- Julio M. Shiling
Castroism’s Recent Economic Rehashing.
Another venture into regime-directed economic reformulations that could potentially serve social domestication and political durability.
János Kornai, the Hungarian economist, was most correct when he declared in his classic The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (1988) that “socialism is irreformable”. The former communist discovered early on that Marxian economic models breed what he coined a “shortage economy”. Vladimir Lenin’s New Economic Policy (1921) was one example of a desperate attempt to save socialism from collapse by tempering radical collectivization schemes with politically controlled flirtations with state capitalism. Castroism’s recent economic rehashing is another venture into regime-directed economic reformulations that could potentially serve social domestication and political durability.
Communist China has perfected this prototype. Vietnam followed suit. The “China Model” (a/k/a Socialism with Chinese Characteristics) and Vietnam’s “Đoi Moi” are both a sociopolitical configuration of a Marxist-Leninist state with a hybrid economic system consisting of a regime-driven model that utilizes modern concepts and practices of the market, the international division of labor, finance, and trade for the purposes of staying in power and promoting socialism. Key to sustaining the dictatorial hold requires the money (lots of it) to pay for the elaborate network of repressive state terrorism, and the ability to domesticate, both, internal society and the diaspora. This China and Vietnam have been able to comfortably achieve. Castro-Communism has been trying to accomplish the same thing for decades but has consistently failed.
