The Politics of Communist Economic Reform

Abstract

This chapter compares the political, economic, and social-network dynamics of major economic reform campaigns within communism itself by Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Mikhail Gorbachev. Over their histories, Soviet, Chinese, and East European communisms frequently had tried to reform themselves economically in a wide variety of ways. The dynamics of economic reform in the climactic 1980s were not as different from what had preceded it as is commonly assumed. It was the outcome more than the process that differed. Hence, the chapter analyzes the transition from communism to “capitalism” not from the outside perspective of capitalism but from the internal perspective of communism.