> But we should acknowledge that China
> is still the most socialist system in the world as measured by any reasonable
> standard, and as compared to any other government in power.
Socialist in what way? Just because the state owns lots of stuff? Do ordinary workers really have any say in the government or how things are run? Are there free open elections, a reasonably free press, and the freedom to organize independent trade unions? No more so than in corporate-dominated USA, I'm afraid.
> And its not as if China did not give radical left solutions a running chance. It
> took 4 decades of faithful adherence to
> Marxist Leninist economic doctrines, at great costs, before some pragmatist would
> suggest perhaps enough is enough.
There's nothing terribly radical or Leftist about expropriating the peasantry to fund state-autarkic industrial accumulation, which was what Maoism was all about. Historically, China was so wracked by civil war, the most vicious foreign exploitation and a truly genocidal Japanese imperialism that the hegemony of the CP was the *only* viable progressive political option for the mainland. Maoism was the peasant politics of a peasant revolution, which was its greatest strength and also the source of its degeneration into the madness of the Cultural Revolution; but Marxism isn't about stamping this or that government as "socialist" but about grappling with social contradictions (how history changes, how what can be progressive in one era can turn reactionary in another era, etc.) and thinking through the problem of human emancipation regardless of what authority is in charge.
> Happy Thanksgiving that at least there is still one major socialist
> power alive even if not all well.
Yes, I give thanks for the EU every day, too.
-- Dennis