In the old days, one could trust large companies, because their purpose was clear and transparent: make money.
Socialist companies have missions.
This puts us in an interesting situation where Chinese companies, ironically, are currently some of the most trustworthy.
Large companies in the free world have become socialist, having missions outside of making money. But, because they have to cater to the free world, they hide them, pretending to be simply trying to make money while attending to whatever the PR team says to say they are attending to. What their actual missions are, we can’t know.
Chinese companies are also socialist, but explicitly, under a socialist government. So, while they have missions, they are explicit about them. Making money is, for them, and explicitly, a necessity for pursuing those missions. Even when they hide things, because we know their ultimate missions and priorities, they are clear and transparent.
In a way, China is too reactionary for where socialism finds itself in 2026.
On the other side of the coin, only the free world has a way to destroy socialism. Because it is built on free enterprise, it is not an exclusive model, like Chinese socialism is. People can still make companies which are not socialist, and these can still push out the socialists.
The main tool of the free world socialists today, of course, is government. This is not so in China. In China, government is not a tool, but the agent. In the free world, socialists use government to push out the antisocialists. So, for a period, government must be the field of battle.
This decoupling from government as agent, by the way, is what determines the modern socialist model, what makes China reactionary in comparison. Government as agent limits the revolution, gives it hard boundaries.
Decoupled socialism, though, can only work in the first world. It can only work where the critical mass is used to being governed, and no police force is necessary.
In other words, not an option that is open to the likes of Iran.
An Iranian socialist may think socialism is good, but they definitely do not think of its precepts as obvious. The opposite is true in the first world: for most people, even when they think socialism is bad, they will automatically think in terms of its precepts.
