10 ms·

Yes, since Mao's death and the complete reversal of his economic policies and embracing of capitalism by Deng Xiaoping, whom Mao disgraced for his unorthodoxy,

by flomble 10y ago

Yes, since Mao's death and the complete reversal of his economic policies and embracing of capitalism by Deng Xiaoping, whom Mao disgraced for his unorthodoxy, the economy of China has rapidly developed. There is a reason this article lays the blame for the senseless waste of life at Mao's feet and not the CCP leadership as a whole. Comparing the Dust Bowl to the Great Leap Forward is... questionable. How many people died due to the Dust Bowl? Did the US government of the time respond to it by doubling down on an absurd economic plan in the furtherance of a political ideology?

pastProlog 10y ago
> embracing of capitalism Zhao Ziyang embraced capitalism, and he was arrested after the June 4th incident. Capitalism run by the communist party of China? Also, Mao and Zhou Enlai are who made peace with the USA, not Deng Xiaoping. > Deng Xiaoping, whom Mao disgraced for his unorthodoxy Mao and Deng had a falling out in the mid to late 1960s, but Mao empowered Deng again in 1974. Deng Xiaoping called himself a communist, not a capitalist. He did say it doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice. If China was a capitalist system, it would be more like Japan or South Korea or the US or Western Europe. Deng said he was proceeding in a dialectic manner economically. If you don't know what that means, then you don't know what communism is, and you wouldn't be able to tell if Deng was a communist or not. Actually Mao was accused by people to his left of abandoning communism due to his interpretation of the theory of productive forces (as well as the role of peasantry and proletariat etc.) Deng just expanded on that.
- adrianm 10y ago
  "Deng said he was proceeding in a dialectic manner economically." What does this mean? Isn't dialectics a form of reasoning?
  - twblalock 10y ago
    Dialectical materialism is a Marxist view of history, which is generally what people mean when they use the word "dialectic" in this context. These may be useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism
    - adrianm 10y ago
      I still want to understand what it means to be economically dialectical.
- flomble 10y ago
  The reason Deng Xiaoping had to use a coy phrase about cats to avoid admitting to his policies running counter to communism is that communism is at the core of the Party's identity and history, and that abandoning it openly would seriously undermine their legitimacy. The 'dialectical' approach to communism has meant slowly discarding almost everything which makes an economy communist. The "socialist market economy" allows private ownership, even of means of production and allows the private accumulation of capital. If you want to argue that it's actually communist because the transition was slow and the leadership still claims to be communist with a straight face, I'm not going to bother rebutting that. The reason China's system is not more like the countries you listed is that it is autocratic, and the reason Zhao Ziyang was arrested was his excessive and open sympathy for a people's democratic movement.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    > The 'dialectical' approach to communism has meant slowly discarding almost everything which makes an economy communist. The dialectical approach is the traditional approach, invented by Marx and added to by Engels and others, which they used to explain pretty much everything. It's not something invented by Deng Xaioping. It is in fact the essence of Marx's philosophy. In a nutshell, the dialectic is an explanation for the evolution of society that looks at the systems by which society produces what it needs, i.e. "modes of production," and how contradictions in these modes of production are resolved through the creation of new modes. Hegel used the dialectical framework to describe the evolution of ideas, but Marx turned it upside down and argued that ideas were a consequence of the material conditions of life, the basis of which is the mode of production. The classic example of Marx's dialectical thinking is his analysis in The Communist Manifesto that capitalism "produced its own gravediggers," the industrial proletariat. The proletariat would overthrow capitalism, but existed because of capitalism. The contradictions in the capitalist system caused the creation of an entire class of people which would eventually overthrow it and create a socialist society, and then a communist society. In other