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ziq wrote (edited )

The famine you were talking about was actually caused by the massive relocation of farmers to industrial areas

Most of them were moved to rural communes and collective farms. Agriculture was by far the biggest industry.

So there is still the fixation on industrialism, through both Mao's ideology as well as the european authoritarian communists.

Yeah, agriculture and backyard furnaces are still industrialiasm but it's not what Marx was talking about; society revolving around advanced industrial cities; manufacturing hubs. Mao's industry had little to do with what Marx envisioned. It was primitive in comparison to Europe's industrial society and this was in keeping with Mao's technological conservatism:

Mao was suspicious of Soviet models of economic development. Instead, Mao favoured an ideological shift in economic policy that would continue industrialisation but also move China towards agricultural collectivisation. This may have been driven by Mao’s suspicions about the growth of technology, the rise of a potentially bourgeois‘expert’ class and the expanding divide between urban and rural production. Implemented in 1958, the Great Leap Forward had two objectives: to create an industrialised economy in order to ‘catch up’ with the West; and to transform China into a collectivised society, where socialist principles defined work, production, even people’s lives. History records the Great Leap Forward as a disaster. It gave rise to economic stagnation, led to food shortages and famine, and caused the deaths of untold millions.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

that is a good point, that it was a decentralized type of industrialization attempt, rather than the more centralized factory models of Europe. But in the wiki article i linked, it also talks about TGLF being the first time China had added so many non-agricultural wage laborers to the economy, so it seems like there was some of that as well, assuming that is accurate.

But for the record I am far from an expert on China, I'm just reading some stuff on wiki rn lol

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