Vidiwell [any]

not a very comrade-ly comment at the top but we can let it slide

your reference to the supposed benefits of the opening up period to the average individual in china are references to bourgeoisie statistics and various propaganda outlets.
the truth is murkier and less clear as to what exactly took place. but your confidence in speaking for the 100’s of milliions of hokuo workers as well as workers in africa who supply the raw materials at poverty wages is notable. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2023.2217087

what you are referencing in the final comment was known as war communism and would be another thing entirely. the NEP was due to the backwards state of rural russia after the civil war. The decision to collectivize afterwards was the topic of intense debate in the 20’s but by the 30’s stalin and trotsky and others all agreed that collectivization was the way forward. Modern chinese analysis on the maoist period likes to associate it with “war communism” but such analysis does not stand up to actual analysis on the breakthroughs and advancements that were made during that period.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1929/12/27.htm

again please read these sources I am sending, I fear we will not be speaking on the same page otherwise.

capitalism is not the only system that can industrialize. the soviet union and maoist china are critical examples of this. the most basic postulate of socialism is that it is superior system of productive relations. that was the core of the NEP, enabling these systems to battle it out, and the less productive one lost. And at the same time the party could strengthen its grasp on power. Nothing of the sort is happening in china today, and the reverse happened to agriculture and industry during the opening up period. Again please read the plenum I sent earlier from 2024 and grasp what china is saying nowadays and how they are continuing to prioritize the market and privately owned enterprises. They are not retreating and consolidating their forces, they have no plans to change the current system. The recent BRICS meeting further reinforces this point given the nature of their speeches there and overall contentedness with the state of the world.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1928/11/19.htm

regarding your question about capitalist encirclement, fortunately stalin has once again anticipated this.
two presumptions about the need for rapid industrialization

1. speedy industrialization is not ideal but somehow necessary because of extreme conditions

2. Fascism is extreme and requires extreme action are both veils for revisionism. Both are used both by you and the chinese writers here to justify chinas path as a return to the NEP. First point, socialism is superior and concessions to kulaks are only necessary when socialism is weak. Please review the chinese TVE system and explain why it was destroyed to justify dengism. Rapid industrialization and collectivization are good should be implemented. decollectivization must be justified on its own terms and china has failed to do so(because the implicit reason of opening a reserve army of labor to keep wages down in china is kind of not really socialist of them). Secondly, if fascism is extraordinary, then was , the lack of fascism after the second world war an indicator that peaceful coexistence was not only justified but good for development (or worse, that the social fascist USSR necessitates cooperation with the bourgeois democratic USA)? Taken to an extreme, differentiating between the forces of bourgeois democracy and fascism within bourgeois politics would become the main task of non-revolutionary times, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1927/12/02.htm additional reading here

and to put a final cap on it and raise a few questions https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/polemic/peaceful.htm https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sino-soviet-split/cpsu/openletter.htm should provide two points on encirclement and peaceful coexistence that should be useful to anyone further defining their thoughts on the matter. When is peaceful coexistence possible? what are the limits? what defines the line between rightism ultraleftism and the correct line? I will leave this for people reading this comment to chew on, but its non trivial.

It is worth mentioning at this point, that technically the NEP was barely considered by the architects of the chinese opening up periods. much more considered were singapores opening up, eastern europe’s reform period, and others. the post-hoc justification with the NEP is another propaganda tool. http://sg.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/jbwzlm/xwdt/200711/t20071129_2016862.htm

