Not only did Mao Zedong Thought lead us to victory in the revolution in the past; it is - and will continue to be - a treasured possession of the Chinese Communist Party and of our country. That is why we will forever keep Chairman Mao’s portrait on Tiananmen Gate as a symbol of our country, and we will always remember him as a founder of our Party and state. Moreover, we will adhere to Mao Zedong Thought. We will not do to Chairman Mao what Khrushchev did to Stalin.
Whether the socialist market economy of the PRC looks like the perfect ideal of socialism in our heads or not, we must recognize that the same failures caused by Kruschev have not come to pass:
Rather than stagnating due to clunky liberalization undermining the planned economy, economic growth has stabilized and increased, allowing the PRC to commit to vast infrastructure projects and serve as an alternative to US Hegemony from within the global market.
The market reforms are not without their risks, nor their contradictions, but to be good Marxists we must correctly analyze material reality. The failures of Khrushchev and the successes of Deng’s market reforms are both lessons in practice. Dogmatism and book worship are to be opposed.
While I think the meme whitewashes Mao, I think this is whitewashing Deng in reference to Mao. Yes, you have repeated Deng’s rhetorical tact in his own estimation very well, but the substance of what Deng and the subsequent CPC said amounted to that Mao was a good revolutionary leader, and he did things here and there (like liberate Tibet) that were good, but it is an overall condemnation of the projects that he oversaw in office from start to finish, with the Cultural Revolution just being the most exaggerated example of this condemnations, despite itself featuring programs that were globally recognized as radically successful and beneficial to the people, like the Barefoot Doctors campaign, which withered and died under Deng (granted some of that was from development, but the gutting of social welfare made some aspects of this harmful).
The modern CPC recognizes Mao as 70% good, 30% bad, not 70% bad, 30% good. Further, many of Deng’s specific policies are outdated, which is why the modern CPC adheres to a “middle of the road” position upholding both Mao and Deng equally. The overall estimation of Mao is quite positive, but with a lot of the good from the Cultural Revolution came instability and excess, which is why not just the CPC, but the people of the PRC see it as a contentious subject.
I uphold both Mao and Deng as valid and important Marxist-Leninists, but not that all of their policies and actions are universal. I don’t think that’s an uncommon position, or one that elevates Deng over Mao, which would in my opinion err on right-deviationism.
It’s funny how, going by your own description (which again, I believe does accurately represent the CPC’s claims) the compromise position between Deng and Mao ends up being Deng’s position on Mao still. Further, I think you can only get to those actual numbers by starting in the 1920s, and even then the math seems shaky, especially since the CPC effectively threw out a lot of Mao’s pre-1949 positions as well as his post-1949 projects. In my view, they basically have warped Mao into a more purely nationalist figure by preserving (the better portion of) his accomplishments as a nationalist while throwing out so much of what made him more than that.
To the best of my knowledge, the Cultural Revolution is not a contentious subject to the CPC, because there’s no contending, there is just condemnation. Obviously, I think Mao did some foolish things throughout his career and, up until the end where he did that great reversal, most of his errors were effectively left-deviationist, but their scope is wildly exaggerated and even the Cultural Revolution, while representing great failure on his part in many critical aspects, was a failure of his ability to defeat the bureaucrats who virtually did a coup via their factions of the Red Guard, one that he ultimately surrendered to. I don’t think that the CPC tends to foreground this element.
I find it sort of admirable, the main mistakes Mao made if we avoid getting into issues of international relations, because we can see a consistent through-line of him being almost an anarchist in some respects, basically just hoping people will spontaneously be communists, and then it doesn’t pan out. You saw it with the Hundred Flowers campaign, with the research phase of the Four Pests campaign, with certain aspects of the Great Leap Forward, and most catastrophically with the Red Guards. It’s very unfortunate in part because this wasn’t just a dogma that he was beating against a brick wall, it worked out great sometimes, like with the land reform, but there are critical differences in these cases. In any case, I view these failures as having been used as a smokescreen by a fundamentally more crassly nationalist faction to undermine socialist construction and produce the state we see today where Marxism is relegated to an alcove in the humanities and Keynesians make the economic policy (albeit much more faithfully than the Keynesians in somewhere like America).
