Re: Communism is the opium of Marxists like yourself, so keep smoking.
Well, I see that "communism" is a mere catchword to you... A meaningless, if evil, notion you sling at your opponents.
Let's just examine the basic tenets of Communism: production of goods and services are to be planned and initiated by the government/state, if necessary, over quinquennial spans... The corporations, enterprises, shopping malls/retailers, and professionals that must carry out the state-planned production(s) are not privately owned but belong to the citizenry as a whole... A by-product of such a centralized economy is that out-and-out competition and cutthroat rivalry between producers/firms are ruled out --which doesn't mean that healthy emulation is not happening between producers of similar goods/services...
Finally, at the political level, multipartism is forbidden on the basis that the only acceptable policy is the one that best furthers the country's overall/superior interests. But then again, it allows competing/diverging factions to vie with each other WITHIN the ideological ambit of the Party.
Sounds familiar? It should, because the above glib sketch of a Communist society actually fits (Y)OUR Capitalist world as well!
More and more economic sectors have been consolidated into oligopolies and monopolies through relentless waves of M&As in the 1980s and 1990s, to the point that competition has become an empty slogan. Be it the car industry, aircraft manufacturers (a Boeing/Airbus duopoly), retailing (Carrefour, Wal-Mart,...), the luxury biz (LVMH, Gucci, Ralf Lauren,...), the media (Time-Warner, Bertlesmann, Murdoch,...), the oil majors, etc., global multinationals are carving up their markets worldwide. The CEOs and Chairmen at the helms of these global "competitors" are not fighting each other to the death. Quite the contrary: they are regularly consulting each other, meeting at such posh venues as Davos, Bilderberg, and Boao...
Products that used to be rival offers by independent producers have been turned into mere brands of the same company. For instance, Volkswagen AG (Europe's #1 carmaker) owns VW, Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Skoda, Seat, Audi. Fiat Auto owns Fiat, Lancia, Alfa-Romeo, Ferrari, Maserati, IVECO,...
Now, what of the private ownership of these multinationals? Well, for all the capitalist propaganda about Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Rupert Murdoch, the overwhelming majority of large corporations somehow belong to... each other! The actual ownership of global banks, insurers, and large corporations is a maze of cross-participations, with the same people sitting on the boards of dozens of different companies...(*) The Japanese word for it is zaibatsu, the Korean is chaebol, the Belgian used to be "holding", former French PM Balladur coined the expression "noyau dur", etc. As for the privately-owned small- and medium-sized companies, some of them run by the same family for generations, what's their real "independence" when their lifeline depends on ONE or two big customers? They are mere corporate satellites of large monopsonies (including the state itself, the biggest customer for the construction sector, weapons manufacturers,...), they owed their "corporate independence" only to fiscal and/or labor rules that make it preferable for the larger company to outsource/farm out non-core activities to a retinue of "flexible" subcontractors...
As for the political analysis, we've all seen that most political disputes --especially in the US two-party system-- boil down to tweedledee and tweedledum... After all, that's why Kerry lost: on key issues such as the Iraq war and Iran, he proved no clear-cut alternative to Bush.
Hence my opinion that it's Western capitalism that is slowly but surely drifting towards Chinese corporate collectivism --not the other way around!!!
Gus
(*) I've dubbed it "technocratic property":
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