Tag: stalinism

The group of fewer than four hundred bureaucrats and military officers who sit atop Chinese power held a meeting yesterday that heralded a “historic declaration.” The final text, encoded into the bureaucracy’s ledger was interpreted by nearly every media this morning as a play by Xi to stay in power. In reality that’s just the surface: the Plenum ideologically culminates an underlying movement that has been underway for months which disciplines economic power, refocuses and represses mass culture, and centralizes the bureaucratic apparatus in preparation for a war economy.

After the first five installments of our series “Under Communism”, several readers have asked us our opinion on “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”, the title of a book by Aaron Bastani which, although it has had few translations and media coverage outside of the English-speaking world, seems to have succeeded in coining the term.

News of an outbreak of protests in Cuba leapt through agencies to media outlets around the world yesterday. Beginning in San Antonio de los Baños, protests spread in a matter of hours from the West to the East of the country and ended up surrounding the Capitol in Havana. The regime’s response was swift: exculpatory speeches, calls for civil confrontation and door-to-door repression all night long.

Raúl Castro has announced his upcoming retirement at the age of 89, 62 years after the M26J guerrillas entered Havana and 60 years after Fidel Castro proclaimed Cuba’s entry into the Russian bloc. The retirement of the last active commander of Sierra Maestra from the political leadership of the Cuban ruling class occurs in the midst of the latest acceleration of the agonizing and perennial crisis of a national capital in ruins.

A new offensive against the living conditions of Cuban workers begins. On the horizon, even famine.