Re: [Marxism] Communist conspiracy

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ruthless writes: "Notably, the Cuban workers are not allowed to  form
independent trade unions, even when they are employed by a multinational
company operating in Cuba. If workers are really running the Cuban state,
then how can one explain this?"

Ruthless is approaching this at an absurd level of abstraction. 

Cuba is NOT a "workers state" in general. 

It is a TINY workers state a couple of hundred clicks from the most powerful
imperialist power the world has ever seen that is trying to survive in the
context of an imperialist world economic, political and social system after
having TWICE suffered a complete disruption of its trading patterns and
economic relations, not to mention a mercenary invasion, naval blockade, a
few hundred plots to assassinate its central leader and by now what are
probably a few thousand terrorist attacks. 

It is a small, besieged fortress in a hostile world that has been living
under emergency state-of-siege conditions for half a century. 

And, YES, OF COURSE being forced to try to survive under SUCH circumstances
creates problems, distortions, limitations that were never foreseen or
intended at the outset of the process, but by now seem an inherent part of
it. 

Yet despite all that, Cuba is providing the essential, indispensable human
capital that is making possible a lot of the social advances of the
revolutionary processes in Venezuela and Bolivia. That tells us something
very *fundamental* about Cuba TODAY, which is, on balance, whether is should
be seen as part of the problem or part of the solution. 

The Cuban revolution is a revolution that developed under specific
historical circumstances and that was made by people created by those
circumstances. I AGREE that I would have preferred a Cuban Revolution of
such  strength and clarity that no one could justly doubt the bona fides of
its socialist democracy, the legitimacy of its unions, or the autonomy of
its other mass and cultural and civic organizations.

But THIS is the revolution that actually developed, the regime that took
root, and not as a Thermidorean reaction rolling back social advances, but
as a desperate attempt to stay as close as possible to the high water marks
of the social conquests of the revolutionary upsurge. It is not JUST and
perhaps history will eventually show it was not even MAINLY a CLASS
revolution, but MOSTLY a national revolution that TOOK ON a certain class
content BECAUSE IT HAD TO for the nation to survive and TO THE DEGREE
necessary for the nation to survive.

This is NOT an original argument that I have come up with. It is basically
one of the central pitches of the Fidelistas to the Cuban people, certainly
for the past two decades, that "patria o muerte" and "socialismo o muerte"
are the SAME thing: Cuba can only be Cuba and remain Cuban as a socialist
country, as the word is commonly used in today's world (not the way we would
define socialism strictly speaking). The alternative to THIS Cuba is a Cuba
100 times more colonized and degraded than the Cuba of Batista in the
1950's.

In a sense, it matters very little whether one calls this a workers state or
state capitalism or grumph. The essential political questions all remain.
What the WSWS (which has the position it has only because of the bizarro
history of Healyism, i.e., for strictly and exclusively factional reasons)
or more orthodox state caps try to do is to conjure away political questions
with ritual incantations. Hoc est corpus meum. Hocus Pocus. Capitalism. We
hates it forever.

BUT there are the practical questions, like Cuba's infant and childhood
mortality rates, education, job or income guarantees, not to mention, as
Pablo Milanes says, "otras cosas, mas dignas, mas hermosas" (other things,
more dignified and more beautiful).

POLITICALLY, what you have to decide, is NOT whether Cuba fully deserves the
label "socialist" or "workers" in the purest, ideal sense of the word but
whether THIS, even if you call it "state capitalism," is qualitatively
superior for working people than "regular" capitalism is IN LATIN AMERICA.
And THEN if you want to call it "capitalism" you have to square that with
the expropriation of the imperialists and the national bourgeoisie (AS A
CLASS) by ARMED WORKERS and positing a new "capitalist class" whose
prerogatives and privileges are a hundredth, if that, of the prerogatives of
REGULAR capitalists and who can lose not just their privileges, but their
lives if they're caught with just a few thousand dollars in side deals for
their own personal enrichment (look up General Ochoa on Wikipedia)

And THEN you have to explain why, TWO DECADES AFTER all the OTHER
"socialist" bureaucracies figured out that the way to guarantee their
privileges was to return to "normal" capitalism, the CUBAN "bureaucracy"
STILL flees from "market mechanisms" like the devil from Holy Water.

