RE: [Marxism] The two souls of socialism (was: RE:JohnHolloway-AlexCallinicos debate)

[Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ian Pace says: "Well, Cuba still isn't of great strategic or economic
importance to the USA 
any longer, now that it's no longer aligned with the USSR. That's why I
believe the antagonism from the USA is largely symbolic."

I think the evidence could well be read to support the opposite
hypothesis, i.e., that Russia's centrality as an antagonist has receded
now that it is no longer aligned with Cuba. As long as the USSR retained
even the most tenuous links to what made it like Cuba, to its past, as a
tradition and its counterpart in property forms and social conquests,
the size, resources and strategic importance of the Soviet State made it
imperialist enemy #1. 

Ian Pace says, about Cuba-U.S. relations, "my suggestion [is] that the
antagonism is symbolic rather than being rooted in the geopolitical
interests of global capital."

I agree in a certain sense, except that instead of "symbolic," I would
call it political. The problem with Cuba isn't that it messes up some
vital oil pipeline or denies the U.S. some ultra-important market or
military base. The problem with Cuba is that it shows that the
revolution is possible, that the people can make it, and that there is
no power on this earth greater than that of a people determined to win
its liberation.

"Symbolic" in the sense of "unimportant" or of "little practical
significance" is not coherent with American actions. Because U.S.
antagonism towards Cuba isn't limited to "symbolic" gestures, but is
quite material and quite extraordinary. The U.S. spends no small amount
of political and economic capital trying to keep Cuba isolated. It pays
a significant political, diplomatic and economic price for its
obstinacy.

Ian doesn't see this because he doesn't see the importance of revolution
in the colonial and semicolonial world. Basically he assumes what he is
trying to prove: the unimportance of the revolutions in the Third World.


"What I'm suggesting, in line with Callinicos, is not so much
prescriptive as fatalistic. I would LOVE to think that it were possible
for the underdeveloped countries to achieve their own brand of socialism
irrespective of the first world, but I simply find it hard to believe
this will be able to happen, with all the forces of global capital
stacked in opposition."

Ian in his various posts gives sharp and clear expression to what I
noted was a clear danger of the way Callinicos absolutizes the global
power of capitalism: a perspective that reduces the masses of the third
world, the big majority of humanity, to passive impotence awaiting the
revolution in the white countries, Western Europe and the United States.


I know this attitude well because it is the attitude of much of the
Latin American petty-bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. Sure, they
recognize that the U.S. in insufferably arrogant, petty, self-absorbed
and imperialistic, but who is going to stop it from being that way?

This was the explanation I heard --privately, of course, and on at least
one occasion after alcoholic lubrication-- from representatives of
several of the countries that decided to "play along" with the United
States and support the invasion of Iraq, some even sending their own
troops. "The United States can do anything it wants," the argument goes.
"Our choice isn't whether to approve or disapprove, but simply whether
we're going to get a better deal for ourselves by playing along." 

But despite the blindness of petty-bourgeois democrats, experience shows
not just that the imperialists are powerful, but that there are very
real limits to that power. The limits are being shown every day in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Palestine, Cuba and Venezuela, among other places. These
limits are the result of the capacity of the oppressed and exploited for
heroism, for courage, for sacrifice: for struggle.

This is something that is hard to comprehend from the perspectives of
the imperialist world, and above all the United States, where people are
socialized that the greatest good is individual self-satisfaction
achieved through consumption of commodities. 

If you look at the five Cuban heroes in prison in the United States,
there is absolutely nothing exceptional about them or what they did.
They are ordinary working people who had agreed to help Cuba's
revolutionary intelligence service in preventing terrorist attacks, as
many have done before them, and as many continue to do, we can be sure.

Why is it that Cuba has never had any difficulty finding workers willing
to penetrate terrorist groups, and even draws to it people from other
countries willing to help, even in the highest reaches of the Pentagon,
for absolutely no reward save jail or assassination if exposed? And the
United States, the most powerful and richest nation the world has ever
known, capable of offering a 7, 8 or even 10-digit reward, is unable to
penetrate a band of crazed fanatics that its own CIA helped to create,
al Qaeda?

Iraq is showing that the essential lesson of Vietnam is still valid,
perhaps even more valid today than then. And that lesson is that the
power of the people is greater than the man's technology. It is the
power of ideas and ideals.

This, I would say, is the most essential "soul" of socialism in our
epoch. Not from above. Not from below. But struggle. 

This is what has allowed Cuba to survive all these years and to play the
role it does. That its children are raised from the youngest age with no
greater aspiration than the one embodied in the slogan of the José Martí
Pioneer Organization: "We will be like Che."

Joaquín



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