Re: The Americanization of Elian

["Jose G. Perez" <jgperez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> these petty-bourgeois strata - that make, unfortunately,
> the monstruous majority of the population in all countries today - will
> perhaps support socialism only if it proposes itself to attach itself
> the lagacy of political democracy of old bourgeois revolutions, and not
> to smash it (also a formulation of Trotsky's, in his early 1930s
> writings about Germany). The Cuban Revolution has, unfortunately, made
> no new developments in thsi issue, and has the same fragile
> institucional armour of all preceding "really existing" socialist
> regimes, therefore being not a "model" for future developments.But the
> fact is that that would be to expect too much of the Cuban Revolution.

    I think you're 110% wrong in viewing Cuba as another expression of the
"really existing" socialist regimes. Cuba was and is a revolutionary
alternative to the Stalinist model.

    True, Cuba has had no use for "legacy of political democracy of the old
bourgeois revolutions" as it has been handed down to this day. Bourgeois
democracy is a rotten shell with absolutely no democratic content
whatsoever. In the United States, where it has achieved its most finished
expression, it consists of nothing more than the buying and selling of
thousands and thousands of governmental positions mediated through
"elections" in which, even when the presidency itself is at stake, the
*majority* of the population refuses to participate. Even a rabidly
patriotic right-wing commentator found no better tittle for a book about
Congress than "Parliament of whores."

    "Freedom of expression" consists largely of the "right" to choose
between the truth according to Microsoft and Bill Gates; the truth according
to Time Warner, Ted Turner and AOL; and the truth according to Rupert
Murdoch. With top executives and editors paid in the currency of the age,
stock options, is it any wonder that the transparent attempt at constructing
a rapacious monopoly by AOL-Time Warner was met on all sides with hosannas
of praise?

    But Cuba has, over these decades of revolution, had much use for
proletarian democracy, which is exercised primarily not at the ballot box
but in the direct participation of the masses in the tasks of governing.
When the old bourgeois complain that the workers they had fired the evening
before came back the next morning in militia uniforms and expropriated the
enterprise, what they are complaining about is proletarian democracy in
action, and the fulfillment of Marx's dictum that the liberation of the
working class can only be the work of the working class itself.

    In the initial years it was primarily through the militia and the mass
organizations, and especially the CDR's that proletarian democracy found an
admittedly imperfect expression.

    Since then, however, there has been the constitution of the People's
Power.

    The model for the Cuban popular democratic institutions is the Paris
Commune, as analyzed by Marx in the Civil War in France, and with an
addition: the block-by-block Committees for the Defense of the Revolution as
the foundation of the Cuban system. It is the CDRs which nominate candidates
for the municipal assemblies and serve as a basis for the election of
provincial and national assemblies of people's power. People's power
delegates are not professional politicians, but working people. Every so
often they must hold assemblies to "render accounts" and are subject to
recall if the people find them wanting.

    Elections are non-partisan. The Communist Party doesn't have a slate of
candidates nor does it mobilize behind the scenes to back particular
individuals.

    True, Cuba does not permit the creation of pro-imperialist, CIA-financed
"opposition parties." Under the siege conditions that have existed for the
past 40 years, however, it seems hard to argue that this ban is unjustified.
And I know of no instance where anyone has proposed the creation of a
different party *within* the revolution in recent decades, nor of any
current that emerged from the CCP seeking an independent existence.

    In the early years of the revolution a tiny, insanely ultraleft
Trotskyist group was tolerated, but it was ordered to disband in 1964 or
1965, after several reported instances where their members were arrested or
their publications suppressed. According to some sources, Ché intervened
several times on those occasions, and also urged members of the group to
give up their independent existence and join the O.R.I. (predecessor to the
CCP).

    Those accounts do not ring false. From the beginning the team around
Fidel sought to build a single party that included all Cuban revolutionary
militants. Over the years, various prejudices (such as those against gays
and lesbians) and even formal rules (against religious believers) have been
reversed in pursuing this goal. Within the party there have been at various
times a spread of views on a variety of issues, especially those concerning
Ché's views on the economy and socialist construction. We know that the
party has broad-ranging pre-Congress discussions, including internal
bulletins, and that for recent Congresses, hundreds of amendments to the
draft resolutions have been submitted to the Congress from local units.
There is nothing in the statutes about tendency rights, minority views,
etc., but whether these amendments represent a widespread different view on
a particular issue isn't publicly known.

