From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-panix.com>
Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2002 19:07:01 -0500
Subject: Re: AUT: Capitalist Cuba ?


On Wed, 06 Mar 2002 07:53:13 +0800, Kurasje Archive wrote:
>Back since the break between russian bolshevics
>and the west-european communists in the first
>half of the 20'ies it was clear to everyone with
>a minimum of critical and open mind that USSR
>was state capitalist. Lenin and others from the
>new soviet leadership admitted openly that the
>revolution was dead and that state capitalism
>was the order of the day in Russia.

Citation?

>But back from the 20'ies and especially from the
>vawe of 'academic' systematical re-reading of
>Marx in the 60'ies it has become clear that such
>political and social 'revolutions' as the
>russian as well as the cuban has ben nothing but
>specific transitions of capitalism from
>'classical/typical' private bourgois
>institutionalisation into some alternative
>public organisation.

Perhaps you are thinking about Algeria, etc., where capitalism 
persisted under the cloak of state ownership. Cuba broke with 
capitalism completely.

>The anarchists said so spontaniously very early
>on, council communists like Rhle, Pannekoek and
>others tried to argue with more traditional
>'marxist' arguments. From around the 2.WW even
>left-trotzkyists begann to get the picture as
>stalinism has turned the official 'socialist'
>paint on state-capitalism into the absurde. Tony
>Cliff is best known and did some of it. The
>'Johnsom/Forest'-tendency is less known, but did
>it even better.

This is just a roster of all those who thought that the Soviet Union 
was capitalist. We need data rather than sterile list-making in order 
to move ahead in this discussion. The real answer to state capitalism 
has been the utter catastrophe that has met the Soviet people after 
the Yeltsin-Putin regime was consolidated. This is real capitalism, 
as opposed to the dogmatic constructions of small Marxist sects.

>The academic re-reading of Marx in the 60'ies
>and beginning of the 70'ies did the final (Roman
>Rosdolsky, Helmuth Reichelt just to name a few).
>On the grounds of the systematic
>'reconstruction' of Marx's methodological and
>conceptual project of the critique of political
>economy (based on all available manuscripts,
>i.e. Grundrisse, the original manuscripts of Zur
>Kritik ... and the various drafts of chapters to
>Das Kapital etc.) it became well established as
>the kernel of his theory that commodity
>production, money-economy and capitalism are
>inseparable:

Right. Commodity production, money-economy and capitalism are 
inseparable. Unless revolutionaries in Latin America, Africa and most 
of Asia can wait until the forces of production ripen, they should 
avoid taking power. This is nothing new. It is Kautskyism pure and 
simple. What I keep hearing here is Kautskyism wrapped in shiny 
postmodernist tinsel. Under the wrapping, it is the same old stagist 
crap.

>And so to the present discussion: what is going
>on in Cuba ?

How would anybody here answer that except me? You are too busy 
studying philosophical abstractions.

-- 
Louis Proyect, lnp3-AT-panix.com on 03/05/2002

Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org




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