Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 14:13:13 -0600 (CST)
From: "Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave-AT-eco.utexas.edu>
Subject: Re: AUT: capitalist cuba?


On Thu, 7 Mar 2002, Louis Proyect wrote:

> (Posted to Marxmail by Mohammad Alam, an undergraduate in the Boston area
> whose father contributes occasionally to Counterpunch)
>
> The fundamental flaw behind the idea that Cuba is a capitalist state is
> that it smacks of crude formalism. Instead of starting out from
> actually-existing reality, the material conditions, historical roots, and
> political processes of Cuba, these autonomists take their blueprint model,
> hold it up next to the Cuban model, and declare the latter to be
> antithetical to socialism.

This fella offers no evidence that anyone is ignoring "actually-existing
reality" and the posts here certainly have not. The "blueprint" to which
countries like Cuba have been compared here are not those of "socialism"
but of capitalism. It is the presence of "actually-existing" social
relationships of the sort found in capitalism that have led people to
reject the notion that the Cuban leadership has led the country beyond
capitalism.

> I can probably find commodity production in Nazi Germany and Stalinist
> Russia, but unless I am a liberal--or an 'autonomist'--I will not cut out
> this tiny organ from two very different corpses, put them next to each
> other, and claim that it proves both are capitalist. If A is a part of B,
> and C is part of D, and if A and C are equal, it does not at all follow
> that B and D are equal. This is elementary Marxism.

This is elementary set theory. The problem with the above argument is that
what the people here preoccupied with "commodity production" seem to mean
by it is not only that commodities were produced in each case, but that
one of those commodities was labor power as a result of the working class
being stripped of control over the means of production through various
processes of primitive and ongoing accumulation. If "commodity production"
was present in both cases then it was not "a tiny organ" within widely
different, much larger social bodies; it was a fundamentally structuring
set of relationships that Marx associatd with capitalism.

> If capitalism prevails in Cuba as it does in the rest of Latin America,
> then why are there such huge discrepancies in the social relations, living
> standards, and security levels between the island and the mainland?
> Clearly, if capitalist laws are operating in both spheres, then they should
> produce similar results--but this is not the case, looking at Cuba's health
> care and education statistics.

Wrong headed on all counts. First, it has been contested here that living
standards etc in Cuba are much different from those elsewhere in Latin
America (a contesting that has not been rebutted so far) so the asserted
discrepancies can not be accepted as the basis of argument. Second, there
is great variation among countries and sub-sectors of countries that
everyone would agree were capitalist. The argument about differences
favorable to Cuba implying that it is socialist is no more tenable than
the same argument applied to New York as opposed to Mississippi.

>
> The easiest way to check the completeness of an idea is to check if an
> alternative is offered. In the case of the autonomists, who are quick to
> condemn the party, the vanguard, Lenin, and every other socialist
> development of the last 100 years out of hand, it not at all surprising
> that no alternative is set forth. Precisely as they do not ground their
> analysis of Cuba in the concrete conditions of Cuba's development, instead
> referring to abstract laws, they cannot propose any real solution to the
> problem. The correct word for this is opportunism.

One is "opportunistic" if one doesn't accept to play the game of central
planner and specify AN alternative model of social organization? Humbug.
And real solutions have been offered anyway: the struggles by workers in
Cuba, increasing linked rather than isolated from, workers struggles
elsewhere in the world.

> I have my own set of objections to Stalinism and the durability of its
> brand of socialism, but one cannot sweep the issue away with the broomstick
> of jingoistic obfuscation, calling the entire set of anti-imperialist
> socialist movements "capitalist", "state-capitalist", or similar nonsense.

In the first place, the "issue" is not been swept away, it is being dealt
with, just not in a way this person likes. In the second place, if the
analysis this person disagrees with is judged "nonsense", why bother
responding to it. This person should simply talk to those he agrees with.

> This kind of method is a capitulation to bourgeois criticism that prevents
> one from learning from the past and applying learned lessons for the
> future.

If anyone hasn't learned from the past, it is this writer who can not
recognize that what 20th Century socialism has organized is the
accumulation of capital and the endless imposition of work on the people
whose lives it has subordinated. The "bourgeois criticism" of 20th Century
socialism was that it really was different than capitalism, and worse, it
was judged to be less efficient economicially and more repressive
politically.

> Moreover, it is an insult to the struggles of the past
> half-century, and an insult to the dedication of revolutionaries who fought
> under the banner of Marxism, to claim that they were really just
> capitalists of some sort without knowing it.

Such a statement could only be made by someone who confuses the
"revolutonary leadership"  with the masses of people who fought the
revolution. No one is insulting the later, only arguing that the ideas and
projects of the former wound up reproducing capitalism instead of getting
beyond it.



............................................................................
Snail-mail:
Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1173  USA

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http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
............................................................................




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