What do you think of the work of Robert Weil? I just finished his "Red Cat, White Cat." and found it disappointing. Very impressionistic and missing good,hard class-analysis of the post-Mao changes in China. Petras' articles on China are better. Weil really yearns for the days of Mao, he spends a lot of time defending the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Rev. I don't think turning back the clock is feasible or desirable. A renewed socialism in China will look different, though I confess Mao had some good ideas.... the particular form of socialism will grow through class struggle and will be worked out through practice. With regards to top-down reforms, as Trotsky said:
"Karl Marx saw the failure of the March revolution in Germany in the fact the it "reformed onlt the very highest political circles, leaving untouched all the layers beneath them-- the old bureacracy, the old army, the old judges, born and brough tup and grown old in the service of absolutism." Socialists of the type of Kerensky were seeking salvation exactly where Marx saw the cause of failure." History of the Russian Revoltion, p221
More Trotsky [few write like this anymore!]
"Their class instinct was refined by a political criterion, and though they did not think all their ideas through to the end, nevertheless their thought ceaselessly and stubbornly worked its way in a single direction. Elements of experience, criticism, initiative, self-sacrifice, seeped down throught the mass and created, invisibly to a superficial glance but no less decisively, an inner mechanics of the revolutionary movement as conscious process. To the smug politicians of liberalism and tamed socialism everything that happened among the masses is customarily represented as an instinctive process, no matter whether they are dealing with an anthill or a beehive. In reality the thought which was drilling through the thick of the working class was far bolder, more penetrating, more conscious, than those little ideas by which the educated classes live. Moreover, this thought was scientific: not only becasue it was to a considerable degree fertilised with the methods of Marxism, but still more because it was ever nourishing itself on the living experience of the masses which were soon to take their place in the revolutionary arena. Thoughts are scientific if they correspond to an objective process and make it possible to influence that process and guide it. Were there qualities possessed in the slightest degree by the ideas of those government circles who were inspired by the Apocalypse and believed in the dreams of Rasputin? Or maybe the ideas of the liberals were scientifically grounded, who hoped that a backward Russia, having joined the scrimmage of the capitalist giants, might win at one and the same time victory and parliamentarism? Or maybe the intellectual life of those circles of the intelligentsia was scientific, who slavishly adapted themselves to liberalism, senile since childhood, protecting the imaginary independence the while with long-dead metaphors. In truth here was a kingdom of spiritual inertness, spectres, superstition and fictions, a kingdom, if you will, of "spontaneuousness." But have we not in that case a right to turn this liberal philosophy of the February revolution exactly upside down? Yes, we have a right to say: At the same time that the official society, all that many-sided superstructure of ruling classes, layers, groups, parties and cliques, lived day to day by inertia and automism, nourishing themselves with the relics of worn out ideas, deaf to the inexorable demands of evolution, flattering themselves with phantoms and foreseeing nothing--at the same time in the working masses there was taking place an independent and deep process of growth, not only of hatred for the rulers, but of critical understanding of their impotence, an accumulation of experience and creative consciouness which the revolutionary insurrection and its victory completed." Ibidp169-70 Sam Pawlett