[Marxism] Celia Hart: "Welcome" Trotsky

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The following is another comment by Celia Hart, a member of the Cuban
Communist Party  who describes herself as a "freelance Trotskyist" and
proclaims that "Che Guevara Made Me a Trotskyist".  

I disagree with Ernest Mandel, himself an important Martist, who is
quoted by Hart that Trotsky was the Marxist who bes understood the
problems of the twentieth (and the twenty-first) century? Mandel did not
live to pass judgement, unfortunately),  But the decisive Marxist
figures who led the FORWARD ADVANCE of the working class, was Lenin in
the first decades of the twentieth century and Castro in the las
decades. 

But Trotsky's contribution, essentially a defense and developmenht of
Leninism,  is nonetheless inescapable in every field of political
action. I am pretty convinced that none of us including Castro, Guevara,
and many other revolutionaries, would be here as we are if Trotsky had
folded before the Stalinist onslaught.

So probably Celia Hart, the freelance Trotskyist, and myself, who
regards himself as a post -Trotskyist, mean something close to the same
thing.

Fred Feldman

 

IV Online magazine : IV372 - November 2005
Cuba/Marxism
?Welcome? ... Trotsky
Celia Hart

http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/article.php3?id_article=898
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Celia Hart is the daughter of two historic leaders of the Cuban
Revolution, Armando Hart and the late Haydée Santamaria. A physicist,
writer and member of the Cuban Communist Party, she describes herself as
a ?freelance Trotskyist?. She has published many articles on Trotsky and
on the Permanent Revolution. The article that we publish here, written
on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the assassination of Trotsky
by the Stalinist agent Ramon Mercader, was first published on the web
site Rebelion. 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

?There is a dimension that is lacking in the German film Goodbye Lenin.
I know, because I lived in the GDR not long before the Wall came down.
This wall was brought down before it was even built. The immense tragedy
of the transition to capitalism in Eastern Europe cannot be measured by
the few years that elapsed between the vulgar and decadent perestroika
and the festive tearing down of statues of Lenin. You cannot say goodbye
to Lenin if he was never welcomed. They did nothing but import his
image, marginalize him, turn him into a clown subordinated to the
Stalinist bureaucracy.

The Lenin to whom they said goodbye in this film had nothing to do with
the person who initiated socialism in the world. Their statues were
empty of content, and I think, also of form.

So there. We will not understand it as long as the life and ideas of
Leon Trotsky remain hidden in many places. It may seem ironic, but the
only way to bring Lenin back is to understand the reasons for the
banishment of his best contemporary. We will not succeed in
understanding what happened if we do not render understandable the
obscure mechanism by which the Soviet bureaucratic caste monopolised
socialism, betraying the International and demolishing the revolutionary
spirit in the world.

Of course there remains an alternative for us: take the mask away
entirely, from the beginning, something that will take us time, a thing
that is increasingly rare, besides the fact that we lack first-hand
information. It is as if, while a ship was sinking, the engineer sent an
on-the-spot report on the how and the why of the shipwreck, and that
people were nevertheless intending to weigh anchor and head for the same
seas with the same intentions, without seeking to know the causes of the
catastrophe, burying in the sand, ostrich-like, the message in the
bottle.

The 20th century has not finished speaking to us. The vicissitudes that
revolutionary practice experienced remain hidden from view. And if there
is someone who can be a witness to the 20th century, it is certainly
Leon Trotsky.

Ernest Mandel put it much better: ?Of all the most important socialists
of the 20th century, Trotsky was the one who most clearly recognised the
fundamental tendencies of development of the principal contradictions of
the epoch, and it is also Trotsky who most clearly formulated an
adequate strategy of emancipation for the international workers?
movement?. [1]

Yes, we need Lenin, who will only come back on condition that we listen
to what Trotsky has to say to us. They defended the same thing, except
that Trotsky survived him and was able to interpret in his life and in
his death the forces that were exterminating socialism. I challenge, at
this point in time, any thinker who is sincerely trying to understand
what happened, to ignore the experiences of Trotskyism, even if only to
refute them. Those who avoid them, those who leave them to one side, are
not real Leninists.

They say that without Lenin, Karl Marx is of no use. I would add that
without Trotsky there is no Lenin. All the Marxist thinkers, especially
genuinely revolutionary Marxists, are indispensable for understanding
Karl Marx, who did not have a crystal ball. He only pointed the
direction for revolutionary ideas, the philosophy, so that for the first
time in history people could dig the tunnel towards their - globalised -
happiness.

