From Engels to Lenin to Mao, all have expressed their sheer repulsion towards dogmatism. Mao has even written one text after another and spoken in multiple meetings about battling this problem in the party. He, along with other materialists, has made it clear that the Markets are a historical category that have existed since before capitalism. Capitalism =/= Commerce.
Then how is it some Marxists who claim to have read theory call China capitalist and label its supporters as ‘Dengists’? Socialists created the fastest growing economy ever observed in human history that lifted hundreds of millions of people out of absolute poverty. And now these dogmatists wanna give its credit to capitalism!?
Their entire prejudice is based on the misconception that Deng Xioping did not follow on Mao’s thoughts. Deng literally heeded Maoist ideas such as “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend” and “The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant”. He built the productive forces for the Chinese people based on—not in spite of—the continuing influence of Mao Zedong’s ideology. Now Xi Jingping is continuing both of their legacies.
So people who make such non-materialist and often times liberal critique of the Chinese economy have either not read theory or did not develop any dialectical and historical materialism to understand the theory!
As Marxists and materialists, it is our responsibility to confront these reductionist elements in our movement and bring back the pendulum at its correct course when it swings too much to either sides; right-wing revisionism or left-wing dogmatism.
“No investigation, no right to speak.” - Mao Zedong
There is a problem I have noticed among western Marxists in transforming Marx’s descriptive claims into normative prescriptions as to how to run a society. In Marx’s Capital, he argues that societies have a centralization tendency as industry develops, and this tendency gradually reduces the scope of money, markets, and small enterprise. Once it reaches a national scale, it becomes a hindrance to production itself, and so Marx argues in the Manifesto in favor of nationalizing these large-scale enterprises.
However, people see the descriptions and how contemporary societies are progressing and then transmute them into prescriptions on how a society should be run. They come to believe that socialism is about outlawing money, markets, and small enterprise, yet if you read the Manifesto Marx never advocates this at any point, and somehow this does not lead them to reconsider that they may be misinterpreting what Marx was saying.
They double-down on this belief that Marx’s writings on money, markets, and small enterprise are all normative prescriptions about we should run a future society, and insist anyone who doesn’t make money, markets, and small enterprise illegal are not TRUE Marxists, but again, Marx never advocated for that, neither did Engels, neither did Kautsky, neither did Hilferding, neither did Lenin; in fact Lenin said it would be “economic suicide” for the party that tried to do so.
I think part of it is that these people don’t read much on the philosophy so they think in black-and-white rather than dialectical terms. They don’t understand that no society is pure and that everything contains internal contradictions, so we only define societies based on their principal aspect, which sublates all other aspects and thus determines the qualitative character of that society. Since they think in black-and-white terms, they assume socialism can only be pure or else it’s not “true” socialism.
Left-communists will unironically argue that if the entire planet has one giant planned economy where everything is owned in common operating according to a common plan, but some kid has a private lemonade stand somewhere, then it’s capitalist. The idea of not defining socialism in absolute puritanical terms does not even occur to them because they don’t read philosophy so they think like a metaphysician seen socialism as only existing in its more pure metaphyiscal definition without any internal contradictions.
If you think it must necessarily be absolutely pure, then of course things like money, markets, and small enterprise will have completely disappeared.
The purpose of the Party is not to make money, markets, and small enterprise illegal. You will notice that Marx never proposes this as a policy suggestion in the Manifesto at all. The purpose of the Party is to (1) nationalize large-scale enterprises, (2) expand participatory democracy in the economic sphere, and (3) rapidly encourage the development of the forces of production.
It is that third point, #3, which brings about the gradual dissolution of money, markets, and small enterprise, not as a law that declares them illegal but as a natural consequence of the development of industry. This is core to Marx’s analysis but seems to be something most western leftists struggle to wrap their head around for some bizarre reason.