this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
1 points (100.0% liked)
Ask Lemmygrad
947 readers
3 users here now
A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Market reforms of Deng were amazing
I hope you won't mind my ultra moment here. I think while the results speak for themselves, he got lucky.
Even in retrospect, Deng Xiaoping seems to be the rightmost someone can be and still reasonably be considered a communist. Looking at some of his unimplemented ideas and the policies that were reversed in the following decades, it's understandable why someone would think he was a capitalist roader in his time. The path he set the CPC on meant that the party had to walk a difficult tightrope, fooling the westerners by obfuscating their long-term plans while keeping the creeping liberalism at check. Whole the capacity of her administrators and will of her people played the main part, China couldn't have made it to today without fortune by their side.
Tldr I agree but only with hindsight
I don't think this is an ultra moment, so much as leaving out dialectics. Luck always factors into things, yeah, but the results speak for themselves because communist theory and practice works, and socialist projects continuously show this. The way they went about it could have gone wrong in a number of ways, sure, but so can working toward a revolution, so can the start of a revolution, so can the day to day mundanity of organizing a local party meeting, etc. It's how you use the dialectical process to adapt to the shifting circumstances and predict outcomes that makes the difference. And of course the people themselves, the struggle they put into it every step of the way. But point being, Deng and whoever all agreed with his path were picking a path and trying it, and in some ways it worked and some ways it didn't, and they have adjusted since. It's that adjusting that is so pivotal.
Or to put it another way, while luck is always a factor in things, analysis can usually reveal that there's less luck than it might seem at a glance and sometimes it's a matter of how deep you get into the factors in play. Casinos play on this all the time by having the appearance of handing over outcomes to luck, but in reality, being heavily weighted toward the "house winning."
It was a leap of faith and incredible trust in the future generations. If that went as market reforms did elswhere we would be now cursing him as second Gorbachev (or Gorbachev as second Deng). And the world could be as well completely doomed with no socialist China.
isnt that true all the time though? i remember reading in john reeds book that what made the soldiers finally break for the october revolution was kerenski demanding and not asking. Up until then a lot were undecided and the revolution might have failed because the ones that were decided were stronger on kerenskis side? so much in life is up to chance that the best you can do is hedge your bets