Return to the Source

Hey, what's up comrade?

When's your latest (I'm sure will be great) article supposed to be published? A good number of us are looking forward to what's next in Return to the Source! lol

I was wondering Comrade ..do you know any good places to start research on the Derg..thanks!!

Anyway, he was pretty clear that whilst using material incentives and so on was acceptable, it would have to be bolstered by other political consciousness raising activity for it to be truly effective. It'd be worth having a look through one of those books, or checking out the Great Debate from the 60s, as these were when his thought was articulated most clearly, and its relevance to the Chinese experience is pretty clear in my opinion.

I'll see what I can find for you - it's mostly in Spanish though and scattered across his Escritos y discursos so hard to get a comprehensive thing that's written by him - Helen Yaffe's book and Carlos Tablada's books on Che's economic thought are pretty good and comprehensive things on what he thought. Essentially though he criticised overeliance on material incentives and productive-forces determinism, arguing a need to develop political conscious independently of but simultaneously with the development of the productive forces. His writings on the Budgetary Finance System - a management model he developed whilst head of the National Bank - are perhaps the clearest single expositions of this by Che - one of the writings is here but it's in Spanish, so apologies if you can't read it!

From the beginning of the split until 1971 they had good foreign policy, all the epic-fail stuff came after when Zhou Enlai who was basically Deng's mentor was calling the shots. By that point Mao was going senile, the GPCR had been ended prematurely in 1969 and Lin Biao and his supporters had been deposed by Zhou and his supporters most likely (I know Lin Biao got charged with trying to coup Mao but there pretty much no evidence that he actually did)

About Deng Xiaoping though, I still think he was rightfully the no. 2 target during the GPCR. Look at all the positive aspects of the Mao era which were undone by him and the $400 million worth of aid that he gave to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan among other things. China has him to thank for its modernisation to him but it also has him to thank for all the wealth inequality, sweatshops, lack of health care etc. that came with it. It's good he decided not to go down the Gorbachov road in 1989, but still.

Yeah, their support of the striking workers and fighting against corruption and such have indeed been good signs.

Interesting article on China you've got, I don't think I completely agree with it though. I think I'm somewhere between your view and the view of China being a full-scale capitalist imperialist power. I see it as having been state-capitalist since Deng's reforms, however I don't view state-capitalism as automatically being the doomsday though.

I think China's main problem isn't the fact that it's state-capitalist but rather that it's not moving forward from state-capitalism toward socialism but staying still as state-capitalism. That's obviously better than moving toward market-capitalism like the USSR and the People's Democracies did and I think the crackdown on Tianmanen stopped China from going the same road, but the material conditions that led to Zhao Ziyang and Tiananmen will still remain as long as China's in its present state. I guess I differ from others in that I think Chinese socialism can still possibly be salvaged.