    In the arts, material limitations have been the biggest "censor." Since
the early days of the revolution movies especially have taken a harshly
critical look at various aspects of Cuban society. Such efforts have not
been always welcomed by the top leaders of the revolution; Fidel is said to
have been very upset with a film produced a couple of years ago
(Guantanamera). Very early in the revolution Fidel laid out "the law" on
culture, which is, within the revolution, everything, outside the
revolution, nothing. And, yes, various people "have had problems" as they
say in Cuba at one time or another, but by and large the revolution has
stuck to that line for 40 years.

    Cuba has a rich political life where all kinds of subjects are debated
and discussed. I've observed on various trips discussions about issues like
the legalization of the dollar, the visits by Cubans abroad, material versus
moral incentives, wage differences, emigration to the U.S. and in every
instance I've been struck by the fact that the man or woman on the street is
most often more radically egalitarian and more intransigent against anything
perceived as a U.S. attack or provocation than the government. And I never
saw any signs of hesitation on anyone's part in criticizing current policy,
especially from the left.

    Which brings me to my next point, which is that the MAIN difference
between Cuba and the regimes of "really existing" socialism of unhappy
memory isn't that Cuba practices proletarian democracy, but that Cuba has a
completely different approach, a revolutionary approach, to both domestic
and foreign policy.

    The latest issue of the Militant carried an introduction by Armando Hart
to a new collection of speeches by Che addressed to young people where Hart
talks about this quite explicitly. The book is being issued by Pathfinder in
the U.S. and Abril in Cuba.

    Following are extracts from that introduction:

* * *

At the beginning of the 1990s it was said that all models for changing the
world had disappeared, together with the possibility of finding new ones.
The image of the Heroic Guerrilla, however, rises throughout the Western
world as a specter that continues to grow. And it will do so, with greater
or lesser force and richness of ideas, to the extent that it reaches young
people and they take up the essential part of his actions and aspirations.

José Carlos Mariátegui, one of Latin America's great revolutionary thinkers,
studied and pointed to the need for myths. He pointed out how peoples who
have accomplished great feats have had to create myths among the masses. If
we want to be revolutionaries in the strict sense of the word, we must study
 the reasons and the factors for why Che lives on in the hearts of the
Americas and expresses, in a thousand different ways, the desires and
aspirations of the most radical youth on various continents. Thirty-some
years after his rise to immortality in the Yuro Ravine, his image resonates
through plazas and streets, reviving his cry of "Ever onward to victory!"
Finding the reasons behind these facts is the best way to uphold the ideas
of socialism and the possibilities of revolutionary change.

The teachings and the example of Che's sacrifice in the jungles of Bolivia
have etched in the minds of the new generations for all time a sense of
heroism, and of moral values in politics and history. And since the moral
factor has been what's lacking in politics and has ended up leading to
revolutions, there is one conviction of Che's that has been dramatically
confirmed: without the moral factor, there is no revolution. He also spoke
with eloquence, depth, and rigor about the need for a new man in the
twenty-first century. Life itself has compelled this individual to be formed
in the twentieth century. Recognizing the enormous role of culture and moral
values in the history of civilization, and extracting from it the necessary
practical consequences is Commander Ernesto Che Guevara's most important
message to young people. There is a history behind this. Civilization never
made an analysis with the necessary depth, from a scientific viewpoint, of
the role of moral and spiritual values over the course of history. That is
the most important intellectual challenge that the twentieth century has
left to youth.

In Europe, Western and Christian culture began to evolve before the year
1000 until it achieved, with Marx and Engels, the highest level of
philosophic knowledge in relation to social and economic science. In Latin
America and the Caribbean, meanwhile, a line of thinking
crystallized-symbolized by Bolívar and Martí-that, on a scientific basis,
emphasized the power of man and the role of education, culture, and
politics. The originality of Ernesto Che Guevara-as with the Cuban
Revolution-consists of the following: Inspired by the spiritual heritage of
Our America, and starting with his commitment to moral values, he adopted
the ideas of Marx and Engels, and advocated using the so-called subjective
factors to motivate and guide the revolutionary action of the masses and of
society as a whole.

