A top economist has joined the growing list of China’s elite to have disappeared from public life after criticizing Xi Jinping, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Zhu Hengpeng served as deputy director of the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) for around a decade.
CASS is a state research think tank that reports directly to China’s cabinet. Chen Daoyin, a former associate professor at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, described it as a “body to formulate party ideology to support the leadership.”
According to the Journal, the 55-year-old disappeared shortly after remarking on China’s sluggish economy and criticizing Xi’s leadership in a private group on WeChat.
Marx maintains that the next Mode of Production emerges from the previous, dialectically.
Ah, okay. Well, the previous mode of production involved no private property and no accrual of capital. Now there is both. So do please point out where Marx talks about how things go from not earning capital to earning capital to not earning capital again.
I did. Mao tried to jump ahead to Communism, without developing the Means of Production. This was misguided. Deng noted the failures of the Gang of Four:
During the “cultural revolution” the Gang of Four raised the absurd slogan, “Better to be poor under socialism and communism than to be rich under capitalism.” It may sound reasonable to reject the goal of becoming rich under capitalism. But how can we advocate being poor under socialism and communism? It was that kind of thinking that brought China to a standstill. That situation forced us to re-examine the question.
The PRC had eliminated Private Property, but were poor. The people were struggling. They had not actually developed the Means of Production to the level they needed to be.
Here’s a Marxist “test,” if you will. If you take expert Marxists and place them in an entirely new Earth-like planet, with no tools, what would their course of history look like? Would they be able to achieve Communism through fiat, or would they have to go through similar stages of production as we did in history?
The Marxist answer is that, while they may be able to go through the process of development more quickly, with the knowledge of key technologies like agriculture and the steam engine that allowed for major leaps in Mode of Production, they would not be able to achieve Upper-Stage Communism outright, and would have to develop Modes of Production alongside technological development, just like you can’t skip from wooden pickaxes to diamond pickaxes without iron pickaxes in Minecraft, if you’ll forgive the analogy.
No you did not. You did not point to where Marx said it or what he said despite me asking you to multiple times. That is just a lie. You are clearly here in bad faith and this discussion is over. And I better not see this kind of trolling from you to other users.
In my opinion, I did provide it. I could link The German Ideology and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and if you read them you would perhaps understand Dialectical and Historical Materialism better, but we are having a discussion on Lemmy. The capacity for sharing information and the expecations for a single thread of replies are very low.
Marx was incredibly intelligent, but he couldn’t predict the future, thus, like I have linked in Critique of the Gotha Programme, the closest we can get is his insistence that the next Mode of Production emerges from the previous. Asking for a quote for him saying “communism is when you eliminate private property, struggle a ton, then bring it back in a controlled manner and gradually increase public ownership” won’t happen, because the initial failure isn’t necessary.
Imagine trying to build a modern cell phone with bronze-age technology. You can’t, just like you can’t materialize Communism through fiat without developing the Means of Production. Marxism isn’t Utopian, ie it isn’t about picking a good society and forcing it into existence, regardless of the level of development of the Means of Production. Marxism is Scientific, ie it focuses on historical developments, the Mode of Production is tied to the technological level of the Means of Production. Feudalism disappeared after the Industrial Revolution, largely, and not earlier. Having achieved a backwards, idealist, impoverished “communism” like under Mao and the Gang of Four goes against Marx’s theory of historical development of class society, and China paid the price for ignoring that.
Theory must meet practice, and practice must inform theory. The PRC tried to establish Communism without developing the Means of Production adequately, readjusted, and has now rapidly developed. Holding an ultra-Maoist line like the Gang of Four that insisted it is better for the Proletariat to be poor under Socialism than rich under Capitalism is Revisionism. Maoist Theory regarding Class Struggle did not meet practice, therefore the correct choice was to take a gradualist approach while maintaining CPC control so that when the Means of Production are more developed, they can be more Socialized in turn as Socialism emerges from Capitalism.
You are clearly here in bad faith and this discussion is over. And I better not see this kind of trolling from you to other users.
This is insulting, especially considering you haven’t attempted to respond to the rest of my comment, where I try to actually engage with modern analysis of a country Marx never lived to see and actively analyze. If clearly high-effort replies are considered “trolling” and “bad-faith” by your standards, then how can you consider your “gotchas” any better?
