Raul & Fidel Castro Meet with China’s FM
HAVANA TIMES, Aug. 1 — Both President Raul Castro and former President Fidel Castro met separately on Sunday with visiting Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jichei. No details of the talks were disclosed to the press, just the standard: “they talked about the current international situation” and “strengthening” the already “solid bilateral relations.”
Following the talks with the Cuban leaders, Yang Jichei and his delegation left for Costa Rica.
From article below:
Trotsky renounced predicting in advance which possibility would prevail. Only the relative power of the proletariat and the bureaucracy could determine this. In the Soviet Union, for many reasons we cannot dwell on here, the proletariat was incapable of carrying out the political revolution. However, in the end the bureaucracy was also too weak to control the situation. The result was a collapse and chaotic backsliding into capitalism.
The Chinese bureaucracy took note of this process, beginning with the slowdown in growth in the 1970s and ending with the collapse in the 1990s. This was the basis for the introduction of “market socialism” in 1978.
A NEP kind of policy is, however, very dangerous for the workers and peasants, especially in the context of a deformed workers’ state, because it has the tendency to strengthen all the pro-capitalist elements. Possibility becomes probability, and then probability becomes reality. Imagine for example a complete NEP in Cuba today – US imperialism would take over the country in no time. From an abstract economic point of view a NEP in Cuba would be correct, but politically it would be suicide.
http://www.marxist.com/transitional-economics-why-china-went-capitalist-2.htm
On transitional economics – Why and how China went capitalist (Part two)
Written by Jeppe Druedahl
Monday, 02 August 2010
In this second part of Jeppe Druedahl’s contribution to the discussion on China, he explains how initially the Chinese bureaucracy, after the death of Mao, introduced market methods as a means of stimulating production within a planned economy. However, over time the capitalist methods began to dominate and the relation between the plan and the market were overturned. Quantity was transformed into quality, and capitalism has come to dominate. [part one]
The role of bureaucracy
The basic motive of every bureaucracy is its own material interests.
Real socialist praxis would be expressed in the constant exchange of delegations of workers’ council representatives and work teams, etc., between brother socialist states — not in the exchange of diplomatic delegations, based on political practice which hasn’t altered much in form or substance since the napoleonic wars.