Deng Xiaoping (August 22, 1904 – February 19, 1997), formerly known as Deng Xiansheng, was a Chinese Marxist-Leninist revolutionary and theorist, who was the de facto head of state of the People's Republic of China from 1977 to 1992, following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. He was born in Guang'an, Sichuan. His primary contributions to Marxist theory include the Socialist Market Economy, Reform and Opening Up, the Four Modernizations, and the Four Cardinal Principles, which are included under his theoretical thinking which is known as Deng Xiaoping Theory.
Infrared's Assessment of Deng Xiaoping
Haz Al-Din stated[1] the following about Deng:
Why is Deng Xiaoping correct? Everyday I realize how correct Deng Xiaoping was. […] Deng Xiaoping Thought exists beyond the threshold of Ilyenkov's self-sacrificial apocalypse. […] Deng Xiaoping is not a revisionist but is merely elaborating Marxism-Leninism to its conclusion. […] Deng Xiaoping's unleashing of the productive forces amounts the aftermath of Ilyenkov's apocalypse. It is post apocayltic. Where Ilienkov cannot perceive any reality outside of this apocalypse in which we are … that reality is already taken for granted in Socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Haz explains that Deng Xiaoping's contribution to Marxism-Leninism is the understanding that the pace of socialist construction happens at a level that escapes the purview of socialist consciousness, that socialist consciousness is actually derivative and secondary with regard to the material scale of time at which socialist construction occurs.
The quote references Soviet philosopher, Evald Ilyenkov, who Haz regards as expressing the ultimate conclusion of official Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology in its purest form. In his famous work Cosmology of Spirit, he writes that at a certain point in the development of communist society, mankind will voluntarily induce a cosmic catastrophe, so as to reverse the process of 'thermal dying' or the heat death of the universe.
For Haz, the true meaning of this bold outlook lies in the Soviet view of the objectivity of socialism, beyond the threshold of the Soviet ideological apparatus, as an apocalypse, a final unity of the ideal with material reality, which actually entails the negation of material reality. Thus, Soviet ideology implicitly regards communism as an ever-distant ideal, to be realized at some later date in the future. It cannot actually be achieved, for this means the negation of all reality.
Deng Xiaoping's contribution to Marxism-Leninism, by contrast, allows for the recognition of socialism as an objective historical phenomena, irreducible to any individual consciousness or ideal. Socialist construction is recognized to occur at a scale far beyond the threshold of individual consciousness, itself integrating the entire movement of the world economy, global market, and even Western capitalist system toward the rational conclusion of an entirely new mode of production. Socialism, when understood as the riddle of history solved and the true driving force of history, does not need to be imposed upon reality, only recognized. The economic policies of a Proletarian Dictatorship, guided by the scientific socialist outlook, reflect a wise appraisal of a historical phenomena that is ultimately beyond its own direct control.
Rather than engaging in the voluntarist and Utopian re-modeling of all society from scratch, the main significance of a proletarian dictatorship lies in ensuring the sovereign nature of economic development. This is in contrast to the chaos of the cultural revolution, where 'socialism' as an ideal was sought after in all of the most minute details of culture, society, and the economy.
Whereas the Soviet Marxism-Leninism and the Western Cartesian outlook underlying it regarded material reality beyond consciousness to be apocalyptic, Deng Xiaoping in a sense renders it possible to regard socialism as a post-apocalyptic phenomena, going beyond the threshold of the idealist, rationalist, and gnoseological assumptions of bourgeois civilization.