>>2885878Excerpt from an essay I wrote:
The main theoretical ground of Chinese revisionism is that the world is not ready for communism and that they cannot achieve it themselves, only sitting by passively for the worldwide revolution to happen. They think with enough economic development, China will become the most powerful country in the world, and socialism will come to exist peacefully. This is a lot like Eurocommunism. To think Communism will inevitably come about like the rapture is mechanistic materialism, where the contradictory parts inside a system are not acknowledged. Communism is not inevitable. This is a rightist theoretical failure which Stalin describes as too much faith in the workers to endure capitalist conditions while continuing to have socialist consciousness.
Predicting the future is beyond us scientifically. Even if we knew how, it would take an enormous computer to simulate all the electromagnetic fields and molecules and atoms needed to predict with good accuracy the future course of human civilisation (let alone know anything with perfect certainty, because then you’d have to simulate the universe). By studying the past we can predict ourselves that Communism will be the next stage in Human history. But we can’t know it. History is made by all the people on the Earth, and their decisions make historical social forces that inform the decisions of everyone in the future. People are made by their material reality, but what makes history is people, not an abstract historical process that resolves automatically. It certainly will, but how exactly it does so is up to us!
The roaders claim that socialism in China is impossible due to capitalist encirclement. This goes against the theory of socialism in one country – in fact, in a lot of ways the arguments of revisionists are the same as left-communists. The heart of Chinese theoretical revisionism is that of Bukharin, who was both a rightist and ultra-leftist. Left-communism and rightism are linked in a lot of ways, especially so when it comes to the theoretical defence of China, where both agree that socialism cannot actually be built in the modern day. Socialism in one country is so important because people are made by their environment. If you run a capitalist state for 40 years you will become capitalist yourself. Only if you believe individuals are not informed by their material conditions can you claim that it is possible to run a state capitalist country without turning into a capitalist yourself. The CPC even encouraged their members to be capitalists!
The bourgeois counter-revolution is often likened to the NEP, but they could not be any more different. China’s analogy to the NEP was the period of New Democracy, where elements of the national bourgeois were accepted in order to develop the country to a modern standard. These policies were correct in their time period for achieving modernisation and completing capitalism, but they were always temporary, and once they were completed industry in both countries skyrocketed, with socialist economy proving more efficient. China was already a modern country in an industrial and social sense by the 1970s. For example, GDP growth between 1963 and 1978 was 7.5. Calories per day increased from just over 1800, to 2400. In the 1930s, infant mortality was 300 per 1000. In 1978 it was 30 per 1000. Life expectancy drastically increased (Chris Brama, Chinese Economic Development pp. 286-315). Industry modernised, and the Unlike the NEP and New Democracy, the “reform and opening up” was historically, socially and economically unnecessary.
When the roaders won, they ended the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and abandoned class struggle. Class struggle is the primary contradiction in socialism. The roaders overturned this after taking power in 1976. The 1981 resolution concretely states their abandonment of class struggle as the primary contradiction. The primary contradiction that they found was not the threat of imperialism (which is dubious considering the strength of China’s position even before any collaboration with the West, where only a joint invasion by both the U$ and the U$$R could defeat them), but, as Xi Xingping put it in the 19th National Congress, “the contradiction between the people's ever-growing need for a better life and unbalanced and inadequate development”. That is not a Marxist understanding of the contradictions at play.
The bourgeois state of China is closest to fascism than any other label. It uses socialist rhetoric while being economically capitalist. There is a large state sector which is run for profit, with the bourgeois being brought under control of the party. The workers union is for stability, not for class struggle. The only country it can be compared to in its economic inequality is America. It is an imperialist country. Class struggle is completely rejected while socialist imagery remains, which is a famous aspect of capitalism. That being said, it is not worse than the U$A – they are both massive imperialist countries who are responsible for the deaths of millions each year through social murder. It is probably most similar to social-fascist countries like Denmark.