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China was MLM Communist, meaning Maoist rethinking of Lenin. Many of the members of the Communist Party quickly became right wing (in fact, the capitalists took over after Mao's death.) Mao was perhaps so Lenin-centric that he ignored the economy too much and was mislead by advisors who were just supposed to be "good servants of the people" and handle things.
Oddly enough, the problem was never Mao. It was that the average Chinese folks were so damn enthusiastic about Mao's ideas that they took them to absurd extremes. For example, during the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong wanted people to increase grain production. Regions went nuts competing with one another and many areas ended up deciding on their own (i.e. not enough authoritarianism) to melt their good metal tools to make BIGGER tools, but what happened is that they made weak useless metal that couldn't be used for anything. Timing was unfortunate and a drought hit and the combination of the problems killed about 3 million people (equivalent in US population terms to about 500,000 people.) The canard that Mao forced starving peasants to produce the best grain for urban areas in untrue. Mao Zedong was a peasant farmer himself and most committed to that group. In actuality there was corruption among the local leaders.
Mao's response to this was Leninist: revolution is on-going and trust the people. In the first wave, the workers overthrow the imperialists. In the second wave, anyone who uses their party position as status and to keep people repressed must be overthrown by the people. Ironically this is exactly what people criticize Stalin for NOT having done. So Mao called on the youth to form a "Red Guard" to criticize the party itself and to challenge their teachers and corrupt local authorities: i.e., the kind of people who would steal the best grain and profit off it and to challenge everyone to reimagine the future as something vibrant and new. The guideline was the great majority of teachers and authorities are good, some are mostly good but need guidance from you, and some are corrupt Once again, the youth went to absurd extremes and started beating up teachers and party officials and still untrusted former capitalists and Mao had to call in the army to stop them. Mao's response was that some were treated unfairly and that was wrong and that others were treated fairly. Modern Maoists think that the big mistake here was giving young kids so much power.
The moral of the story here is: Communist China was more like an anarcho-communist state constantly provoked by a folk hero than a totalitarian state; the party itself didn't really kill people other than spies, etc. and its death count was miniscule compared to the US supported nationalist regime that was in power until 49' and the proto-capitalist state that began after '76, but the citizens went nuts on each other and were brutal under communism. After Mao's death it was taken over by capitalist totalitarians within the party who established an ordered anti-democratic state while allowing wage slavery to begin again. Mind you, many of the pro-democracy reformers in China now want to end capitalism in their country.
From what i understand, Leninism "worked" for about 2 decades as well, basically until the death of Lenin.
And the threat of communism was the real social control that made capitalism work from Roosevelt to Reagan. Both corporations and the state feared the people enough to allow a middle class. A middle class capable of ascending and descending was necessary to ward off the idea of a more of less permanent working class of peons and royals. The Friedmanite solution (which Reagan embraced) to that was: fuck the middle class. Don't fear them, make them fear you. Just as Leninism said that a temporary dictatorship of a proletariat vanguard was necessary to upend the State, Friedmanites believe that a temporary dictatorship of ruling class is necessary to force through a hardline capitalist economy (which is why we assassinated moderate socialist presidents and installed Pinochet in Chile and the Shah in Iran) The free-marketers are even more vague about how the temporary dictatorship turns into a capitalist democracy--the market will magically make democracy happen.
What I find disingenuous is the ahistorical treatment of all communist nations as bleak death camps and the attribution to communism the failures of capitalist market reform. It's was a mixed bag, just a different mixed bag than here. If people count the famine after the Great Leap Forward as deaths caused by communism, then it's fair to count all the deaths caused by free market policies as deaths caused by capitalism, including the withholding of AIDS medication in Africa. If communism is responsible for the murderous lunacy of the Red Guard ("but Mao told them to rebel against corruption"), than all deaths due to organized crime are "capitalist deaths" ("but my teachers said to value the entrepreneurial spirit"). The biggest distinction to me seems to be under communism, so-called enemies of the proletariat are executed within the imperial state, while under capitalism, the proletariat and poor are executed outside the imperial state. So we always say "thanks but uh, I prefer things the way they are." Well, yes, of course we do.
Both systems are also equally idealistic and utopian: to think that the vanguard proletariat will give up power once they attain it or that "the people" are can refrain from collapsing into an unthinking mob...that's idealistic. To think that people like Bush and his cronies with massive amounts of birthright money are going to give up power and allow themselves to be "vigorously regulated" and lose a literal chunk of fortune for our benefit is idealistic. To think that these people who own the system can be brought to justice "peacefully" or through voting is far FAR more utopian that overthrowing them in violent revolution.
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