Let us use this simile. Socialism is supposed to be a tunnel, a path
that we can take, in this world where we have only things to win and
nothing to lose but our chains. Well, it was the October Revolution that
was the first attempt to dig this tunnel that Marx told us about.

But Stalinism dynamited it from within. When it was being built,
dynamite had been left to destroy it. Trotsky was the engineer who
showed where the explosives were. They didn?t want to listen to him. We
know what happened then... the planet Earth was ravaged.

Today we declare very poetically that the tunnel we are going to build
will be the socialism of the 21st century. Whether it is of the 21st or
the 31st century, the tunnel can be dynamited because of exactly the
same insufficiencies and we will continue, full of tears, waiting for
the socialism of the future century...this time turned into cockroaches.

The possibility of a transition to socialism is a scientific discovery.
It is not a poem or a way of speaking. The only way to get there is
through the class struggle. It?s as simple as that.

The discovery of the origin of capitalist exploitation is a scientific
truth of the same value and the same objectivity as the rotating
movement of the earth around the sun. We don?t need Einstein, the Laws
of General Relativity and of Geodesy to explain to us why we go from
summer to autumn. Newton is more than sufficient. The results are
identical and the mathematics are infinitely more simple.

We don?t need to understand black holes or Hawking?s theories to put a
satellite into orbit. It may be that communications, computers and so on
have somewhat complicated the reality of modern capitalism, but it
nonetheless remains true that the essence (?the chicken from rice to the
chicken?) is still the same as several centuries ago. There is no need
for ?quantum economists? or ?tensorial mathematics? to explain to us the
origin of the exploitation of the capitalist system and its present
weakening.

What we call ?socialism of the 21st century? amounts to saying that we
have to build ?the aeroplane of the 21st century?. But this plane will
have to overcome gravity, just as the plane of the 20th century did. In
this 21st century, as for millions of years, the constant G of Universal
Gravitation is still the one that Newton calculated ( G = 6.7 x 10 -
11m3/kgs2).

I admit that we have to make more comfortable, faster and more secure
aeroplanes, because the demands of the 21st century are different from
those of the 20th century, but the ultimate reason for a machine that
has to conquer gravity is the same.

By way of comparison, we could say that our plane, which tried to
conquer gravity in 1917, took off and crashed on the earth?s surface. It
would be better to look for the causes before engaging in nay futuristic
discourses, because whatever the 21st century is, G remains invariable.
>From the 19th to the 21st century, the primary causes of capitalist
exploitation are identical: the expropriation of labour. So there is
only one way to go ?from the reign of necessity to the reign of
liberty?. Enough of cutting capers, when each instant that passes counts
against us.

The plane fell, and now we believe that with our computers, our
cellphones or the internet we are going to be able to defy gravity
without taking G into account. Of course not! Gravity will continue in
the same way until the planet disintegrates. We had better get a move
on, drop the rhetoric and realise once and for all that the enemy has
not changed. He is perhaps more aggressive and dangerous, but still the
same. Let us hurry, at last, to find out who we really are.

But why then Leon Trotsky? I don?t have a fixation with a historical
figure, as many people reproach me with having. It?s just that this man
knew a lot of things about the black box of this plane that wanted to
make history take off.

Leon Trotsky was assassinated 65 years ago, in the most grotesque
manner. After 65 years, we are still spattered by his blood. This
assassination ought to have put an end to the Kremlin?s right to try and
monopolise and transmit socialist thought, but they continued and it
became transformed into a salt statue.

With the Red Star medal awarded to Ramon Mercader, they celebrated, with
secret and cowardly hurrahs, the death of socialism. This assassination
was one of the most perverse terrorist acts in history. It was the
glorious October 1917 that committed suicide on August 20th.

Mercader, having served his sentence in Mexico, went to Cuba (in 1960).
I still don?t understand who he met and how, nor if he could look in the
face Marti?s crown of martyrdom and Mella?s ashes. The man who had in
his hands, without realising it, the mission of wiping out the left wing
of socialist ideas, died in Cuba, something I have difficulty in coming
to terms with. He was there in those luminous years of Che Guevara. That
seems to me so impossible ...

Of course the road of the ideological survival of the Cuban Revolution
had nothing to do with Mercader, the GPU and Stalinism. Quite to the
contrary, what enabled my revolution to survive was the spirit of Leon
Trotsky, although we didn?t know it, because it had been hidden in the
folds of historical memory. The truth is stubborn and it makes its way
like slow but constant water that nothing can stop.

There is a mysterious circuit in the Cuban Revolution, which was born
with the Cuban Revolutionary Party, continued with Mella, then with the
most radical wing of the July 26th Movement, culminating in a sublime
way with Che Guevara. This is the circuit of resolute class commitment
and internationalism.