I guess I don’t agree that Marxism is pushed aside, just interpreting different conditions. There certainly are liberals in the PRC, but as previously stated, the DotP remains, the large firms and key industries are overwhelmingly publicly owned, and central planning is still the main reason why the PRC is doing as well as it is.
I don’t consider Lenin to have been undermining socialism with the NEP, same with the SME in the PRC, as long as the large firms and key industries remain dominated by public ownership and as the medium fims grow they too are increasingly sublimated.
We’ll have to see if this continues to pay off or not.
We’ll have to see if this continues to pay off or not.
You’re a Historical Materialism Guy, aren’t you? China is historically progressive, anyone who says otherwise should be laughed out of the room, but that feature is not a binary and socialism is not a necessary condition of historical progressivism (it is the highest form of historical progressivism). China can do good things in the world without being Marxist, and indeed doing good things while not being Marxist is exactly what it is doing.
I guess I don’t agree that Marxism is pushed aside, just interpreting different conditions.
But you are objectively, observably wrong here if you’re responding, as it seems you are, to when I said:
the state we see today where Marxism is relegated to an alcove in the humanities and Keynesians make the economic policy
This is not even really a secret, it is out there in the open that Marxist economics literally just aren’t part of the mainstream discussion in China. On the broadest possible level, China talks about stages of socialist development, but then when it comes to assessing the actual behavior of the economy even a single step lower in abstraction than that, historically you were literally more likely to encounter an Austrian economist than a Marxist outside of academic cloisters, and today I think it’s mostly Keynesian factions. If you read more of what is published by the CPC itself on Qiushi rather than wishcasters like Ben Norton, I think this will become obvious to you over time. We’ve had a couple of Chinese posters in the history of the site who talk about this, where their politicians are literally all arguing on fundamentally nationalist, (sometimes state) capitalist lines and Marxism has been dead from a policy standpoint for decades
I acknowledged that the PRC has liberals, many of whom infest the CPC. At the same time, Marxism-Leninism is still what is upheld as the party line, and is what is integral to the top levels of the CPC. I read a lot of what users like Xiaohongshu post, including the reality that liberals have gained in influence, but I disagree that Marxism is suddenly meaningless in the PRC.
Maybe I do need to read more Qiushi, but I don’t really listen to Ben Norton already. There is an ideological struggle between liberalism and Marxism in the PRC, a consequence of Reform and Opening Up, no doubt, but I just haven’t seen any evidence that liberalism has definitively won out in influence and that Marxism has been tossed aside entirely.
Norton was just an example, I view him as sort of the champion of the Marxist China wishcasters in the current day, but there are many people with virtually identical beliefs who will tell you most of the same things.
Have you read a lot of Xiaohongshu’s posts?
There are no Marxist voices in the mainstream today. All the distinguished Marxist economists have long been banished to the humanities and social science departments long ago. They do write books, sometimes articles/blogs on the internet, and newspaper columns, but they have very little influence on policymaking. The mainstream is full on dominated by Western economists these days.
If you actually listen to the debate, both sides are openly making fun of the Mao era central planners for being inefficient lol.
Also FYI the correct term for Marxist economics in China is “political economy” (政治经济学). Nobody uses the word Marxist economics. Similarly, neoclassical economics is called “Western economics” (西方经济学). If you don’t know the correct terminology in Chinese, it can be very difficult to search for the relevant information you want.
I personally know someone who grew up under Mao, who was sent to work in a factory as a teenager under his policy (and doesn’t really cherish those memories but maintains a life-defining respect for him). He’s a huge revisionist and makes silly claims about China if you start from a zoomed-out ideological standpoint (claims silly enough that I refuted them in seconds such that he admitted they weren’t right), but has plenty of knowledge about the state of the country in many more concrete respects (he can talk my head off about manufacturing), and everything that he’s told me in terms of concrete facts comports with Xiaohongshu’s characterizations: Marxism exists in academia, but when people are studying economics, they are studying Western economics and those are the lines along which they debate economics, it just manifests very differently because China has different circumstances from places like America and has threats to its sovereignty that are a lot more imminent than merely imploding under its own weight, which is America’s only threat (and one that is still killing it anyway). That is why a basically nationalist project remains historically progressive.
