Hacker News Reader

Comment by flomble | Hacker News Reader

The reason Deng Xiaoping had to use a coy phrase about cats to avoid admitting to his policies running counter to communism is that communism is at the core of the Party's identity and history, and that abandoning it openly would seriously undermine their legitimacy. The 'dialectical' approach to communism has meant slowly discarding almost everything which makes an economy communist. The "socialist market economy" allows private ownership, even of means of production and allows the private accumulation of capital. If you want to argue that it's actually communist because the transition was slow and the leadership still claims to be communist with a straight face, I'm not going to bother rebutting that.

The reason China's system is not more like the countries you listed is that it is autocratic, and the reason Zhao Ziyang was arrested was his excessive and open sympathy for a people's democratic movement.

View on HN

> The 'dialectical' approach to communism has meant slowly discarding almost everything which makes an economy communist.

The dialectical approach is the traditional approach, invented by Marx and added to by Engels and others, which they used to explain pretty much everything. It's not something invented by Deng Xaioping. It is in fact the essence of Marx's philosophy.

In a nutshell, the dialectic is an explanation for the evolution of society that looks at the systems by which society produces what it needs, i.e. "modes of production," and how contradictions in these modes of production are resolved through the creation of new modes. Hegel used the dialectical framework to describe the evolution of ideas, but Marx turned it upside down and argued that ideas were a consequence of the material conditions of life, the basis of which is the mode of production.

The classic example of Marx's dialectical thinking is his analysis in The Communist Manifesto that capitalism "produced its own gravediggers," the industrial proletariat. The proletariat would overthrow capitalism, but existed because of capitalism. The contradictions in the capitalist system caused the creation of an entire class of people which would eventually overthrow it and create a socialist society, and then a communist society. In other words, communism could never exist without capitalism having existed first, because the social class which would create communism would not have existed unless capitalism had created it.

Marx, followed by others including Lenin and Stalin, insisted that the full development of the productive forces was a necessary precursor to communism. He elaborated on this in the Critique of the Gotha Program, in which he advocated a different distribution of resources than in a full communist society -- some people would get more than others, according to their contribution to society rather than their need. At a later time, the productive forces would be developed to the point that they could provide enough wealth to distribute to everyone according to need, regardless of their contribution to society. (It's not unlike the arguments of some basic income proponents -- automation (productive forces) has created a society in which there is enough wealth to spread around to everyone, regardless of whether or not they have jobs.)

Similarly, the Soviet Union initially instructed the Chinese Communist Party to cooperate with the KMT in the 1920s, because they believed that full development of productive forces, under a capitalist regime, was a necessary precursor to communism. Not helpful, or merely good to have, but necessary according to Marx's dialectical philosophy.

The reason Marxism and Maoism are distinguished from each other is that Mao rejected that view, which was originally formulated by Marx, and advocated that communism be built by rural peasants rather than the industrial proletariat. Deng's ideology was closer to orthodox Marxism than Mao's was, in many ways. Deng argued that Mao tried to move too fast and skip the stages of social evolution that were necessary preconditions for communism, namely a thriving capitalist economy. If you want to redistribute wealth, you have to create it first. Deng argued that a market economy was the best way to do that, and that some people would get rich, but that's acceptable because it could be sorted out later when the productive forces were sufficient to support a true communist distribution of wealth. This is very similar to the views Marx expressed in Gotha, but more accepting of private property -- as long as it remains useful.

Maybe Deng was disingenuous and tried to sneak capitalism in through the back door, or maybe he really did believe what he said. But you can't dismiss his views as being non-Marxist ipso facto, because they are clearly derived from Marx's theory of history and expressed via Marxist concepts.

This is probably the best post I've ever read on HN. Thank you for making it. Deng's leadership, as you note, is so canonically, textbook Marxist that arguments to the contrary sort of make me blink and go "what?".