Which brings me to my final point, which is in direct response to the
question of why there are no "independent" unions of Cuban workers directly
employed by "multinational" (meaning, of course, imperialist) companies
operating in Cuba. The reason for this, at least the last time I checked, is
that THERE ARE NO SUCH WORKERS.

The Cuban authorities have thought about this very, VERY and I mean _*VERY*_
carefully. And basically, a multinational cannot hire directly in Cuba. It
can only hire THROUGH a joint enterprise that makes the Cuban state, in
essence, a union on steroids, including very specifically a hiring hall. 

And this is true not just in relation to labor relations. Multinationals
that invest in Cuba do so in a framework where they in essence function as a
subordinate part of a state-organized economy. Some Spanish hotel chain, for
example, even with a trillion pesos, cannot freely buy some piece of real
estate and set up another hotel. Some pharmaceutical that is selling
Cuban-developed vaccines abroad can't freely set up an additional plant in
Cuba to try to cash in on growing demand. BOURGEOIS freedom of commerce,
autonomy for what in Spanish is called "private initiative" and so forth DO
NOT EXIST in Cuba, NOT EVEN for enterprises with majority imperialist
capital economic structures, and NOT EVEN if they can make a real killing
for the government or certain government personnel.

Is this a very tense, and in the last analysis, a fundamentally untenable
way to organize the economy? You bet. Like duh... 

But it doesn't have to last forever, just long enough to reconstitute
something seriously deserving of the name "socialist camp." The WAY Cuba has
structured all this is instructive. IMHO, it is NOT the most "productive" or
"profitable" or "economically beneficial" way to do it for Cuba, but it is
one that very clearly seeks to limit the penetration of imperialist capital
INTO Cuban society and give the state mechanisms to regulate and "tax" the
benefits of workers at those places.

The symbol for me of this contradictory reality is that you can, with
government agreement, build a very fancy hotel with restaurants and shops
and so on, investing millions of dollars and being allowed to keep and
repatriate a majority of the profits. What you can't do is set up a
restaurant minimally worthy of the name with a few thousand dollars worth of
equipment. Foreign multinationals can invest millions, but a Cuban, say one
abroad, cannot send his relatives on the island a few thousand dollars to
set up a business.

That seems perverse. But what is involved is the acceptance by the
revolution that it must live in a world dominated by imperialism and
capitalist economic relations. But WITHIN that world Cuba will function as
much as possible as one integrated conglomerate, to prevent as much as
possible capitalist social relations taking root and becoming dominant
WITHIN Cuban society. Thus FOREIGN capital operating in and through a mixed
company as part of a government-organized economy is much more tolerable
than tiny capitalists WITHIN Cuban society operating independently.

That said, WHY there are no independent/autonomous unions even in such
"mixed" (state straight jacketed) enterprises is certainly a legitimate
question, but one with a fairly complicated and in essence unfinished
historical answer. It goes back to the 1800's, Cuba's struggle for
independence from Spain, and the quest to unite all the anti-Spanish
revolutionary forces in a single group, which was largely achieved in the
1890's under the leadership of José Martí. And this combines with BOTH the
"natural" tendency or desire of the workers to unite in the largest possible
formations to fight against the bosses AND the legacy of both Zinovievism
and Stalinism in the revolutionary movement. I differentiate between the
two, "Zinovievism" (what most experienced people on the left would call
"Leninism" or "Leninist party building" in general) and "Stalinism" as such
because even the main anti-Stalinist forces within the communist movement,
the Trotskyists, defended the need for a highly disciplined and centralized
"combat" party.

And then you come to 1959 and 1960 in the Cuban union movement, and the
decision by the July 26 Movement, the Fidelistas, to insist on a united
workers movement, including a large degree of influence by the traditional
pro-Moscow CP, rather than a split within the union movement between the
PSP-led sectors (the PSP -- People's Socialist Party -- was the name of the
pro-Moscow party) and an alliance of people critical of the CP both from the
left and the right. 

