Re: [A-List] Raúl on the 26th + Fidel Cuba's Self Criticism/US communist notes

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

"Physical labor on its own does not generate conscience." 
 
Comment 
 
Or consciousness, or a sense of the world in which we live, or an  
understanding of the impact of classes, property, and the history of ideas or  the 
meaning of culture as the history of a generalized lived experience. The  modern 
history of class as military conflict and life style combines with and  
interacts upon the formation and evolution of what we call the consumer society. 
 
Comrade Raul estimate and criticism of the efficiency of reproduction and  
distribution of meat stuff and milk in Cuban society, from point of origin - the 
 milking of a cow, to consumption by children and adults raises a complex of  
questions revolutionaries in the imperial centers have grappled with for many 
 years. Cuba poses every theoretical question in the treasure house of Marx 
as  practical questions of the proletarian revolution. For instance, is not the 
 question of meat and milk production also a question of the historic breach  
between town and country, which evolved in modern âEuropeanâ driven history 
as  the struggle between town - the bourgeoisie, and country - the feudalist? 
 
Interestingly, in the imperial centers and most certainly America, we face  
these same issues from a different location in the social equation. Because  
American society is dying from over consumption of food stuff and everything  
else, and is locked into an intractable spontaneous battle against consumption  
and obesity, we are compelled, in our to live from day to day in reasonable  
health, to ask a different set of questions springing from the same social  
equation. We cannot avoid these questions. 
 
Why do human beings drink cow milk? What is the history of this culture?  
Generally speaking, statistic state that milk consumption in America has been  
steadily falling for 40 years. What is the history of a heavy meat diet?  
Although meat is not the worst thing one can eat, the meat and milk culture, as  it 
exists in todayâs world as a reproduction relation, is the recreation of  
culture specific to the bourgeoisie.  For an American communist to state  such is 
to risk being called arrogant, insensitive and out right chauvinistic  towards 
the plight of the former colonials and the battling proletarian masses  in 
Cuba and throughout the world. 
 
This is not the case.  
 
As a child I slowly discovered through great bodily pain and agony that I  
could not digest milk, ice cream and an assortment of dairy products. I did not  
stop drinking milk until in my teens, but the quiet conversation amongst my 
peer  group was always, âblack people cannot digest milk.â Under what 
conditions is  our species driven to consume the milk of another animal and is it not 
a law of  earth-nature, that off springs of mammals seize milk consumption, 
after the off  spring has left the breast of mother? 
Cuba was a slave society, which is to  say a historical unraveling of its 
milk and meat culture would produce some  starling and interesting observations.  
Cuba is blessed with a location  that could make it a primary area of non 
chemicalized fruit and vegetable  production, as well as a garden of various 
herbal products. 
 
Milk consumption apart from and outside of motherâs milk, is harmful to the  
human organism because when it combines in the body with other harmful  
substances, obstructions are formed to the efficient operations of the human  body. 
Here, a concept of efficiency and vitality as a law system is being  deployed. 
 
Patience is asked, because in America we are dying of over consumption of  
food stuff and the solution is not âless consumptionâ but to halt consumption 
of  a complex of things and dismantle the infrastructure designed to reproduce 
those  things we should not be consuming in the first place. âLess consumptionâ
 is the  transition program. 
 
Efficiency is at all times the steady and conscious removal of obstruction  
in a metabolic process. Efficiency as applied to production relations is the  
removal of obstruction and the shortening of designs in the process of  
reproduction and distribution. Efficiency is not a bourgeois concept of process  
logic although efficiency as bourgeois production relations is viewed from the  
standpoint of value production. Value production is understood to mean  
production with profit as its purpose. Efficiency is measured in many ways, even  when 
we cannot ascertain the long term outcome of our impact on the earth,  
society and the individual. Efficiency is labor replacing devices with a  potential 
to free larger segments of labor from the societal battle for  subsistence. 
Efficiency is the accumulation of productive forces, as measured  against a 
preexisting combination of tools, machines, energy source + human  labor used in 
the process of reproduction and distribution. 
 
It is useless and wrong to adopt an anti-technological development  attitude. 
How technology is evolved and configured; and for what purposes it is  
deployed and where it is deployed is of concern. âCommunist humanâ seems to me a  
concept needed to replace the old concept of âsocialist man.â âSocialist manâ 
is  said to be distinguished by his consciousness and selflessness in the 
process of  labor. 
The bourgeois critics decried that âsocialist manâ was a lifeless  
instrument of the state without individuality or the creative spirit, while  reserving 
creativity and spirit to those with money. 
 