Your post reminded me that the thing nearly everybody forgets (and I'm totally being generous when saying "forgets", because I'm convinced most critics of Marxism--and I consider myself a partial one--have never read Marx) is that Marx considered capitalism, in its state as, you note, as a necessary precursor, to be a good thing. Capitalism, for its many, many, many faults, is a damned sight better for your average person than feudalism is. (This is a reason why, despite my own beefs with capitalism and even mixed economies, I will hold up pitchforks and torches when the anarcho-capitalists come to town, because anarcho-capitalism is functionally either wishcasting nonsense or feudalism in a funny hat--no intermediate stage.)

I'm not sure Marx would have agreed that capitalism was good, but rather that it was necessary for society to pass through a capitalist phase in order to get to the really good part, communism.

The sad thing is, most people who graduated high school in countries other than the United States know this stuff. Considering the impact these ideas have had on the world, they are worth learning about. I had to explain this stuff to a lot of students when I was in academia, except the foreign students.

To be clear, I mean "good" in a relative sense. I mean--like, capitalism, to Marx, is if not a strict positive development, it's real, real close to that relative to the alternatives at the time Marx was writing.

Also, yes, that this is obvious to people who didn't have a K-12 education in the United States is...troubling. But so are a lot of things about K-12.

> most people who graduated high school in other countries know this

Really? When traveling, I've often found myself surprised by the history that others don't know.

Granted, as an American I had indeed not known any of what you just said before, but I would be rather surprised if your perception of what most people know wasn't skewed.

This is a very thorough and informative post, and there's nothing in it which I would outright disagree with.

I was under the impression that Mao's unorthodox approach to revolution built on peasants rather than the industrial proletariat was and is seen, by the CCP itself, to be vindicated by their accession to power, and that that particular Maoist tenet was never really overturned.

I've never studied Marxism itself in depth, only come into contact with it in studying history, and it seems that you have a more in-depth understanding, but I thought that what Historical Materialism held about the necessity of capitalism as a precursor to communism was that in concentrating property and the means of production in the hands of the bourgeoisie, it oppressed the proletariat, giving them an incentive to revolt if they ever developed class consciousness, and caused conflict between different bourgeois groups (e.g. governments), causing capitalism to be completely unstable and necessarily bringing about its demise.

That is a very different chain of events to a communist government deliberately allowing a capitalist economy to flourish under its aegis. Capitalism leads to exploitation and thus unrest, but the most unwavering ideological pillar of the CCP is that the Party fosters social harmony and that it has an absolute mandate to rule and should not cede power. Deng himself made that clear when he decided to crush the Tiananmen protests, and the modern CCP has not budged on that front either.

Did Marx ever consider what a communist government who came to power before the full development of productive forces should do? Given that the reality Deng found himself in was at odds with the orthodox prediction of historical development, was his dialectical approach actually in line with Marxist orthodoxy?

> I thought that what Historical Materialism held about the necessity of capitalism as a precursor to communism was that in concentrating property and the means of production in the hands of the bourgeoisie, it oppressed the proletariat, giving them an incentive to revolt if they ever developed class consciousness, and caused conflict between different bourgeois groups (e.g. governments), causing capitalism to be completely unstable and necessarily bringing about its demise.

That's the most important part of capitalism's role in the dialectical framework, but the theory of productive forces is also very important.

Communists were not oblivious to the fact that capitalism is by far the most powerful engine of wealth creation and technological innovation in history. They recognized that fairly early on, which is why Marx believed that it was important to have a transitional stage between pure capitalism and pure communism, which he outlined in Gotha. I believe he discussed industrial automation as a way to free the majority of people from work. When Lenin needed to rebuild the Soviet economy after WWI, he turned to capitalism as the right tool for the job, and openly referred to it as capitalism.

I think Deng's approach was fairly well in line with Marxist orthodoxy in terms of the necessity of the development of productive forces, but he was more permissive of private ownership of capital and property than Marx would have been. Marx advocated a society with socialized ownership and management of the economy during this period, but Deng embraced a market economy instead. Both Marx and Deng believed that during this period, people would be rewarded proportionally to their contribution, not their need.

Deng's famous cat quote was an attempt to reconcile his use of the market with Marx's theory, by asserting that it didn't really matter by which method one developed the productive forces, as long as the method was effective. After all, it's only a transitional stage, and it's over when the productive forces can generate the wealth and goods necessary to support communism, so if a market economy gets you there fastest, why not use it? It's difficult to know how long Marx thought that would take, but I suspect he had a faster time scale in mind than Deng had.

