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Notes
From
the Editors
Food Security in
Cuba
by
Sinan Koont
After
Neoliberalism: Empire, Social Democracy, or Socialism?
by Minqi Li
European Labor:
The Ideological Legacy of the Social Pact
by Asbjørn Wahl
She Challenged
the Rules
by Bernardine Dohrn
István
Mészaros is author of Socialism or
Barbarism: From the “American Century” to the Crossroads (Monthly
Review Press, 2001) and Beyond Capital:
Toward a Theory of Transition (Monthly Review Press,
1995).
This essay was
written at the request of the Brazilian periodical, Margem Esquerda,
and published in its November 2003 issue.
also by this
author:
Militarism and
the Coming Wars
The Challenge of
Sustainable Development and the Culture
of Substantive
Equality |
This year Cuba will be celebrating the forty-fifth anniversary of its
victorious revolution: a great historic achievement. And when we bear in
mind that the Cuban revolution—the long sustained action of a nation of
just eleven million people—survived for forty-five years against all odds,
successfully confronting the declared enmity, the U.S.-dictated
international political encirclement and economic blockade, as well as the
ever renewed attempts to subvert and overthrow the post-revolutionary
order by the world’s most preponderant economic and military power, even
this simple fact puts forcefully into relief the magnitude and the lasting
significance of the ongoing Cuban intervention in the historical process
of our time. We are all contemporaries to an achievement whose
reverberations reach well beyond the confines of the tendentiously
propagandized “American Hemisphere,” offering its hopeful message to the
rest of the world.
In 1999, three years before the U.S. government ominously decreed that
Cuba belonged to the extended version of the “axis of evil,” envisaging
the elimination of the Cuban “vicious circle”* at an early phase of the aggressively promoted
“new American Century,” I wrote in the foreword to the Indian edition of
Socialism or Barbarism:
We are about to leave the twentieth century, described by
capital’s most vocal apologists as “the American century”. Such views
are voiced as if the October Revolution of 1917, or the Chinese and
Cuban Revolutions and the colonial liberation struggles in the following
decades had never taken place, not to forget the humiliating defeat
directly suffered by the mighty United States in Vietnam. Indeed, the
uncritical defenders of the established order confidently anticipate
that not only the coming century but the whole of the next Millennium is
destined to conform to the unchallengeable rules of “Pax Americana”.*
To be sure, all those who engage in the futile attempt to rewrite
history refuse to acknowledge even the obvious; namely, that major
historic events, like the ones just mentioned, cannot be wishfully undone
in order to suit the political contingencies of the moment. Such events
arise from quite fundamental social contradictions. They cannot be
deprived in any way of their historical relevance and burning actuality as
long as their deep-rooted contradictions have not been addressed in a
positive and lasting form by a more advanced stage of development. Not
even when we think of the kind of wholesale capitulatory reversal which we
have witnessed in the former Soviet Union can we succumb to the view that
the initial contradictions have been surmounted.
Dare we think about the next forty-five years? The answer can only be
that we must. Historical changes of the magnitude here referred to,
although they immediately make a dramatic impact, can only fulfill their
full potential in a longer perspective. This is all the more true because
the well entrenched historical adversary always adjusts its own
strategies—constrained only by the ultimate limits of its systemic
determinations—in order to nullify every move of its progressive
counterpart. This is so whether the adjustments mean granting some more or
less temporary reformist concessions or, on the contrary, ruthlessly
engaging even in the most destructive course of action. This is why
Khrushchev’s notion of a “peaceful competition” with capitalist
production, as the mutually accepted judge of the rival objectives, was
extremely naïve, to say the least, when the actual historical stake
concerned nothing less than the question of instituting a radical
hegemonic alternative to capital’s social order. The firmly established
capitalist antagonist never entertained the kind of illusions for which a
very high price had to be paid.
In this context we should not forget that if there is a question mark
regarding Cuba’s next forty-five years, the same question mark hovers over
the future of all humanity. For at the present phase of capital’s
historical development, as a result of the system’s deepening structural
crisis, not only the past reformist concessions must be taken back—as
indeed they are—even in the capitalistically most advanced countries but,
given the chronic insufficiency of the productively available remedy, the
deadly irrationality of engaging in the most destructive course
of action on a global scale looms large on the horizon, trying to impose
itself as the rational solution to all our problems.
