Snowden isn't alone

This is a very general comment I made on FaceBook about the Snowden debate:

What scares the US imperialist government is that Snowden (and Manning and Assange and and and) aren't alone. They represent millions of people. They alone did what they did, but not in social or political isolation. They are the tip of a huge iceberg. In the old days it was the mass struggle for bourgeois democracy (aka civil rights, freedom from arbitrary government intrusion and oppression), these days it's for a much wider and broader goal including human rights like health education and welfare for all and economlic equality (aka socialism). This is a war (we can call it class war, between the class of those who own the factories and facilities we need to make and do things and the class of those who don't own shit but are forced to work hard for these others just to stay alive).
And this class war and the representative role of Snowden etc is why the scandals and political fighting don't just evaporate despite all the efforts of lickspittle apologists for tyranny to belittle, criminalize and intimidate.
The big problem for most people today is that the official surface discussion in the US and other states around the world is one big lie never ever naming things by their real names or explaining what all the drama is about. So some people really get hung up about Snowden's girlfriend being a pole dancer or about the fact not that he had to run for his life from the "land of the free TM ha-fucking-ha" but that he ran to this or that other country where he was able to find shelter.

Re sub-imperialism

Fred Feldman posted a contribution to the Green Left discussion group on Yahoo on the use of "sub-imperialism" to characterize a number of countries today, such as China, Russia and India.

I replied as follows:


--- In GreenLeft_discussion@yahoogroups.com, "Fred Feldman"  wrote:

> Actually, if Green Lefters defend China as an oppressed nation against
> imperialism (not just "oppose an attack" but SOLIDARIZE WITH CHINA against
> an attack), that would be adequate since there is a basis for reasonable
> Marxists to disagree about the class character of the state. But in fact the
> trend seems to be toward proclaiming China an imperialist power (perhaps
> with the highly subjective category of "sub-imperialist" as a transitional
> characterization), which clearly implies no defense against anybody anytime.
>
> Thus a war between China and the United States or China and Australia would
> be an inter-imperialist war with "a plague on both your houses" as the
> indicated political stance.
>
> If Green Left's Marxism still includes "revolutionary defeatism" in a war
> between China and Australia, that would mean considering the defeat of
> Australia as the lesser evil in a war with China from the standpoint of
> making a socialist
> revolution in Australia.  From this standpoint, Chinese revolutionaries
> would be expected to take the same stand - defeat of their "imperialism" as
> the lesser evil.  Chinese people who took the side of their country against
> US, Japanese, and/or Australian imperialism would be regarded as traitors to
> socialism.

This shows how important the question of the character of the Chinese state is to revolutionary Marxists. Because it's so important it's crucial not to play fast and loose with the terms in which the characterization is made. To speak of a "trend" towards considering China imperialist while at the same time claiming that "there is a basis for reasonable Marxists to disagree about the class character of the state" is to play fast and loose with terms like "imperialism" and "Marxism", not to mention "reasonable".

Marxism would not "trend" towards a characterization in this way. Some Marxists might, but then the question would be how far a trending impressionist agrees with Marxist economic analysis, and whether this is "reasonable". Let's be clear. There is disagreement, even among serious revolutionary Marxists, about the class character of the Chinese state. But so far this has not been the subject of any serious large-scale debate. A key issue for those who originally held with the characterization of Deformed Workers' State seems to be how far the reforms of 1979 constitute a restoration of capital. But the bullet in this debate hasn't yet been bitten.

Why was the situation different in the mid-1930s regarding the Soviet Union? For this argument it's enough to say there was a revolutionary Bolshevik current in the USSR and the world that was strong enough and confident enough in its Marxism and place in the class struggle to bite the bullet and consider the hugely contradictory situation that had arisen after October succeeded in overturning the capitalist state of Tsarist Russia, but where this new non-capitalist state had either become capitalist once more or remained non-capitalist while displaying blatantly anti-socialist and counter-revolutionary characteristics.

I'm referring, obviously, to the Left Opposition and the embodiment of its Bolshevik leadership in Trotsky and those closest to him.

In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky came down firmly, Marxist-style, on the side of the most contradictory alternative - a state which was at the same time non-capitalist, anti-socialist and counter-revolutionary. He did this because it best fitted the facts, and his presentation of these facts and his reasons for interpreting them as he did convinced the non-Stalinist revolutionary left that was moving towards the foundation of the Fourth International after the catastrophic defeat of the workers movement in Germany.

