Abstract
By the close of 1978—having been successful in shaping the resolutions of the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee Congress of the Party—Deng Xiaoping proceeded to revise the economic policies of post-Maoist China by rejecting the prevailing collectivistic model of agricultural development in favor of decollectivization. There was a return to a “family responsibility system,” once again making the family farm the nation’s primary rural productive unit. Together with a return to a more traditional agriculture, there was a restoration of rural markets that increased the profits of individual enterprise. The profits and efficiencies that resulted provided the funding, and freed rural labor, for small scale sideline enterprises. In a short space of time, gross agricultural production doubled, and an increased measure of industrial activity, which served local consumer needs, manifested itself in the rural areas.
In the initial years of the post-Mao era, interpretations of the change of course favored by the successor leadership centered on the question of whether China was going revisionist. As the magnitude of the transformation became more apparent, the focus shifted to the People’s Republic’s abandonment of Marxism.
—Kalpana Misra1
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Notes
Kalpana Misra, From Post-Maoism to Post-Marxism: The Erosion of Official Ideology in Deng’s China (New York: Routledge, 1998), 2–3.
See Yu Dixin, “China’s Special Economic Zones,” Beijing Review, December 14, 1981, 14–17; Suzanne Pepper, “China’s Special Economic Zones: The Current Rescue Bid for a Faltering Experiment,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, vol. 20, no. 3 (1988); see Harry Harding, China’s Second Revolution: Reform After Mao (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1987).
Marx generally spoke of the asymmetrical relationship between the advanced industrial, and less-developed, regions as “colonial.” The term “imperialism” was introduced later. The definitions of the terms varied—and there is no universally accepted definition for either. For the purposes of the present discussion, both will be understood to refer to an asymmetrical relationship between two political entities that have entered into international connection where one party, employing military and/or economic advantage, profits at the others expense. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1976), vol. 6, 488.
See Engels’ correspondence with Karl Kautsky and F. A. Sorge, on September 23 and November 10, 1894, in Marx and Engels, Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1967), vol. 39, 301, 310.
J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967).
See, for example, summary renderings in Rudolf Hilferding, Das Finanzkapital: Eine Studie über die jüngste Entwicklung des Kapitalismus (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1955, originally published in 1909), section 5;
Karl Kautsky, Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung (Berlin: Verlag J. H. W. Dietz, 1929), vol. 2, 143–46.
V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), vol. 22, 185–304. Hereafter LCW.
In Stalin, The Foundations of Leninism, in Problems of Leninism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953), 42–46, there is a reasonably comprehensive discussion of what Stalin refers to as “Lenin’s theory of revolution.” See, in particular, the account in Stalin, “The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists,” in ibid., 122–31.
Engels, “Der magyarische Kampf,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1959), vol. 6, 172, 174, 176.
“Strategy must base itself entirely on the data provided by the theory and programme of Marxism. The theory of Marxism arrives at the conclusion that the fall of the bourgeoisie and the seizure of power by the proletariat are inevitable, that capitalism must inevitably give way to socialism.” All this, we are told, had been “scientifcally formulated.” Stalin, “Concerning the Question of the Strategy and Tactics of the Russian Communists,” J. V. Stalin, Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952), vol. 5, 165. See Stalin’s comments in The Foundations of Leninism in Problems of Leninism, 36–39.
See the full account of the communication in Alan J. Day, ed., China and the Soviet Union 1949–84 (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1985), 32–33.
Lin Biao, Long Live the Victory of People’s War! (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965).
See Engels’ discussion with Marx in a letter dated May 23, 1856, in Marx and Engels, Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1962), vol. 29, 56–58.
The essay by Paul Baran, “On the Political Economy of Backwardness,” that appeared in January 1952 in The Manchester School of Economics and Social Studies, reprinted in Robert I. Rhodes, ed., Imperialism and Underdevelopment: A Reader (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 285–301.
See the discussion in Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957), 149.
Over the next two decades, all this was to be standardized among “dependency theorists”; see, for example, Samir Amin, Unequal Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979);
Samir Amini, Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974);
Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
Typical of this kind of association was James O’Connor, an editor of Studies on the Left, who became a major dependency theorist. See his essay, “The Meaning of Economic Imperialism,” reprinted in Rhodes, Imperialism and Underdevelopment, 101–50. A significant number of other authors collected around Monthly Review, which published a considerable amount of literature devoted to the thesis. Paul Baran, who was notable in this connection, was coauthor with Paul Sweezy on Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966). Baran’s essay, “On the Political Economy of Backwardness,” reprinted in Rhodes, Imperialism and Underdevelopment, 285–301, was considered seminal in dependency theory literature.
See Harrison Salisbury, The Coming War between Russia and China (New York: Pan Books, 1969).
Deng Xiaoping, Speech by Chairman of the Delegation of the People’s Republic of China at the Special Session of the U.N. General Assembly (April 10, 1974) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1974).
See the entire discussion in Enver Hoxha, Imperialism and the Revolution (Tirana: “8 Nenton” Publishing House, 1979), 208–79.
See, as an illustrative case, the discussion in Michel Chossudovsky, Towards Capitalist Restoration? Chinese Socialism after Mao (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986).
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© 2014 A. James Gregor
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Gregor, A.J. (2014). Maoism, Deng Xiaoping, and “Proletarian Internationalism”. In: Marxism and the Making of China. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137379498_9
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