words, communism could never exist without capitalism having existed first, because the social class which would create communism would not have existed unless capitalism had created it. Marx, followed by others including Lenin and Stalin, insisted that the full development of the productive forces was a necessary precursor to communism. He elaborated on this in the Critique of the Gotha Program, in which he advocated a different distribution of resources than in a full communist society -- some people would get more than others, according to their contribution to society rather than their need. At a later time, the productive forces would be developed to the point that they could provide enough wealth to distribute to everyone according to need, regardless of their contribution to society. (It's not unlike the arguments of some basic income proponents -- automation (productive forces) has created a society in which there is enough wealth to spread around to everyone, regardless of whether or not they have jobs.) Similarly, the Soviet Union initially instructed the Chinese Communist Party to cooperate with the KMT in the 1920s, because they believed that full development of productive forces, under a capitalist regime, was a necessary precursor to communism. Not helpful, or merely good to have, but necessary according to Marx's dialectical philosophy. The reason Marxism and Maoism are distinguished from each other is that Mao rejected that view, which was originally formulated by Marx, and advocated that communism be built by rural peasants rather than the industrial proletariat. Deng's ideology was closer to orthodox Marxism than Mao's was, in many ways. Deng argued that Mao tried to move too fast and skip the stages of social evolution that were necessary preconditions for communism, namely a thriving capitalist economy. If you want to redistribute wealth, you have to create it first. Deng argued that a market economy was the best way to do that, and that some people would get rich, but that's acceptable because it could be sorted out later when the productive forces were sufficient to support a true communist distribution of wealth. This is very similar to the views Marx expressed in Gotha, but more accepting of private property -- as long as it remains useful. Maybe Deng was disingenuous and tried to sneak capitalism in through the back door, or maybe he really did believe what he said. But you can't dismiss his views as being non-Marxist ipso facto, because they are clearly derived from Marx's theory of history and expressed via Marxist concepts.
- xenadu02 10y ago
  The dust bowl was caused by a natural drought combined with individual farmers using bad practices. The US Government paid an army of researchers to solve the problem and go into the field and teach the farmers about soil erosion, etc. Also the rains returned. There is nothing in common with the two events.
  - sib 10y ago
    The US government also created a program in which 100's of millions of trees were planted across more than 18,000 linear miles in a massive attempt to reduce the wind-caused erosion and dust storms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plains_Shelterbelt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plains_Shelterbelt
- dmoy 10y ago
  Zhao was not purged because of his support for capitalism. He supported captialism-like economic reform, and he was purged, but that wasn't the cause.
fennecfoxen 10y ago
> Comparing the Dust Bowl to the Great Leap Forward is... questionable. How many people died due to the Dust Bowl? Did the US government of the time respond to it by doubling down on an absurd economic plan in the furtherance of a political ideology? Doubling down? It was more like an excuse to introduce the absurd economic plan. FDR's New Deal featured the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which ultimately tried to restore prosperity by paying farmers not to farm and burning crops as a price-support tactic. (Won't even go into the non-agricultural price-fixing schemes of the NRA which were ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court. No, the other NRA.) Mild, mild stuff compared to the Great Leap Forward, of course (and of course unrelated to more reasonable programs like Social Security).
- vinceguidry 10y ago
  > Mild, mild stuff compared to the Great Leap Forward, Err, that was the whole point.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  The whole point of the New Deal activities was to stop deflation. It's a tough problem to solve. Our way of dealing with it today is to compel banks to hoard cash.

