Reply to Jim Devine on Cuba

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Devine has asked me privately to continue our debate over Cuba. I
explained to him I have heard the arguments against Castro's deficiencies
and lack the desire to make the case for him one more time. Indeed, as Doug
Henwood can testify, I have just had a brutal debate with a Peruvian Maoist
who argues that Castro is a "social fascist". This character has the same
old complaint about Castro buried underneath the bizarre "third period"
Stalinism crap: there is no workers democracy in Cuba.

Well, okay, let's have another go at it. Maybe some of this will be
interesting to PEN-L'ers. All I would ask is that Jim refrain from using
certain formulations that I find offensive and I promise to not make ad
hominem attacks on his skin pigmentation or professional status.

It seems that the futility of proletarian revolution in Cuba is very much
on Jim's mind. I am not sure whether he is aware of this or not, but his
arguments are almost the same that the Mensheviks directed at Lenin in
1917: Russian lacked a working class sufficient in numbers and social power
to be an effective ruling class. Marx and Engels had a country like German
or England in mind, not backward Russia. The end result would be chaos and
dictatorship.

Lenin answered his critics in the April, 1923 article titled "Our Revolution":

"Infinitely stereotyped, for instance, is the argument they learned by rote
during the development of West-European Social-Democracy, namely, that we
are not ripe for socialism, that, as certain 'learned' gentlemen among them
put it, the objective economic premises for socialism do not exist in our
country. It does not occur to any of them to ask: but what about a people
that found itself in a revolutionary situation such as that created during
the first imperialist war? Might it not, influenced by the hopelessness of
its situation, fling itself into a struggle that would offer it at least
some chance of securing conditions for the further development of
civilization that were somewhat unusual?

"'The development of the productive forces of Russia has not attained the
level that makes socialism possible.' All the heroes of the Second
International, including, of course, Sukhanov, beat the drums about this
proposition in a thousand different keys, and think that it is the decisive
criterion of the revolution.

"But what if the situation, which drew Russia into the imperialist world
war that involved every more or less influential West-European country and
made her a witness of the eve of the revolutions maturing or partly already
begun in the East, gave rise to circumstances that put Russia and her
development in a position which enable us to achieve precisely that
combination of a 'peasant war' with the working class movement suggested in
1856 by no less a Marxist than Marx himself as a possible prospect for
Prussia?

"What if the complete hopelessness of the situation, by stimulating the
efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to
create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from
the West-European countries? Has that altered the general line of
development of world history? Has that altered the basic relations between
the basic classes of all the countries that are being, or have been, drawn
into the general course of world history?

"If a definite level of culture is required for the building of socialism
(although nobody can say just what that definite 'level of culture' is, for
it differs in every West-European country),why cannot we begin by first
achieving the prerequisites for that definite level of culture in a
revolutionary way, and then, with the aid of the workers' and peasants'
government and the Soviet system, proceed to overtake the other nations."

Louis Proyect