'Armed Social-Democrats' - Maoism & class struggle

[m-14970@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Hugh Rodwell)]

>The exchange between Doug and Adolfo demonstrates why some Maoist groups
>here have been dubbed "armed social-democrats".
>
>It is almost impossible for a "progressive bourgeoisie" to exist, like in
>pre-imperialist Europe, given the fact that the bourgeois classes of
>"third-world" nations are integrated with imperialism.

Good stuff, Zeynep.

'Armed Social-Democrats' -- a brilliant description!

I mean, Adolfo wrote:

        The national bourgeoisie in Cuba was not for various reasons kept
        into the United Front of the revolutionary classes, driving it
        instead into the hands of imperialism and creating the schism of
        the Cuban nation to the advantage of social imperialism first and
        now Yankee imperialism.

The creation of a workers' state (however deformed) was what saved Cuba
>from a fate worse than death at the hands of vengeful imperialists, and
meant among other things it didn't have to suffer the horrors of a
Nicaragua style contras war. It also made it a beacon of progress for many
Latin-Americans better able to appreciate the availability of free
universal medicine, education and so on than many of us in welfare state
imperialist countries.


So the problem for the Maoists and other petty-bourgeois nationalist
tendencies is not changing society, but rewarding goodies and punishing
baddies. It doesn't matter a damn that bourgeois property relations mean
built-in exploitation and growing social inequality and tension wherever
they exist, what matters is rewarding people that say they support us by
letting them carry on exploiting workers, and punishing those who don't
support us by confiscating their property. This is sentimentality, not
socialism!

It was the same crap in Nicaragua. Landowners are still the third great
class of bourgeois society, living off rent, which is nothing but surplus
profit appropriated on the basis of a monopoly in a means of production
(land). This raises the prices of basic necessities and distorts the whole
system of production and consumption. Instead of starting from this fact
and nationalizing all land except that owned by non-exploiting smallholders
(this is a question of the number of workers employed rather than the size
of the holding -- I'd tend to think anything over five employees is ripe
for intervention, but the figure would be thrashed out on the ground using
local knowledge), there was all the sentimental muck about 'national'
landowners, as if exploitation -- as a mechanism depending on class and the
relationship in which people stand to the means of production -- wasn't an
issue! Sheer voluntarism.

The whole point about Marx's analysis of class relations is that they are
impersonal and operate as natural laws of development, regardless of the
conscious volition of the agents of the process. This has the political
corollary that the transition of capitalism to socialism will not be
achieved without transforming the relations of production in a society. In
other words it is fundamentally necessary to remove the capitalists and
landlords, and to take away any possibility for them of relating to capital
and the land in a way that automatically reproduces exploitation for their
own benefit and to the detriment of the proletariat (at the other,
exploited pole of the relationship to capital and the land).

As for Adolfo's 'self-sufficiency' nonsense in relation to Cuba, more on
that some other time.

Cheers,

Hugh





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