Re: [Marxism] Sam Farber and other, better, things...

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

I wrote:

"It took two more decades for history to deliver a verdict but when it did,
it was catastrophically conclusive: you could not defend the future of East
European and Soviet socialism by preserving its status quo. Only by purging
socialism of the criminal bureaucratic misrule covered up with the
ultra-euphemistic qualifier, "really existing," could the socialist
revolution, which in reality is MORE than property "forms" because it is at
bottom a mass movement of the working people, be rekindled."

To which S. Artesian replied: 

"That is indeed the lesson, and it took history awhile to not exactly
deliver the verdict, but execute it.  Indeed the verdict was obvious for 60
years-- the bureaucracy disarms the revolution, the bureaucracy administers
the impulse to capitalist restoration, sometimes actively, sometimes
passively." 

This is somewhat arcane and theoretical, but I used "verdict" deliberately. 

The existence of bureaucratically deformed workers states for several
generations contradicts --or appears to-- Trotsky's 1930's analysis of the
USSR's bureaucratic regime as a fundamentally unstable,  sui generis sort of
Bonapartism that would certainly be swept away in the next major world
political/military convulsion.

Today looking back we can see why the historical "moment" of Stalinism
lasted for decades: the peculiar outcome of WWII, with the twin victories of
the USSR and the United States, the latter over both its imperialist enemies
and allies, which were the major colonial powers, creating an opening for
the anticolonial revolution, a restructuring of the imperialist camp and
system under U.S. hegemony, as well as for the Soviet bureaucracy's
defensive creation of a buffer zone of states facing west as the U.S. began
gearing up to attack the USSR at the first suitable opportunity.

Fortunately, the timely development by the USSR of its own atom bomb,
together with the anticolonial revolution, Western Europe's moribund state
following the war, etc., forced that perspective to be abandoned and we
wound up with the relative stasis of the Cold War. 

Thus the idea that of necessity the bureaucratic regimes would lead to such
a rotting out of socialist content that nothing would be left but an empty
shell was far from self-evident in the late 1960's. 

Some Trotskyists may have understood --or at least believed-- it was doomed
to happen. But the curious thing is that, insofar as I know, the ONLY public
figure whose contemporaneous statements show he understood what was
happening in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in real time at the end of
the 1980's was Fidel, as shown by his statements preparing the Cuban people
for the "special period in times of peace." 

S. Artesian's conclusion to his comments was "All the more reason then to
oppose Fidel's position back then.  And the reprises of those positions
now." 

But frankly, I think the more important thing isn't to "oppose" but to
*understand.* 

It's now been two decades since what was for many leftists (and not just
leftists) the end of the world, the end of history, with the collapse of the
Soviet Bloc and the dismemberment of the Soviet Union itself, and China's
increasingly bourgeois economic reforms.

The ability of Fidel and the team around him to lead the Cuban socialist
revolution through that dark passage and emerge not unscathed but certainly
unbowed needs to be studied and understood for no other country was able to
do it. Of the wreckage of 20th Century socialism, Cuba alone survived. 

My impression is that the key objective of the Cuban leadership was
political: maintaining to the maximum degree the cohered unity of the Cuban
nation. In doing this one key element was preserving to the maximum degree
possible the social conquests of the revolution in health, education, and
"social security" -- broadly understood this last term not as just
retirement, but guaranteeing all citizens at least a minimally decorous
standard of living, given the economic realities of the country. And another
was preventing the emergence of capitalists WITHIN Cuban society. FOREIGNERS
could and do have private capital in Cuban "mixed" enterprises, but
suggestions that Cubans abroad, for example, be allowed to help capitalize
even very small businesses within Cuba were rejected -- I believe because of
the threat this was perceived as posing to the social and political
coherence of the nation.

A new attempt to build socialism, but a different kind from the "really
existing" socialism that no longer exists, a socialism of the 21st Century,
is underway in Venezuela; Bolivia and Ecuador seem to be taking the first
steps along that road also, while maintaining close relations with a broader
layer of governments in Latin America that reflect or express to varying
degrees the national movements of their own peoples at its current level of
development and the slowly emerging supra-national movement of the peoples
of Latin America as a whole.

One can't say, of course, that WITHOUT Cuba, the Bolivarian revolution in
Venezuela would have been impossible. But both as an example and a mass
reservoir of cadres and know how to quickly transform Chavez's promises of
social advances into conquests of the revolution, Cuba has played an
absolutely decisive role in the emergence of the new movement towards
socialism in Latin America.

Joaquin


________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: 
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40archives.econ.utah.edu