Yeah he was a b****

Deng did the same to Mao except just paying him a little lip service so it didnt look like a full denouncement lol

I’m not the biggest fan of deng but his own implements of Chinese socialism (sic.) was far more justified than Khrushchev

China needed the industrial (among other things) development that the USSR already had at that point u feel

The USSR’s de stalinization was more reactionary to public attitude than actual material condition vs the heavy lack of development in Maoist China

Though I’m not looking at this from the most educated view

This is the ideological excuse but not the real reason

The moment they jailed the Gang of Four and let Deng back into the party China had no business calling the USSR out on anything yet the split still continued another decade

I remember you going into it a bit back, but I think you're psychoanalysis Mao a bit too much like he had absolute power.

and to the second post I agree with you on that, also what do you think of Lin Baio, I know third worldist love him lol, and Gonzaloist compare him to as a Khrushcev character (staying close to Mao like Khrushchev did with Stalin).

Also didnt China and USSR started trading again during the 80s before the collapse did seem like relations were cozying up again.

Khruschev is for some reason super overhated, it is unwarranted IMO. The economic system wasn't that bad under him and the USSR was the peak of its power both at home and abroad. The communist movement was also at the peak of its power in the 1950s.

The bullshit started with the Kosygin reform 1965 which was done after they ousted Khruschev and first introduced market mechanism into the USSR. They could have reformed planning using the proposed OGAS systems but for a few political reasons mainly corruption and a loss of power for bureau crats they didn't pull through with it, leading to the slight "stagnation" under Brezhnev and the crisis under Gorbachev.

Ultimately while Khruschev was a b**** for some of the lies he pushed about Stalin and being too afraid of the USA, I wouldn't see his era specifically as the reason for the "downfall".

I would argue the seeds were set with the faction ban by Lenin (although I think Lenin was justified with this). Stalin didn't overturn this and kind of ruined the inner-party democracy and went overboard with purges. Khruschev brought it back slightly but not to the point Lenin envisioned. Brezhnev was a hack with zero Marxist knowledge, he ruled in the time period where I would say the train for any salvaging of the USSR was already departing. If Brezhnev had reformed the party and pushed cybernetic planning and tried to re-align with China, IMO the USSR would still exist.

It's not a psychoanalysis, Mao was embarrassed when both USSR and China were communist yet one was rapidly industrializing and the other was failing to grow economically for the first few years. Mao would constantly point at the USSR as a foreign invader later on to distract from domestic issues, even staging and provoking border conflicts.

Also you gotta understand how proud Chinese people are, even someone like Mao, they were the biggest and richest part of the world for centuries, they felt slighted in their national honor to align under the USSR and suddenly be the "little brother".

Stalin treated Mao like a b****, supported the KMT in the 1920s and the USSR didn't help enough in the Korea War. Furthermore the USSR fought a war against China in Xinjiang in the 1930s. Stalin insisting on all communist countries to follow exactly his policies and lines didn't help either.

The Khruschev thing was just talk, you really think Mao cared about revisionism when later on he allied with the USA?

China got the blueprints for the nuclear bomb gifted by the USSR a year before the split and then ran off on the plug.

FFS they renamed the street on which the Soviet embassy was located on into "Anti-Revisionism Street" and a bunch of other goofy s***

After the USSR went full-on capitalist in its last 2 or 3 years I think China didn't feel that threatened anymore and they cozied up again but it was too late.

Maoists love to claim Lin Biao wanted to assassinate Mao but this seems so far-fetched, reminds me of Stalin guys saying Trotsky wanted to ally with Hitler

i think deng himself was a decent marxist and is obviously now infamous for the dengist reforms but as i think arcade goon pointed out the people following deng such as zemin really opened the gates for the worst of it. obviously deng is responsible for this initial inertia and he deserves whatever criticism he holds for it.

like just read marxists.org/reference/archive/deng-xiaoping/1956/8.htm

even if u just skim it he is correctly a***yzing and self criticizing the party railing against bureaucratism, ideological egotism, and divorcing investigation from the people and material reality.

