Re: Cuba and worker's commune

[m-14970@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Hugh Rodwell)]

>On Tue, 4 Jun 1996, Adam Rose wrote:
>
>> Ultimately, I am inspired by a vision of a future society that I think
>> it is worth fighting and dying for. It is not worth fighting and dying to
>> bring about a society like Cuba. If Cuba is socialist, it is not worth
>> fighting and dying for socialism.
>>
>
>Louis: While Adam in his comfortable English surroundings with his
>high-paying electronics job can sniff at the Cuban revolution and send it
>back to the kitchen, this has not stopped millions of others from fighting
>and dying to achieve what Cuba has achieved. I recommend that Adam take
>the time some day to read the "Second Declaration of Havana" by Fidel
>Castro to figure out why Cuba = Socialism in the minds of 3rd world
>dwellers. Accustomed as they are to seeing children dying from diarrhea
>because they have no access to clean water, illiterate peasants cheated by
>landlords because they can't read a deed, unemployed shantytown residents
>who sell chewing-gum on the streets to get by, these denizens of places
>like Haiti do have the notion that if their country was like Cuba, that
>would be a real advance.

Adam is wrong, because a workers' state, which he is programmatically
incapable of recognizing, *is* worth fighting and dying for (workers have
fought and died for less), regardless of the regime running the place.
Obviously, any conscious worker ready to fight will wish to fight and if
necessary die for a non-capitalist state with a regime of workers'
democracy -- that's what Bolshevik-Leninist party organization is all
about.

Louis is wrong, because he abstracts, as always from the role of the party
in defining the strategic choices of workers. What to fight for is not the
result of an ahistorical popularity contest: Cuba vs Haiti, but of the
policies involved nationally and internationally in the dismantling of the
capitalist mode of production in Cuba, in the reproduction of a repressive,
antirevolutionary regime and in the impending restoration of bourgeois
relations of production. These policies did not emerge spontaneously out of
nowhere, they were and are the result of a political process whose methods
and guiding principles and history are all capable of description and which
at every stage in their development could have taken a different turn if
the political and social forces involved had lined up a bit differently.

Just having a notion that Cuba is a better place than Haiti is a minimal
first step that turns people in Haiti in the right direction. The rest is a
question of organization and schooling as to *why* Cuba is better, and
*how* Haiti can be changed to get the same advantages.

Cheers,

Hugh




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