Word: marxiste
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...getting their allies, not to mention Communist movements that have not yet come to power, to follow their leadership. China's example can only encourage such countries as Yugoslavia and Hungary to continue their efforts to blend market elements into state-dictated economies, and lead out-of-power Marxist parties to think they do not have to copy the Soviet line either...
Brucan, in common with Western analysts, also believes that successful Chinese modernization "is bound to acquire a tremendous following, particularly in the Third World." Many African and Asian leaders are committed to Marxism as the leading anticolonial ideology but suspicious of the Soviet version. Marxists in Africa talk about an "African socialism" that seems to embrace just about anything that can be accommodated with a one-party state. China's example seems likely to encourage them to believe that they can develop their economies and remain theoretically Marxist without following the U.S.S.R...
Gorbachev, Deng and the heads of almost every Marxist country face the same fundamental problem. In a 1984 interview with the Italian Communist daily L'Unità, Hu Yaobang, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, phrased it this way: "Since the October Revolution [of 1917, which enthroned Soviet Marxism], more than 60 years have passed. How is it that many socialist countries have not been able to overtake capitalist ones in terms of development? What was it that did not work...
That something has failed, and failed badly, is no longer seriously disputed, even by many Marxist experts. Before Deng, the failure was more starkly obvious in China. The average peasant or city worker was little better off, if at all, when Mao died in 1976 than he or she had been in the 1950s. But even the Soviet Union has long since had to forget Nikita Khrushchev's hollow boast that it would inevitably "bury" the U.S. by surpassing the American standard of living. Quite the opposite: the U.S.S.R.'s economic growth rate has slipped to about half the pace...
...animating spirit of Deng's reforms has been to liberate the productive energies of the individual, a daring concept not just for a Marxist but for a Chinese (the concept of individualism has a negative connotation in Chinese society). He began, appropriately, with agriculture, which had been collectivized by Mao to a degree extreme even for the Communist world. The land was worked by communes that grew what the state directed and turned over all food produced to the state for distribution. Pay was based on a system of "work points" that bore little relation to production: a peasant would...