The closest thing this movement has had to a similar decisive intervention concerning the character of a state is Peng Shuzi's work on The Causes of the Victory of the Chinese Communist Party (www.marxists.org/archive/peng/1951/nov/causes.htm) and the debate leading to the characterization of Deformed Workers' State.

Neither Peng nor the Fourth had the theoretical or organizational authority of Trotsky or the pre-war Left Opposition, so there was little to deter impressionist non-revolutionary Lefts like Tony Cliff from proclaiming early in the 50s that The Revolution Betrayed had been mistaken, that the USSR was capitalist and that China was too. Their Marxism couldn't stand up to the combined pressure of bourgeois witch-hunting and Stalinist propaganda.

The problem for us today is that this has been happening by default within the genuinely revolutionary tradition of the Fourth and closely allied movements. The bitter contradictions digested in The Revolution Betrayed have not been understood as such. It could even be argued that the bitterness and scale of the contradictions inherent in the Chinese state and regime are even greater than those in the Soviet Union.

Whatever the case, the contradictions have not been confronted openly and massively, so the trial is not just not over, it hasn't even started.

Which presents us with a huge and responsible task.

Including the main reason for my present contribution, which is to disagree flatly regarding the term "sub-imperialism".

Fred declares that the category is "highly subjective" and used as a "transitional characterization". Maybe he meant "impressionistic" - in which case he should have said so. But "subjective" can be compared to "objective" and related to facts, which Fred doesn't do. As for "transitional", well, things change, powerful states and economies become weak and vice versa, so there is a case for terms describing such change to be labelled transitional. Trotsky and the Fourth labelled their programme "transitional" for good reasons.

Fred writes:

> The sub-imperialist category is misleading because it effectively eliminates
> the qualitative distinction between imperialism and not-imperialism,
> oppressed and oppressor nations, and it is infinitely expandable and
> basically un-scientific. If China is imperialist or sub-imperialist, why not
> Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, or even Vietnam? If India is imperialist or
> sub-imperialist, why not Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia?

But this is not so if sub-imperialism has been defined clearly in terms of transition from less powerful to more powerful, and its preconditions have been set out. In the first place, it is misleading to lump together "imperialism and not-imperialism,
oppressed and oppressor nations", simply because imperialist oppression is not the same as any old oppression of one nation (or entity) by another. So we'll ignore that, although it forms the basis of most of the arm-waving examples Fred gives. It is not in the least intrinsically "infinitely expandable", as that depends on the definition and preconditions.

For instance, sensible definitions of sub-imperialist would have to include such empirical qualities as great size, great population, and economic and military viability on a grand scale. The military viability would include things like complete impossibility of total invasion and occupation. The history of Russia gives an indication of the kind of countries that might come into consideration here. The "sub" would have to include the transitional element of not yet big enough and ugly enough to face down the US in an open confrontation, despite a desire to do so and probable capacity to put up a good fight.

There is nothing strange about any of this, and in fact the definition would enable a good description of the relative strength of such acknowledged imperialisms as Germany, Britain, France, Sweden, etc.

Lenin takes relative change between imperialist countries for granted when he writes of "aspiring imperialisms" such as Japan and Germany and compares them to the old established imperialist powers of Britain and France. And in 1900, the US was the biggest aspiring "sub-imperialism" of them all.

And the definition given here, preliminary as it is, would be able to handle the status of Korea, Thailand, Pakistan and Indonesia without pausing in its stride.

Fred concludes by writing:

> The tendency is to envision an almost exclusively imperialist world - one in
> which almost every state not directly controlled by imperialism economically
> and politically like the Marshall Islands or Puerto Rico or Chad tends to
> "rise" to imperialist or subimperialist status, becoming a challenger to
> "old" imperialist powers for re-dividing the world (like Germany in the two
> world wars) and thus one of the driving forces toward world war.  This is
> not theoretically impossible, but highly improbable in anything like the
> near future.      

Which of course is as impressionistic as the approach he is criticising. Much as most governments would dearly love to elbow their way closer to the fleshpots and bury their snouts in the trough with the US, it is farcical for them, or us, to dream of such a thing, let alone "envision" it. Put this generally, it is in fact "theoretically impossible" - at least for a Marxist Marxist - and it certainly has no bearing on whether or not one or two of the most powerful and expansive non-acknowledged imperialist countries (say Russia and India, leaving China and Brazil aside for the moment) are in a position to challenge or actually even in the course of challenging the currently hegemonic imperialist power(s).