> Similarly, the Soviet Union initially instructed the Chinese Communist Party to cooperate with the KMT in the 1920s, because they believed that full development of productive forces, under a capitalist regime, was a necessary precursor to communism. Not helpful, or merely good to have, but necessary according to Marx's dialectical philosophy.

Yes. The irony of course is that prior to Lenin arriving at the Finland Station and publishing the April Theses, Marxists in Europe, Marxists in Russia, and even the leading cadre of the Bolsheviks expected the same thing in Russia - that Lenin would support the provisional government formed by the February revolution. The Russians advised the Chinese CP not to do what they did. Of course, China had even less of a proletariat than Russia. When the KMT government fled to Taiwan in December 1949, only one ambassador left with them instead of remaining on the mainland - the Soviet Union's.

> Maybe Deng was disingenuous and tried to sneak capitalism in through the back door, or maybe he really did believe what he said. But you can't dismiss his views as being non-Marxist ipso facto, because they are clearly derived from Marx's theory of history and expressed via Marxist concepts.

Right. Lenin wrote a rebuttal to what he called infantile left wing communists in 1920, which was before the NEP when they really started saying capitalism had been restored in Russia. Stalin disbanded the Comintern and spoke of socialism in one country. Khrushchev was called a revisionist by Mao and Hoxha, and he switched a lot of capital production over to production of consumer goods. Actually people were probably right, because that really was the beginning of the end of the Russian (and Eastern European) economy which had been growing like gangbusters prior to that.

The economy has been growing, but the growth was not sustainable for a number of reasons - after 20 or so years of 'communism' the planned economy started massively missallocating investments, the technical expertise carried over from germany and eastern europe after the war was less and less relevant, and many of the people who got to the top were clueless sociopaths. There was no real pressure for effectivity - it took for example about 10 years to develop a consumer car in a socialist country, and then they could not hit production targets, whereas in the West cars were abundant and cheap. And then there were price controls. The market did not work, because it was forbidden from doing it, and the alternatives did not work either, so the economy went bust.

Some good points, twablalock, but you left out some essential stages in the history.

To start, Marx predicted that the alleged contradictions in capitalism in advanced industrial economies would lead to a workers revolution, with a pre-industrial country going first to socialist economics without the capitalist phase being seen as rather dubious. When decades went by and this failed to happen, it lead to a great crisis in the communist movement. One faction, lead by Eduard Bernstein concluded that revolution was impossible and so joined in with the social democrats, hoping to bring about socialism by gradual reforms.

The other faction, lead by Lenin, stuck with revolution as the means, but lead by a tightly-disciplined group of intellectually-oriented political activists. Lenin also thought that revolution had failed to occur because European nations used the profits from imperialism to pay-off the workers. That is important because he also thought this system, once it had expanded around the world, would lead to a world war that would destroy it, and then all the workers would revolt.

That in turn mattered because Russia, as a largely pre-industrial state, was not seen by marxist ideology as ready for communism, and so it would seem the communists should not try to provoke a revolution there, but Lenin believed that after the European war and communist revolutions there, the industrialized would aid a Russian communist state.

Well the great war came, the Russian communists started a revolution and took over, but after the war capitalism did not collapse. The question then was whether to switch to a capitalist state, or try to go ahead to socialism anyway. Lenin pushed for the first option, then died, there was a long power struggle between Trotsky, Bukharin, and Stalin, with the last eventually winning.

Stalin said he was for the capitalism option, but after a while switched to a brutal, totalitarian version of socialism, and this produced very rapid industrialization, but never a transition to true egalitarian socialism.

But in the meantime Mao took this to be proof that a non-industrialized nation could move directly to industrialization and eventually true communism (as did a great many 3rd world leaders and revolutionaries), and so when he came to power, went ahead with an even more brutal version.

In both cases, Russia and China, totalitarian industrialization eventually stagnated and went backwards. The Russians, under Putin, eventually opted for crony capitalism, the Chinese for a freer but still quite corrupt version.

It's a long, crazy story, full of delusions and failed predictions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com