Deng:
"Modernization does represent a great new revolution. The aim of our revolution is to liberate and expand the productive forces. Without expanding the productive forces, making our country prosperous and powerful, and improving the living standards of the people, our revolution is just empty talk. We oppose the old society and the old system because they oppressed the people and fettered the productive forces. We are clear about this problem now. The Gang of Four said it was better to be poor under socialism than to be rich under capitalism. This is absurd."
marxists.org/reference/archive/deng-xiaoping/1979/152.htm

obviously to this day its highly debatable whether this was the correct decision or not, but it wasn't a wanton decision made without deliberation. He understood the wealth China had, and the resources they needed to acquire in order to access that wealth was something that capitalist countries held.

"It is wrong to maintain that a market economy exists only in capitalist society and that there is only “capitalist” market economy. Why can’t we develop a market economy under socialism? Developing a market economy does not mean practising capitalism. While maintaining a planned economy as the mainstay of our economic system, we are also introducing a market economy. But it is a socialist market economy. Although a socialist market economy is similar to a capitalist one in method, there are also differences between them. The socialist market economy mainly regulates interrelations between state-owned enterprises, between collectively owned enterprises and even between foreign capitalist enterprises. But in the final a***ysis, this is all done under socialism in a socialist society. We cannot say that market economy exists only under capitalism. Market economy was in its embryonic stages as early as feudalist society. We can surely develop it under socialism. Similarly, taking advantage of the useful aspects of capitalist countries, including their methods of operation and management, does not mean that we will adopt capitalism. Instead, we use those methods in order to develop the productive forces under socialism. As long as learning from capitalism is regarded as no more than a means to an end, it will not change the structure of socialism or bring China back to capitalism."
I think this quote is particularly notable as it outlines the entire dengist debate in and of itself. And obviously until more recent policies the entire pro argument had little merit as the modernizations obviously changed the structure of and brought capitalism to china. this is why i think the current state and direction of china is so interesting in the present and any modern socialist will be defined as to their position to china.

"At present, we are still a relatively poor nation. It is impossible for us to undertake many international proletarian obligations, so our contributions remain small. However, once we have accomplished the four modernizations and the national economy has expanded, our contributions to mankind, and especially to the Third World, will be greater. As a socialist country, China shall always belong to the Third World and shall never seek hegemony. This idea is understandable because China is still quite poor, and is therefore a Third World country in the real sense of the term. The question is whether or not China will practise hegemony when it becomes more developed in the future. My friends, you are younger than I, so you will be able to see for yourselves what happens at that time. If it remains a socialist country, China will not practise hegemony and it will still belong to the Third World. Should China become arrogant, however, act like an overlord and give orders to the world, it would no longer be considered a Third World country. Indeed, it would cease to be a socialist country. I first addressed these points in a speech delivered at the Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1974. The current foreign policy, which was formulated by Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai, will be passed on to our descendants."

I mean if Mao felt slighted against Stalin why wouldn't he have just agreed with the de stalinization.

Also the invasion was against the Kuomintang, then again if you were patriotic Chinese communist. I can see why this would bother someone even if they were against the Kuomintang

The allying of the US just seemed like trying to play the Soviets off, especially sense they were having border skirmishes. Though many of Chinese foreign policy blunders feel like it was due to trying to play the two off like Tito did.

I do think Mao was serious about revisionism especially since the cultural revolution happened.

@Womanpuncher69 regarding how to deal with revisionism:

First of all, you cannot have full obedience to the party. This is bullshit. I talked to a member of the CPC's youth wing and she was full-on brain-washed. She said she will defend the wealth of Jack Ma because the party says that markets are necessary for pushing China's productive forces. I asked if China can't develop productive forces without having billionaires. She said it doesn't matter because the party decided so, the party represents her country, she loves her country and thus she loves the party. Now you might think this is just a singular anecdote but I have noticed that Chinese people have extreme obedience towards power, maybe this has historical roots stemming back to the imperial era.