Again happy to speak further but I am requesting you spend a little more time reading these documents, defending dengism in circuitous ways is not a productive use of our time here.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii130/articles/joel-andreas-paths-not-taken "Weber argues, in response to popular anger at growing corruption among party officials, profiting from their role as gatekeepers in a semi-marketized system. Liberalizers argued that all-out privatization would do away with profiteering bureaucrats altogether. In 1988, Deng himself took up the banner of radical price reform, and this time central authorities actually took the first steps. The August 1988 Politburo meeting at Beidaihe announced the liberalization of all prices. The immediate result was runaway inflation—soaring from 12 per cent in July 1988 to 28 per cent in April 1989—exacerbated by panic buying and bank runs. Within weeks, the pragmatic Deng backed away. Chen Yun was called in to reverse the liberalization and impose stabilized prices on key goods. China had escaped full-blown shock therapy by a whisker, Weber argues, yet Deng’s aborted 1988 price-reform push came at a high price: its destabilizing effects helped to catalyse the political crisis that culminated in the massacre of June Fourth. "

and chapter 8 of escaping shock therapy might be of interest to you in the realm of dengism

I dont think you or the author understand what stalin and lenin were writing about yes. I am trying to identify and show you where you are mistaken on this matter. You cant just throw around terms like “dialectics” and quantitative into qualitative without actually proving the underlying contradictions and defining how a given solution is revolutionary. I laid out how the opening up period and china’s current trajectory flip the NEP on its head. Either you think lenin and stalin and mao were brilliant thinkers who moved the project and theory of socialism forward, or you think they were fundamentally incorrect, should probably not be studied and that Deng represents the horizon of socialist thought.

again, from china’s plenum which I linked above and recommend reading. “Focus on building a high-level socialist market economic system, give full play to the decisive role of the market in the allocation of resources”

this is absolutely fundamental to understanding of marx, is the market more efficient at distributing resources than state planning? this is a critical component of lenin’s work into state capitalism. We can not adopt a gnostic-dengism that presumes china can just press the socialism button whenever they like, we can defend china from imperialist depredations but in a post-october 7th world given china’s response any china defender must hold themselves to higher standards and truly question their underlying beliefs. Again happy to talk more.

the chinese author is making false comparisons to the NEP and chinas opening up period in order to create a socialist justification when none exist.

free trade being controlled by government monopoly is a critical component of the NEP, lenin wrote about that extensively in the documents cited by the author. the author has failed to acknowledge why that is important and is justifying the opposite. Deng’s approach was to open the country and eliminate that monopoly. This inspires little confidence in the authors understanding of these economic concepts .

The question of “slowly” vs “quickly” is often mentioned, as is the nature of why cant we just be “kind” to the kulaks or other reactionary classes. Again, I recommend returning to stalin/lenin/mao’s/gang of 4’s work on the basics of chinese and russian capitalism and/or socialism to understand why what you are saying is incorrect.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/zhang/1975/x01/x01.htm this could be a useful starting point regarding true socialist thought in china.

the sort of bottom line I am trying to get across here is you cant just flip the NEP on its head and say “now its our version.” Lenin was trying to make the point that market exchange among the peasantry was a sign of backwardness and centralization is objectively superior to a system of petty production. Mao implemented this, and it did lead to inflation eventually but thats beyond the scope of this topic. Deng and the opening up period basically just forced global market competition in order to rationalize both the SOE’s and ENCOURAGED rural petty production through TVEs, which is fundamentally backwards. Now not even TVEs exist, as they had to be destroyed to open up the rural labor market. which is why the major innovators of china are all private,Huawei, Tencent, Baidu, Bytedance, BYD, LONGi, etc.

State owned centralization and efficiency are not being achieved, china is chasing profits as a market based economy must.

“carefully” taking those steps over is trite to say when over 300 million migrant hokuo workers are subject to the crushing depredations of capitalist production while an increasingly powerful reactionary chinese middle class is approaching consumption levels that are eating the world, all while the communist party is nominally at the helm.

https://english.www.gov.cn/policies/latestreleases/202407/21/content_WS669d0255c6d0868f4e8e94f8.html from their recent plenum, on increasing the opening up and marketization of their economy and taking state planning backwards.

https://www.stats.gov.cn/sj/ndsj/2023/indexeh.htm

As well as statistics showing the complex rate of return and investment continue to fall from chinese economic bureaus.

