RE: [Marxism] Chavez embraces socialism (but not the old kind)

["David McDonald" <dbmcdonald@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yosef's sectarian response to the unfolding Bolivarian Revolution -- more
than adequately replied to by Mohammed -- raises the interesting question of
normative definition of socialist revolution.

His method is Aristotelian to the core. A = A, or A does not = A and is
therefore B. If a revolution does not look like the Cuban Revolution, and
does not unfold at the same place and institute the same measures in the
same order, it is not a revolution. Last month we obtiuarized Ernst Mayr,
whose towering contribution to biology consisted in great part of refuting
this method of normative thinking about species. He is rightly considered a
dialectician, even by the NYTimes, and he was the sparkplug that led to the
modern systhesis of evolutionary thought.

Mayr pointed out that species consist of populations. There is no norm of
what members of a species look like. Within a population there exist
variations of many kinds, potentially infinite in scope, and constrained
only by the necessity for interbreeding. It was the absence of competitive
species and abundance of varied habitat waiting to be filled that provided
the basis for Darwin's finches' remarkable radiation, utilizing such vast
variation and leading to speciation, that fooled Darwin into not grasping
that they were, in fact, finches. It took an expert to clue him in on the
underlying similarities.

So, my point is that every revolution, and every upsurge leading to a
revolution,  begins with a specific set of circumstances that is unique in
space and time, and it is therefore woodenheaded and wrong to suppose that
things will unfold in the same manner as in Cuba, Eastern Europe, Russian in
1917 or the Paris Commune. If it were  necessary only to repeat with
fidelity the steps taken by revolutionary ancestors we would all be living
in socialist heaven by now.

When Fidel goes into the history of the Cuban Revolution, as he does in
almost every speech I have ever read of his, he never begins in 1959 or even
in 1953. He goes back to the Grito de Lares, which happened on my birthday
in 1868 and retraces all the episodes of the Cuban fight against foreign
domination and cites by name and deed many a person who probably never heard
the word socialism and could not have been fighting consciously for it.

So far from it being correct to simply apply the measures taken by
successful antecedents, I would say it is almost the definition of error to
do so. I would cite Hungary and Portugal as obvious examples.

In Venezuela, the commanding height of the economy -- the oil industry --
was nationalized generations ago. In December of 2002 a struggle occurred
against an owner's lockout that is a textbook example of imposing workers'
control over a previously nationalized asset. The official union of the oil
workers was one of the bad guys. The army included a gigantic chunk of good
guys. The masses occupying the freeways were bad guys. Those enraged by the
stoppage of ordinary commerce were the good guys. It goes on and on.

My favorite quote from Trotsky, paraphrased: If it were only necessary to
put a minus sign wherever the bourgeoisie has placed a positive sign, every
sectarian would be a master strategist.

David McDonald


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