Word: deng
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...matters of economic organization, however, even Lenin was a backslider of sorts. In 1921, when his "war Communism" stirred dangerously strong opposition, he shifted to the New Economic Policy, which sounds almost like a preview of Deng's reforms. Under the N.E.P., the new Soviet state owned and operated only what Lenin called the "commanding heights" of the economy, that is, the basic industries. Peasants could grow and sell privately what they wished after paying a tax in produce to the state; small-scale private enterprise was permitted; foreign capital was invited...
...while Deng intends his reforms to be permanent, Lenin viewed the N.E.P. as a strategic retreat. Stalin put an end to it and launched the Soviet Union on a nearly total collectivization of agriculture and nationalization of industry. Stalin's system became the dominant version of Marxism, if only because the U.S.S.R. for decades was the sole significant officially Marxist state and remains its most powerful...
...which reached chaotic extremes during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that began in 1966. Party bureaucrats and intellectuals were banished to factories and into the countryside to "learn from the people" by working with their hands, and teenage Red Guards rampaged through China assaulting supposed "bourgeois rightists." One was Deng, who was paraded through Peking with a dunce cap on his head and mocked as a "capitalist roader...
...exactly that, but to the extent that he bothers with ideology, which is not very far, he certainly tends to a minimalist definition of Marxism. As Deng told TIME: "In carrying on socialism, I think we should uphold two things. First, public ownership should always play a dominant role in our economy. Second, we should try to avoid [class] polarization and we should always keep to the road of common prosperity." Beyond that, he implies, pretty much anything goes if it "will lead China to development...
...minimum, the spirit of Deng's course is very different from that of classic Marxism. While Marx can be read as allowing the market to coexist with socialism for a while, he regarded the market as an exploitative device that would eventually disappear. It seems doubtful that he would have approved any attempt to revive it after it had disappeared. Most of all, Deng's version of Marxism lacks the crusading zeal of the classic variety. Marx preached his revolution as history's final showdown between the forces of light and those of darkness. It strains the imagination to conjecture...