Date: 12 Mar 2002 09:52:48 +0200
From: "Tahir Wood" <twood-AT-uwc.ac.za>
Subject: Re: AUT: alternatives to capitalist cuba?


Louis, I don't intend to enter into your favoured style of polemic, just to point out that you understood very little of what I had said. See below.
Tahir

>>> lnp3-AT-panix.com 03/11/02 03:21PM >>>

>Tahir Wood:
>I think this is really the only important point. The Leninist argument 
>turns on just this point. If these societies are not in transition to 
>communism then they really don't have any significance as "socialist 
>states". I agree with those who have cited Bordiga's argument in this 
>discussion: that all of the regimes that we have been talking about are 
>actually in a transition to capitalism. That is, the revolution from above 
>has precisely the function of doing what Bordiga identified as the essence 
>of capitalism: "capitalism is the revolution in agriculture". From such a 
>perspective it makes very little sense to distinguish rigidly the 'state 
>capitalist' project in Cuba from say that of Franco's Spain.

What utter garbage. Franco's fascist movement came into existence to return 
land seized by peasants and run collectively to the gentry.

Tahir: This seizure of land by peasants occurred under the very nose of the Republican government in the thirties? This seems to me to be a very simplistic explanation of the rise of Franco's movement, but that was not my main point ...

 The July 26th 
movement was established to enable the peasants to do exactly that. Tahir 
is lost in abstractions like all the other intellectual communists here.

Tahir: No I'm not. Sometimes one does have to go to a higher level of abstraction precisely to avoid getting lost in an arbitrary mass of empirical details. Firstly, let me say that the idea of land to the peasants as being the reason for the emergence of the July 26th movement is equally as simplistic as your earlier point. But this was not the main issue - I precisely distinguished between such conscious intentions and ideological rationale on the one hand and the forces that shape such movements and give them their real historical significance on the other. The fact is that any movement which has as its aim the development and modernisation of a particular nation (whether it openly calls this capitalism or not) will oversee certain processes which are intrinsic to the development of capitalism, like the proletarianisation of the peasants, the bringing of agriculture under a modern managerial mode of organisation and the accumulation of a surplus to enable industrial development. In the case of those countries that do this under the general ideological rubric of socialism it may take a while before this reality becomes apparent, but it will. The increasing liberalisation of the Cuban economy, which is very apparent to anyone with eyes, is only possible at all because it has all the fundamentals of a capitalist economy in place already. Look at the Cuban tourist industry, which is less than ten years old. The strategy of boosting tourism as a way of saving the bankrupt Cuban economy was only announced in Fidel's speech at the 4th party congress in 1991.This achievement of a highly managed tourist industry emerging in about five years or so could not have come into being without there being a solid substrate of capitalism underlying it. You cannot liberalise non-capitalism.

>To say that one or other state had some greater measure of social welfare 
>or something similar comes nowhere near the main point. The idea that a 
>"socialist state" ("socialism" in one country) is a way of leading to 
>communism is a religious belief. It could only have been said to have been 
>proved if it had shown at least some sign of going that way, but of course 
>there is no such evidence at all.

The argument has not been about social welfare primarily. It has been about 
the concrete class struggle that took place in Cuba and which led to the 
flight of the concrete bourgeoisie to Miami and the near-cataclysmic 
nuclear confrontation over Cuba's right to develop an alternative to 
capitalism. Does autonomism require you to sign a contract that you will 
never study history?

Tahir: Actually I don't know what any of the above facts have to do with what we were talking about. First of all I believe that all historical movements are about class struggle, so that isn't the issue here. You surely are not suggesting that the cold war was evidence of the socialist nature of the SU or whatever other country you would name. The "alternative to capitalism" point also doesn't wash. The Cubans were disobedient to their former paternal authority. The turn towards 'communism' came only later and was always couched in nationalist terms. The Cuban revolution is shot through with nationalism and was so from the beginning. The national hero (that's official!) is Jose Marti, and just about everything in the country is named after him or other nationalist figures. I can name you a whole range of other countries' conflicts with the US which had nothing to do with capitalism vs socialism, but everything to do with nationalism and the sorts of disobedience that I have mentioned. I have never been to any country where the national flag is as frequently displayed as it is in Cuba.

>Personally I believe that the argument for socialism as the lower stage of 
>communism can only have meaning on an international scale, because that 
>would imply each of the former nation states being liberated from a world 
>system. It is important I think to not slip into the kind of voluntarist 
>argument here, which is very vulnerable to ridicule, namely that Castro et 
>all did not create genuine socialism because they were too reactionary in 
>their ideas, too stupid, too lazy or some such thing. They didn't create 
>socialism as the lower stage of communism because no one can in a 
>situation like that. The idea itself is a nonsense. Once you take charge 
>of a nation state within the framework of global capitalism you are 
>administering a capitalist state and there's no way out of that.

TINA.

Tahir: Well Louis, you conveniently snipped the last part of my message where I precisely said let's talk about alternatives. The TINA espouser here is you, who says Cuba is our only alternative ("There is a happy land ... tra la la"). But this is no alternative. All the previous "acutally existing socialist" countries have been undergoing a painful and contradictory path of capitalist development. The Russians botched it because they didn't understand that that's what they were doing and they finally delivered an inferior product to the West, unlike the Chinese who have been clear since the late seventies at least about what they are actually doing. Clever chap Deng, in his own way.

You see a man like yourself, Louis, who has a lot of trouble understanding abstract concepts, as you so frequently tell us, wouldn't understand the deeply layered or stratified nature of reality. There are all sorts of things that we as historical actors think we are doing, but there are deeper forces at work shaping our ends despite our best intentions. Hegel called this the cunning of reason. But at least we can learn from history (rather than just cite it as you do). You refuse to do this and cling stubbornly to a rationale that has lost any sort of basis in history at all. 





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