Another one from our comrade:
That was before Hudson and Harvey went to the Marx conference in Beijing in 2018, where they were both stunned that Capital Vol. 3 was never taught in China.
You’d think that China would have learned this by looking at the West, or at least by reading Volume 3 of Capital. In fact the Peking University meeting, the Second World Conference on Marxism, David Harvey gave the opening and closing speech. His point was that the Chinese should read Volume III of Capital to understand why and how the volume of debt and credit grows exponentially. As banks get richer and richer, the One Percent get richer. They need to nurture more and more markets for their credit and debt creation. So they lend on easier and easier terms, at a rising proportion of the home’s value. So it’s bank credit that has been inflating the price of housing.
David Harvey asked how China can let the price of housing go up so high in Shanghai (the most privatized city) that almost everybody who has a house is a millionaire. How can China expect to remain competitive in exporting industrial products when the cost of housing is so high?
Unfortunately, his talk and mine were almost the only economic talks at the meeting in Peking. As one of the Russian attendees pointed out to me, “Marxism” is the Chinese word for politics. “Marxism with Chinese characteristics” means to doing what they want politically. But economically they’ve sent their students to the United States, to attend business schools to learn how U.S. financial engineering practices.
Shanghai is where Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys came in the 1970s and early 80s, because the Chinese government worried that if western Marxists came over, they would tend to interfere with domestic Chinese politics. So actually, China had less exposure to foreign Marxian economics than to U.S.-style neoliberal teaching.
I won’t pretend that my views are identical to theirs, that is not remotely true, but the central point in this branch of our discussion is something where I believe they agree with me.
Yes, I’ve read a good deal. I’m aware that the central stance of yours and Xiaohongshu’s is similar. At the same time, I simply do not have enough evidence, just online anecdotes to tell me that Marxism has been so completely sidelined as to be irrelevant. With such a level of evidence, I can only agree that there are contradictions, and indeed a large number of liberals that do have a good degree of influence, but not that this influence has toppled and removed Marxism entirely. I’ve seen just as much evidence, frankly, that Marxism is gaining in influence since the late 90s and 2000s period. At this point, I refuse to take a declarative stance about the outcomes of this struggle, and I hope that’s something you can at least understand, in an era where there are huge networks of wishcasters and China hawks.
This was a very interesting discussion and I appreciate both of you for it.
I was thinking about it since yesterday and I wanted to ask you something. Putting aside worker’s rights issues, the existence of billionaires, etc. If we all take it as granted that there’s at least some form of capitalism in China, and Marxists say it’s state capitalism as a brand of Chinese socialism under the control of the CPC, then would there be any real conflict if economics is driven by Western capitalist theories under the control of a Marxist political party?
Essentially, does it really matter if the economists are capitalists when the politicians guiding policy and business are (at least theoretically) still Communists?
Disapproving of mud-slinging towards previous socialist heads of state like Stalin, Mao, Deng, etc. has nothing at all to do with denying settler-colonialism in the US. You have literally no evidence of me denying the US Empire’s settler-colonial nature, I regularly push for decolonization and landback, especially over on my Lemmy.ml account where there are far more bloodthirsty settlers.
You laser-focused on a strawman because you aren’t interested in discussion, like you claim, but sowing division until you eventually get banned. Wrecker behavior.
This is largely a shitposting site. If you want discussion, post in the theory or politics comms, or the news comms. Further, you said this was to provoke discussion, but you accused me of being a patsoc unprovoked after I gave a thoughtful response. You’re just a wrecker, and not even an entertaining one at that.
I’m opening the floor to the motion to elect this user and every member associated with his order of the “The Radiant Trail” [preliminary] ACP(M) to be elected to the official hexbear entertainment committee for a period of five years.
