Kathryn’s Reviews > China and Socialism: Market Reforms and Class Struggle > Status Update

like, somehow both anti-Deng and anti-Mao and at the same time totally misunderstanding the contradictions of Chinese society and the way they manifested through the line struggles against capitalist restoration.

treating the Communist Party and Chinese society at large as a monolith, as if struggles for economic democracy and worker self-management weren't a major part of the Cultural Revolution, and as if the counter-revolutionary incident in Tiananmen Square '76 was a spontaneous worker uprising rather than an organized counteroffensive by the capitalist roaders which promoted slogans against workplace democracy/mass management in favour of tighter one man bureaucratic management controls, detached from political lines and proportional planned development, in favour of maximizing profitability on an enterprise-by-enterprise basis, and stifling worker leadership, initiative and creativity through strict regulations on division of labour.

also their analysis of China's economy under Mao here seems like a stereotype of the idea of "Stalinism."

"emphasized heavy industry" - correct, though Mao early on criticized socialist construction in the USSR as one-sided, and put forward the policy of "walking on two legs," whereby agriculture is the foundation (for subsistence and raw materials), heavy industry is the leading factor (for means of production and defence), and light industry is the bridge (for consumption and other inputs), so as to develop planned proportional development, taking into consideration the contradictions between town and country, and working to strengthen the worker-peasant alliance and eventually eliminate those class distinctions all together.

"centralized economic planning" - again, does not take into consideration that the Chinese economy was based on the principles of strategic centralization and tactical decentralization, which encouraged mass initiative at the local level in order to best serve local interests, as well as organizing production at a national scale so as to balance proportional planned development.

"state ownership of means of production" - is overly simplistic, you can have public ownership in both capitalism and socialism, what is important is what politics are in command and whether or not the working class has leadership. form vs. content, the content of ownership in state enterprises was in a continuous state of struggle, where exploitative mutual relations among the people were fought against by mass movements which emphasized eliminating the divisions of labour between cadre-worker, manager-worker, technician-worker, and intellectual-worker, and promoting mass management, initiative, production, and experiment in order to serve to working class and eventually eliminate those distinctions all together.

"party control over political and cultural life" - ignores the ongoing line struggle (the party is not a monolith), and the fact that the revolutionary line of the party launched massive mass movements during the Cultural Revolution which lit the country on fire in order to advance every aspect of Chinese society forward through the local initiative of the masses. the transformations in politics, agriculture, industry, education, health, culture, the military, etc. were pushed forward at all times by the masses.

"main responsibility to promote production and labour discipline" - this is literally Deng's line, not Mao's, which was to "grasp revolution, promote production" and to "take class struggle as the key link" while advancing the revolutions in production, and in science and technology. the advanced mass organization of the working masses to transform social relations, restrict bourgeois right, and to struggle against self and raise mass consciousness, aimed to advance a communist consciousness and mass initiative that would accelerate the development of the productive forces under the leadership of the working class, and that would continuously work to eliminate the soil from which the new bourgeoisie, inner-party bourgeoisie, and counterrevolution stems.