Leon Trotsky walks here, silent, unknown and slandered, with a malicious
smile. Why was it forbidden for so many years to put Leon Trotsky in
relation with the Cuban Revolution? I haven?t managed to find out, but I
know that if there is a revolution that has been radical, it is
certainly ours. And if there was someone who called for revolutions that
were radical and never-ending, it was certainly Leon Trotsky. Perhaps
Marti was not mistaken when he declared that ?in politics the real is
what is not seen?.

We should speak at length of Julio Antonio Mella and analyse in depth
his activity in Mexico. Fortunately we have the excellent works of
Olivia Gall [2] and Alejandro Galvez Cancino, [3] which analyse in an
absolutely clear and precise fashion, with considerable documentation,
the communist activity of Mella in this period.

Mella referred to Trotsky after returning from the USSR and knew the
objectives of the Left Opposition through Andreu Nin (assassinated, just
for a change, by the GPU during the Spanish Civil War). He wrote to a
comrade in the book The Platform of the Left Opposition: ?For Alberto
Martinez, with the aim of rearming communism. Julio Antonio Mella?. [4]
His declared Trotskyism is not what should be most important for us.
Much more transcendent were his radical positions in Mexico. In fact,
and in his political consequences, ?Mella is considered by the
Trotskyists as the initiator of the current that later constituted the
Left Opposition in the Mexican Communist Party?, says the historian
Olivia Gall. [5]

It was also Julio Antonio Mella who introduced us to the road to
socialism in Cuba. It was he who established the superb bridge between
Marti and Bolshevism, which represents the best of our recent past and
the near future of the world. Whatever might be said, and even if some
people would like to wrap him up in a pathetic patriotic flag and
attribute a narrow discourse to him, this valiant, vigorous and
polemical Mella - and no other - was the first Cuban communist.

The Stalinism which subsequently contaminated us, and which in a certain
fashion had its importance during the course of the socialist
revolution, is nothing other than a contagious virus, in spite of which,
and not without battles, the ideal of socialism was able to survive,
because it was the very essence of the revolutionary process. The
Stalinist parties did not contribute ideologically to our process,
neither when they expelled Mella from the party, nor when they
collaborated with Machado, or any many other occasions, thank God!

There are still some comrades here who have a lot to tell us, faithful
to the socialist revolution...and grateful to have been helped and
listened to by another Marxist who figures alongside Mella on the emblem
of the Union of Communist Youth of Cuba: Che.

And it is precisely Che that I want to invite, in his totality and with
the star on his forehead, to extend a welcome to Trotsky on this 65th
anniversary of his assassination. Che Guevara, symbol of the most
radical communism, managed to fashion an instrument out of a Trotskyism
that he didn?t know. And that was only because the theoretical truths of
Trotsky have the same constancy as the value of G, the constant of
Universal Gravitation. Che found his own way to many of Trotsky?s
theses, without ever knowing it...without being allowed to know it.

I am going to give two examples which enabled me to begin to discover a
secret communion between the two of them.

Che Guevara was the revolutionary who best understood the principles of
the permanent revolution, to such an extent that he died for having
tried to defend these principles. But he not only died for having wanted
to implement these theses, he also died for having sought,
intellectually, to reach its essence.

For this 65th anniversary I am going to take up again here the three
fundamental aspects of the permanent revolution.

First aspect: ?The theory of the permanent revolution, which originated
in 1905, declared war upon these ideas and moods. It pointed out that
the democratic tasks of the backward bourgeois nations lead directly, in
our epoch, to the dictatorship of the proletariat and that the
dictatorship of the proletariat puts socialist tasks on the order of the
day.? [6].

Che was categorical on this subject. Here is what Nestor Kohan has to
say about it: ?He (Che) at no time accepted that in Latin America (I
would add: and in the world) the tasks consist of building a ?national
revolution?, ?democratic?, ?progressive?, or a capitalism with a human
face, which leaves socialism till later. He expounds in a trenchant
fashion, very polemical, that if we do not propose to make the socialist
revolution, then what results is a caricature of revolution, or ends in
failure or tragedy, as has happened so many times.? [7]

These two exposés are identical. The underdeveloped countries don?t have
to wait till an English or German person decides to organise the
revolution in their countries. Trotsky said that in the Manifesto of the
Conference known as the ?emergency? conference of the Fourth
International in May 1940: ?...the perspective of the permanent
revolution in no way signifies that the backward countries must wait for
the signal from the advanced countries, or that the colonial peoples
must patiently wait for the proletariat of the metropolitan centres to
free them. Help comes to those who help themselves!?

