalize or moralize what is really a single indefensible system, or to enhance the self-esteem of ideologues while pursuing the hard work of gathering up all the resources. the cold war disguised the fact that the systems were, in playing out their real essences, converging toward a situation in which state and economy are fully integrated and held in very few hands: a truly permanent, systemic, chronic, sclerotic hierarchy with the world's worst rhetoric. and then one of the meanings of 'globalization' and the various 'international mechanisms' that go with it, may be that it is a premonition of a world system of this variety, which is already emerging. (one name is 'technocracy.' i like to call it 'jurgen habermas'.) but there would be many barriers to overcome, from nationalism and tribalism to religious chauvinism and individualism/tribalism of the 'i/we dissent/withdraw/slack off/sabotage/hack' variety. (honestly i think history is, from our point of view, wildly contingent, and no one can know how such a thing comes out.)
this is also one of the reasons that the left/right spectrum is just not helping anyone toward understanding the phenomena, much less in deciding what positions to take. we should dissolve the left/right spectrum the way carnap dissolved metaphysics: it never meant anything; it was a kind of nonsense verse.
i don't know that squishy totalitarianism is really catching on as the name for the great synthesis at the end of history, or, as i like to think of it, the prelude to our richly-deserved extinction. but whatever you call it, i call it fun!