The problem is this: If your party does things that we Marxists regard as good and you are totally loyal, then everything is fine. But what if the party gets co-opted by opportunists? Now, suddenly, following your party means following a revisionist line. Oops.

Therefore, there must be a real culture of democracy and discussion within these parties. China will not collapse overnight because they introduce more discussions and criticisms within the party.

Lenin did the faction ban because they were in a civil war. The situation in China today is not comparable to USSR 1921. There is no need to suppress genuine discussion.

Look at Western democracy: There is a pluralistic variety of opinions, but all within the Overton window of capitalism. The same thing could apply to any stable socialist nation: Have a lot of opinions within the Overton window of socialism.

This was actually the norm in the socialist movement up until 1921, for the Bolsheviks as well. A lot of people try to translate what Lenin decided during the Civil War into a time and space that is different.

The invasion was against the Republic of China but there is no reason to think the PR China would not want to defend Xinjiang territory.

Nowadays historians overall agree that a lot of the border skirmishes were fake or were instigated by Mao for a response, maybe you can compare it to the little s***-flinging that happen over in Kashmir.

first up i want to say that ur first assumption is immaterial. obviously somebody who's a cpc youth member believes these things becuz of the nature of the nationalism and education of modern china. assuming historical roots back to imperialist submission is a bizarre take.

but i as usual agree w your other takes. self criticism and investigation was a prominent and important part of initial maoism for a reason. the kind of stalinist line of "there are no left errors" guarantees a form of uncorrectable revision as the truth of material conditions is something you have to explore and make corrections to your assumptions of.

in general i think over time things get lost in translation and a rigid conservative political structure makes it hard to correct incorrect assumptions. obviously the dialectic counterpoint here being that you don't want to platform reactionary arguments but its not like china hasn't had issues w that already.

Second of all, you do need popular participation in politics. Vanguard party is good and all, but its role should be to guide the masses. Sometimes this means disregarding them in an almost paternalistic way, but often times this means listening to the common voice and pushing a mass line.

Cuba IMO has handled such participation well.

You need a popular participation in the armed forces and security so you don't get couped and can start a guerilla war in case the USA wants to invade. See Cuba or Venezuela.

You don't necessarily need elections. IMO sortition (random choice like jury duty in the USA) into certain councils to advise politicians and technocrats would also be a good idea. For example, make a council that decides about building planning in the city and get a few representatives of the government, technocrats and then a few civilians in there. You have to give people the feeling they are a part of the state.

Communes are also a good idea (I don't mean the hippy stuff but basically having for example a communal cafeteria, communal cleaning, communal kindergartens and so on). Also very useful for women because they don't gotta do unpaid housework as much.

You need lobby organizations that can play a part in political life, like an association of mothers, an association of (insert religion, hobby, ethnicity) et cetera. Instead of denying them the right to organize, create a semi-official structure for them to interact with the state and let their voices be heard.

You basically need to embed socialism into the daily lives of people, in social life, in security and defense, in neighborhood affairs and so on. You have to count on your people to revolt against anyone trying to take away their socialism. Most people in the USSR were actually against its abolition. Imagine if millions had went on the street in those days to protect the USSR?

China has this problem nowadays too: Chinese people are incredibly grillpilled. Of course, Westerners have the opposite problem, they talk about politics all day despite not having any influence. But Chinese people see politics as something far away from them, something untouchable and uncontrollable that reigns over them whether they like it or not, so they don't even bother following it much less participating in it.

So beyond allow more varied discussion within the realms of the party, you have to allow genuine grassroots popular movements. There has to be a certain level of interaction between the masses, the party and the government, a synergy of sorts.

