Re: Stalinism And Standards of Intellectual Discourse

[Chegitz Guevara <mluziett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 20 Dec 1995, Kevin Cabral wrote:

>       I would agree with you about the revolutionary nature of Cuba, and
> also honor leaders like Chegitz but why do you feel that socialism in one
> country alone is always inevitable to fail? I'm a bit undergunned on
> material concerning this long-time debate, but I'd ask first what aspects
> of production inevitable lead to a collapse of a state like Cuba.
>
> Kevin

My first comment is that the statement, "honor leaders like Chegitz," is
an indefinate phrase. Either it should be written, "honor leaders such as
Chegitz," or "honor leaders like Chegitz does." I hate to correct your
English, but the thought of someone honoring me disturbs me somewhat.
It's not that I don't appreciate the ego stroke, but I'm hardly someone
who deserves honoring. One of my former comrades, whom I once admired
greatly, once said, "We have to be prepared to fill the role of a Lenin."
In other words, we must all take responsibilty for making the revolution.
Leaders are nice things to have, be we can't wait for them to appear,
anymore than we can wait for the revolution to happen.

However, to the task at hand, which is, why is Socialism in One Country is
a doomed policy. I could simply say that, no country contains within it,
all of the necessities for making a modern economy produce a high standard
of living, and that any attempt at building socialism will be met with the
most extreme hostility from imperialism, and therefore, will be unable to
obtain those necessities, but that would be too easy. I could also point
to the real world failures of attempts to build socialism in one country,
but we could argue about the causes of that for decades (and we will).
Instead, I will pull a quote from the "old men in London," Marx and Engels
in their German Ideology. My copy is the Third revised edition, Progress
Publishers, Moscow, 1976.

==========================================================================

This "estrangement" ["Entfremdung"] (to use a term which will be
comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished
given two *practical* premises. In order to become an "unendurable"
power, i.e., a power against which men make a revolution, it must
necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity "propertyless," and
moreover in contradiction to an existing world of great wealth and
culture; both these premises presuppose a great increase in productive
power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this
development of productive forces (which at the same time implies the
actual empirical existence of men in their *world-historical,* instead of
local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise, because
without it privation, *want* is merely made general, and with *want* the
struggle for necessities would begin again, and all the filthy business
would necessarily be restored; and furthermore, because only with this
universal development of productive forces is a *universal* intercourse
between men established, which on side produces in *all* nations
simultaneously the phenomenon of the "propertyless mass (universal
competition), making each nation dependent on the revolutions of others,
and finally puts *world-historical,* empirically universal individuals in
place of local ones. Without this, 1) communism could only exist as a
local phenomenon; 2) the *forces* of intercourse themselves could not
have developed as *universal,* hence unendurable powers: they would have
remained home-bred "conditions" surrounded by superstition; and 3) each
extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. *** Empirically,
communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples "all at
once" and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of
productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with them. ***
{emphasis mine, Chegitz}, pp. 54-57

=========================================================================


Marc, "the Chegitz," Luzietti
personal homepage: http://shrike.depaul.edu/~mluziett
political homepage: http://shrike.depaul.edu/~mluziett/chegitz.html

A curse on the judges, the coppers and screws | Who tortured the
innocent, the wrongly accused, | For the price of promotion | And justice
to sell | May the judged be their judges when they rot down in hell

The Pogues, "Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six"



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