Re: Cuba and Socialism

[Adam Rose <adam@xxxxxxxx>]

Jon writes:
>
>  >>  b) the party which came to power did not describe itself as socialist
> until well after ( one ? two ? ) years after the revolution. <<Adam Rose
>
>  Jon Flanders:
>
>   What percentage of the Russian workers and peasants described *themselves*
> as Socialist one or two years after the Bolshevik revolution, five years, ten
> years????
>
>   Did the mass of Russian workers and peasants rally round the Bolsheviks
> because they were *socialist*, or was it because they were the only ones in
> actual practice who fought for Peace, Bread and Land?
>

Russian peasants - well who knows what they thought. Every potato in a sack has
a different shape, every peasant a different set of ideas. Whatever, the 
peasantry
supported the Bolsheviks because the Bolsheviks gave them their land and ended
the war.

But the Russian working class - they had gone through a long process at the
end of which they had been won to the conclusion that only a workers state
could solve their problems, and that this could only be achieved under the
leadership of the Bolshevik party. The mass of the Russian working class
were consciously fighting for socialism.

This is the core of my objection to seeing the Cuban revolution as a socialist
revolution - it negates the idea that socialism "is the self conscious movement
of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority". The Cuban
revolution was not self conscious, nor was it a movement OF the immense
majority. whether or not it was in their interests.

[ Five years after the Russian Revolution we are in a different situation - the
Russian working class that had gone through the three revolutions and had
remade society in its own image had either been killed in the civil war or
absorbed into the bureaucracy.].

>
>   Do you think Fidel and Che were ignorant of socialist ideas before 1959?
>

No, they were by no means ignorant of socialist ideas, although the version of
socialist ideas they had been exposed to was the shameful travesty of socialism
as represented by the Cuban CP. I would say that they had never been exposed to
the revolutionary Marxist tradition.

They were nationalists, and described themselves as such - didn't they ?

Adam.



Adam Rose
SWP
Manchester
UK


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