Essay:Refuting Common "Dengist" Arguments

Capitalist roader Xi Jinping meeting with neo-fascist leader Donald Trump.

Dengism is a veritable cancer to the Marxist movement, a revisionist pollutant which takes the revolutionary inclinations of the masses and distorts them to fulfill the desires of the social-imperialist Chinese bourgeoisie.

Dengism must be combated with all due militancy and exposed as the counter-revolutionary, right-opportunist tendency that it is. That following are common arguments employed by followers of this revisionist deviation.

"Dengist" arguments

"China raised 800 million people out of poverty, ergo, socialism!"

"The old parties are products of an epoch whose task was to develop capitalism as speedily as possible. The struggle between the parties was over the question how best to expedite and facilitate this development. The new party is a product of the present epoch, which raises the issue of the very existence of capitalism. In the U.S.A., the freest and most advanced country, this issue is coming to the fore more clearly and broadly than anywhere else. The entire programme and entire agitation of Roosevelt and the Progressives turn on how to save capitalism by means of bourgeois reforms. The bourgeois reformism which in old Europe manifests itself in the chatter of liberal professors has all at once come forward in the free American republic as a party four million strong. This is American style. We shall save capitalism by reforms, says that party. We shall grant the most progressive factory legislation. We shall establish state control over all the trusts (in the U.S.A. that means over all industries!). We shall establish state control over them to eliminate poverty and enable everybody to earn a “decent” wage. We shall establish “social and industrial justice”. We revere all reforms—the only “reform” we don’t want is expropriation of the capitalists! The national wealth of the U.S.A. is now reckoned to be 120 billion (thousand million) dollars, i.e., about 240 billion rubles. Approximately one-third of it, or about 80 billion rubles, belongs to two trusts, those of Rockefeller and Morgan, or is subordinated to these trusts! Not more than. 40,000 families making up these two trusts are the masters of 80 million wage slaves. Obviously, so long as these modern slave-owners are there, all “reforms” will be nothing but a deception. Roosevelt has been deliberately hired by the astute multimillionaires to preach this deception. The “state control” they promise will become—if the capitalists keep their capital—a means of combating and crushing strikes. But the American proletarian has already awakened and has taken up his post. He greets Roosevelt’s success with cheerful irony, as if to say: You lured four million people with your promises of reform, dear impostor Roosevelt. Very well! Tomorrow those four million will see that your promises were a fraud, and don’t forget that they are following you only because they feel that it is impossible to go on living in the old way." —Vladimir Lenin, The Results and Significance of the U.S. Presidential Elections

Having supposedly raised "800,000,000" individuals out of "extreme poverty" matters little on the question of socialism. What matters is that the ultimate act of the expropriation of the exploiters will never happen in the People's Republic of China and all other instances of modern revisionism. "Dengists" and other revisionists, therefore, only seek a society where the national flag is red and where the ruling party calls itself "communist." However, they do not want by any means a true abolition of the capitalist system.

Socialism is not mere poverty reduction, it is not symbolism without substance, it is not economic growth. Socialism is the revolutionary transformation of society from one mode of production to another. Do not be fooled by these revisionists who seek to regress us back to social democratic notions on what constitutes socialism.

"How can you argue against millions of CPC members? You don't know better than them!"

This argument is premised on an argumentum ad populum fallacy. What is popular is not necessarily correct. For instance, the National Socialist German Workers' Party had over 8 million members at its height, yet it espoused the most backwards, reactionary stances known to humanity. A more modern example would be the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is the largest party in the world by membership (over 180 million members) yet espouses a fascistic, Hindu nationalist tendency.

By the same reasoning employed by Dengites, how could anyone question these fascistic organizations when they hold millions of members?

It must be noted that this argument, in addition to maintaining obviously fallacious reasoning, is also relying on an anti-Marxist, subjectivist position. Revisionists who espouse this argument are suggesting that reality is not one, definite truth but a myriad of "national" truths shaped independently of each other which have no relationship to the other.

"China executes billionaires, therefore, they are anti-capitalist!"

In December 2008, US American investor Bernie Madoff was apprehended by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was later charged with around a dozen felonies relating to his operating of one of the largest ponzi schemes in modern history.

From this, can we say that the United States of America is opposed to investors and Wall Street fatcats as a whole?

Of course not! This was simply an instance of class discipline being enforced. If all of the American bourgeoisie where to act in such deceptive ways to the extent of operating massive ponzi schemes, the callousness of American capitalism would be even more visible than it currently is to the proletariat and the system would scarcely last a month before being swept away in revolution.

The same can be applied to the People's Republic of China, another capitalist state with massive stock markets and investors. The Chinese bourgeoisie must enforce a collective class discipline to maintain its system of exploitation.

This argument, additionally, attempts to use irrelevant examples of the treatment of individuals to speak about the treatment of classes. What happens to a small grouping of capitalists matters little in a country which has one of the largest populations of billionaires in the world (competing with the United States). Even if one capitalist is persecuted and even executed, thousands of large capitalists still exploit the Chinese working class to the bone and the system of Chinese capitalism persists.

"China still has five-year plans, ergo, socialism!"

While it is true that the modern People's Republic of China still maintains nominal five-year plans, this does not presuppose socialism. Other capitalist countries such as India and Pakistan have had five-years plans in the past. The existing five-year plans in the People's Republic of China are conducted much less as true socialist economic planning but more "guides" to capitalists on how to conduct themselves. Modern five-year plans in China do not emphasize any form of economic collectivization or centralized planning but collaboration with capitalist-operated industries to attain social democratic objectives.

Furthermore, economic planning by itself is not socialist. Various capitalist countries employ economic planning. For instance, between the years 1936 to 1940, Hitlerite Germany underwent a "four-year plan" which militarized the economy along with other attainments.

"China is not social-imperialist! They build roads and factories in other countries"

This argument represents an ignorance of the very nature of imperialist exploitation — exportation of capital, which by necessity means that factories and roads are being built to help facilitate (social-)imperialism.

As Joseph Stalin said in Foundations of Leninism:

"But in exploiting these countries imperialism is compelled to build these railways, factories and mills, industrial and commercial centers. The appearance of a class of proletarians, the emergence of a native intelligentsia, the awakening of national consciousness, the growth of the liberation movement-such are the inevitable results of this 'policy.' The growth of the revolutionary movement in all colonies and dependent countries without exception clearly testifies to this fact. This circumstance is of importance for the proletariat inasmuch as it saps radically the position of capitalism by converting the colonies and dependent countries from reserves of imperialism into reserves of the proletarian revolution."

"China is implementing Socialism with Chinese Characteristics! It is just Marxism applied to China's conditions!"

In 1982, capitalist roader and arch-revisionist Deng Xiaoping proclaimed "We must integrate the universal truth of Marxism with the concrete realities of China, and blaze a path of our own and build a Socialism with Chinese Characteristics".

While Maoism teaches us that in every country, a guiding thought emerges based on the practice of revolutionary theory in the country's concrete conditions, they are all in continuity with Marxist theory and are strictly applications of it. "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" seeks to assert that the very foundations of socialism changes from country-to-country, which is simply false:

"You speak of Sinified socialism. There is nothing of the sort in nature. There is no Russian, English, French, German, Italian socialism, as much as there is no Chinese socialism. There is only one Marxist-Leninist socialism. It is another thing, that in the building of socialism it is necessary to take into consideration the specific features of a particular country. Socialism is a science, necessarily having, like all science, certain general laws, and one just needs to ignore them and the building of socialism is destined to failure." —Joseph Stalin, From the Conversation with the Delegation of the CC CP of China in Moscow