This choice was not without some negative consequences, as it was
essentially a reflection of the similar choice made in the political arena,
which was to create a united political organization out of the left-wing
anti-Batista forces (essentially, the July 26 Movement, the PSP, and the
Revolutionary Student Directorate) and which then led to the two "Escalante
affairs" and all sorts of other problems, completely or in part, including
the hassles Silvio Rodriguez, Pablo Milanes and other young artists of the
"nueva trova" had.

But the most obvious alternative to uniting with the "Stalinists" was even
worse, which was to try to build a broad leadership and cadre for the
revolution WITHOUT these many hundreds or couple of thousand of the most
committed, dedicated, revolutionary-minded people (despite their Stalinist
mistraining) on the island. 

Throw in a half century of implacable U.S. hostility, terrorist attacks,
slanderous propaganda and so on, and you get what you find today, where
unity against the common imperialist enemy IN THE FORM of a single party, a
single union federation, a single women's association, a single boy- and
girl-scout-type organization, and so on has become very deeply entrenched.
And especially when this sort of unity can be traced all the way back to the
most important figure in the nation's history, José Martí, and the Cuban
Revolutionary Party of the 1890's. (Once Fidel dies, I think he will be
recognized as just as significant, but not yet. But insofar as THIS point is
concerned, Fidel's legacy will be seen as entirely on the side of the single
organization).

That is not the only, and one hopes not even the most relevant experience on
this point now underway in Latin America. A revolutionary process is
clearly, beyond any doubt, underway in Venezuela; others seem to be taking
off in Bolivia and Ecuador; looking back over the past 5, 10, or 15 years,
national movements against imperialism are clearly on the rise throughout
what José Martí called "Nuestra América", our America, a coincident upsurge
that is extremely important because of the force a united Latin American
nation can represent. 

These present politically a very pluralistic face, and there is no
possibility of melding them all into one. New forms of uniting in the
struggle are being essayed and discovered. 

Because it is not just a question of left parties, social movements, or even
"progressive" or "reform-minded" administrations bending to these popular
sectors, but that the hard-core neoliberal regimes are collapsing.

Under Calderon, Mexico is becoming a basket case. Yesterday the chief of
police of Ciudad Juarez resigned in response to "narcoposters" threatening
to kill a cop and prison guard every 48 hours until he quit.  Those more
intimate with Mexican affairs than I am think what is involved there is a
fight for turf between two cartels, and not really a fight between
"organized crime" and the government, even though that is how it appears.

Last year's anti-drug tsar is in custody for having been on the take from
the cartels for hundreds of thousands a month. The number of killings
doubled last year and this year's rate is even higher. 

Even CNN, which is as close as you can come to being blind, deaf and dumb
and still be in the news business, was saying this week Mexico was on the
verge of civil war and heading in the direction of becoming a failed state,
albeit this was not on the main CNN U.S. network, but in a web site article
and on their Spanish-language network. And the State Department on Friday
issued a travel warning advising Americans to stay in the tourist areas if
they had to go to Mexico and especially avoid the border towns.

Colombia is even worse. In a desperate, brown-nosing gesture, Uribe is
offering troops for Afghanistan. And it's not just the war. Tens of
thousands of people have been displaced by floods in the last week, and the
government is hapless. Now a volcano is erupting in the same area, and all
Uribe can do is tell people to stay away. 

With what every day looks more like something deserving to be called a world
depression, die-hard pro-imperialist forces are in disarray, and even those
who might otherwise be seeking accommodations with Washington are visiting
Cuba to have their pictures taken with Fidel instead.

The more likely way to a major, qualitative change in the way Cuban society
is organized is through a major change in the relationship of forces between
imperialism and what will emerge as a new socialist camp, and the
experiences and example of the other countries in that camp. Much will
depend on whether a leadership emerges in Mexico or Colombia to lead those
countries out of their acute social crisis in a progressive direction.

Joaquin


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