Cuba is next door to the United States and can be militarily reached
very easily. But, of course, the same unhindered, easily reachable
targeting is in active preparation—both for the purpose of blackmail,
including nuclear blackmail, and for unleashing some devastating military
action—even for the most remote corners of the world. Yesterday’s “Star
Wars Project” could still pretend to be a “defensive shield,” even if in
reality it was nothing of the kind. However, its heavily updated
successor, codenamed “Falcon” (Force Application and Launch from the
Continental U.S.), by no stretch of the imagination could be considered
anything other than a blatantly offensive system of weaponry, to be
deployed against the entire world. The first operational phase of this
system will be completed by mid-2006, and the initial tests will take
place already in 2004. The fully developed unmanned delivery vehicles will
be able to “strike targets 9,000 nautical miles distant in less than two
hours.” Moreover, they will “carry a payload of up to 12,000 pounds and
could ultimately fly at speeds of up to 10 times the speed of sound.” The
purpose of this infernal war machine is to enable the United States to
go it alone against whichever country they please to subdue or
destroy, in their design to achieve world domination as the unchallenged
and unchallengeable ruler of global hegemonic imperialism. As John Pike,
head of the Washington think tank, GlobalSecurity.org, commented on the
new weapons system: “It is about blowing people up on the other side of
the planet even if no country on earth will allow us to use their
territory.”*
The failure of the American government’s long-standing policy against
Cuba is widely recognized. Even a former minister of Margaret Thatcher’s
Conservative British government has great reservations about the American
anti-Cuban stance and its adoption by the governments of Europe, as he
made it clear in a recent article:
It is naïve in the extreme to think that in the post-Castro
era Cuba will effectively become the 51st state of the US. Yet that is
precisely what many in the US administration and indeed, on this side of
the Atlantic, appear to believe. In fact, the very opposite is likely to
happen....We must avoid the danger of borrowing the blunt instrument of
America’s political sledge-hammer [nor should we view Cuba] through the
unfocused binoculars of American wishful thinking.*
Needless to say, critical views, even when they cannot be accused of a
“left-wing political bias,” make no difference at all to the reactionary
policymakers of the U.S. administration. One of their undersecretaries of
state, John Bolton, shamelessly accused Cuba of being the supplier of
biological weapons to the enemies of the United States, on the “grounds”
that the Cubans have an advanced pharmaceutical industry. This was a
provocative attempt to mark out Cuba as a “morally justified” early target
for U.S. military attack. I myself sharply commented at the time (June
2002) in a Brazilian TV interview, that such men have no morality and no
respect whatsoever for the truth. Not surprisingly, attempts of this kind,
designed to indict Cuba of fictitious anti-American crimes, are constantly
renewed. Fidel Castro reported in his May Day 2003 speech a very recent
and equally threatening case:
The policy of the US government is so brazenly provocative
that on April 25, Mr Kevin Whitaker, chief of the Cuban Bureau at the
State Department, informed the head of our Interests Section in
Washington that the National Security Council’s Department of Homeland
Security considered the continued hijackings from Cuba a serious threat
to the national security of the United States, and requested that the
Cuban government adopt all of the necessary measures to prevent such
acts. He said this as if they were not the ones who provoke and
encourage these hijackings, and as if we were not the ones who adopt
drastic measures to prevent them.
The international controversy about the sentencing of the Havana
hijackers had a great deal to do with disregarding the direct military
threat to which the country was—and continues to be—subjected on this
score.
The cynical pursuit of provocative acts and their hypocritical
misrepresentation in the mass media remain the defining characteristics of
U.S. policymaking that Cuba is condemned to live with for the foreseeable
future, even if by no means for the next forty-five years. To be sure, not
for the next forty-five years! For it is inconceivable that the present,
extreme aggressive phase of global hegemonic imperialism—which is now
absurdly trying to “compensate” for the incurable wastefulness of its
system of destructive production by way of astronomical
expenditures on armaments and associated military adventures, financed
from the “black hole” of American indebtedness—should be able to endure
for remotely that long, instead it may exterminate humankind altogether if
not stopped well before that time.