"NEP is capitalism, says the opposition. NEP is mainly a retreat, says Zinoviev. All this, of course, is untrue. In actual fact, NEP is the Party’s policy, permitting a struggle between the socialist and the capitalist elements and aimed at the victory of the socialist elements over the capitalist elements. In actual fact, NEP only began as a retreat, but it aimed at regrouping our forces during the retreat and launching an offensive. In actual fact, we have been on the offensive for several years now, and are attacking successfully, developing our industry, developing Soviet trade, and ousting private capital."

-Stalin

happy to talk further

In part 4, they mention lenin’s “series of retreats”, and describe “restoration of small scale industries” “peasant business” “encouragement of free trade” as things that occured in the NEP and constituted as you say “a strategic retreat”. All of these points fail to grasp what was actually happening during the NEP and the strategic reasons for this. Restoration of small scale industries happened rarely, and in fact the main thing that occured on the industry side was state owned centralization, which directly leads to why peasant business was critically allowed in order that it would be crushed by the efficiency of state owned industrial planning. They were forced to compete on these grounds and this laid the groundwork for the kulaks to be crushed by stalin. Not merely because one had to make concessions to capitalist production, but because in lenin’s genius there was a fundamental understanding of the dialectic between industry and agriculture. there is plenty of material out there on what occurred during the “opening up period” in china, but rather than being a continuation of the NEP it was in fact the opposite, efficient state farming and highly collectivized villages being swung backwards into petty production and commercialized agriculture. Finally to state free trade as what happened in the NEP is grossly wrong, the soviet union had a monopoly on foreign trade in this time. This exact question is the subject of endless deliberation in the socialist 20th century, from albania to china, and is discussed in the tax in kind, why does this writer get the topic so wrong?

I could go on from here but ive written most of this before.

Again, stalin answered all of this in “concerning questions of leninism”, its just embarassing this is what passes for modern socialist literature these days.

always curious to see people(in the “on the experimental nature of socialism”) blatantly twist what went on during the NEP and Lenin’s writings before and after that to justify their own version of actually existing socialism. Like the author outright says “we dont want to get too much into the weeds in economic theory”, cites a couple figures on rail buildup, mentions socialist means of production(and scarcely tries to define them?) and manages to dunk on stalin and mao’s agricultural reforms? And tries to tie it all into failures of post Khrushchev eastern bloc states economic reforms? as though that question doesnt answer itself. Dengism is always strange to read up on. thanks for posting.

I dont disagree there is not a hard break between mao and deng but the fundamentals of the opening up period, the regrettable failure of the cultural revolution, and the decline of Mao/gang of 4 power and rise of deng/capitalist roaders power are all fundamentally related and intrinsic to china’s dropping of a global revolutionary outlook and beginning of a capitalist realpolitik worldview. these things were more fully realized as you say in Hu-Xi etc but the groundwork was critically laid down before that. Would love to talk more on this.

Fascinating. Explain further? How does commodity production and firms chasing profit not define capitalism? If you are not a Marxist feel free to assert that and come up with some new method of defining these things. Or did the soviet unions failed struggle over commodity production and revisionism under Khrushchev not make that point clear? Is it merely the Communist parties perceived dominance, despite many other commenters on this website explaining how the “Marxist” theory that is produced and consumed by the party being of extremely mediocre quality? Or perhaps the recent plenum’s assertion that the “free market” will continue to define every aspect of state investment? This is fundamental stuff, the ability of the state to stave off the falling rate of profit, but the reality that that continues to define literally every aspect of china’s economy can not be divorced from its politics. http://www.news.cn/politics/20240721/cec09ea2bde840dfb99331c48ab5523a/c.html

How does this opinion square with Lenin and Stalin’s writings on the nature of external trade controls, “the tax in kind” or any other sorts of works on the NEP and its understanding as the literal inverse of what occurred during china’s opening up period, regarding specifically the imposition of capitalism upon collective farming? Stalin would critically ask if the rate of value is predominant or controlled, and clearly the chinese states massive investments in propping up vast portions of the economy that are suffering capitalisms depredations is indicating the economy is critically defined by that aspect, in stark contrast to NEP or stalin era soviet union.