In its second aspect, ?The second aspect of the ?permanent? theory has
to do with the socialist revolution as such. For an indefinitely long
time and in constant internal struggle, all social relations undergo
transformation. Society keeps on changing its skin. ... Revolutions in
economy, technique, science, the family, morals and everyday life
develop in complex reciprocal action and do not allow society to achieve
equilibrium. Therein lies the permanent character of the socialist
revolution as such.? [8]

For his part, Che wrote in Socialism and Man in Cuba: ?In this period of
the building of socialism we can see the birth of the new man. His image
is not yet quite fixed. It will never be able to be, given that the
process is parallel to the development of new economic structures.? [9]
For Che, ?the only rest for revolutionaries is the tomb?.

Third aspect: international. For Trotsky, ?The international character
of the socialist revolution, which constitutes the third aspect of the
theory of the permanent revolution,flows from the present state of
economy and the social structure of humanity. Internationalism is no
abstract principle but a theoretical and political reflection of the
character of world economy, of the world development of productive
forces and the world scale of the class struggle. The socialist
revolution begins on national foundations-but it cannot be completed
within these foundations. The maintenance of the proletarian revolution
within a national framework can only be a provisional state of affairs,
even though, as the experience of the Soviet Union shows, one of long
duration. In an isolated proletarian dictatorship, the internal and
external contradictions grow inevitably along with the successes
achieved. If it remains isolated, the proletarian state must finally
fall victim to these contradictions.? [10]

Che said on the subject of revolutionaries: ?If their revolutionary
ardour dulls when the most pressing tasks have to be carried out at the
local level and proletarian internationalism is forgotten, then the
revolution ceases to be a driving force and falls into a gentle
somnolence, of which our irreconcilable enemy, imperialism, takes
advantage to gain ground. Internationalism is a duty, but also a
revolutionary necessity.? [11]

I will not waste time. If there is someone who always fought to make the
Cuban Revolution ever more socialist, it was Che. He threw himself into
the building of socialism in a backward land, deepening day after day
its socialist character...only to completely abandon it in the name of
the world revolution. I do not know anyone else who did the same. I
don?t think there is any greater fidelity to the theses of the permanent
revolution. That the conditions in Bolivia were not favourable...that is
another subject than the permanent revolution. We can certainly
criticise him for having been too permanent or too consistent a
revolutionary.

The other element of convergence, in different circumstances, between
Trotsky?s thought and Che?s, resides in their firm commitment to planned
economy. It is certain that Trotsky initially opted for the NEP, given
the terrible economic circumstances in which the young Soviet state
found itself with what was known as War Communism.

But Trotsky very quickly criticised the new state of affairs. He
considered, as Isaac Deutscher describes to us, that ?with the move to
the NEP, the necessity of planning became more urgent (...) Precisely
because the country was reviving under a market economy, it was
necessary to see that the market was controlled, and to have the means
of exercising this control. He went on to raise the question of the
Single Plan, without which it was impossible to rationalise production,
to concentrate industrial resources and to establish equilibrium between
the different sectors of the economy.? [12]

Che?s positions in favour of the plan and his proverbial aversion to the
NEP are well known. Che considered that Lenin, if he had had the time,
would have revised his opinion of the NEP. And there was not only the
plan. Che also took a position, at the end oh his life, in favour of
socialist democracy. Michael Lowy writes in Rebelion: ?We know that in
the last years of his life Ernesto Che Guevara had made considerable
progress in distancing himself from the Soviet paradigm
(...) But a large part of his later writings still remains unpublished,
for inexplicable reasons. Among these documents there is a radical
critique of the Manual of Political Economy of the Academy of Sciences
of the USSR, written in Prague in 1966 (...) One of its passages is very
interesting, because it demonstrates that in his later political
thinking, Guevara was coming round to the idea of socialist democracy.?
[13]

That was what Che was like. Although he had insufficiently studied Leon
Trotsky, he was going in the direction of the most consistent Trotskyist
theses. Perhaps he wasn?t conscious of it, but that is of little
importance. It indicates in any case that these theses are correct and
in return gives even more force to Trotsky?s thought. In 1965, Che wrote
to Armando Hart from Tanzania about his choices concerning Marxist
philosophy, and in paragraph VII he told him: ?And we should find there
your friend Trotsky, who it seems existed and wrote.? [14]

That may make us think that he didn?t know a lot about the founder of
the Red Army. It appears nevertheless that during the last year of his
life he drew closer to his works. Juan Leon Ferrer, a Trotskyist comrade
who worked in the Ministry of Industry, assured me of this. Furthermore,
Che received the periodical of his organisation, and it was Che who had
the imprisoned Trotskyists freed on his return from Africa. Comrade
Roberto Acosta, who has since died, shared a close comradeship with
Guevara. According to Jose Leon Ferrer, during the sugar harvests
(zafras), they spoke of these subjects. This comrade says that Che had
read Permanent Revolution, and we know that in Bolivia he was carrying
in his backpack the History of the Russian Revolution.