A lot of it is just about keeping people rooted to the movement, giving them constructive pressure vaults, make them the last stopgap to coup-d'etats, don't create a separate warrior-caste (see: police officers in USA) or a separate bureaucrat caste that feels zero connection to the people (see: USSR in the late 80s).

This way you can also co-opt any dissent into your movement (same thing liberals do: look at how they managed to take the anger at George Floyd and co-opt all of it into their agenda).

I remember you talking s*** about cultural revolution before but wasn't this one of the point of it get the masses involved again.

Do you reject the cultural revolution entirely ? or just think it was mishandled ?

IMO it is not immaterial, you have to understand the role of Confucianism in China. Filial piety is still a big thing and this translates into politics. China is of course not a fairyland, it is a country like any other, but we should always keep in mind that they have 5000 years of continuous culture that leads to other cultural views than others. I would absolutely say that Chinese people value obedience more than Western people, and that Chinese people even prior to the PRC have had a bigger emphasis on collectivism rather than individualism. This isn't even a bad thing (see the pandemic and how it was handled). The thing is though that they should be obedient towards the goals of communism, not obedient towards what party member of the day says.

Of course she is influenced by education and such, I trust you guys enough to know I don't think there is a "Chinese essence" like some spirit floating around in the ether, it is all tied to their base and superstructure.

There are mandatory Marxism classes in China and I was shown the curriculum. They mostly talk about dialectics in a very vague way, which is also the basis of Xi Jinping Thought and basically a word-salad with the words "Marx" and "dialectics" namedropped like it's a damn The Game album to give them red-street-cred. They talk about historical materialism too, obviously with an emphasis on "muh productive forces", while completely ignoring the cycle of base and superstructure that Marx uses to explain why in the concept historical materialism history can even manage to move forward (through the contradictions that arise between base and superstructure).

This was the table of contents:
1. The materialness of the world and the law of development
2. Practice and cognition and its law of development
3. Human society and its law of development
4. Essence and laws of capitalism
5. The development of socialism and its laws
6. Communism

@ARCADE_GOON "The problem is this: If your party does things that we Marxists regard as good and you are totally loyal, then everything is fine. But what if the party gets co-opted by opportunists? Now, suddenly, following your party means following a revisionist line. Oops."

I agree with you on that but once the opportunists take power, is there any way for the marxist to gain power again or like what my comrades said when I asked them the "red bourgeois would maintain their power like the bourgeois in any capitalist country does"

I guess the question is that once opportunist take power does the DOTP turn into a DOTB and is there anyway to turn it back outside of a revolution.

IMO, the superstructure always lags behind the base a few years to decades.

I will give you an example: I talked to Asian people and they think of Europe very highly. IMO, they have the image of 1980s and 1990s Europe in their mind, where the European Community constituted like 30% of the world economy, whereas it is just like 15% now. They come to Europe to study and are disappointed when they see the disorder and poverty and chaos.

On the flip-side, Germans I talk to still think of China as some poor-ass country when in reality their infrastructure is often times far more sophisticated than ours. Their university libraries look like damn airports, their trains are awesome and they use computers and phones for everything while I gotta go to the local bureau and do it all with paperwork. Germans still think of China in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s. The normal German doesn't know how China in 2021 is.

Base and superstructure do not align in times of changes. It takes a few years for even the dumbest idiot to internalize changes that society has. How many Americans think Biden is gonna be a return to the Obama-days of the USA? They don't realize yet that the world will never be like 2008 again.

Translated into the Cultural Revolution, I think the attempt to radically change the superstructure without paying enough attention to the base will always fail.

They did some stupid stuff, like the sparrow campaign or the "people's iron ovens". The Soviets told them that the iron they make is s***ty and can't be used for anything. It seems like some actions were done more to make a point than for any economic reasons.

I am not entirely critical of Mao, I think the communes were a good idea, I think the iron rice bowl was a good idea, I think he handled landlords the correct way, he handled opium addiction the right way, a lot of it was fine. I don't see him as some Hitler-esque villain like liberals do.

