Food safety scandal rocks China as report claims cooking oil carried in same trucks as fuel
Public outrage is mounting in China over allegations that a major state-owned food company has been cutting costs by using the same tankers to carry fuel and cooking oil – without cleaning them in between.
The scandal, which implicates China’s largest grain storage and transport company Sinograin, and private conglomerate Hopefull Grain and Oil Group, has raised concerns of food contamination in a country rocked in recent decades by a string of food and drug safety scares – and evoked harsh criticism from Chinese state media.
It was an “open secret” in the transport industry that the tankers were doing double duty, according to a report in the state-linked outlet Beijing News last week, which alleged that trucks carrying certain fuel or chemical liquids were also used to transport edible liquids such as cooking oil, syrup and soybean oil, without proper cleaning procedures.
And how do billionaires fit into that model?
In their willingness to faithfully implement the central economic plan, just like every other economic participant.
"Capitalism is when people have different amounts of money" is definitely a take, though.
Please do show me where in Captial or the Manifesto Marx approves of the existence of private owners of corporations to get extremely rich. You can just quote a passage or two. I don't remember any of that from when I read them, but perhaps you can fill me in on how the workers are controlling his means of production.
You might as well be talking to a wall. There's no way in hell you're going to change a tankie's mind... I live in China and everybody here knows it's a capitalist society. The five year plans exist mostly on paper. The government will implement it in the sense of making specific grants available for specific target industries.
As a result you'll have a ton of startups in that field popping up, and then slowly burning through the funds over the next 4 years, rinse & repeat. A few companies make it, most just take the cash and die.
They also change the plans often enough, in reaction to the markets. You know, just like any capitalist regime would.
Oh I know, I just like watching them twist themselves into pretzels trying to make these silly claims.
China is an interesting model.
Not explicitly, but implicitly it’s in the link from SSJMarx.
Marx from the “German Ideology:”
And Engels from the “Principles of Communism:”
You do know they wrote those passages in the 1800s, right?
So how long, exactly, was it supposed to take to eliminate the multi-billionaires that didn't exist yet and didn't even exist in China until relatively recently?
It takes as long as it takes. There is no timetable for social change.
Got it. As long as China eliminates the multi-billionaires and private companies within the next three billion years, it will not be a capitalist country.
Unironically, yes. It’s the INTENTION that matters. Are they striving for communism, or is it just lip service? Only by their actions can we tell.
Ah yes, good intentions. I seem to remember something about a road being associated with those.
As opposed to the flooded dirt road western capitalism is leading us.
...and we've come to whataboutism.
And apparently the two options, according to what you are arguing, are be capitalists or fail at doing something else but have good intentions and then be capitalists anyway.
I’m sure the fascism that’s coming will sharpen these distinctions, rendering this entire debate irrelevant.
Anyway, my wife’s friend is in hospice with brain cancer so I need to visit her. I’ll ask her which political economy is best? /s
You're doing an argument from emotion followed by whataboutism. Any other fallacies you'd like to try out?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm
Am I supposed to read the whole thing to find the defense of the billionaires that didn't exist when he wrote that or do you feel like quoting me a relevant passage rather than make me waste my time to see something that isn't there?
Not just that chapter, either. You should read the whole book.
In other words, you can't quote the relevant passage where an ever-increasing number of billionaires who control the means of production is a feature of communism.
The accumulation of labor power through central management of the capital stock isn't something you're going to understand or accept as a single sentence.
You want this to be like the Bible, where you can just quote John 3:16 and nod sagely, as though it should be revealed wisdom.
But the material is more complex than a bronze age scripture verse.
That said, capital accommodation is one stage of economic development. This is the chapter which covers the process of economic development. At some point, you do need a handful of central administrators to oversee productive use of capital. And these administrators will become rich as a result.
Marxism doesn't refute this process, it leverages the process towards Socialist accumulation.
I'm pretty sure, based on the Marx I have read, that a pillar of Marxism and communism is that the workers control the means of production, but you have taught me that what is meant by "the workers control the means of production" is "one multibillionaire controls the means of production for tens of thousands of workers." So thank you, I had no idea that all this time, the U.S. was a communist country too.
Through workers councils and vanguard parties that govern the country.
That doesn't preclude any one person from accumulating more currency than another.
He doesn't control it. He administers it on behalf of the workers' state.
If you read the whole book, rather than panicking at being handed a single chapter, you'll know more
Now that's just nonsense:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhong_Shanshan
He literally earned $5 billion in one day and became the sixth-richest person in the world because his company became publicly traded.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210115223106/https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferwang/2021/01/05/chinas-bottled-water-mogul-gains-5-billion-in-one-day-becomes-worlds-sixth-richest-person/?sh=7872f8b6792d
Entrepreneurship and buying and selling stocks, publicly traded companies... Things China didn't have for decades back when it was apparently less communist (who knew Mao was so non-communist), but which the U.S. also has now.
Once again, sure sounds like the U.S. is just as communist as China.
But hey, I'm sure the fewer than 300 billionaires in China with their over $4 trillion in wealth back in 2020 have distributed it all to the workers now, right?
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/20/chinas-billionaires-see-biggest-gains-ever-fueled-by-ipos.html
Or is hoarding wealth also a big part of what makes a country a communist one?
That's how strong federal governmental systems work.
He didn't earn anything. He benefited from a sudden upward swing in speculative asset prices.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch25.htm
PLEASE READ MARX
I've read Capital and the Communist Manifesto, which is why I know that billionaires who hoard money and own controlling interests in publicly traded corporations is a feature of capitalism, and also why I know that China didn't used to have such things.
But to hear you and others tell it, China was more capitalist under Mao than it is today.