u/aimixin - originally from r/GenZhou
Ultraleftists tend to take the "abolition of private property" as a sort of spiritual commandment, that it has to be done immediately and absolutely or else a country is "not true socialist".
Of course, such an assertion completely contradictions with Marxism, which views the foundations of socialism as laid by the development of markets. So Maoists try to "resolve" this contradiction by insisting that, yes, you need markets, but they should all be collective/co-operative markets.
"Should be". Maoists can't actually give a real theoretical reason from a Marxian basis to why this "should be" the case, only moralizing. I have seen this idea also repeated by some leftcoms, but it's mostly an ultraleft thing, since leftcoms will more often insist that it's "not true socialism" until there's a complete abolition of collective property as well, i.e. only public in absolute purity.
Socialism is based on public ownership, not co-operative, not collective, but public and centralized ownership. The goal of the socialist period is to develop the productive forces as rapidly as possible to try and move beyond decentralized, local, private ownership. Not to merely change the form of private ownership, but to move beyond it entirely.
The fundamental question on how to deal with the private sector should thus is how to do away with it as rapidly as possible, but this decentralization is inherent to small, underdeveloped production. By extension, this necessarily means the fundamental question on how to deal with the private sector thus depends on what develops the productive forces as rapidly as possible. It is a question of political economy, just like all questions of Marxism, and not a question of moralizing.
Marx and Engels hardly wrote anything on this, only vaguely in a couple letters suggesting co-operative property might be good in the transition period. The closet thing to a decent theoretical reason to why they might be useful is Engels argues in The Peasant Question of France and Germany that they can be good for the peasantry because it prevents the peasants from losing their farms which is inevitable in the course of capitalism's development, and thus it can give the proletariat something to offer the peasants in order to form an alliance to facilitate a revolution.
This, in the case of the peasantry, at least has some reason why it might be useful. Land reform was pretty central in all successful socialist revolutions because they they occurred in semi-feudal countries with a large peasantry. But this is still central to the peasantry, it doesn't answer the question of how to handle the private sector outside of the peasantry, in the underdeveloped small production sectors of the industrial economy.
Che Guevara heavily critiqued the co-operative peasant sector, the kolhkoz system in the book Apuntes criticos a la Economia Politica. He basically said what I said, that there is no Marxian basis for saying collectives are the basis of socialism, but more than this, these collectives tend to contribute to a capitalist, and not a socialist, superstructure.
This is because when you collectivize property, the workers are not really "workers" anymore but more akin to petty bourgeois business owners. They cease to have class interests aligned with the broad working masses because they own and operate their own business, and thus they benefit from deregulation and a dismantling of the public sector.
Interestingly, Engels had foreseen this, and wrote in a letter that he speculated it could be prevented not allowing cooperatives to own he means of production directly. The cooperatives would not be state-owned but would also not own the means of production, they would only borrow these tools from the state.
Stalin implemented this into the USSR and the peasant farms could only borrow their tractors from the Machine Tractor Stations. However, Che pointed out that this actually didn't prevent the problem. The peasants as a class were still powerful enough to pressure the government into abandoning that policy and allowing them to own their means of production directly. Under Khrushchev, the Machine Tractor Stations were dismantled and and the tractors sold off to the peasants, and the stations reorganized as mere servicing stations.
Che pointed out that this was a prime example of how the cooperatives as a class will push for a loosening of public control and, in a sense, privatization of the means of production, because they are effectively their own class separate from the proletariat with different interests.
(Interestingly, as a side note, Mao never supported Stalin's policy in the first place and heavily criticized Stalin for not allowing the peasants to own the means of production, saying that Stalin had a problem of "distrust" for the peasantry.)
Che was also critical of the USSR's claims that these farms were inherently more productive than normal private farms. He accused Soviet textbooks of "covering up the truth with words" by using misleading numerical comparisons between the US and the USSR's farms to make it seem like the USSR's was far more efficient.
Che was not some "Dengist", he didn't want privatization. He mainly criticized the co-ops because he thought that people didn't take it seriously enough how similar of a negative affect they have to the socialist system as bourgeois property. He thought the fact the USSR never took this seriously might actually lead them to return to capitalism in the long-run.
The ultraleft obsession that the entire underdeveloped sector has to be transformed into collectives/co-operatives has no real basis in political economy, and was only useful as a strategy for the peasantry to win them over to the proletariat's side.
But there are real economic reasons why it might be preferable to have bourgeois property rather than co-operative property in the underdeveloped sector. Primarily, in a global capitalist economy, it is difficult to integrate into that economy with co-operatives, because they are worker owned, and thus can't really be invested into by foreign private owners.
This was one of the reasons Mao's China ended up being so isolated. Mao agreed fully that China needed commodity production and needed to expand commerce, but Mao wanted to restrain it to decentralized communes that traded with each other, and wanted to move beyond any form of bourgeois ownership as rapidly as possible.
Mao also tried to rush things even further, trying to move beyond decentralized communes to large-scale public ownership when the country still only had 10% urbanization rate. When Mao's policies were not working, he falsely assumed it to be a superstructure problem, that it wasn't because the country was too underdeveloped, but because there were too many bourgeois elements in the superstructure that needed to be purged.
Mao then would go onto launch an attack against the wrong thing during the Cultural Revolution, only deepening the crisis.
Mao's problems were basically three-fold: (1) an overuse of decentralized communal/co-operative production in the underdeveloped sector which lead to economic isolation, (2) an attempt to rush the development of planning and the public sector far more than what the productive forces could actually sustain, and (3) launching an attack on the superstructure when the productive forces were what needed to be developed most at the time.
Deng Xiaoping thus would go onto argue that (1) they should be willing to experiment with some private ownership in order to attract foreign investment, (2) the development to a nearly fully publicly owned economy is a lot slower than originally anticipated and could take over a hundred years and these rushed policies were doing more harm then good, that they needed to "take a step backwards in order to take two steps forwards", and that (3) Mao's obsessive focus on the class struggle in the superstructure neglected the building of the productive forces, and that these need to be re-prioritized and made central.
Mao achieved a lot of great things, but also made mistakes. Maoism arose outside of China of people who basically treat Mao like a deity and refuse to admit he did anything wrong. It honestly is annoying because it puts me in a position of feeling like I constantly criticize Mao even though he did far more good than mistakes, but Maoists constantly apologize for his mistakes which puts me in the position of constantly having to point out that they were, indeed, mistakes.