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