Cuba has been forced to live in a state of emergency for a very long
time. The great hardship that had to be overcome under such circumstances
was not confined to the consequences of the American blockade. After the
demise of the Soviet system the situation became even more aggravated, not
only through the further tightening of the American blockade, in the vain
hope of precipitating an immediate collapse, but also due to the country’s
sudden loss of its main markets and supply sources. As a result, the
calorie and protein intake of the population was nearly halved, and the
painful years of the “special period” were needed to restore the
nutritional requirements of the people to the earlier level.
It goes without saying, the conditions of a continued state of
emergency are unfavorable to the achievement of several desirable
objectives both on the political/cultural and on the economic plane. But
they cannot be simply wished out of existence, nor should they be, of
course, prolonged any longer than it is historically justified, once the
conditions change for the better.
Here we can see a great contrast with the Soviet experience. As we all
know, for a number of years after the October Revolution the country had
to cope with the extreme hardship of a genuine state of emergency. Later
on, however, Stalin artificially prolonged for decades the earlier fully
justified state of emergency, since that provided him with the easier
option for implementing his authoritarian policies. But following in this
way the “line of least resistance”—in that in Stalin’s view all
questioning of the decreed policies could be easily crushed—resulted in
the institution of mass labor camps, with terrible consequences for labor
productivity, bringing with it the gross violation of legality for which
Khrushchev rightly castigated him in 1956. Moreover, when in 1952 Stalin
had to admit that Soviet labor productivity was in serious trouble, he
tried to remedy the situation by stipulating yet another authoritarian
solution, in terms of a strictly managerial imposition of labor
discipline. In his last major writing, “Economic Problems of Socialism in
the U.S.S.R.,” he decreed the eternal validity of the “law of value,” the
absolute permanence of the “nonessential” division between mental and
physical labor, and the rightful separation of society into well rewarded
“socialist executive personnel” (“our business executives”) and “physical
labor power” firmly controlled not only politically but also by “rational”
market-like institutional practices. He insisted on the need for proper
“commodity production and circulation” to be regulated on the basis of
“cost accounting and profitableness” bequeathing thereby a dangerous
legacy for the future also by conferring “socialist legitimacy” on the
traditional authoritarianism of the “disciplining market” whose fateful
consequences are familiar to us all.*
Obviously, there is nothing artificial about Cuba’s painfully long
state of emergency in the face of the constantly renewed and intensified
military threats of its preponderant adversary. Nevertheless, no one can
deny that the full potential of the Cuban revolution will be brought to
fruition in a future when, as a result of a fundamental change of
circumstances and global relation of forces, it will be possible to say
that the almost prohibitive burden of confronting capital’s destructive
forces belongs irrevocably to the past.
The victorious Cuban revolution is both unique and of a universal
significance. It is unique in that it grew out of two hundred years of
resurgent struggle, at first against Spanish colonialism and thereafter
against U.S. imperialist domination. The great historical figure José
Martí—who more than one hundred years after his death remains a tremendous
inspiration to the present—directly connected, in his far-sighted vision,
the two phases. He thus clearly anticipated well before the conclusion of
the anti-Spanish struggle that Cuban emancipation would only be
accomplished when they have succeeded in defeating the new, American,
domination.
But the Cuban revolution is also unique in the sense that the overthrow
of the servile Batista regime was preceded by three years of armed
struggle, sustained by an ever increasing number of the country’s
population. To this must be added that at the time of the revolution’s
victory the U.S. government still maintained the illusion that it would
still be able to dominate the country as it pleased under the new
circumstances, even if in a somewhat altered form. Moreover, given the
overwhelming popular support for the overthrow of the American client
regime, in the heat of the moment it even had to make some friendly noises
about the change.
When their attempts to reimpose their former domination by other means
failed, at once they adopted an openly hostile attitude. It is on that
account that we can clearly see that the historical adversary necessarily
adjusts its strategies when it has to face a major challenge. It does so
in order to reverse the situation, or at least in order to prevent further
occurrences of what it has been surprised with or, rather, subjected to.
Accordingly, subsequent U.S. policymaking not only against Cuba but all
over Latin America (and not only there)—assuming the form of the violent
overthrow of democratically elected governments (cynically in the name of
“democracy and freedom”) and the imposition of brutal
dictatorships—heavily underlines this point. The Cuban revolution is thus
unique also in the respect that in its aftermath even the first signs of a
potential anti-imperialist armed struggle had to be crushed by direct or
indirect U.S. intervention, as shown also by Che Guevara’s tragic
fate.
