Date: Fri, 22 Nov 1996 13:46:33 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: Broken records


>        3) This one's for Louis Proyect, but other answers welcome: given
>that you accept that Cuban workers played no substantial role in the 1959
>revolution, and given that you argued that Castro was right not to focus on
>the working class, how do you then justify characterising it as a
>proletarian revolution? This is a genuine, serious question, and I'd
>appreciate a genuine, serious (non-abusive) answer.
>
>Charlie Hore, Bookmarks  
>
>

Louis: The problem is that Cuba in the 1950s did not look like Germany or
England in the late 19th century, no matter how you slice it. China in 1949
had something like 3 million workers out of a nation of nearly a
half-billion. Most of these Chinese proletarians were employed in small
light-industrial shops. Mao looked to the huge radicalized peasantry and
overthrew capitalism. What would you call this? I guess you would call it a
socialist revolution led by peasants rather than industrial workers.

Cuba is a little bit more complicated. It had advanced sugar plantations and
cattle ranches. The people who lived in the countryside and were exploited
by capitalism were campesinos, but they were also workers. Gosh, how can
somebody be a campesino and a worker at the same time? Isn't this a
contradiction.

Yes, it is a contradiction. Get used to it.

Campesinos lived on tiny scraps of land that they rented from the plantation
owner and on which they eked out subsistence crops. They also worked as
cane-cutters for wages part of the year. This semi-proletarian layer was in
the vanguard of the Cuban revolution. What would you Cliffites like to
*label* this? A semi-proletarian revolution? Fine by me.

Now what happened is that both in China and Cuba the peasants and
semi-proletarians used violent means to destroy the bourgeois state and
begin the construction of socialism. In China this meant expanding the
industrial working-class at the greatest pace in history, much faster than
anything that occurred in England in the 19th century. The same thing has
happened in Cuba. The sons and daughters of cane-cutters are now
school-teachers, truck-drivers and mechanics.

So to sum up: bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intellectuals formed guerrilla
armies based on the plebian masses in the countryside which they used as a
battering ram against the comprador bourgeoisie and it its imperialist
defenders.

The states that were formed were used to promote universal health care, free
education and adequate nutrition. Unemployment became a thing of the past
and the standard of living improved radically. The old ruling-classes ran
off to Taiwan and Miami.

Call this whatever you want. This is what I am for. This is something that
no Trotskyist sect has ever accomplished or ever will for the simple reason
that it prefers to act on the basis of empty abstractions rather than living
reality.




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