Asia

May 15, 2008 -- ``Let’s seek the opportunity out of the world's crisis. In responding to the increase in global food prices, let us improve productivity. Amidst the oil crisis and price rises, let's be thrifty. Let's develop the energy resources.'' -- Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudoyono, May 1, 2008.

The poor will benefit from the increase in fuel prices rise, he said on May 7, 2008.

Meanwhile vice-president Yusuf Kalla said that so far the fuel subsidy has been benefiting the rich. He added ``The protesters who oppose this policy mean that they are helping the poor.''

Acting as if they are doing it ``on behalf of the poor'', the Indonesian government plans to impose a 30% rise on petroleum prices. It will be the third oil price rise under the Susilo Bambang Yudoyono government. To help the poor survive this unpopular policy, the government is granting direct cash transfers amounting 100,000 rupiah per month per family. The direct cash transfer ``gift'' was also implemented with the oil price rise in 2005.

Will this price rise benefit the poor?

By Eva Cheng
Beginning in late 1978, the Communist Party of China's ``reform and door opening'' program has purportedly sought to strengthen China's socialist course by introducing market mechanisms to speed the development of the productive forces. However, by the 1990s, especially in the second half, when state-owned enterprises were privatised en masse, displacing numerous workers and increasingly depriving retired workers of their hard-earned entitlements, the CPC's claims of staying on the socialist path had become a subject of hot debate.

The corruption and degeneration of a section of the CPC were issues even before the so-called reform, and were certainly made worse by the influx of foreign capital in the 1980s. This added to growing frustration with workers' worsening plight, forming the backdrop to the student protests beginning in 1986-87 and escalating into a series of bold mobilisations in early 1989, which Beijing answered by massacring the protesters on June 4, 1989.

By Gong Xiantian
[Subtitled “An open letter prompted by the annulment of section 12 of the constitution and section 73 of the General Rules of the Civil Law of 1986”, this paper by Beijing University Professor Gong Xiantian was dated August 12, 2005. The translation for Links is by Eva Cheng.]

As a member of the Communist Party of China (CPC), a citizen of the People’s Republic of China, a professor who has engaged in years of research on the teaching on law, someone with party spirit, conscience, knowledge and experience, I am of the view that the Property Law (Draft) of the People’s Republic of China (abbreviated as Draft from here on) violates the fundamental principles of socialism and will roll the “wheel of history” backwards. In the absence of amendments of a principled nature, the National People’s Congress has no right to legislate the Draft because it violates the Constitution (see appendix)!

By Sonny Melencio

China today confronts revolutionary socialists with some intriguing and controversial questions. How far have capitalist production and social relations been restored? Does this constitute a social counterrevolution that has rolled back the post-capitalist property relations established since the 1949 revolution? And what are now the strategic goals and tasks for revolutionaries?

China’s ruling Communist Party (CP) bureaucracy’s persistent rhetoric that it is still firmly for socialism has sent confusing indications as to where the decollectivisation of rural and industrial production—under the so-called “economic reform” since 1978—might be taking China. The CP has claimed that these were merely manoeuvres to speed up the development of productive forces, much needed to take China beyond its current primary stage of socialism. Even if it was the genuine intention, it at best represents the view of only one faction at the power centre. Ultimately, however, neither intentions nor proclamations matter. Their social consequences—their implications for the property and social relations in Chinese society—are what’s crucial.

This resolution was adopted by the 18th Congress of the Democratic Socialist Party of Australia, held in Sydney, January 5-10, 1999.

I. Theoretical framework

1. For orthodox Marxists, as Lenin explained in his 1917 book The State and Revolution, the state is a centralised organisation of force separated from the community as a whole which enforces, through special bodies of armed people and other institutions of coercion, the will of one class, or an alliance of classes, upon the rest of society.

By Max Lane

• The development of Timorese society
• Strategies for the struggle for socialism
• Cooperatives and politics
• Mass action
• The concept of the party

The Socialist Party of Timor (PST) is still a small party, with around 500-600 committed activists, now mostly based in branches in several East Timorese towns. It has received another 2000-2500 applications for membership in recent months. Its leaders acknowledge that the organisation is still in a very early stage of development and is not yet consolidated.