We could add many examples which show that these two exemplary
revolutionaries lit up the same path.

Both of them brilliantly and successfully led an army and a nascent
socialist state, fully applying the teachings of Karl Marx; both of them
were revolutionary ideologues who took power and sought to deepen the
revolutionary process while remaining, respectively, loyal to Lenin and
Fidel, leaning to their left. For representing the most developed ideal
of internationalism and revolutionary consistency, both were
assassinated.

Ernesto Guevara made me a Trotskyist. When I had access to Trotsky?s
writings, very belatedly for my liking, I realised that many things had
already been told to me from my childhood onwards, by Che. From the
first pages, I had the confirmation of what I had so many times felt in
reading Che: that the revolution has nothing to do with national
idiosyncrasy; that there is no room in socialism for the pronouns ?our?
or ?your?; that revolutionary theory, like the laws of physics, is a
universal language. As Armando Hart stated in another
epoch: ?Our struggle is not only for Cuba, but for all the workers and
the exploited of the world. Our frontiers are moral. Our limits are
those of class.? [15]

What I most appreciate in Trotsky is his way of speaking, the passion
that his discourses always awaken in me. It is the same thing that
subjugated me with Che Guevara. That is why I am fighting in his army,
as in Che?s, without betraying anyone. Both of them express with the
same truth the word, the gun and the heart.

Comrades: let us finally come of age. There is too much injustice, too
much exploitation, the evidence of the unique solution is only too
great; too many of ours are dead. Leon Trotsky is calling us back to the
struggle. Let us bid him unconditionally welcome!

Che Guevara is his amphytron, and the peoples of Latin America are
demanding socialism. Trotsky has won the theoretical match in a dramatic
way. Let us without delay and with confidence arm our revolutionary
movements. Trotsky and Che are in our party. Let us once and for all
give the tree a good shake, so as to unmask the new reformists who are
preventing the Bolivarian revolution from advancing - this revolution
which is the spearhead, the first rung on the ladder of an unprecedented
continental revolution.

Let us remember once again that the sun, the stars and gravity are our
allies. Workers of all lands, unite!?

- Celia Hart, is the daughter of two historic leaders of the Cuban
Revolution, Armando Hart and the late Haydée Santamaria. A physicist,
writer and member of the Cuban Communist Party, she describes herself as
a ?freelance Trotskyist?. She has published many articles on Trotsky and
on the Permanent Revolution.

NOTES

[1] Ernest Mandel: Trotsky as Alternative, London, Verso, 1995.

[2] Olivia Gall: Trotsky en Mexico, Coleccion Problemas de Mexico, 1991.
Olivia?s Gall?s doctoral thesis (in French), Trotsky et la vie politique
dans le Mexique de Cardenas (Université de Grenoble 2,
1986) is also essential reading.

[3] Alejandro Galvez Cancino: Julio Antonio Mella. Un marxista
revolucionario, Critica de l?Economia Politica, 1986.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Olivia Gall, op. cit.

[6] Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution, 1931 Introduction to the
Russian edition 1929, available on www.marxists.org

[7] Nestor Kohan: Ernesto Che Guevara. Otro mundo es posible, Editorial
Nuestra America, 2003.

[8] Trotsky, op. cit.

[9] Ernesto Guevara: Socialism and Man in Cuba.

[10] Trotsky, op. cit.

[11] Guevara, op. cit.

[12] Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed.

[13] Michael Lowy, ?Ni calco ni copia: Che Guevara en busqueda de un
nuevo socialismo ?. Rebelion, August 5th, 2002.

[14] Ernesto Guevara, Letter of December 4th, 1965 to Armando Hart,
published in 1997 by the Cuban journal Contracorriente. In his book
mentioned in note 7 above, Nestor Kohan presents and analyses this
letter, which remained unpublished for over 30 years.

[15] Armando Hart ?Greetings from the Central Committee of the Cuban
Communist Party to the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union?. (Published in Politica internacional de la Revolucion
Cubana, Editora Politica, 1966).


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