Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

There is simple identifiable reason for the economic success of Chinese communist regime.

It was Deng Xiaoping and the revolutionary but simple change he made to the standard Marxist thinking:

> Socialism means eliminating poverty. Pauperism is not socialism, still less communism. [1]

Traditionally Marxists justified the poor conditions in the socialist countries as necessary step on the road to full communism. Alternatively they blamed capitalists outside the country or some inside forces. Deng abandoned this excuse and introduced very pragmatic economic approach.

Principles like "One country, two systems" or the cat's color theory: "It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice." helped to push this idea trough.

Basically Chinese first moved towards Socialist market economy with limits to private ownership, but the process has taken over and it's impossible to think that private ownership would be reduced again. I don't think that new generation of leaders really want to do that. They don't believe in communist ideology anymore. They want China be like Singapore or South Korea without the democracy part.

[1]: Deng Xiaoping, BUILD SOCIALISM WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS, June 30, 1984 http://academics.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/China/Deng/Buildin...

I agree in general with these points, but how do you figure "One country, two systems" contributed to China's economic boom? Was it necessary for China's opening up to the US and then to world markets? I am aware that one of the things Deng did to reassure first Kissinger and then Winston Lord was to tell them the status of Taiwan was non-negotiable, but that Mao's promise to set it aside for 100 years stood.

Marxists by and large have not defended these systems, but attacked them. Leninists and proponents of derived systems like Stalinism and Maoism have defended them (I'm purposefully avoiding the term "Marxism-Leninism" as depending on who you ask to define this, it can refer to either Leninism or Stalinism; the term was introduced by Stalin and used to justify a lot of his own "innovations" like the thesis of Socialism in One Country, but in "modern" usage it often refers to something closer to Lenins actual ideology purged of the Stalinist elements; but in any case it is ambiguous). Under Marxist theory all of these systems are doomed to failure - Marx argued already in The German Ideology (1845) that he saw an advanced capitalist economy with sufficient wealth that redistribution would eliminated poverty, rather than just spread it around, to be an essential precondition for a socialist revolution to succeed without devolving into renewed class struggle.

It was Lenin that "circumvented" that requirement with his idea of a "revolutionary vanguard" to guide the country to socialism without waiting for capitalism to develop, and pushed the ideas you ascribe to Marxism. In fact this, along with Lenins idea of "democratic centralism" that allowed for tighter control of the party was what drove the split between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks - the former with the Socialist Revolutionaries believed that socialism in Russia required allowing a capitalist economy to develop first, in line with Marxist theory. Many of them were murdered or arrested for their opposition to the Bolshevik coup.

Deng's reforms were not really anything particularly new: Lenin was forced to accept the same realisation that a return to at least a limited market economy was necessary with New Economic Policy in 1921, after the strict collectivisation during the Russian civil war had harmed the economy substantially. However Stalin reversed most of NEP in the year after gaining power, and this approach was then largely shelved until Deng. But in both cases is what a bandaid to counter damage done by their attempt to policies on underdeveloped economies that they did not have the resources to make work [that does not mean their policies necessarily would work under any circumstances; but the point is that to have a chance at all required a much more developed economy].

Translation: If you're going to redistribute wealth, it helps a lot if you have the wealth in the first place.

Marx argued already in The German Ideology (1845) that he saw an advanced capitalist economy with sufficient wealth that redistribution would eliminated poverty, rather than just spread it around, to be an essential precondition for a socialist revolution to succeed without devolving into renewed class struggle.

Systems that create wealth are subject to Pareto distributions. However, relative inequality is the primary driver of social unrest. So a stable solution for societal organization needs to take both into account.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3XYHPAwBzE

> Deng's reforms were not really anything particularly new: Lenin was forced to accept the same realisation that a return to at least a limited market economy was necessary with New Economic Policy in 1921, after the strict collectivisation during the Russian civil war had harmed the economy substantially.

Indeed Deng's reforms were influenced by the NEP, according to Pantsov and Levine in Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life:

> It will be recalled that Deng Xiaoping himself had studied Marxism from the works of the Bolshevik leaders who had propounded NEP. He drew on ideas from NEP when he spoke of his own reforms. In 1985, he openly acknowledged that 'perhaps' the most correct model of socialism was the New Economic Policy of the USSR.