As I understand it, "sub-imperialism" refers to imperialist potential in a country that for a variety of reasons is still clearly 'sub'ordinate to the leading imperialist countries. Some countries might make it all the way, and watch once leading countries eat their dust as they fall by the wayside. Some might just hover mid-league for ever, so to say. But we have to acknowledge change as it happens, and do our best to grasp what's going on and why. That is our duty both to the working class as revolutionary socialists and to science as thinking citizens.

When did the USSR turn its back on Marxism?

On a discussion list I presented a mainstream of Marxist development this way: "Marx and Engels in the 1840s through the Paris Commune to the October Revolution in 1917 and on to the Left Opposition and Fourth International - it's Bolshevik-Leninist built on rock-solid Marxist (and that's Marx and Engels) foundations".

DV asked me: "So at what point does your allegiance split off (or maintain the true centre) of that line, later in the SU? And why?

And I replied:

The change in the political character of the USSR can be located most simply in the year 1924. Lenin died in January, 1924, and during the year Stalin was able to consolidate his power in the Bolshevik party apparatus, principally by opening the floodgates to new members with interests that were bureaucratic and careerist rather than class-based and socialist. The struggle against this development can be traced in the history of the Left Opposition to Stalin and the bureaucracy, which Trotsky founded in 1923 while Lenin was still alive, albeit incapacitated.

Evidence of healthy working-class socialist internationalism is abundant in the records of the first four Congresses of the Third International (ie before 1924). After 1924 the politics of the Soviet government turn against  all the principles of the Bolshevik party that carried out the October Revolution and led the successful defence of the new non-capitalist workers state against the imperialists and reactionaries of the surrounding world and Old Russia.

The best brief account of the general development can be found in Trotsky's book The Revolution Betrayed (1936)  (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/index.htm)

The Stalinist bureaucracy instituted a new regime in the Soviet Union that Trotsky and the Left Opposition characterized as politically counter-revolutionary, although on a non-capitalist economic foundation. In other words, the USSR remained a workers state, but was run by a degenerate and counter-revolutionary regime

The catastrophe of the Nazi capture of power in Germany in 1933, resulting largely from the appalling anti-Marxist leadership provided by the German Communist party following orders from Moscow - Social-Democracy was called the main enemy of the German working class, rather than Nazism - drove Trotsky and his comrades to conclude that the Third International was beyond recovery and led them to prepare the foundation of a new working-class socialist international - the Fourth International. This was achieved in 1938, and the founding document - the Transitional Programme, "The Death Agony of Capitalism" (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/index.htm)- is the best short presentation of modern Marxist perspectives in the imperialist world after the victories of Stalin and Hitler. That is in a world dominated by counter-revolutionary regimes from the US to the USSR. At the same time as the world was split into two antagonistic economic camps - capitalist-imperialist in the US and Europe, and non-capitalist  (what we could call proto-socialist) in the Soviet Union.

Slutwalk and sectarianism

On FaceBook, Juan G posted a link to an analysis of Slutwalk:

http://www.yasminnair.net/content/slutwalk-end-feminism "If Slutwalk is to remain relevant, it needs to become more than a gathering where people share stories about their abuse. Without a critical self-awareness and a willingness to address and act upon the structural, economic, and political problems that face women and others, Slutwalk is in danger of becoming the Halloween of feminism: the one day of the year when women feel empowered to dress in scanty clothes and call themselves sluts, but which leaves them without the power with which to actually make and create the kind of change that goes beyond an Obama slogan.

There is nothing insignificant about the demand that people not be harassed or worse for how they dress, but reclaiming “slut” is only the beginning. There is a particularly vapid form of activism that has overtaken the left-progressive world, where mostly people of colour and other oppressed groups engage in “story-telling.” This works like a drum circle, an endless chanting of personal woes that drowns out the structural components of capitalism, and allows for the construction of a fiercer, more powerful neoliberalism that uses the realm of the personal to erase our consciousness of the destruction of our social, political, and economic resources." - a thought-provoking piece ;0

I made the following comment:


