"Getting things done" under communism

We've heard that communism gets things done: hospitals built in a week, entire cities waiting to be populated, mass renewable energy, millions relocated for the Three Gorges Dam, and a multinational infrastructure vision for the East. During China's earlier communist revolutions, these projects were tailored toward visualizing Mao's "revolution in the social system," "change from private to public ownership," and, importantly, "the change from handicraft to large-scale modern machine production" (Little Red Book). That sort of vision is not just appreciation for large engineering, but a deeper intention to set out a path for a whole nation and command the whole of its resources. Westerners bought into that picture on climate change long before coronavirus. Moving fast and big from the top-down now seems the only alternative to a Western world marred in tribalism, complacency, and economic stagnation. For all the talk of disruptive technology and artificial intelligence, ironically the West is more lethargic than ever.

So we wrote a new narrative - 'if only we had one Party that knows the Right Thing To Do, we'd have our action soon.' Naomi Klein is one example who has embodied this narrative for many years leading up to her 2014 book, This Changes Everything, which trashed free-market ideologues for climate change gaslighting. The Green New Deal and Professor Mark Jacobson's global mineral calculations for renewable energy are two other examples. In my experience these are common talking points among green activists, green industry circles, and university environmental departments.

Lockdowns are the new quick action - all-the-rage in the East and West alike. Top-down police powers will handle the mask-less miscreants so that everyone else can selflessly wait this out "for the good of society as a whole." Bottom-up capitalistic approaches of open dissent, work from home, delivery food, and medical production are occurring but also are harmed by regulations throughout the economy. The top-down and the bottom-up direction of society are the current incarnations of communism and capitalism. This created the pretext for Lockdowns to sweep the world.

For every quick action by communists, there are costs both human and financial. Often the new cities weren't needed and may never be populated. Up to 30% of China's renewable energy is dumped because the supply-demand timing doesn't match. Forced resettlement programs sent villagers to live in swamps. When Chinese Communist Party achieved total control of the economy during the Great Leap Forward, production was devastated and food supplies collapsed. Here is another piece we might feel we see today: hospitals going bankrupt in the middle of a pandemic, the most unemployment claims in history, and unprecedented monetary policies like negative interest rates. This is the new 'getting things done.'

The Wuhan Lockdown leaves less room for any disconnect between the intentions and consequences. 'Getting things done' is the razor wire and guards at your front door. It's the drone descending on your afternoon walk commanding you to go home. It's the medical regulator disappearing doctors and China's red-yellow-green contact tracing app. In Spain and the U.S., we were always let our for "essential" walks - though not in France. Yet we faced empty shelves, the CDC banning private efforts on coronavirus tests, and governors calculating the so-called "medical capacity" so they could demand everyone surrender their ventilators.

We've dabbled in the reasoning of "communism getting things done" for too long. China is neither a climate change leader nor a coronavirus response leader. Communism doesn't "get things done." For China, communism is about enforcing a social design that's obsessed with only two things: the power of the Party and income growth. What communism truly gets done in China is obscure all truth and establish corruption as a fundamental pillar. You end up having to go to the Party for everything, which is the whole idea.