Nice piece that resonates with my current thoughts. That China is sharing the fruits of industrial success with society as a whole gives hope to the cause—we lost that hope with the privatizations of the 1990s—but we should check how the money is truly distributed. I've read that China is also replacing an aging workforce with robots—wouldn't it be better to employ young foreigners instead? As Marx pointed out, machines don't buy; thus, once the aging population has died out, who will buy the robots' products? How will wealth be generated and redistributed then?

Fine article. I've not been able to follow development in north and south korea, so that part were especially interesting.

You're describing the effects of the 4th industrial revolution, a phase of capitalism we've been completely unprepared for, despite the many harbingers. I come from a party ( the Italian "Rifondazione Comunista" that, despite boasting to reshape communism for the 21st century, never moved beyond the Bolshevik tenet that only blue-collar workers are workers and all others ( especially intellectuals, the white collars) were the enemy. That experiment died miserably, I believe, because it failed to teach the masses that white is just a shade of blue (fascism has been much better at spreading this idea)—what alternatives do we have today? Where are the communist/socialist parties for the 21st century?