Above all âsocialist manâ was of course âman,â in as much as men occupied  
the industrial and military fronts, but more than that, this man was 
industrial  and imbued with the logic of the industrial epoch. Consequently, this 
socialist  man love of the earth was a love - ethics and morality, shaped by the 
industrial  epoch and the medieval metaphysics of properties from which the 
industrial epoch  evolved.  This history of process logic is called into question 
. 
 
Communist human is freed from such logic. I am reminded of some words from  
Cheâs âSocialism and Man in Cuba.â 
 
âOur task is to prevent the current generation, torn asunder by its  
conflicts, from becoming perverted and from perverting new generations. We must  not 
create either docile servants of official thought, or âscholarship studentsâ  
who live at the expense of the state â practicing freedom in quotation marks.  
Revolutionaries will come who will sing the song of the new man and woman in 
the  true voice of the people. This is a process that takes time.â
 
Our current generation in America, has by design, been deprived of basic  
education and a fundamental sense of earth and species being. This generation  
has been deprived of a historical sense of process logic and even the mechanical 
 logic of the industrial epoch. This generation is perverted in a way where 
its  individual rights and assumptions are running into the most basic laws of 
our  species metabolic processes. Obesity is the face of the last and final 
stage of  bourgeois rule. Universal over consumption in the imperial centers and 
under  consumption outside the imperial centers. This under consumption does 
not mean  the lack of things but the lack of nutrient. The human body does not 
convert  milk and meat stuff into nutrient or rather the primary source of 
nutrient on  earth springs from vegetation and fruits., sunlight and clean air - 
nitrates.  Communism in America has never tackled this issue of over 
consumption as a  metabolic process defining the species and the specific behavior of 
our own  working class, as it becomes spontaneously driven to combat this 
destructive  culture. 
 
Cuba has within it some of the most beautiful people - human beings, on  
earth and their beauty and health stems from their biology and consumption. Cuba  
has much the world can learn from and can, if it chooses, market its beauty  
while communists in the imperial centers learn how to wage the struggle for  
beauty. Modern communism is a struggle for beauty in all its dimensions.   
Obesity is degeneracy and the ultimate human ugliness, although our bourgeoisie  
has been waging an unrelenting centuryâs long battle to convince humanity that  
plump and fat is a sign of health and human vitality. 
 
It is of course easy to accuse this writer of advocating starvation policy  
for humanity outside the imperial centers, but this is not the case at all. The 
 front of the battle against obesity is in the imperial centers. A 
dispassionate  examination of what constitutes human beauty, even with all its 
variations,  means a body with the least amount of obstructions to its harmonious 
metabolic  processes. In America  the average person, carries with them for a  
lifetime, no less than 10 - 50 pounds of dead matter in their body. The  
implications of this cultural fact is startling. 
 
Say, 30 pounds  of always present death matter, requires a daily input  of âXâ
 amount of âfood stuffâ - which is not really the meaning of food,  
multiplied by 300,000, 000 people. This daily process requires âXâ amount of  direct 
water input for the individual and another âXâ amount of energy resources  
and configuration of the reproduction infrastructure. A heavy meat and milk diet 
 is impossible to sustain and will lead to rapid death, without massive 
alcohol  consumption, which required reconfiguring our productivity infrastructure 
and  system of reproduction a certain way. Alcohol production, distribution 
and  consumption is one of the cornerstones of bourgeois imperialism long 
history of  New World colonization and resulted in horrible destruction and 
disfigurement of  the earlier peoples of this hemisphere. Any society that follows 
this pattern of  consumption will produce the same or similar results that exist 
in America and  be thrown into conflict with the metabolic process governing 
our species  existence and the earth. In addition a similar generalized form of 
awareness -  consciousness as understanding of species relations, will be 
spun. Here the  issue is not simply exchange within the world market but cultural 
consciousness  as the battle for human beauty. Exchange on it own, when 
detached from what is  exchanged, why it is produced in the first place and how it 
is produced, does  not generate conscience. 
 
The practical approach of communists, is to try and disclose the key link  or 
links in a chain of events and grab hold of the key link, in order to pull  
the entire chain forward. In America the practical communist approach has  
varied, deviated from the world communist movement, at various junctures of its  
evolution 
 
The more efficient production and distribution of meat and milk, -  anything, 
most certainly entails eliminating obstructions and shortening design  in 
transportation and distribution, even in America. Energy conservation - a  very 
bourgeois way to approach energy conversion, is important to everyone. 
 
In as much as we in America suffer from over consumption of everything, the  
question of critically examining everything produced and why it is produced is 
 important.  Not just how it is produced - the technological infrastructure,  
but why it is produced in the first place. 
 
 



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