u/ThePeoplesBadger - originally from r/GenZhou
It seems that based on what I have read:

  • WW1 and the foreign-backed civil war utterly destroyed Russia and its population, but the Bolsheviks won out after a very long and drawn out period of devastation.
  • Lenin introduced the NEP to begin to build the basis for an eventually socialist economy by developing industry and agriculture with similar practices to other capitalist countries (but without imperialism)
  • There was disagreement in the Bolshevik leadership after Lenin’s strokes and passing on how to move forward. Some top party leaders suggested moving forward “at a snail’s pace,” but it seems that Stalin had a very “yes we can” attitude, introduced five year plans, and completely revolutionized the country/countries in socialist construction.
  • When Stalin died, Khrushchev turned around and in his “secret speech,” condemned Stalin and hung all blame on Stalin for all of the problems in the USSR.
  • Khrushchev initiated changes and reforms that were seen by China as extremely problematic and revisionist, contributing to the Sino-Soviet split.
  • China followed some very similar approaches to building socialism as the USSR but also approaches unique to the material nature of China, hence “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
  • Mao dies in the 70s (right? I could have the dates wrong) and the torch is passed to Deng Xiaoping, and China opens up to foreign trade and meets with Nixon and China becomes an economic power on the international market.
  • It seems like since then, China has been working deliberately and exactingly toward eliminating poverty, raising the living standards, and building up industries and trade across the entire spectrum.

Please correct any misunderstandings I may have above, as these are the understandings that form the basis of my questions.

  1. What were the reforms initiated by Khrushchev?
  2. What were the reforms initiated by Deng?
  3. How/why were the Khrushchev reforms revisionist?
  4. Were the Deng reforms revisionist, and regardless, why or why not?
  • archive_botOPB
    0·
    2 years ago

    u/ScienceSleep99 - originally from r/GenZhou
    Khrushchev was an actual capitalist roader but not Deng and Co who were repeatedly denounced as such? And did the term mean restoring capitalism in X country, or did it mean taking the capitalist road to socialism? I never figured out which one it was.

    As for the household responsibility system, it was China’s prior pre-reform decades of massive government investment in collective farms, rural infrastructure, especially irrigation that helped lay the ground work for higher productivity. In the transitional stage, collectivization of agriculture, based on all around development of large scale industry which is capable of reorganizing agriculture on a modern technical basis, is vitally needed. So how can a socialist state base itself on large industry and also a scattered and ultimately regressive small commodity peasant economy? Collectivization and the elimination of the Kulak class was a leap that propelled the USSR. What China was missing was lacking the level of mechanization that defined Soviet collectivization, but the reformers took an even further step backward by de-collectivizing. For a short while production increased but later stagnated. Bourgoise writer Will Hutton said, the “typical peasant plot is far too small to be the basis of highly productive agricultural sector in the long run.”

    A few decades later unproductive farmers were encouraged to sell their land and seek other employment. The aim was to consolidate land holdings and commercialize agriculture. Between 1992 and 2007 close to 20 million farmers were driven off their land. So China went from collective farming, to HRS, to the growth of modern agribusiness.

    This story like so many in China details the development at all costs model of the reformers, mimicking everything capitalist countries did to get rich in order to develop the productive forces. Everything from primitive accumulation such as what I described above with the dismantling of collective farms, to pushing rural peasants in the urban economy, etc.

    I would never go so far as to call Deng and his ideological predecessors as wanting to restore capitalism, but I will say they did want to literally take a “capitalist” road by mimicking or using a Eurocentric capitalist model development as a tool to build the productive forces, and lay the ground work for a new more advanced socialist base.