Again, as I have previously laid out here, whether it be the claim that the market is superior to the state, that import substitution is necessary, or that this is just a neo-NEP, all fail with a fairly basic reading of lenin, stalin, or mao’s writings? If you believe capitalism is a superior method of production than socialism than we might as well discard the entirely of the soviet union and north korea’s experiences regarding this and start from square one.

Again comrade, we arent among liberals, we can have sincere and in depth discussions about the nature of the modern political economy and china’s place in that world. and not sugarcoat anything. I am happy to provide additional reading and discuss with you on any of these topics.

I am genuinely curious in the thoughts of a modern dengist. If leftcommunism is just everything to the left of your given ideological strata, then thats a profound disappointment compared to Mao’s intense debates on the topic. if its something more substantial, I would hear it. None of this is to criticize china’s vast accomplishments, although again as laid out in previous comments almost all of those accomplishments can be attributed to the maoist period, with the deng period merely cannibalizing everything the socialist period built up.

China is interested in Raison d’État. same as any other modern state. They are capitalist because their economy obeys the law of value, even the SOE’s are subject to this if anyone here took the time to read about it. This website’s darling Michael Hudson, despite having some interesting contributions in american fiscal policy, has a remarkably weak defense of china, boiling down to “they dont have a federal reserve”. Comrades here trying to run defense and tie themselves into knots for its foreign policy decisions are being very silly to be frank. The sharp contrast between pre and post maoist china’s foreign policy can be explained simply, the capitalist roaders won the struggle, they have no interest at this point in time of fighting for global revolution. Their material support for cuba is a pittance, and possibly a strange artifact of cold war antagonisms. The extended loans with interest, they have privatized healthcare, and their economy runs on the extraction of raw materials from Africa and South America. None of this is to paint them as “imperialist” obviously we can defend them against western depredations, but trying to call them some bastion of socialism is bananas. And to paint them as some sort of special economy who succeeded because of the magic of "market socialism"is also a mistake. Their success is in fact highly similar with other “tiger” economies of Asia. Highly Prudent governance and massive state investment to ward off the falling rate of profit non-withstanding.

The red sails article linked below is the classic example of lazy dengist analysis that honestly falls apart with a little thinking. there is almost no political economic explanation of why billionaires must exist and the same, borderline gnostic, claim of a “master plan” by the CPC. Taking trite quotes from deng and saying “historical materialism” does not absolve people of actually having to defend their economic explanations. I have deconstructed myths about chinas “need” for market socialism, capitalist penetration, etc before and will do so again if asked, but this stuff is straight out of lenin and was functionally settled almost 100 years ago at this point.

Their decision to open up their economy and subject hundreds of millions was the force that saved capitalism. Those people labor now so the rich of the world can live lives in abject splendor. There is no such force waiting in the wings for next time. Who knows how that contradiction will resolve. Who knows how the seeming impending showdown with the USA will go.

It seems to me that modern china is ready to work with about anybody. a quick stroll through the BRICS countries would say so, India(one bad day away from a billion person religious war) a semi feudal and mildly fascist(although with a robust labor movement) country being a standout. But yes as you say the matter that seems hard to square is the USA’s uncompromising belligerence. although its possible that is a strange but powerful cold war cultural artifact that just possesses the various higher ups in the military with a fanatic bloodlust. Obviously exceptions among the elite like Elon who clearly would like to benefit from chinas industrial capacity remain despite his incoherent libertarian ideals, Milei in Argentia talked a big talk and then when the chips were down decided he did like china, global capitalism was allowed to eat another day. somehow the USA persists in barreling towards war though. Although this probably should get squared into a proper analysis, Matt christman had a byline through his vlogs about capitalism “leaving behind” the need for the USA as its tool securing globalized markets, and now that it has locked itself into a role as the reserve currency while also producing a population with expectations about consumption/immigration/lots of other things that result in highly present and irreconcilable contradictions. But I am sure there is an even cleaner explanation, or one that better captures geopolitical complexities inside Lenin’s break with the second internationale on how imperialism will always lead to war.