You’re also not interested in discussion yet claim to be doing this to spark discussion, you’ve been on Hexbear for years but you also just joined, etc. etc. Is this dialectics? /s
Everything is dialectics, so yes, my responses are dialectical. My words have dual meaning. I am new insofar as this is a new account, but I am senior here because I have been here on many other accounts.
Other users have certainly felt it important to spark a struggle session surrounding Deng Xiaoping Theory, so you wouldn’t be alone, but at the same time, this is wrecker behavior for a Left-Unity shitposting site. Claiming that you’re here to spark discussion, and refusing to engage with discussion, isn’t “dialectics,” it’s pedantry.
To be frank you’re pontificating harder than the Spartacist League trot I met in L.A who sold me a newspaper while bickering and nitpicking over anything I said.
Khrushchev gained power by intentionally lying about Stalin, demonizing the socialist project, and implementing reforms that ultimately undermined the centralized system of the USSR, leading to stagnation and collapse. Deng, on the other hand, refused to do so:
Whether the socialist market economy of the PRC looks like the perfect ideal of socialism in our heads or not, we must recognize that the same failures caused by Kruschev have not come to pass:
Marxism-Leninism/Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory are the core of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, rather than a rejection of Mao and historical nihilism.
Socialism is upheld in the PRC, the large firms and key industries are firmly in the hands of the state, while the CPC maintains strong control of the medium firms.
The centralized system of socialism in the PRC is upheld. Social unity in collective purpose is high, even if there is broad diversity in thought, there is unity in continuing to improve and develop socialism to higher stages.
Rather than stagnating due to clunky liberalization undermining the planned economy, economic growth has stabilized and increased, allowing the PRC to commit to vast infrastructure projects and serve as an alternative to US Hegemony from within the global market.
The market reforms are not without their risks, nor their contradictions, but to be good Marxists we must correctly analyze material reality. The failures of Khrushchev and the successes of Deng’s market reforms are both lessons in practice. Dogmatism and book worship are to be opposed.
While I think the meme whitewashes Mao, I think this is whitewashing Deng in reference to Mao. Yes, you have repeated Deng’s rhetorical tact in his own estimation very well, but the substance of what Deng and the subsequent CPC said amounted to that Mao was a good revolutionary leader, and he did things here and there (like liberate Tibet) that were good, but it is an overall condemnation of the projects that he oversaw in office from start to finish, with the Cultural Revolution just being the most exaggerated example of this condemnations, despite itself featuring programs that were globally recognized as radically successful and beneficial to the people, like the Barefoot Doctors campaign, which withered and died under Deng (granted some of that was from development, but the gutting of social welfare made some aspects of this harmful).
The modern CPC recognizes Mao as 70% good, 30% bad, not 70% bad, 30% good. Further, many of Deng’s specific policies are outdated, which is why the modern CPC adheres to a “middle of the road” position upholding both Mao and Deng equally. The overall estimation of Mao is quite positive, but with a lot of the good from the Cultural Revolution came instability and excess, which is why not just the CPC, but the people of the PRC see it as a contentious subject.
I uphold both Mao and Deng as valid and important Marxist-Leninists, but not that all of their policies and actions are universal. I don’t think that’s an uncommon position, or one that elevates Deng over Mao, which would in my opinion err on right-deviationism.
It’s funny how, going by your own description (which again, I believe does accurately represent the CPC’s claims) the compromise position between Deng and Mao ends up being Deng’s position on Mao still. Further, I think you can only get to those actual numbers by starting in the 1920s, and even then the math seems shaky, especially since the CPC effectively threw out a lot of Mao’s pre-1949 positions as well as his post-1949 projects. In my view, they basically have warped Mao into a more purely nationalist figure by preserving (the better portion of) his accomplishments as a nationalist while throwing out so much of what made him more than that.
To the best of my knowledge, the Cultural Revolution is not a contentious subject to the CPC, because there’s no contending, there is just condemnation. Obviously, I think Mao did some foolish things throughout his career and, up until the end where he did that great reversal, most of his errors were effectively left-deviationist, but their scope is wildly exaggerated and even the Cultural Revolution, while representing great failure on his part in many critical aspects, was a failure of his ability to defeat the bureaucrats who virtually did a coup via their factions of the Red Guard, one that he ultimately surrendered to. I don’t think that the CPC tends to foreground this element.
