Re: Fatalistic Marxism

["Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky" <gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

En relación a Fatalistic Marxism,
el 10 Mar 00, a las 17:47, Julio Pino dijo:

Now, reading the discussion on South
> Africa and Third World revolutions, it seems to me many have come
> full-circle, arguing that with the end of the Soviet Union and the
> rise of a unipolar world the best revolutionaries can opt for is to
> win some wiggle room inside the global market; anything else would be
> suicide.
>    But this trend of thought ignores what communists do for a living:
> provide leadership by analyzing(not ignoring)objective and subjective
> factors that further the class struggle and lead to victory.

Can anyone in her or his senses be again this? The fact, however, is
that the case that Julio is doing cannot be too easily sustantiated
on the Cuban example.

The Cuban revolution was outstanding in that Batista was so rotten
that even many in the USA were for his ousting (a situation reminding
that of the military dictatorships in South America after the 1982
South Atlantic battles). Fidel manoeuvered to enjoy good support from
the USA, and the American Intelligence Colonel Jules Dubois wrote a
bio praising him that gained a great audience, for example, in
Argentina among the counter-revolutionary camp. So much so that Fidel
was greeted with joy and myrth by the right wing oligarchs when he
came to Buenos Aires during the late 50s (here you have a true
revolutionary who takes Fascists -in Argentina read Peronists- to the
wall and shoots them, not like our flimsy petty bourgeois!). In fact,
many Peronists did not understand why Fidel accepted the hommage by
these fancy ladies and gentlemen of the Argentinian oligarchy. He was
simply raising funds, but he was used here in a very dirty way.

This was not due to Fidel's manoeuvering, on the other hand. There
WAS a link between Fidel and an ideological side of the American
foreign policy. Although during the Bogotazo Fidel found shelter in
the Argentinian embassy (by those times, the Foreign Relations
ministry of Peronist Argentina was led by Atilio Bramuglia, a man of
Socialist origin and inclinations), he was no Peronist nor Socialist
in those times. He was more of a Reformist (in the Latin American
sense of a democratic nationalist petty bourgeois nurtured in the
traditions of the Reforma Universitaria of 1918, much as the early
Haya de la Torre and many others).

The party he belonged to was of that origin and ideology. They were
democrats in two senses, first and foremost in the sense that they
were for democracy within their own countries, and also in the sense
of the "popular front" against Fascism during the World War II. This
second part of their democratic beliefs entered into contradiction,
both in the case of Fidel and of Haya. But while Haya preferred to
stick to "democracy" in the sense of Western imperialism, Fidel stood
firmly with his own people and his revolution, thus rejecting that
kind of "democracy". Many of the early traits of the Cuban revolution
can be traced back to this shift of beliefs.

It was the burning experience of revolution, and it was the
realization that in order to fulfill his national-democratic goals he
had to turn left, what turned Fidel and his men towards socialism and
communism. Things were, it seems, the other way round, Julio. That is
the way I see it from here, at least.

In this sense, the existence of the USSR _was_ a major asset for
them. There is another Julio on this list who obtained, from a high
and dedicated Cuban official, a confession more or less on the line
"But Julio, how could we imagine that the USSR was to founder?". This
can be understood only when one thinks of the complex origins of the
Cuban Communist Party, and their attempt at constituting a Marxist
party from power, not before getting to it. As to the Cuban CP of the
Batista years, suffice it to say that they were so terrible that they
even accepted a Ministery of Batista once.

We should not, however, extract the conclusion that

the
> practical thing to have done after the fall of the USSR would have
> been to dissolve the Communist Party (a la Milosevic)and proclaim the
> whole revolutionary experiment had been a big mistake.

I agree with Julio in that what Fidel is doing is admirable and the
results show that this path is the one to be taken. But I would not
deride efforts by other revolutionaries to keep going ahead through
different lines. Things are not easy, and while the decission of the
Cuban masses to fight to the end is an example of what one must point
to, not everybody can count on such a situation.

This said, I fully agree in that there is nothing fatalistic with
Marxism, and that

>   nothing in the history of revolutions (or
> counter-revolutions)is pre-determined. Revolutionary consciousness

is, as Julio Pino claims,

> the key, and it's

certainly

gained not by proclaiming yourself a vanguard party
> but by constantly reading and translating and acting upon local
> conditions, not the wind blowing from the four corners of the empire.

However, one of the important things not to forget in a semicolonial
country is that precisely because it is semicolonial the winds that
blow from the four corners do also blow from inside the country, that
is why we are semicolonials.





Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxx