Re: Workers' rule unthinkable w/o democratic rights (reply to José)

["Jose G. Perez" <jg_perez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[Ben --

    This is the reply I drafted upon  seeing your message. Sorry I
didn't get a chance to post last week. Summer break with the kids out
of school has been taking up most of my free time.]

>>José, unfortunately, defends the existing bankrupt conception of
workers' rule.  José does this by defending the suppression of
independent organizations of workers in Cuba--and by arguing that
this suppression must be considered normal when a workers
revolution is surrounded by a more powerful imperialist camp.
More than this--José goes so far as to argue that even in such an
economically developed and powerful country as the United
States--it will be necessary to suppress independent
organizations of workers.<<

Ben,

    I will try to reply quickly as I think you may not have grasped
the essence of my argument about Cuba. The matters you raise re. the
Internet are extremely interesting and important, and I suggest we
take that discussion up separately. In general, I am in agreement with
the direction of your comments on that point although I do not know if
I would take them as far as you do.

    My response to you, a lot of it was simply directed at answering
the question: if Cuba is not a workers state dominated by a bureaucrat
caste, why does it look so much like the USSR and so little like the
commune? Why do we not see the "state of a new type" and instead see a
"bureaucratic military apparatus"?

    Part of the answer --which I realize now I did not communicate
effectively in my last response-- is that we do not see "the state of
a new type" in part because it IS a state of a new type, as Marx,
Engels and Lenin said, a state that is no longer "properly speaking" a
state.  Cuba's social and political structures are impossible to
understand without understanding the central role played by the mass
organizations, the CDRs, the unions, the Federation of Cuban Women,
etc.

    The block-by-block Committees for the Defense of the Revolution,
for example, play an important role in keeping bourgeois forces in
check, a quintessentially "state" activity. Yet we do not think of the
CDR's as "the state" nor should we, it is not a bureaucratic-military
apparatus rising above society, but rather the working people
"organized as the ruling class" quite directly and transparently. And
if it were just a question of keeping an eye on disgruntled
pro-capitalist elements living in the past, it is quite likely
something like the CDR's would be enough. Given the CIA, however, the
CDRs are, unfortunately, not enough.

    The other part of the answer is what I focused on: Cuba has a
bureaucratic-military bourgeois type state apparatus because it is not
yet able to do without it. It is imposed both by the narrowness of the
material base and especially by the external threat. My contention is
that historical experience has now shown this is "normal" while
workers state face a strong threat from a world imperialist system.

    This is NOT NOT NOT the same as saying that a consolidated
bureaucratic caste rules Cuba, or that a bureaucratic degeneration of
every socialist revolution is probable or inevitable until the workers
in the main imperialist centers get it together. The pressure or
tendency towards the emergence of such a caste is, I believe,
inevitable, but it can be fought, and fought with growing success. The
key to that fight is the conscious organization and mobilization of
working people around the key political, social and economic issues
facing the revolution.

    But not until imperialism has been overthrown, I think, are we
likely to see workers states without such significant
bureaucratic-military apparatuses of repression, regulation and
control, and therefore without a built in, so to speak, tendency
towards bureaucratization, i.e., the political expropriation of the
working people.

    In the meantime, we are likely to see a lot of what we see in
Cuba, elements of the new and the old mushed together and intertwined.
Of great importance is the direction of motion of the society and the
struggle as a whole. In Cuba's case, I believe the evidence is clear
that the motion has been towards consolidating and developing the
institutions, the organizations, and above all the consciousness and
combativity through which the Cuban working class keeps control of its
state and keeps tendencies towards the consolidation of a privileged
bureaucratic layer in check. This, of course, has not been a constant,
uninterrupted process. Both Cuba's own mistakes (the excessively
voluntaristic policies of the late 1960s, followed by their
"objectivist" twin, the adoption in the 1970s of the East
European/Soviet "economic calculus," which tended to view the building
of a socialist society merely an automatic matter coming from economic
development) and external factors (imperialism's victory in the cold
war with the restoration of capitalism in Russia) have made it a long
and winding road. But the Cuban revolution has persisted.

    You argue for theory and for theory to be materially grounded. I
believe my "theory" is materially grounded. The *necessity* of these
kinds of specialized organs has been amply demonstrated by the 20th
century. A workers state surrounded by a hostile and more powerful
imperialist camp with higher labor productivity MUST HAVE professional
intelligence services, a professional military establishment, and a
state monopoly on economic dealings with the capitalist world, which
implies a whole series of specialized organs and all sorts of
restrictions in every field.

    You equate this *automatically* with the workers organizations
being suppressed, I contend this is not so. The development of an
effective state ("bureaucratic military apparatus") is the only way
the working people can keep the freedom to organize as a ruling class
under prevailing conditions. And what I was addressing was how such a
working class keeps its apparatus subordinate to it, instead of having
the apparatus making decisions in the name of the working class that
in reality seek to establish and re-enforce all sorts of privileges.

    Nowhere did I argue that the suppression of workers organizations
is a necessary or desirable outcome of this. I believe precisely the
opposite is the case. And in terms of materially grounding the
theories, I believe the organizations of the working class and the
working people generally are quite alive and well in Cuba, thank you.
But don't take my word for it, go down and have a look.

    That said I do not understand why you think that workers
organizations are suppressed in Cuba. On the contrary, they have the
run of the place.

    You make a fetish of this word "independent," and I'm not sure
what content you give it. The Cuban mass organizations certainly are
not organs of the state controlled from the Palace of the Revolution.
But, yes, they do act in concert with state organs, properly speaking.
That is precisely as it should be in a "healthy" workers state.

    (When I talk about the working class organized as the ruling
class, that is what I am talking about. It is not a matter of
elections and formal guarantees; the working class cannot RULE as an
atomized, passive mass of voters or consumers. The workers must be
conscious, must act AS A CLASS through their OWN organizations and
through mass organizations in which they have the decisive weight).

    The Cuban mass organizations have their own internal life, elect
their own leaders, and so on.

    You will object that they are "controlled" by the Communist Party.
But to the degree that is true, it is because the party has won the
allegiance of the big majority of people in Cuba, and, in particular,
has the support of the advanced, conscious workers, a layer in which
the party is rooted.

    Nor was this position established by repression against other
working class parties. The current Cuban CP is the result of a fusion
between the three main organizations involved in the revolution, the
pro-Moscow People's Socialist Party, the July 26 movement, which had
an extensive urban underground in addition to its guerrilla forces,
and the smaller University of Havana-based Revolutionary Student
Directorate.

    With the revolution, working people in Cuba have made tremendous
strides. Illiteracy has been wiped out. Everyone has access to
education and medical care. And despite the tremendous damage to the
economy done by the collapse of the soviet bloc, there is none of the
pauperization and hunger you see throughout the third world -- and not
only there. Most of all, the Cuban revolution has brought Cuba's
working people a sense of dignity, of pride, of collective and
individual worth that is entirely absent in the rest of the continent.

    Many, I daresay most Cubans are conversant with military weapons
and basic military techniques. Tens of thousands of workers are
battle-hardened veterans of the campaigns in Africa. Hundreds of
thousands participate in the militia. There are weapons depots for the
militia throughout the island. If the people of Cuba wanted to be rid
of this government, it would have been long gone. They have the
knowledge, the means, and most importantly the sense of self-worth and
combativity to do it.

    The fundamental reason there are no other parties in Cuba besides
the Cuban CP is that no significant layer of working people have felt
a need for such a party. The question of one or more parties cannot be
posed in the way you do it, abstractly, in the pure realm of platonic
essences and metaphysical realities. Parties are formed by real people
with real goals in mind and expressing real class interests.

    I am aware of only one other political current in the workers
movement which had an organized, public, independent expression in
Cuba in the early years of the revolution, and that was the
Revolutionary Workers Party (Trotskyist), or POR (t). This was a tiny,
ultraleft grouplet which followed an international current around Juan
Posadas (Homero Cristali, if I remember his real name right). The
Posadistas, among other things, called on the USSR to strike the first
blow during the Cuban missile crisis and insistently demanded of the
revolutionary government that it "nationalize" the Guantánamo naval
base. Since that base was then (as it remains today) occupied by the
U.S. military, this was an extremely provocative stance to take.

    The Posadistas functioned until 1965 or so. They had repeated
scrapes with the government, some issues of their newspaper were
suppressed, some of them were jailed for a time, and more than once
Che Guevara is said to have interceded on their behalf. I believe some
of the Posadistas also worked with him in his ministry, and he is
reported to have argued with them to join the ORI (fused precursor of
today's CP). Which, like a Stalinist caricature of a "Trotskyite
splitter," the Posadistas, of course, refused to do.

    On the part of the top Cuban leaders that came out of the July 26
movement, there does not seem to have been any particular aversion to
Trotskyists or Trotskyism in general, despite the fact that they were
forced by circumstances to become close allies of Moscow. That was
not, of course, true of every last one of the Cuban cadres, especially
some of those who came out of the pro-Moscow People's Socialist Party,
but then again, such people didn't seem to have much use for Fidel
either (as we will see). But the POR was in hot water because it was
so insanely and provocatively ultraleft.

    At around the time that the Cuban POR (t) was ordered to disband
(1965 or so) Posadas, whose politics had grown increasingly bizarre,
discovered that UFO's were emmissaries from other worlds coming to
bring socialism to earth, or some such nonsense (The description of
the POR(t)'s politics I can vouch for, I actually read their paper and
hand-outs. The stuff about Posadas and the UFO's is what I've read and
been told). Having achieved escape velocity, the Posadistas by and
large ceased to be a concern of the left.

    In addition to the Posadista current, a second current arose
within the fused organization. It was headed by ex-PSPer Aníbal
Escalante, organization secretary of the ORI. It was basically a
Stalinist current which tried to usurp the leadership of the
revolution through administrative appointments to posts in the fused
group. This was denounced by Fidel in a famous speech which Pathfinder
Press has in print under the title, Fidel Castro denounces bureaucracy
and sectarianism.

    Escalante was given a second chance as head of a state farm. From
the position he reorganized what the Cubans later were to call "the
microfaction." They wanted to replicate in Cuba the economic
mechanisms then in vogue in Eastern Europe and the USSR, and they
wanted Cuba to defer to the Latin American CP's and their reformist
line in regional politics.

    Escalante and his cronies linked up with East European diplomats,
who shared many of their criticisms of Cuba, seeking to use Cuba's
dependence on trade with the Soviet bloc to leverage themselves into
power. They (supposedly jokingly) suggested, for example, that vital
soviet oil shipments be temporarily suspended and that Cuba be told
this was due to repairs in the port of Baku.

    Needless to say, this clique was broken up and its main leaders
arrested, tried and convicted. This happened around 1967 or 1968.
Fidel gave a 12-hour speech to the party Central Committee dealing
with the issues but it has never been published as far as I know.
(BTW, if memory serves, Elizardo Sánchez, Washington's favorite Cuban
"dissident" came out of this current).

    Apart from those two cases, the POR and the Escalante
micro-faction, I am aware of no other currents that (at least
ostensibly) accepted the framework of the revolution and attempted to
set up shop outside the Cuban CP. What does this mean? That all
dissident opinion is ruthlessly suppressed?

    Clearly not. I'm aware of several instances where there have been
sharp discussions in the party as a whole over deeply-felt
disagreements, including over allowing exiles from Miami to visit
Cuba, over the free peasant markets, and over allowing religious
people to be members of the party.

    According to the official report, at the last party Congress,
there were hundreds of amendments proposed and discussed to the main
resolution at the rank and file level; a number were adopted. Whether
these were all different or, whether many were repetitive of the same
underlying idea and represented, in essence, one or more currents
within the party is something that hasn't been made public, nor the
actual content of the amendments adopted (although someone comparing
the original draft with the adopted version could easily see) or
rejected. We know there were discussion bulletins where these
amendments and comments on them were published, and that there were
votes in local party units and regional preparatory congresses on
amendments.

    I repeat: I am aware of no current that arose within the party or
outside of it since the 1960s that proposed itself as an alternative
within the framework of the revolution to the Cuban CP. And the party
projects itself as being inclusive of all the best revolutionary
fighters. (This was what the discussion about allowing people with
religious beliefs to join was all about). It is consciously and
heavily working class in composition; it is much easier for an
ordinary worker to be selected for party membership than a government
functionary or administrator. As far as I have been able to discover,
party membership carries a lot of prestige but absolutely no
privileges.

    You constantly hear that people aren't allowed to form other
parties in Cuba. That is certainly true of pro-capitalist elements.
But we should remember that parties are the expression of classes or
specific segments of classes. If there is a specific instance where a
layer of working people sought to express their interests by
organizing outside the Cuban CP instead of in and through the CP and
the mass organizations, I am not aware of it.

    The POR(t) did not represent such a layer; it was a tiny handful
of ultralefts. The Escalante microfaction represented --or tried to--,
the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy and the aspiration of some
folks to become a tropical version of the Soviet caste. By their
actions they placed themselves outside revolutionary legality and
dealt with as such.

    Undoubtedly, there are comrades inside and outside the CP whose
particular points of view reflect to one extent or another the
tendency towards bureaucratization inherent in a society in Cuba's
position. There is always some discussion going on down there that
relates to this, lately, around the role of the press and the media.
But there is no consolidated bureaucratic caste in Cuba. There are no
great privileges for government officials and administrators. When I
met the head of the warehouse that had belonged to my father, the man
was, essentially, homeless: he and his wife had separated, she stayed
in the apartment with the children, he was basically living in his
office. How I found him was also significant. He was doing guard duty
on his own time at the warehouse on a Sunday. It was his turn, as it
turned out.

    That was quite a few years ago, before the fall of the Berlin
wall. Today, there is a greater social differentiation than there was
20 years ago. This was a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The decline of Cuba's GDP was roughly comparable to that of Russia (on
the order of 40%). But the difference is that whereas in Russia
this has been a holocaust for working people, with life expectancy
dropping several years, for example, in Cuba no such thing has taken
place, and some basic health indexes have even begun improving again.

     But there's no question but that the relative equality that
prevailed in Cuba until 1989 has been eroded. The big factor
in this is not whether you have some important government job, but
whether you have access to dollars. The main categories of people with
access to dollars are, first and foremost, those with relatives
abroad, and, second, those who work in the tourism sector.

    The government is trying to level the playing field, so to speak,
by paying a small sum of dollars to workers in certain key industries,
but that is just beginning. At any rate, the government has clearly
turned the corner on a runaway "dollarization" of the economy with its
attendant hyper-inflation of the peso, as happened in Nicaragua during
the revolution there, as well as in Bolivia in the 80s and many other
Latin American countries. The peso has sharply recovered value in the
parallel market, going from about 120 to the dollar to around 20 or 25
(I'm not sure the exact figure right now). The exchange trend is
stable: the government has chosen to significantly increase the lowest
pensions and salaries (thereby increasing the number of pesos in
circulation) rather than keeping the issuance of pesos stable to let
the economic growth keep soaking up the excess pesos in the hands of
the population, which would drive the parallel exchange rate down
further. The reason for this is obvious: to move towards closing the
gap between the less privileged and better off layers of the
population.

    This, too, is evidence that the working class through its elected
representatives and its party set policy in Cuba. The first thing a
bureaucratic caste would have done is raise its own salaries, not
those of the worst-paid.

    The current "dissidents" in Havana are an isolated and discredited
handful of pro-capitalist individuals. They do not represent a rival
current among working people which is being repressed.

    These people have no following in Cuba not due to a lack of a
hearing, all their activities and statements are treated as events of
world-shaking importance by the right-wing Miami Spanish-language
radio stations and Radio Martí, the U.S. government's own gusano
propaganda outlet. These are easily picked up in Cuba in the evening
on even the cheapest radios.

    The truth is that Cuba has a very rich political life, and people
do not hesitate to criticize the government. And while it is just
talk, it is tolerated, even from pro-imperialist right-wingers. If
people were jailed for criticizing the government, probably every
Cuban over the age of five would be in prison. Criticizing the
government is the national pastime.

    But on the street, the criticism is usually from the Left. People
hold dearly to the ideals of solidarity and equality, and while what
is viewed as unnecessary bureaucratism is a constant target, people
tend to be merciless in criticizing measures which increase social
inequality.

    How all this gets refracted through the mass organizations and
governmental structures I'm not in a position to tell you in detail.
What I can tell you is that it does. Thus, for example, in the early
1980s there was an experiment with free (i.e., not price-controlled)
farmers markets, and they gave rise to a layer of intermediaries who
made a killing. So strong was popular revulsion at this that they had
to be shut down. It also contributed to a rethink in the leadership of
how the administration of the economy had been restructured in the
1970s, and from there to a broad ranging "campaign to rectify errors"
the main one having been copying the methods of economic
administration used in the USSR and Eastern Europe. As in the early
1960s, by the way, there was an open, broad-ranging ideological debate
about this issue and its ramifications. There have been numerous
debates in specialized journals about this overall issue of the
building of socialism, the administration of the economy, material and
moral incentives, self-financing enterprises versus central government
allocations, and it seems to be continuing to this day.

    Based on a report I saw in the Militant, there appears to be
similar discussions underway right now centered in the Cuban labor
movement following the necessary retreat of the past decade, now that
Cuba's economy is recovering with some vigor.

    That the "person on the street" in Cuba is usually voicing
criticisms from the left is something anyone can verify by going down
there.

