Re: Nicaragua

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 26 Apr 1996, Rahul Mahajan wrote:

>
> I thought the SWP position (I got this from ISO members in Austin) was that
> Cuba was a "state capitalist" society.
>

Louis: The English SWP is a "state capitalist" group. When American SWP
was Trotskyist, it defended the idea that the USSR and similar
countries were "degenerated workers states". All except for Cuba which
was a "deformed workers state" like the USSR until Stalin took over.
The American SWP stopped calling itself Trotskyist when party boss Jack
Barnes decided that the Permanent Revolution theory of Trotsky was
incorrect. Some months later every single member of the group also became
convinced of the wisdom of this. Those that didn't were expelled.
This group of 500 styles itself as "communist" nowadays and thinks of itself
as something like the Cuban CP, just a little smaller. (What fucking
chutzpah.)

I find all of this sort of categorizing totally schematic nowadays. It has
more in common with the formal logic of Aristotle than Marx's method. This
compulsion to label things is absurd. If you are going to speak about
Cuba or Nicaragua, you have dig deep into the complex and contradictory
reality of such societies. Jim Miller, the American SWPer, and Jorn
Andersen, the English SWPer, are both allergic to facts so you won't
learn too much about Nicaragua or Cuba from either one of them.


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