Lenin’s point in What Is To Be Done? was that there is no middle ground between revolutionary socialism and liberalism! Any de-emphasis of Marxist theory strengthens bourgeois ideology by default. What makes this dangerous is that the party, functionally, absorbs the energy of dedicated, loyal people who want to be revolutionaries and channels it into work that never actually threatens power, abandoning the necessary and patient work of developing leadership prepared to support the working class in times of crisis.

Resignation letter of a [now-former] member of the PSL

  • 14 Posts
  • 67 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 11th, 2024
  • Maeve @lemmygrad.mltoWorld News@lemmy.ml•China is building 75 solar parks in Cuba, and the island’s power crisis is becoming an infrastructure experiment
    12·
    6 days ago

    I asked and received. Thank you.

    Edit:

    Generalised subsidies that benefit the relatively affluent and the poor alike are to be replaced by assistance targeted at the most vulnerable – retirees, families with chronically ill children, and impoverished neighbourhoods – but the state’s responsibility for healthcare, education, social security and welfare is unchanged.

    This is the main thing in my mind.

    The reforms unquestionably carry risks. A property market, private banks, large firms and remittance-funded investment will tend to generate a propertied stratum, and in the Cuban case along existing fault lines of access to hard currency and family abroad. None of this should be waved away; it is the real cost of the policy. But the wager is a considered one, and it rests on a proposition that China has spent nearly 50 years testing: that a socialist state which keeps political power, public ownership of the commanding heights and the levers of planning and redistribution in its own hands can use markets and foreign capital to develop without being captured by them.

    I’m unclear on property reforms. Are large swaths of land open to private ownership?