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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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Yes, this is also true, hence why the CPC is moving more towards the left, as they reverted too far to the right. You test, readjust, and test again, and readjust again. This is the path of dialectical materialist knowledge.
Deng gave China what it needed at the time, which the Gang of Four did not. Undeniably, there is a bourgeois class, but the CPC appears to be retaining control, and metrics are improving. We can't erase Deng's achievements for miscalculating, just like we can't erase Mao's achievements for miscalculating.
Overall, though, it's important to recognize that this was in response to an absurd claim that China is "Communist in name only" and that the presence of a stock market and billionaires means the system is Capitalist. By that same logic, the US is Socialist, because it has a Post Office.
It seems perverse to me to say that Deng "gave China what it needed" by depriving countless millions of people of their needs.
I have no interest in the broader conversational context, mostly because I think it's hopeless to try to talk about, at least for me.
It seems bad-faith to interpret my comment as such. What would you have had the PRC do? Poverty has been dramatically decreased to outright eliminated in the PRC in no small part thanks to Deng's strategy of inviting foreign Capital. The productive forces developed dramatically, pruned and managed by the CPC. It is not a reach to say that had the PRC continued with the Gang of Four's line that "it is better to be poor under Socialism than rich under Capitalism," the PRC may not have been able to reach its current standards, metrics, and level of influence, or would have risked outright war with the West had the West not been so thoroughly captured industrially.
Then disengage, comrade. Don't smear my comments with bad-faith interpretations. The CPC has openly stated numerous times that Dengism was Marxism-Leninism applied to the time of Deng, and has served its purpose, so that now Xi Jinping Thought can represent Marxism-Leninism applied to modern conditions. Deng served a vital role, and while he made miscalculations and errors, he did so in reaction to the miscalculations and errors of Mao and the Gang of Four. Just as we know that Mao and the Gang of Four served their purposes as well, and applied Marxism-Leninism to their conditions, liberating China and achieving mass equality and a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and a doubling in life expectancy and an end to famine.
No Marxist in history has been perfect, all have made errors in judgement, we must learn and appreciate what worked and analyze how they fit into the broader Socialist trend.
Extreme poverty has. Poverty is still widespread, and as I already indicated, a lot of the extreme poverty (not all of it) is a problem the Dengists made for themselves: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2023.2217087
The man himself said that he will have failed and capitalism will have been re-instated in China if there emerges a new Chinese bourgeoisie. I think that I've seen this mentioned to you before.
I'm curious about the actual viability of re-collectivized commodity production like Nanjie pioneered. I think Vietnam (which I would broadly regard as even more revisionist) has some interesting farming collective stuff and I've been meaning for the longest time to read about the Tae'en system in the DPRK.
You know as well as I do that in common speech "Dengism" means SWCC, which was established in Deng's time and which Xi, in his plodding speeches almost bereft of actual content, constantly reaffirms as the path Deng rightly put China on.
What would you call his major errors?
I'm quite interested to learn what you think of as being the purpose served by the Gang of Four, since most of them came later than what you mention as the accomplishments of Mao and them.
But really, going point by point is probably worthless, and you have my endorsement to ignore everything I said (though check out that link), I guess what I'm most curious about is, concretely, what actually separates China from a capitalist system? Surely it's not just proportion of SOEs, or fucking Bismark was a socialist. "The dictatorship of the proletariat" is going to be your answer, but I ask, "What separates China's 'DotP' from a liberal democracy?" Surely, it's not just their anti-corruption measures or then Deng really did destroy socialism and I guess Xi re-established it.
I don't know, it just looks to me like a state where the power is held by public businesses rather than private ones in order to keep its sovereignty. To be clear, I'd like to see it otherwise, I get no satisfaction from what I say and it was nice cheering for the emerging dominant power thinking that it was not merely historically progressive but actually represented major progress in world socialism, but ultimately I realized that it was mainly what I wanted to believe and soon came to see Deng as being just a massively more competent Khrushchev, who had the refinement in his approach to praise Mao while in practice being everything that Mao had warned China he was for many years.
I agree. Each point could be an entire conversation in and of themselves. I am not trying to dismiss your concerns or the points you raise.
The class that's in power. Is the US Socialist because it has a state-run Post Office? No. The PRC is led by the CPC, which has a bottom-up and top-down organizational structure via the mass line. It has a market economy that it carefully manages, prunes, and allows to develop to the point of "harvesting," where it increases ownership.
Correct, it would be anti-dialectical to purely look at snapshots of ownership and not trajectories and class dynamics.
The practice of Whole Process People's Democracy is a large factor, but it's ultimately the sum of its parts. The CPC is a DotP, what separates it is who is in power, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. We see the effects of this in privitization vs nationalization, large infrastructure projects or private contracts, an improvement in real wages and democracy for workers or restrictions.
So far, it appears that, especially in the last decade or so, these trends have been rapidly moving in the favor and direction of the Working Class, not the Bourgeoisie.
China is an incredibly complex system, and I won't say your concerns aren't valid. I recommend reading The Long Game and its Contradictions and China Has Billionaires.
I'll be honest, I've looked at China Has Billionaires before and didn't think it was impressive, but I'll try actually reading both, if only because I appreciate you being nice to me.
Could you expand on this point? Most of what you listed in that paragraph, and I think you'd even agree with me on this, belongs in the "this applies to Bismark" category of non-evidence. The part I quoted does not belong in that category, but I also am not familiar with worker democracy being on a positive trajectory in China and would consider that to be positive evidence.
Dessalines has a large compilation of Frequently asked questions, including an article on workplace democracy.
Economically speaking, deng's reforms did not so much eliminate economic planning as it changed the way it was done. The Chinese government controls which industries are allowed to grow and decline through controlling credit and availability of material resources. The mode of production has been reverted to capitalist production essentially, but this is something that dengists acknowledge either way.
Any response to the paper I linked?
Well, few dengists would deny that the dismantling of the iron rice bowls, privatisation measures and neoliberal policies did not cause an immediate increase in extreme poverty. This is why I didn't consider the paper relevant (I also agree with the basic facts presented).
Yet at the same time, the argument for why the PRC had to adopt these policies (temporarily) and why under xi jingping there is a turn away from these trends (started under hu jintao really) are linked, and complex.
Under the Mao era organisation of the economy, China faced many economic problems. It was isolated from the world, its technology was lagging behind the west, and the quality and quantity/quantity of consumer goods available to chinese citizens was limited.
These were the same problems that had destroyed the ussr, and the Chinese could see that it was a dead end. What they did was similar to cutting off a leg and eating it after getting stranded on a barren deserted island. Under ideal circumstances, the cpc would have never done deng's reforms because it would have just been given access to all the tech and international trade it wanted with no strings attached.
When dengists celebrate deng's reforms, what they are really celebrating is that the wound on the leg healed up and we found a way off the deserted island back to our normal life. Or at least, that's my perspective on it. Basically, the Chinese people did not want to live under seige conditions waiting to be outcompeted and destroyed.
I appreciate your perspective