    The Elián González case is a good example of this. People in Cuba
went absolutely ballistic over this not from anything Fidel said (he
didn't say anything for a week and a half), or the modest initial
coverage in the Cuban press, but from what they heard on their radios
from Miami, the statement of the gusano leaders gloating about how
they would not give the child back to his father.

    When Fidel finally did speak (on a Saturday night informally to
reporters), he warned the U.S. Government that popular sentiment in
Cuba was ready to explode, and that if the U.S. did not start behaving
responsibly within 72 hours, Cuba would unleash a campaign to
scandalize it from one end of the globe to the other.

    And --I don't know if this is the sort of thing you have in mind
when you call for the independence of organizations-- it just so
happened that a convention of technical school students was meeting in
Havana that weekend. They heard Fidel's statements giving the
Americans 72 hours -- and ignored it, taking a vote and then marching
en masse to protest at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana. And
following their initiative, other groups of students mobilized to
protest at the interests section. As Fidel said publicly in a later
speech, this was not at all what he had had in mind, an immediate
outbreak of protests. It seems his plan was to ratchet up the pressure
gradually.

    Do you think Fidel put them all in jail for torpedoing his
diplomatic maneuver, or at least kept them after school in detention?
No way. In fact, he said he was so delighted that young people took
the initiative in launching the protests that, with his support, a
"general staff" for the Elián campaign was set up drawn largely from
the leadership of student and youth organizations.

    What little I know of the operation was outlined by Fidel in a
speech he gave the evening Elián was rescued (that speech also
detailed Juan Miguel's threat to Janet Reno to go down to Miami and
get his son back or die trying. Fidel says National Assembly President
Ricardo Alarcón -officially described as Juan Miguel's advisor,
although how Juan Miguel described his role is that Alarcón had been
like a brother to him throughout the ordeal- tried to dissuade Juan
Miguel from this course, and failed. Juan Miguel's American lawyer
said Fidel also intervened to try to talk Juan Miguel out of it -- and
also failed.

    Fidel also read comments and letters about what the government
should do to get Elián back that had been made before Elián's rescue.
They ran the spectrum from Cuba staging a commando raid to get the
child back (a very popular suggestion in Cuba) to staging another
boatlift but this time infiltrating thousands of revolutionaries who
would then organize a revolution in the U.S. (from a young person who
Fidel said should perhaps be given a prize for revolutionary
optimism).

    I've also had bizarre experiences, like talking to a couple
opposed to the revolution that I visited due to a family connection. I
was in Havana as an official government guest, and they knew this.
They had never met me before, yet immediately launched into a diatribe
about how terrible the revolution was and son on and so forth, how
there was no freedom, the government had agents everywhere, etc.

    Why do people feel free to talk like that? Well, because Cuba is
the only country in Latin America, and perhaps all of the Americas,
where for forty years there has not been a single instance of a person
being found shot dead by the side of the road, or of being shot dead
while they slept, or of being disappeared or tortured. Nobody is going
to take away your house for disliking Fidel, and the government
guarantees everyone either a job or, in effect, a welfare check.

    That said, there's been plenty of people jailed for trying to
organize counterrevolutionary groups. As far as I can tell the line
seems to be drawn at actually trying to organize a group, not just
saying stuff.

    I wish the Cuban government did not feel it necessary to take such
measures, but with the situation being what it has been for four
decades, a state of siege and virtual (and, often, not so virtual)
war, I'm certainly not going to criticize them for it or say that
under those circumstances I would not do the same thing. I also wish
that Abraham Lincoln hadn't felt it necessary to suspend habeas corpus
and dump the mayor of Baltimore in jail. Bad precedents and all that.
But I'm not criticizing Lincoln for it either.

    As one person in Cuba whose opinion I value greatly told me,
restricting themselves to a purely ideological battle was a luxury
they never felt they could afford because the enemy does not restrict
himself to a purely ideological battle.

    In your reply, you seem to have little to say about Cuba's actual
governmental structures, the organs of People's Power. These rest upon
the mass organizations, and are modeled on the Paris Commune.

    Each municipality has its own assembly of people's power.
Delegates to these assemblies are ordinary people, working people,
elected by direct secret ballot. Nominating meetings are held block by
block, campaigning as we know it is non-existent. There must be at
least two candidates for every position and runoffs are held a week
later if no one gets a majority. The voting booths and ballot boxes
are guarded by Pioneers (the mass organization of Cuban children). The
Cuban CP is enjoined both by its own policy and by law from
intervening in the electoral process.

