Aristocracy, communism, and Burma

Now that the pro-democracy movement in Burma has been crushed, again, and the country has once again disappeared from the news, here's a link to what Phil Paine said about the situation about two weeks ago: no hope for democratic reform in Burma or many other places while the forces of world aristocracy dominate the scene. Here's a sample, read the rest at Phil's site.

So what can a supporter of democracy learn from this disheartening spectacle of tyranny, treachery, and hypocrisy?

First of all, it should put to rest the nonsensical idea that transnational corporations are in any way opponents of, or hostile to communist dictatorships. They never have been, and never will be. The global aristocracy sees and understands that a communist dictatorship is a corporation. A communist party is an organization whose purpose is to capture a population and enslave it, so that its production can be sold on the global market, for the benefit of a controlling aristocratic elite. The people ruled by a communist regime are its cows and pigs, and global business is perfectly happy to see them slaughtered and turned into salable products. The Party leadership is the corporation's board of directors and major shareholders. The global aristocracy recognizes them as an oligarchy just like themselves. It will happily do business with them, provided they play by the rules, fulfill their contracts, and don’t randomly expropriate global investments. No communist dictatorship has ever lacked eager investment and co-operation from major corporations.

This is what communism, as an ideology, is all about. It's what Marx intended, and what it has been in practice, in every case, without exception. Once in power, the regime may chose to use terror and slave labour to extract resources, in a crude way, such as Mao, Lenin, and Stalin did. They murdered millions to create the maximum state of fear and submission, then set the survivors to digging in mines or harvesting soy beans or sugar cane, and sold the product on the global market. But a communist regime may also set up a more feudal arrangement, easing the reins, giving their captive population enough elbow room to produce more efficiently by personal enterprise, but always retaining the power to extract a lucrative percentage, and always maintaining the ultimate power to crush dissidence and control all transactions. It is this hold on central power that is the heart of the communist ideology, not some particular arrangement of management policy. If the regime choses the looser option, it is not any less communist, and it is not in any significant way changing its ideology. Much nonsense has been written about China “abandoning communism”. This is not even remotely the case. Anyone who is naively waiting for “democratic reforms” to blossom in the regime will wait for eternity. As long as the cash flows in abundance, from global corporate and state transactions, the communist aristocracy will never voluntarily relinquish their power. Why should they? What would make them? In fact, the Party in Beijing has made it perfectly plain that any movement toward democracy among the people of China will be swiftly and brutally crushed. This will not change.

Ever.