The Great Leap Forward
The extraordinary number of deaths during the Chinese Revolution is difficult to fathom. The Soviet Union had a similar experience when Stalin forced the population to modernize Russia's agricultural and industrialization practices. Historians estimate that Mao's Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), mandatory collectivization, forced labor, and the famine that ensued caused the deaths of 18–30 million people in China.
The Theory of Productive Forces
The concept has been used in all examples of state-supervised socialism to date. Joseph Stalin is one proponent of this view. The most influential philosophical defense of this idea has been promulgated by Gerald Cohen in his book Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence.
According to this view, technical change can beget social change; in other words, changes in the means (and intensity) of production cause changes in the relations of production, i.e., in people's ideology and culture, their interactions with one another, and their social relationship to the wider world.
In this view, actual socialism or communism, based on the "redistribution of wealth" to the most oppressed sectors of society, cannot come to pass until that society's wealth is built up enough to satisfy whole populations. Using this theory as a basis for their practical programs meant that communist theoreticians and leaders while paying lip service to the primacy of ideological change in individuals to sustain a communist society, actually put productive forces first and ideological change second.
The Theory of Productive Forces was the basis of Stalin's Five Year Plans, Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, and most other examples of attempts to build and refine communism throughout the world in the 20th Century.