    (In their aversion to polluting the election of representatives
with partisan and factional strife, the Cuban leaders are quite like
an earlier generation of revolutionaries, the founders of the American
Republic. In the United States, however, growing class
differentiation due to the development of capitalism made partisan
strife inevitable. That is a condition that does not exist in Cuba.)

    Delegates keep their regular jobs, which is a good thing because
they are subject to recall at any time. And they must hold regular
assemblies to render account of their work with the population that
elected them.

    At the local level, this system of government works. I was in Cuba
for several weeks in 1979, while people still had fresh in their minds
the previous situation of basically appointed local governments. All
sorts of very practical issues, like the hours stores were open,
transportation services, etc., came under the authority of the new
people's power, making a significant difference to people's lives.

    When I talk about the working class organized as the ruling class,
I also mean this sort of thing. Working mothers being able to tell the
bureaucracy that runs the stores when they will be open, rather than
the other way around.

    Your comments on the matter, it seems to me, assume that Cuba has
a repressive, bureaucratic dictatorship, assume that working people
are being kept from speaking out, assume that the Cuban CP is not a
genuine workers party, without presenting even a shred of evidence.

    On the basis that I defend Cuba, and of your assumptions about
Cuba, you then impute to me a line that is basically apologetics for
bureaucratic repression against the working class. Your whole polemic
rests on essentially these assumptions about Cuba which I contend are
false, ahistorical, and contradicted by Cuban reality.

    You need to come down from the lofty realms of purely abstract
theory and try to prove your case on the ground, in the real world.

    There are, of course, countless things about Cuba that one wishes
were done better, less bureaucratically, more democratically. Quite
unlike your workers democracy, Cuban workers democracy is imperfect,
human, with all sorts of different weaknesses and problems. For all
that, it has one strength yours does not. It lives, and breathes and
fights.

    I remain firmly convinced that the way to contribute to
eliminating
those negative phenomenon is to continue fighting against the Cuban
Adjustment Act, the Helms-Burton Law, the Torricelli Act, the travel
ban and all the other parts of Washington's war against the Cuban
revolution. While Cuba remains embattled for its very survival as a
nation against Washington's drive to turn it once again into a U.S.
colony, it is politically wrong and morally bankrupt to ask the
revolution to
disarm in the face of its enemy. And even more fundamentally, there is
no other
road to the fullest flowering --and eventual withering away-- of
workers democracy than the fight against imperialism.

José

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ben Seattle" <Left-Transparency@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Marxism (LP) List" <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: <hatchet.job@xxxxxxxxxx>; <gunnar.kreku@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>;
<abu-nasr@xxxxxxx>; "Macdonald Stainsby" <mstainsby@xxxxxx>;
<theorist@xxxxxxxxxxx>; <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; "Dan
Christensen" <dchris@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, July 05, 2000 3:53 AM
Subject: Workers' rule unthinkable w/o democratic rights (reply to
José)


=================================================
Workers' rule in modern conditions is unthinkable
     without fundamental democratic rights
           --( reply to José G. Perez )--
=================================================

>    "Because of what happened in the countries that called
>    themselves socialist, and because of the antisocialist
>    propaganda we hear almost every day, it is important for
>    socialists to be able to show that their political
>    alternative is feasible, that it will mean a substantial
>    improvement of social condititions, and that there is no
>    risk for a development as for example in USSR. Trying to
>    explain my political views, I often get answers as:
>
>        'those things are impossible, they have been
>         tried in many countries, look what happened!'
>
>    The traditional general statements are not anymore
>    sufficient to convince working class people. [...]
>
>    The marxist solution is that socialism will be realized
>    as a result of the struggle of the working class. But in
>    this struggle the working class will have to formulate a
>    feasible social alternative long before it has taken power,
>    because otherwise it cannot take power."
    -- Gunnar Kreku -- June 7 [1]

First, I would like to apologize to José and Gunnar (and anyone
else who may have been following this thread) for the delay in my
reply.  Lots of overtime and other responsibilities have made
this unavoidable.

Second, I would like to extend my appreciation to José for his
thoughtful response and, especially, his calm tone.  As the
discussion deepens and becomes more serious some may feel
threatened--and the importance of a calm tone becomes more clear.

José has made a strong effort to present his views in a
principled way and with clarity and rigor.  Any weakness in his
arguments are not the result of a lack of effort on his part.  On
the contrary, the weakness in his arguments finds its origin in
ideology--is a result of the theoretical bankruptcy of the views
which have hegemony on this (and many similar) forums.

<snip>