by flomble 10y ago

pastProlog 10y ago

> embracing of capitalism Zhao Ziyang embraced capitalism, and he was arrested after the June 4th incident. Capitalism run by the communist party of China? Also, Mao and Zhou Enlai are who made peace with the USA, not Deng Xiaoping. > Deng Xiaoping, whom Mao disgraced for his unorthodoxy Mao and Deng had a falling out in the mid to late 1960s, but Mao empowered Deng again in 1974. Deng Xiaoping called himself a communist, not a capitalist. He did say it doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice. If China was a capitalist system, it would be more like Japan or South Korea or the US or Western Europe. Deng said he was proceeding in a dialectic manner economically. If you don't know what that means, then you don't know what communism is, and you wouldn't be able to tell if Deng was a communist or not. Actually Mao was accused by people to his left of abandoning communism due to his interpretation of the theory of productive forces (as well as the role of peasantry and proletariat etc.) Deng just expanded on that.

adrianm 10y ago
"Deng said he was proceeding in a dialectic manner economically." What does this mean? Isn't dialectics a form of reasoning?
- twblalock 10y ago
  Dialectical materialism is a Marxist view of history, which is generally what people mean when they use the word "dialectic" in this context. These may be useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism
  - adrianm 10y ago
    I still want to understand what it means to be economically dialectical.
flomble 10y ago
The reason Deng Xiaoping had to use a coy phrase about cats to avoid admitting to his policies running counter to communism is that communism is at the core of the Party's identity and history, and that abandoning it openly would seriously undermine their legitimacy. The 'dialectical' approach to communism has meant slowly discarding almost everything which makes an economy communist. The "socialist market economy" allows private ownership, even of means of production and allows the private accumulation of capital. If you want to argue that it's actually communist because the transition was slow and the leadership still claims to be communist with a straight face, I'm not going to bother rebutting that. The reason China's system is not more like the countries you listed is that it is autocratic, and the reason Zhao Ziyang was arrested was his excessive and open sympathy for a people's democratic movement.
- twblalock 10y ago
  > The 'dialectical' approach to communism has meant slowly discarding almost everything which makes an economy communist. The dialectical approach is the traditional approach, invented by Marx and added to by Engels and others, which they used to explain pretty much everything. It's not something invented by Deng Xaioping. It is in fact the essence of Marx's philosophy. In a nutshell, the dialectic is an explanation for the evolution of society that looks at the systems by which society produces what it needs, i.e. "modes of production," and how contradictions in these modes of production are resolved through the creation of new modes. Hegel used the dialectical framework to describe the evolution of ideas, but Marx turned it upside down and argued that ideas were a consequence of the material conditions of life, the basis of which is the mode of production. The classic example of Marx's dialectical thinking is his analysis in The Communist Manifesto that capitalism "produced its own gravediggers," the industrial proletariat. The proletariat would overthrow capitalism, but existed because of capitalism. The contradictions in the capitalist system caused the creation of an entire class of people which would eventually overthrow it and create a socialist society, and then a communist society. In other words, communism could never exist without capitalism having existed first, because the social class which would create communism would not have existed unless capitalism had created it. Marx, followed by others including Lenin and Stalin, insisted that the full development of the productive forces was a necessary precursor to communism. He elaborated on this in the Critique of the Gotha Program, in which he advocated a different distribution of resources than in a full communist society -- some people would get more than others, according to their contribution to society rather than their need. At a later time, the productive forces would be developed to the point that they could provide enough wealth to distribute to everyone according to need, regardless of their contribution to society. (It's not unlike the arguments of some basic income proponents -- automation (productive forces) has created a society in which there is enough wealth to spread around to everyone, regardless of whether or not they have jobs.) Similarly, the Soviet Union initially instructed the Chinese Communist Party to cooperate with the KMT in the 1920s, because they believed that full development of productive forces, under a capitalist regime, was a necessary precursor to communism. Not helpful, or merely good to have, but necessary according to Marx's dialectical philosophy. The reason Marxism and Maoism are distinguished from each other is that Mao rejected that view, which was originally formulated by Marx, and advocated that communism be built by rural peasants rather than the industrial proletariat. Deng's ideology was closer to orthodox Marxism than Mao's was, in many ways. Deng argued that Mao tried to move too fast and skip the stages of social evolution that were necessary preconditions for communism, namely a thriving capitalist economy. If you want to redistribute wealth, you have to create it first. Deng argued that a market economy was the best way to do that, and that some people would get rich, but that's acceptable because it could be sorted out later when the productive forces were sufficient to support a true communist distribution of wealth. This is very similar to the views Marx expressed in Gotha, but more accepting of private property -- as long as it remains useful. Maybe Deng was disingenuous and tried to sneak capitalism in through the back door, or maybe he really did believe what he said. But you can't dismiss his views as being non-Marxist ipso facto, because they are clearly derived from Marx's theory of history and expressed via Marxist concepts.
xenadu02 10y ago
The dust bowl was caused by a natural drought combined with individual farmers using bad practices. The US Government paid an army of researchers to solve the problem and go into the field and teach the farmers about soil erosion, etc. Also the rains returned. There is nothing in common with the two events.
- sib 10y ago
  The US government also created a program in which 100's of millions of trees were planted across more than 18,000 linear miles in a massive attempt to reduce the wind-caused erosion and dust storms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plains_Shelterbelt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plains_Shelterbelt
dmoy 10y ago
Zhao was not purged because of his support for capitalism. He supported captialism-like economic reform, and he was purged, but that wasn't the cause.

fennecfoxen 10y ago

> Comparing the Dust Bowl to the Great Leap Forward is... questionable. How many people died due to the Dust Bowl? Did the US government of the time respond to it by doubling down on an absurd economic plan in the furtherance of a political ideology? Doubling down? It was more like an excuse to introduce the absurd economic plan. FDR's New Deal featured the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which ultimately tried to restore prosperity by paying farmers not to farm and burning crops as a price-support tactic. (Won't even go into the non-agricultural price-fixing schemes of the NRA which were ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court. No, the other NRA.) Mild, mild stuff compared to the Great Leap Forward, of course (and of course unrelated to more reasonable programs like Social Security).

vinceguidry 10y ago
> Mild, mild stuff compared to the Great Leap Forward, Err, that was the whole point.
Spooky23 10y ago
The whole point of the New Deal activities was to stop deflation. It's a tough problem to solve. Our way of dealing with it today is to compel banks to hoard cash.