But there was a similar dynamic between Hitler and CR-era Mao: Both of them led in a very vague way. You see, when Hitler was in power, he didn't even give direct orders a lot of the time. He just let people do what they want. People of course wanted to please him, so they were doing what they thought Hitler would approve of. Similar things happened in the CR, Mao didn't really command a lot of the stuff, people just did what they thought Mao would like.

IMO, this is a result of a cult of personality. Society kind of went overboard in revolutionary fervor, but for what reason? After a while they should have just gone back to business and focused on industrializing like Stalin once ordered. I think a lot of it was Mao just wanting to increase loyalty among the people towards him, which would have also worked in a more subtle way (see: Castro).

That being said, had Maoist China continued their path, they might have had even bigger growth than under the Dengist reforms. I don't believe that the Deng reforms were necessary at all, although I am more sympathetic to them than to the Gorbachev reforms because China was way way way poorer than USSR at the time (and still is poorer if we compare 2021 wealth standards to 20th century wealth standards).

oh yea i can see what ur saying then as an intersection of nationalism, the education system and confucianist values. ultimately i agree w u that the issue is the orientation of these values and, given that there are people with correct orientations, it's a shame that there aren't more.

the irony, or maybe self fulfilling premise, is that base and superstructure to me explains this whole phenomenon extremely adequately. post deng policies pretty clearly contradict a lot of marx's assertions about a socialist society so obfuscation in education of marxism has to take place. like the emphasis on productive forces reads to me the same as the emphasis on the civil rights movement functions to conceal the inherent contradictions.

Furthermore, you have to look at the GPR in the context of 5000 years of history weighing heavily on the minds of the people. Alas, I think they could have grown away from this in a more natural way via an emphasis on internationalist communism and dialectical materialism and a steady growth of the economy.

Nowadays, it seems Imperial China is very en vogue again. You got a lot of people saying Marx must be interpreted in a Confucian way, see the bozo @krishna_bound and I quoted the last page. The most popular genre of TV shows in China are imperial-age dramas and romances. A lot of women start cosplaying as imperial-era girls again. You wouldn't have seen this stuff during Mao's era lol

Exactly, this is 100% right - they have to do word-tricks because otherwise they must admit that they are socialist in name only. This in turn confuses a lot of the people there. I have talked to people studying law and politics in China, so people who you think should be acquainted with these things, and they openly admit that they simply don't understand what socialism means, what communism means, what Xi Jinping Thought means, the cognitive dissonance between Marx and the reality of China is so extreme that your brain would shut down. And these are people who had classes both in high school and in university about Marxism.

I like to compare it to corporate McKinsey speak - circling in, synergy, teamwork, solutions, innovation - but with a red paint.

Even though this is the Economist, the headline is kind of accurate: "China is struggling to explain Xi Jinping Thought" - this is the actual diagram that is supposed to help students:

I post on /leftypol/ here and there. There was an announcement that Xi Jinping would release an article about dialectical materialism. People on leftypol waited on it like it was Kanye dropping an album. There was a very similar dynamic to the album release thread of an overhyped album: People were in denial mode, coping, and then the thread kind of died off and people acted like they were never excited in the first place.

The article sucked because, honestly, what does it even say?

This is the article if you guys wanna read -
ccdpch.com/dialectical-materialism-is-the-worldview-and-methodology-of-chinese-communists

A bunch of fancy words to justify Dengism lmao

Meanwhile Lenin explains for more complicated concepts in a far simpler language

yeah cult of personalities have haunted communism, I know Stalin wasn't a fan of his, idk if or what Mao had said about the one around him.

One of things I'm not a huge of fan from Gonzalo Thought is the great leader theory, they justify it saying that every movement had a leader that synthesised and systemised the lessons learnt going like Lenin and Mao and even anarchist movements who were supposed to be against anything like that, with Makhno.

Though to me it seems to be an easy way to fall into cult of personality even if what they say is true