>>574030>If private property, money, abstract value production, class society, and the state, are abolished prematurely, when the oppressive logic and power of capital still controls the entire world, China would become vulnerable to both external imperialist violence and internal reactionary sabotage (no doubt under the banner of “democracy”). The Communist Party would be immediately compromised by foreign backed elements; the country might be torn apart once again by civil war, and once again subjected to imperialist domination. The Chinese revolution, what so many millions fought, worked tirelessly, and sacrificed their lives for, will have been for nothing.How does this explain the alliance between the US and China as well as Deng coming to power prior to the fall of the USSR? China itself has invited in or even cultivated these "internal reactionary" elements by its capitulation to capitalism. It doesn't even explain policy choices. Why, for example, did China allow for businesses within China (not simply multinationals or Western-created businesses) to be structured as traditional Western corporations rather than
solely as worker-owned cooperatives? Why did China decide to save the US during the subprime mortgage crisis if the two are so opposed?
If the idea is that socialism is impossible so long as significant capitalist powers exist elsewhere, then socialism in China will for the foreseeable future be waiting for a socialist revolution in the West beforehand, but it's exactly contrary to what I'm told by Dengists. Instead, they hedge on constructs like "multipolarity" when this is actually wholly irrelevant to whether they continue to justify anything China does as "building socialism." If anything, the world is already multipolar, and it's been so for at least a decade if not longer.
I don't believe the catastrophism Dengists engage in during every single one of these conversations either. "Things could go wrong," but I'm not sure why this "things could go wrong" scenario is always treated as the more likely option when it's just as theoretical as the success scenario (this is equally true of the "success" scenario for Dengists: has communism ever been realized this way? obviously not, yet we're supposed to believe it to be more credible than any alternatives). And one can always predict "things going wrong" in some way and not act, then justify oneself on the basis of projected futility and catastrophe.
The opposition between the possibilities of success and failure won't be resolved through argument anyway, because one can always add more speculations as to what might or might not happen. It's more important to look at this catatrophism's practical function for Dengists: a psychological crutch for a belief system, used to justify the distance between the radical professions of faith and the existing state of things, much like the related "historical necessity." In this sense, they're no different from the "left communists" they hate, just less self-aware.