What is valuable and of interest from the standpoint of Marxism is that from
this vantage point, Che got radically closer to Marx than did other
interpretations of the ideas of the author of Capital that were prevalent
during the second half of the twentieth century. The Third World perspective
of the internationalist guerrilla fighters who fell in Bolivia was an
implicit call to socialists to decisively orient their actions toward the
Third World. The wisdom of this political and moral course was not
understood and supported at the time by those who could and should have done
so. For this reason, the world changed along lines favorable to the most
reactionary right, ending up in postmodern chaos.

In Che's speech in Algiers on February 24, 1964, this call took on a
dramatic and polemical character. Tragically, history would prove who was
right. The saddest thing for revolutionaries is that Che's position on the
role of the previously colonized or neocolonized countries was closely in
line with what Lenin had brilliantly foreseen decades earlier, pointing to
the importance of liberation movements that were emerging in the East.
Valuable literature exists by the person who forged the October Revolution,
and it should be restudied at the present time.

*  *  *

    Thus far Armando Hart.

    One thing that's notable here is the direct and explicit connection that
Hart draws between the Soviet Bloc's refusal to adopt a general policy of
supporting the extension of the revolution in  the third world and the
overthrow of the East European workers states. He views it fundamentally,
not as lack of democracy, but as lack of revolutionary class consciousness.
And it is there that the sharpest contrast between the late "really
existing" socialism and Cuban socialism is to be found.

    I believe the Cuban policy or strategic approach, while not a "model"
does have universal applicability. Because it is, as Hart says, radically
closer to Marx that the political approach behind the other "model."

José

----- Original Message -----
From: "Carlos Eduardo Rebello" <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, January 30, 2000 4:31 PM
Subject: Re: The Americanization of Elian


> > Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 17:14:25 -0500
> > From: Macdonald Stainsby <mstainsby@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> > Subject: Re: The Americanization of Elian
> >
> > Carlos Eduardo Rebello <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
> >
> > (snipp...)
> >
> > I do not believe in the suitability of the Cuban model as a
> > > guide for future developments of the Left,
> >
> > I will start by saying that nothing, not even the mighty Russian
> > revolution, can be considered a "model", that is anti-marxist in my
> > view. However, you seem to be taking pains to make a distance between
> > yourself and the Cuban revolution, and I am curious Carlos, why do you
> > do that?
>
> I do not make nothing of this sort, and I believe that the Cuban
> Revolution today has to be defended at all costs, *even forgetting about
> this debate altogether* for the moment.Perhaps we aren't mature for this
> debate yet, and it can only give a profit to our enemies. So I shall
> make some tentative statements, and get ready to forget about them if
> the situation demands.
>
> The problem is that we have, for most of this closing century, based our
> strategy on the fact that the social interests of the working-class -
> that we expected would form an overwhelming, monstruous majority of the
> population by now- would be enough to get us into Socialism, and that
> therefore the politico-institutional forms attached to socialism were a
> matter of indiference to us. Today, however, the continuous development
> of ever more differentiating patty-bourgeois strata - from the lumpens
> to white-collar workers - between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie
> that Trotsky, commenting on the *Manifesto*, saw already in 1936 as the
> bane of decaying capitalism, puts the important problem that such strata
> will only favour socialism if it is attached to the question of
> *political empowerment* of the population as a whole, and of enabling
> the population at large to participate in politics beyond the local
> level (which would be the only way that could allow us, BTW, to break
> the wall of depoliticised micropolitics that is the hallmark of
> postmodernity); these petty-bourgeois strata - that make, unfortunately,
> the monstruous majority of the population in all countries today - will
> perhaps support socialism only if it proposes itself to attach itself
> the lagacy of political democracy of old bourgeois revolutions, and not
> to smash it (also a formulation of Trotsky's, in his early 1930s
> writings about Germany). The Cuban Revolution has, unfortunately, made
> no new developments in thsi issue, and has the same fragile
> institucional armour of all preceding "really existing" socialist
> regimes, therefore being not a "model" for future developments.But the
> fact is that that would be to expect too much of the Cuban Revolution.
> That's all I wanted to say, but I'm prepared, as regards Cuba, to forget
> about this altogether, and concern myself only about defending the
> legacy of the 1959 Revolution, OK? The issue is one to be debated in a
> more general level, I think.
>
> Carlos Rebello
>
>
> > Macdonald
>