Date: Thu, 07 Mar 2002 20:10:00 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: capitalist cuba?


(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
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. 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.





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