I find it sort of admirable, the main mistakes Mao made if we avoid getting into issues of international relations, because we can see a consistent through-line of him being almost an anarchist in some respects, basically just hoping people will spontaneously be communists, and then it doesn’t pan out. You saw it with the Hundred Flowers campaign, with the research phase of the Four Pests campaign, with certain aspects of the Great Leap Forward, and most catastrophically with the Red Guards. It’s very unfortunate in part because this wasn’t just a dogma that he was beating against a brick wall, it worked out great sometimes, like with the land reform, but there are critical differences in these cases. In any case, I view these failures as having been used as a smokescreen by a fundamentally more crassly nationalist faction to undermine socialist construction and produce the state we see today where Marxism is relegated to an alcove in the humanities and Keynesians make the economic policy (albeit much more faithfully than the Keynesians in somewhere like America).
I guess I don’t agree that Marxism is pushed aside, just interpreting different conditions. There certainly are liberals in the PRC, but as previously stated, the DotP remains, the large firms and key industries are overwhelmingly publicly owned, and central planning is still the main reason why the PRC is doing as well as it is.
I don’t consider Lenin to have been undermining socialism with the NEP, same with the SME in the PRC, as long as the large firms and key industries remain dominated by public ownership and as the medium fims grow they too are increasingly sublimated.
We’ll have to see if this continues to pay off or not.
You’re a Historical Materialism Guy, aren’t you? China is historically progressive, anyone who says otherwise should be laughed out of the room, but that feature is not a binary and socialism is not a necessary condition of historical progressivism (it is the highest form of historical progressivism). China can do good things in the world without being Marxist, and indeed doing good things while not being Marxist is exactly what it is doing.
But you are objectively, observably wrong here if you’re responding, as it seems you are, to when I said:
This is not even really a secret, it is out there in the open that Marxist economics literally just aren’t part of the mainstream discussion in China. On the broadest possible level, China talks about stages of socialist development, but then when it comes to assessing the actual behavior of the economy even a single step lower in abstraction than that, historically you were literally more likely to encounter an Austrian economist than a Marxist outside of academic cloisters, and today I think it’s mostly Keynesian factions. If you read more of what is published by the CPC itself on Qiushi rather than wishcasters like Ben Norton, I think this will become obvious to you over time. We’ve had a couple of Chinese posters in the history of the site who talk about this, where their politicians are literally all arguing on fundamentally nationalist, (sometimes state) capitalist lines and Marxism has been dead from a policy standpoint for decades
I acknowledged that the PRC has liberals, many of whom infest the CPC. At the same time, Marxism-Leninism is still what is upheld as the party line, and is what is integral to the top levels of the CPC. I read a lot of what users like Xiaohongshu post, including the reality that liberals have gained in influence, but I disagree that Marxism is suddenly meaningless in the PRC.
Maybe I do need to read more Qiushi, but I don’t really listen to Ben Norton already. There is an ideological struggle between liberalism and Marxism in the PRC, a consequence of Reform and Opening Up, no doubt, but I just haven’t seen any evidence that liberalism has definitively won out in influence and that Marxism has been tossed aside entirely.
Norton was just an example, I view him as sort of the champion of the Marxist China wishcasters in the current day, but there are many people with virtually identical beliefs who will tell you most of the same things.
Have you read a lot of Xiaohongshu’s posts?
If you actually listen to the debate, both sides are openly making fun of the Mao era central planners for being inefficient lol.
https://hexbear.net/comment/6291342
I personally know someone who grew up under Mao, who was sent to work in a factory as a teenager under his policy (and doesn’t really cherish those memories but maintains a life-defining respect for him). He’s a huge revisionist and makes silly claims about China if you start from a zoomed-out ideological standpoint (claims silly enough that I refuted them in seconds such that he admitted they weren’t right), but has plenty of knowledge about the state of the country in many more concrete respects (he can talk my head off about manufacturing), and everything that he’s told me in terms of concrete facts comports with Xiaohongshu’s characterizations: Marxism exists in academia, but when people are studying economics, they are studying Western economics and those are the lines along which they debate economics, it just manifests very differently because China has different circumstances from places like America and has threats to its sovereignty that are a lot more imminent than merely imploding under its own weight, which is America’s only threat (and one that is still killing it anyway). That is why a basically nationalist project remains historically progressive.