I'm not sure the Chinese would see Deng as a fundamental change to their ideology.
The whole point of the Cultural Revolution was to spend a generation or so breaking down the old money and family structures that had ruled China. Breaking down the country in order to rebuild it. Something like Deng's policies was always in the plans after that.

> Something like Deng's policies was always in the plans after that.
Not really.
> Both Liu [Shaoqi] and Deng supported Mao in the mass campaigns of the 1950s, in which they attacked the bourgeois and capitalists, and promoted Mao's ideology. However, the economic failure of the Great Leap Forward was seen as an indictment on the ability of Mao to manage the economy. Peng Dehuai openly criticized Mao, while Liu Shaoqi and Deng, though more cautious, began to take charge of economic policy, leaving Mao out of day-to-day affairs of the party and state.
> Liu and Deng's economic reforms of the early 1960s were generally popular and restored many of the economic institutions previously dismantled during the Great Leap Forward. Mao, sensing his loss of prestige, took action to regain control of the state. Appealing to his revolutionary spirit, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, which encouraged the masses to root out the right-wing capitalists who have "infiltrated the party". Deng was labelled the second-in-command of the "capitalist-roaders" faction (Zouzipai).
> Mao feared that the reformist economic policies of Deng and Liu could lead to restoration of capitalism and end the Chinese Revolution. For this and other reasons, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966, during which Deng fell out of favor and was forced to retire from all his positions.
> During the Cultural Revolution, he and his family were targeted by Red Guards, who imprisoned Deng's eldest son, Deng Pufang. Deng Pufang was tortured and jumped out, or was thrown out, of the window of a four-story building in 1968, becoming a paraplegic.
See more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping#Target_of_two_pu...

This comment contributes to the discussion, I don't understand why it's being downvoted.

Agreed, this is disturbing. I read it twice just make sure I hadn’t missed any reason for the downvote.

It's a politicised subject; there will always be some downvotes. It will usually self-correct relatively well.

Please don't break the guidelines by going on about downvoting. Instead, if you see an unfairly downvoted comment, simply give it a corrective upvote and move on. Other users will typically do so too—but comments like this one linger on, orphaned and meaningless.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair enough, I just get irrationally annoyed when I see thoughtful comments be downvoted but you're right, I won't do it again.

> Traditionally Marxists justified the poor conditions in the socialist countries as necessary step on the road of communism
“Leninists”, you mean. Marxists see advanced capitalism as a prerequisite to moving on to socialism as opposed to Leninists who try to bypass capitalism; the poor conditions of Leninist states (which aren't found in socialist systems more broadly) are a direct result of that.

NEP (New Economic Policy) was Lenin's idea. The NEP was abandoned in 1928 after Joseph Stalin took over.

It's risky to make broad claims regarding Marxism (both for you and the parent), it's kind of a catch-all term these days, especially when "marxist" has been turned into an insult in large parts of the English speaking world and in particular in the USA. After all, even Karl Marx said he wasn't a Marxist.
I think it's more interesting to consider the ideas and concepts themselves rather that coming up with a rather meaningless and probably misleading label.

> concepts themselves rather that coming up with a rather meaningless and probably misleading label.
Most of communism, anarchism and Marxism is fighting over the possession of language and labels. Different factions were named after different people who fought over the correct form of communism and had periodical ideological purges.
I have been reading about communism and anarcho-communistm recently. Daniel Guérin s book Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, 1970 (originally L'anarchisme. De la doctrine à l'action, Paris, Gallimard, 1965). It's a classic.

But in this case there are clear actual statements by Marx. E.g. from The German Ideology:
> And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced
The point being that, contrary to what people tend to think, Marx saw people as generally driven by self-interest, rather than altruism, and if a group seeking to improve their lives organise, take control of government, but the country is so poor that redistribution just makes everyone poor, there is no reason to assume that some people will not start trying to take advantage of power and cause a return to class struggle. The foundation of Marxism is the idea that capitalism will bring the productive forces of society to previously never before seen heights, where redistribution eventually becomes viable - this is why you e.g. find Marx and Engels spending the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto largely praising capitalism into the skies.
This theme from The German Ideology is one he returned to time and time again, such as e.g. when warning in prefaces to the Communist Manifesto that Russia could only successfully go through a socialist revolution if a revolution was to happen in the most well developed countries in Europe around the same time, to compensate for the underdevelopment of Russia itself.
Whether or not he was right, this is one of the most central distinctions between Marxism and Leninism.

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