The Cuban revolution is unique for a variety of important
reasons—including the historical constitution of its leadership from José
Martí to the present—so it cannot be imitated or repeated, let alone
turned into the compulsory model of revolutionary transformation.
Nevertheless its universal significance cannot be emphasized strongly
enough. In the past the attempts to impose the Soviet model, under Stalin
and his successors, caused immense damage to the socialist movement
everywhere. This cannot be allowed to be repeated in the future, no matter
how great the temptations might be to do so. No one puts this more firmly
than Fidel Castro himself. Talking about our own predicament he said:
Tremendously strong mass movements are emerging, and I think
that these movements will play a fundamental role in future struggles.
There will be new tactics: not the Bolshevik style and not even our own
style, because these belonged to a different world. This should not
discourage anyone. We need to see and analyze, with the greatest
possible objectivity, the current setting in which the struggle will
have to unfold, under the unipolar dominance of a superpower, the United
States. There will be other roads and other ways by which the conditions
will be created for transforming this world into another one.*
The apologists of capital often try to rationalize and “explain away”
their own contradictions and troubles as if they were the result of having
been “exported” from an alien territory by a “subversive force,” and
conspiratorially imposed upon them. As the lines just quoted clearly
indicate, nothing could be further removed from a genuine strategy of
socialist transformation. For a well-grounded strategy must always
advocate the grasp of real levers of transformation by the given social
movements which cannot succeed in their historic mandate unless they
constantly reorient themselves under the prevailing social conditions and
dynamically changing historical circumstances.
The universal significance of the Cuban revolution resides in its great
affinity with the aspirations of all those who want to extricate
themselves from the paralyzing constraints of capital’s social order.
Although in a general sense this concerns everyone who shares the cause
of human emancipation, understandably the echoes generated by the Cuban
revolution were the greatest in Latin America. For the countries of that
continent have been, and indeed are, all dominated by the same imperialist
power, and their efforts to significantly redress their situation were
constantly frustrated and ultimately always nullified, both for internal
and for external reasons, by the system under which they had to reproduce
their conditions of existence. The message of the Cuban revolution to them
was, therefore, twofold.
First, it focused on the question of regaining from America their
national sovereignty and corresponding power of decision making, thereby
freeing themselves from the military, political, and economic domination
of their overpowering neighbor.
And, second, at the same time the fundamental questions of the
socioeconomic reproductive system as a whole had to be subjected to a
radical critique, both because of the capitalist order’s overwhelming
domination by the United States and, more importantly, because of the
historical anachronism and destructive wastefulness of capital’s social
metabolic determinations in general at the present stage of history. In
other words, all of the Latin American countries (and not only them) had
to struggle in order to get out of the real vicious circle of
trying to resolve their immense problems on the cynically inflated tiny
margin of American “economic aid,” when in reality it is the U.S. economy
itself which remains massively dependent on the resources which it must
exploitatively transfer from the rest of the world, in many different
ways, to its own sphere of production and consumption.
Right from the beginning the message of the Cuban revolution was
unmistakable regarding both of these sets of questions which profoundly
affect all of the Latin American countries. Thus, irrespective of
how soon and how successfully the countries concerned can act in the
interest of realizing the deeply interconnected objectives confronting
them, the twofold message of the Cuban revolution—calling not only for
anti-imperialist struggle, but also for a structural/systemic
change of society, as ultimately the condition of success also of the
first—is bound to resound with ever greater intensity, even under the most
difficult circumstances, over the entire continent.
As regards the time in front of us, there can be no doubt that the
challenges and dangers are bound to remain enormous, despite all the
achievements. The military threat against Cuba by the United States has
been intensified in the last few years, in line with the growing
aggressiveness of U.S. policy all over the world. Indeed, as mentioned
earlier, Cuba has been also singled out as one of the states constituting
the extended “axis of evil,” with all of the sinister implications of such
a characterization. Nevertheless, the U.S. policymakers must also remember
their humiliating fiasco at the Bay of Pigs. They must realize that Fidel
Castro’s assertion, in his May Day 2003 speech, is not an idle threat,
when he insists that in case Cuba is attacked, like Iraq, “the aggressors
would not merely be facing an army, but rather thousands of armies that
would constantly reproduce themselves and make the enemy pay such a high
cost in casualties that it would far exceed the cost in lives of its sons
and daughters that the American people would be willing to pay for the
adventures and ideas of President Bush.”
