And, Chiang, I assume you believe that the USSR was socialist until 1956? Until Comrade Khruschev (and I'm not being ironic despite the blood on his hands from the 30's) denounced, "the cult of personality, " (that, of coarse, but, not a very good marxist analysis) of Stalin(ism), opening up the floodgates of the capitalist restoration?
http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/classics/wetoldyouso/text.php?mimfile=lineofmarch.txt Michael Goldfield Melvin Rothenberg Line of March Publications The Myth of Capitalism Reborn: A Marxist Critique of Theories of Capitalist Restoration in the USSR San Francisco, 1980, pp. 102-4
And, btw, on the Gang Of Four, see the really big, special summer issue of Monthly Review in '77 or '78 (you get around to reading the issue of MR I gave you Thomas? w/ the replies by Joan Robinson, Michael Yates, and Contra apologist soon to be, Robert Leiken to Bettelheim? Leiken, was then a maoist.) of Charles Bettelheim letter of resignation to the China-France Friendship Society. Carrol, you must of read William Hinton, "The Great Reversal : The Privatization of China, 1978-1989, " Chiang, the RCP have in their study classes books like, "Red Cat, White Cat: China and the Contradictions of 'Market Socialism'" (Monthly Review Press, 1996), " or Maurice Meisner or Jean Chesneaux, Orville Schell, or the great essay by Isaac Deutscher on the origins of maoist ideology? (see, the collection, "Marxism, Wars and Revolutions, " from Verso. Or this book by a dissident Chinese marxist, "Crossroads Socialism." M.P.