Another one from our comrade:
https://hexbear.net/comment/6313832
I won’t pretend that my views are identical to theirs, that is not remotely true, but the central point in this branch of our discussion is something where I believe they agree with me.
Yes, I’ve read a good deal. I’m aware that the central stance of yours and Xiaohongshu’s is similar. At the same time, I simply do not have enough evidence, just online anecdotes to tell me that Marxism has been so completely sidelined as to be irrelevant. With such a level of evidence, I can only agree that there are contradictions, and indeed a large number of liberals that do have a good degree of influence, but not that this influence has toppled and removed Marxism entirely. I’ve seen just as much evidence, frankly, that Marxism is gaining in influence since the late 90s and 2000s period. At this point, I refuse to take a declarative stance about the outcomes of this struggle, and I hope that’s something you can at least understand, in an era where there are huge networks of wishcasters and China hawks.
This was a very interesting discussion and I appreciate both of you for it.
I was thinking about it since yesterday and I wanted to ask you something. Putting aside worker’s rights issues, the existence of billionaires, etc. If we all take it as granted that there’s at least some form of capitalism in China, and Marxists say it’s state capitalism as a brand of Chinese socialism under the control of the CPC, then would there be any real conflict if economics is driven by Western capitalist theories under the control of a Marxist political party?
Essentially, does it really matter if the economists are capitalists when the politicians guiding policy and business are (at least theoretically) still Communists?
we have Keynesians in America?
“Historical nihilism” is a term used by patsocs to attack communist who oppose settler-colonialism and its history in the United States.
Disapproving of mud-slinging towards previous socialist heads of state like Stalin, Mao, Deng, etc. has nothing at all to do with denying settler-colonialism in the US. You have literally no evidence of me denying the US Empire’s settler-colonial nature, I regularly push for decolonization and landback, especially over on my Lemmy.ml account where there are far more bloodthirsty settlers.
You laser-focused on a strawman because you aren’t interested in discussion, like you claim, but sowing division until you eventually get banned. Wrecker behavior.
If I was not interested in discussion, I would not be on a discussion board to begin with. That makes no sense.
This is largely a shitposting site. If you want discussion, post in the theory or politics comms, or the news comms. Further, you said this was to provoke discussion, but you accused me of being a patsoc unprovoked after I gave a thoughtful response. You’re just a wrecker, and not even an entertaining one at that.
I am not your entertainment committee.
I’m opening the floor to the motion to elect this user and every member associated with his order of the “The Radiant Trail” [preliminary] ACP(M) to be elected to the official hexbear entertainment committee for a period of five years.
Aye
Aye.
aye
Aye
aye
Aye
Aye
Aye
aye
Aye
Aye
Aye
是
It’s quite humorous a Gorgonzola-ite is using wobbly emojis to try and insult the Stalinist admins
You’re also not interested in discussion yet claim to be doing this to spark discussion, you’ve been on Hexbear for years but you also just joined, etc. etc. Is this dialectics? /s
Also, this is the meme community.
Everything is dialectics, so yes, my responses are dialectical. My words have dual meaning. I am new insofar as this is a new account, but I am senior here because I have been here on many other accounts.
So yes, I am new here.
tagline pls
Other users have certainly felt it important to spark a struggle session surrounding Deng Xiaoping Theory, so you wouldn’t be alone, but at the same time, this is wrecker behavior for a Left-Unity shitposting site. Claiming that you’re here to spark discussion, and refusing to engage with discussion, isn’t “dialectics,” it’s pedantry.
Yes you are
You disprove your point even as you make it, because you are ignoring most of what they put forward over and over again.
To be frank you’re pontificating harder than the Spartacist League trot I met in L.A who sold me a newspaper while bickering and nitpicking over anything I said.