Three misleading notions of post-Mao dynamics pervade thinking on recent reforms in China. In one, a tragic defeat has been suffered by true third-world revolutionaries, Maoists, who were in the process of emancipating the rural poor. In place of Maoism, China is said to be emplanting or re-emplanting a Soviet style system, rationalized Stalinism. In another understanding of China's reforms, self-reliant socialism has been replaced by dependent capitalism. Post-Mao China has decollectivized agriculture, made price, market and material incentives more central (...) to the economy, accepted the idea of a capitalist Hong Kong as part of China, opened ports and special economic zones to the laws, investments and logic of the capitalist world market and, in search of advanced science and technology. (shrink)

Roy Medvedev's new book reflects an important change among ruling circles in the Soviet Union, a willingness fundamentally to transform and improve Moscow-Beijing relations by making concessions to China away from the hard-line stance long backed by Soviet conservatives. Anti-Stalinist historian Medvedev details the assumptions underlying this major redirection of Soviet policy. Even the errors and omissions in Medvedev's important book are illuminating. In contrast to Andrei Sakharov, however, Medvedev's nationalism blinds him from seeing some key China-Soviet Union realities. While (...) Medvedev acknowledges that Brezhnev in 1970 sought United States support for a Soviet attack on China, nonetheless, “the chief part in creating the danger of war on the Sino-Soviet border was played by the Chinese leadership” (p. 55). (shrink)

To Samir Amin, Stalinism, “a Soviet type developmental strategy” involves primitive accumulation of capital through the imposition of “a massive tribute on the peasantry” (p. 36) and a siphoning of a huge proportion of that weal “to the military “ (p. 37) ending in a militarily expansionist police state with nothing in common with socialism. In contrast, Yugoslavia's Titoism is an ambiguous inheritance, consisting in a flexible polity which is not dominated by a Stalinist police state, a system which “may (...) yet evolve in a progressive direction,” although its supposedly excessive reliance on the market and foreign trade produces pronounced economic inequalities incompatible with socialism (p. 127). (shrink)

This paper predicts the probability of a profound world climate change that will affect the governance of the world's societies. Carbon dioxide levels in the earth's atmosphere may be doubled in sixty years, warming the earth's climate and altering drastically the patterns of food production, agriculture, forestry and consequently relations between societies.