Lenin built on what Marx said to create a two-step process for building the state, in which there is at first a vanguard of workers though “democratic centralism” (in which only members of the party vote), which eventually leads to a higher communist state in which there is common ownership of the means of production, social and economic equality, and general prosperity. Mao liked the Marxist-Leninist approach, in which the achievement of the communist ideal came at the end of a very long evolutionary process. Deng Xiaoping reiterated this view in an interview with “60 Minutes” in 1986, in
...more