In truth, the U.S. design for a permanent global imperialist domination
has no greater future than the earlier varieties of—in the end always
failed—imperialism. Sooner or later also the globally overextended
aggressors are bound to come to grief, even if on the road to their
ultimate failure they may destroy the conditions of human existence on
this planet. And in that literally vital sense, overcoming the military
threat to which Cuba is subjected is the common cause of all
humankind.
Naturally, the dangers are not confined to the military plane. The
other crucially important dimension is the political-economic warfare to
which Cuba has been subjected in the last forty-five years, which has been
constantly intensified and has assumed new and more dangerous forms. Today
it takes the form of an enormous pressure for “marketization,” rendered
all the more problematical in view of the fact that the acceptance of
market ideology significantly contributed to the disintegration of the
Soviet system under Gorbachev and his collaborators.
When Stalin, in 1952, formulated his first version of marketized
discipline—according to which “labor power” would be “compensated for”
with “profitably produced consumer commodities” for its conformity to such
discipline—much of what he had decreed was theoretically quite unfounded
and had to remain in the realm of fantasy. For the Soviet system could not
operate on the basis of commodity production and circulation, under the
law of value, above all for the simple reason that it did not have a
proper market, and least of all a labor market. Many things can be
regulated in an economy with tolerable reliability with the help of a
pseudo-market, which in fact did exist in the Soviet Union. But this is
certainly not the case where the allocation and firm control of labor
power are concerned. Even Khrushchev resisted the temptation of extending
the changes inspired by Stalin into that dangerous field. Only under
Gorbachev was the critical step taken for the establishment of a fully
fledged labor market, bringing with it catastrophic consequences for the
Soviet economy and society at large, instead of fulfilling the totally
unrealistic expectations of the policymakers.
This is where we find the crucial line of demarcation. Naturally, talk
about marketization can cover many things, often implying nothing more
than the better use of material and human resources. That is a perfectly
legitimate concern under all circumstances. As a matter of fact, though,
it happens to be grossly violated, despite all pretences to the contrary,
precisely under capital’s present phase of hopelessly wasteful production
and consumption: the sworn enemy of all real concern with economy and with
the corresponding rational allocation of resources. The question that
needs answering is: who is in effective control of society’s combined
resources, the “associated producers” or an extraneous decision making
force, even if the latter is ideologically embellished with the name of
Adam Smith’s imaginarily benevolent “invisible hand”? Once labor is
allowed to become a commodity just like any other, tossed around according
to the fetishistic/mystifying—and very far from objective—requirements of
the labor market, the door becomes firmly shut to all aspirations to
realize the much needed socialist objectives of the people. Instead,
everything is poured into the whirlpool of capitalist restoration, as
bitter historical experience tells us. Only the most eager form of wishful
thinking can expect Cuban capitulation on this vital issue.
The Cuban Revolution demonstrated its solidarity, in a most tangible
way, with the cause of human emancipation on countless occasions. But
solidarity is a two-way street. International solidarity can make a
meaningful contribution to the next forty-five years of the Cuban
revolution.
Notes
* In a May 1, 2003, speech
President Fidel Castro cited Florida Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart, “an
intimate friend and advisor of President Bush, has made this enigmatic
statement to a Miami TV station: ‘I cannot go into details, but we are
trying to break this vicious circle.’ What methods are they considering to
deal with this vicious circle? Physically eliminating me with the
sophisticated modern means they have developed, as Mr Bush promised them
in Texas before the elections? Or attacking Cuba the way they attacked
Iraq?”
* István Mészaros,
Socialism or Barbarism (Kolkata: K. P. Bagchi & Co., 2001),
3.
* Julian Borger, “US-based
missiles to have global reach,” The Guardian, July 1, 2003.
* Colin Moynihan, “Cuba has
been left out far too long: Britain and Europe must break with 40 years of
failed US policy,” The Guardian, July 1, 2003.
* For a fully documented
discussion of these problems see chapter 17 of Beyond Capital
(London: Merlin Press, and New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995).
* Fidel Castro, “El mundo
caótico al que conduce la globalización neoliberal no puede sobrevivir,”
Granma, June 25, 1998. Quoted in Gilberto Valdés Gutiérrez, “El
sistema de dominación múltiple” (unpublished). |