Of course, if we believe that China is “capitalist” or at least obeys the law of value(which many metrics of its economy implicitly do, even the SOE’s) then it also will run into many similar problems as the USA. I cant imagine the CPC is not aware of this, but it is in a genuinely delicate balancing act in the coming decades. And while its quality governance and prudent state investment has mellowed out the shocks and bumps, the future is worrisome. Someone else in the thread mentioned “jack ma is not the most powerful person in china” but that belies the reality that there are immensely powerful capitalist interests in china that also rapaciously desire profit, and will put up quite the struggle if xi did “press the communism button”. how they will actually move away from commodity production, if it all, to avoid capitalism’s contradictions remains illusive. Especially as they seem to be putting some aspect of their stability into the fortification of a robust middle class, not exactly a socialist ideal.

I mean this is the same Parenti who defended Gorbachev on cspan with the claim “he was making modern socialism” while Gorbachev was dismantling the USSR. As mentioned below Parenti had real connections to the USSR so this opinion makes sense, although it should be evident to people here that if Parenti’s views were commonplace then that the modern incarnation of people defending china with little investigation is aberrant and regrettable in how limiting the AES horizon of thought is. We are on an explicitly leftist website, dispense with the arguments you make to your lib friends to justify china to them.

“Market socialism” as practiced by modern china is basically a couple arguments masquerading as justification for capitalist restoration. Either you have to let foreign capital into your nation in order to bamboozle them and acquire their leverage/tech/forex etc, and this is merely a tactic in crisis(and also completely breaks with lenin’s work on how foreign trade should be conducted by socialist states, see “Red Globalization” and read up on the NEP more and how its practices used to justify the opening up while actually being completely flipped on their head). Commodity production but under state control, e.g. parts of cuba. At least this is honest about the capitalist production. If this is not the case then maybe capitalist markets are a stage in the development towards communism, especially in “underdeveloped” countries. E.g. Deng when he sometimes said that he didnt care if china was capitalist as long as the line went up. Yugoslavia tried this, and we saw how that went, although perhaps china’s stalled attempts due to political gridlock has something to do with that.

Or perhaps the “market” is more efficient as a director of investment. profit allocates resources better than any state level bureaucrat. This is the most trite, especially looking into china’s agricultural sector which saw almost no increases in efficiency when they were exposed to free market prices, they just started growing cash crops.

And all of this cant be removed from how advanced various aspects of the relations of production are in 2025. Amazon in and of itself removes any ability to say the “market” is a better planner of investment than a massively centralized system of management.

China’s existing system is a series of contradictions defined by various powerful blocs within china that all fundamentally disagree on how it will continue. At least Xi and the various plenums reports are completely honest that the “market” will continue its dominance. It is now, more than ever, impossible to imagine the end of capitalism. www.news.cn/politics/20240721/cec09ea2bde840dfb99331c48ab5523a/c.html From a comrade doing some translating:

“Focus on building a high-level socialist market economic system, give full play to the decisive role of the market in the allocation of resources, give better play to the role of the government, adhere to and improve the basic socialist economic system, promote high-level scientific and technological self-reliance and self-reliance, promote high-level opening-up, build a modern economic system, accelerate the construction of a new development pattern, and promote high-quality development”

They might damn well privatize what little remains of the SOE’s within our lifetimes.

