meaning 1960s China accused the that it had revised or

Last updated: 10/5/2023

meaning 1960s China accused the that it had revised or abandoned the revolutionary aspects of Marxism in favour of a more moderate less revolutionary approach After Nikita Khrushchev became leader of the Soviet Union he began carrying out a limited de Stalinisation in the USSR and also tried to achieve peaceful coexistence with the West This led the CCP to believe that the Soviet Union was departing from orthodox Marxism especially regarding foreign policy and doing deals with capitalist states These arguments eventually split the international communist movement into pro Moscow and pro Beijing parties However in the early 1970s Mao was also prepared to do deals with the imperialist USA thus showing that Maoism s strong nationalist sentiments at times meant he put China s national interests above those of Communist principles and the goal of world revolution Just like the Soviet Union s leaders Mao often put national interests before ideology Capitalism Essentially this is an ideology based on the belief that the most important parts of a country s economy such as banks industries and the land should be owned and controlled by private individuals and or companies An important part of this belief is the view that the state or government should not be involved in the economy In fact in its early liberal or classical phase in the Industrial Revolution it was believed that apart from providing an army and grudgingly a police force the government should not even provide social welfare This it was argued helped ensure freedom Although most capitalist states eventually developed as liberal political democracies this was not always the case Several capitalist states such s Hitler s Germany in the 1930s and 1940s or Pinochet s Chile in the 970s and 1980s were decidedly undemocratic An indication of how apitalism can be decidedly undemocratic is provided by terms such as ate capitalism bureaucratic capitalism or authoritarian capitalism three of these terms have been applied to China since 1949 o liberal capitalism he 1980s a more extreme version of capitalism emerged which ted Keynesian economics and which in several ways harked back me early form of classical unregulated capitalism In most Western states the welfare capitalism that had emerged by the mid 20th century came increasingly under attack In opposition to the welfare state a return to liberal capitalism was called for instead These moves involved calls for a small state i e one that allowed private firms to take over the provision of various public utilities and welfare services in which taxation of profits was reduced and the rights of trades unions were restricted At first the economic policy associated with this rolling back of the state was often called Monetarism and was quickly adopted by Reagan s governments in the US and by Thatcher s in Britain Such policies were based on the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and other theorists linked to the Chicago School of Economics who increasingly argued for an unrestricted capitalism and the privatisation of most publicly owned social services During the 1990s these policies were applied in post Soviet Russia and in the former East European states and this application was often called economic shock therapy Since then these kinds of ideas and policies have usually been referred to as neo liberalism and have been associated with the austerity and privatisation programmes in many Western states following the 2008 banking failures These ideas have also been closely associated with the spread of economic globalisation Dictatorship of the proletariat This Marxist term has three main specialist meanings which in many ways are very different from the usual meaning of dictatorship Firstly in relation to the revolutionary period immediately following the overthrow of capitalism it refers to the dictatorship that would need to be exercised over the old minority ruling class This would involve repression of counter revolutionaries and class enemies to ensure they did not try to overthrow or undermine the revolution and so regain their power However a more significant meaning is dominance or hegemony not harsh and repressive rule According Marxist theory in any class divided society the dominant ideas are always those of the dominant class or classes In a capitalist society these were the private owners of banks factories and land Thus Marx described the parliamentary democracy of late 19th century Britain as the dictatorship of the