And to anyone who continues to defend the opening up period as some magical moment when state controlled capitalism was able to bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, there is plenty of modern scholarship that challenges that conclusion. https://www.jussemper.org/Resources/Economic Data/Resources/DSullivan-JHickel-CapitalismExtremePoverty.pdf

the casual dunking from people with no idea of its historical background was more the point here. an interesting idea with a history in socialist science and instead reduced to the lowest common denominator for a cheap dunk is reddit culture for better or worse. Hence investigate…then dunk.

https://thespouter.substack.com/p/to-dispense-with-abiotic-oil

recommend a bit of “investigation” prior to right to speak. It has an interesting history. Mao and Stalin were abiotic oil guys for a time!

The point that the USSR would have invaded China due to the cultural revolution(or perhaps you are referencing something else I am completely unaware of) is absurd. It only intervened when bourgeois counter-rev was impending within the warsaw pact when it was invited.

The real nature of the question here is not persay the thought process behind how someone could mistake the USSR as an imperialist power equal to the USA, but how the theoretical underpinnings there intertwined with the great proletarian revolutions struggles within military politicization. Once we have that we do not have to throw the idea away wholesale, and it certainly ties into social imperialism in a real sense, and SPD’s being critiqued by Lenin as an origin of that phrase. I do not have persay finalized thoughts there.

To your second point it feels a bit callous to list off a couple points and not grapple with the fundamental failure of decolonizing the world along socialist lines. Certainly China, the USSR, and Mongolia were able to draw reasonable borders all together, but the sino-vietnam-cambodia war is just one example that is clearly formed by colonialism and chinese revisionism and persists to this day. And that underlying issue, not making up a tally of W’s and L’s, is what I am interested in. But certainly point taken that successes are possible, although quite a few of them likely have to due with quelling nationalistic urges in border regions more so than socialist-oblige.

Where to even begin? Yugoslavian regional desires? Vietnamese Doi Moi and how it emerges from Le Duan and how that stems from the differences in the north and the south’s unequal development despite a common struggle? Che’s writings on USSR/Cuba/Free Trade/Sugar? Defining what differs between Khrushchev or Deng(its nothing)? How soviet “social imperialism” is in retrospect clearly subordinated to American imperialism and now China repeats the same mistakes today. The eurocommunism-maoist split and how that really does derive from various European communist parties and just about every single USA communist parties revisionism, which plays out now in various rightist deviations towards what “actually exists” and from that “what is actually possible”.

And of course all of this precedes the answer to why post colonial bourgeois nationalism flared up in border struggles with Vietnam and China, and now regrettably we have a china that continues many of these trends. Laos and Vietnam still at least exist as a good model of interstate relations, or much of the Soviet unions internal borders at least before capitalist restoration and the return of genocidal ambitions we see today.

not to be trite with you, this question is massive, and arguably as fundamental to communism as any other question nowadays, given its real applicability on how revisionism re-asserts itself time and time again, although its particular contours are obviously not at all limited to “who gets to own a couple islands along the amur river”. No easy book to start with, but Albania-China relations is probably as good a starting point as any.

The podcasts failure to really materially interrogate the origins behind Chinese revisionism instead just hand waving away “its all realpolitik now” is fairly disappointing, although of course this same issue comes up with soviet revisionism in the Cuban and Afghanistan seasons as well. Its very very well put together(although the Korean season I think better exemplified its desire to be a high production value drama) and obviously the soundtrack does a great deal of adding emotional weight, but overall its superficial discussion of the class structure, land reform efforts, and revolutionary wartime activity I think places it in an almost unhelpful place since it can give the impression to someone who listened to it that they now “understand” the topic at hand. In a way that is obviously very common to the high speed flow of ideas we all exist in. But not helpful to make any downstream conclusions such as “why did land reform in much of southeast asia succeed and or fail”, why is vietnam now also “market socialist” and how does this play into their modern revisionism. But perhaps I ask too much of a 10 hour podcast.

https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2021/11/25/dark-eucharist-of-the-real-god/

For your consideration

“You keep saying things like down with the bourgeoisie, eat the rich, sodomise the land-owners, impale all people who have more than 25 reál in their pocket, literally murder all human beings regardless of their political beliefs – that kind of stuff.”