We can see it a bit like this... Every powerful movement covers a broad spectrum, from very radical to ultra-cautious, and the more powerful and long-term it is, the more kaleidoscopic and varied the colours and pieces making up the mosaic. Important historical movements affecting huge numbers of people (like universal democratic issues such as national independence, freedom of association and expression, and women's emancipation) include tendencies so clearly delimited from each other that they seem to be totally incompatible, even if they are mainstream in relation to the extremes. 
Slutwalk is one of these apparently separate mainstream trends. It doesn't advocate a castration for every rape, for instance, and it doesn't hide in the gut of male chauvinism like some ultra-respectable tapeworm, so it's not extreme. But it seems incompatible with rational class-based socialist programmes for women's liberation.
So let's not see it as a threat to feminism, but as a partial ally, doing our work for us in places we can't and don't really want to reach. Not the way we would do it, naturally, but nonetheless.
In the 1926 General Strike in Britain the students were out fighting the workers and scabbing alongside the cops and troops. In 1968 they weren't. In some situations the petty bourgeoisie goes rabid and supports the most brutal exploitation of the workers and farmers - Germany and Italy in the 1930s, say. In others it sides with the broad masses and boosts the forces of emancipation - Russia 1917, Cuba 1959, for instance. In yet others it vacillates - as in Venezuela today where the petty bourgeois nationalist military leadership opposes imperialism and its local lackeys.
Our job is to explain, agitate and lead working women and girls in a revolutionary socialist movement for women's emancipation. We haven't really started in this task yet, so naturally people who want to see things change join what's available and visible. Like Slutwalk.
Slutwalk and similar movements show us what gets people angry and on their feet, and reveal all sorts of creativity and humour in mobilization that we're not too good at ourselves. 
Hell, I welcome the appearance of extremes! It shows things are happening, things are moving. If we handle the extremes well it gives us a perfect opportunity to define our own position as clear and rational - that is, as the most attractive and human position to take.
We need to get out of the habit of smacking down every trend in the broad movement that riles us. It's defensive and sectarian. And if we can't handle the variety and human cussedness in our own movement, how the hell will we be able to handle the variety and cussedness of real world society when the capitalists have been kicked out and we get to run the country??

Women against rape who don't want Assange extradited

Interesting article in the Guardian entitled “We are Women Against Rape but we do not want Julian Assange extradited”:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/23/women-against-rape-julian-assange

I commented:

Proportionality is the key to a rational understanding of this affair. And the disproportionate and unusual aspects of the prosecution of this case are made very clear by Naomi Wolf in this article: http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/something-rotten-in-the-state-of-sweden-8-big-problems-with-the-case-against-assange-by-naomi-wolf/
A rational understanding of the affair is of course not the key to its resolution. That lies in a powerful political confrontation of the reactionary and inhuman forces hounding Assange by those fighting for justice and humanity. It is good to see that imperialist states (Sweden, Britain and the US) by no means have things all their own way in this conflict. Their material interests (extracting profit from us at all costs at the expense of our lives and dignity, and violently and deceitfully defending this robbery) confront ours head-on (the Marikana massacre is a recent blatant example of this - the Sharpeville of the Black Bourgeoisie). But although they have the upper hand as yet with their jealously guarded monopoly of violence and propaganda, they are constrained by self-interest to observe certain rights and freedoms allowing us to organize and agitate against them (it's called bourgeois democracy and it's necessary for capitalism to work optimally, and it enrages them as much as competition does, and is just as frequently disregarded by them if they can get away with it).
In this case the material interests ranged against the imperialists include those of exploited minor capitalist states (neo- and semi-colonies like Ecuador), and even the strategic interests of more powerful uppity competitor states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, for instance), so Assange is not solely dependent on public opinion or rags like the Guardian for his safety and defence.
The shocking thing here is really the imperialists' complete lack of concern for women subjected to rape and violence. There has been no massive, long-term campaign in any of the media attacking Assange (and going on about the sanctity of arrest warrants and legal procedure) to highlight and combat the scourge of oppressive everyday sexual practices. Date rape, marriage rape, repressive laws (Oil ally Saudi criminalizing women drivers, say, or the US witch-hunting of professionals providing abortion and sex advice), sneering and smearing attitudes demeaning and humiliating women at work, etc. If what Assange is accused of were taken seriously by the propagandists using it to attack freedom of speech and of information, then they would be permanently apoplectic at the behaviour of the thousands of men in our laddish, macho cultural world who refuse to wear condoms, force themselves on drunk or sleepy or unwilling partners, and never ever ask for explicit permission to get their leg over.

Assange, material interests and rational discourse

There's a good article by Seamus Milne in the Guardian today. “Don't lose sight of why the US is out to get Julian Assange”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/21/why-us-is-out-to-get-assange?

I commented:

This article is simple and straightforward. Its foundation is the potential consequences for Assange of the material threat posed by his Wikileaks activity to the material interests of the US and its allies, including Britain and Sweden. These consequences are manifestly terrifying. The most evidence for this is the treatment being handed out to Bradley Manning and the whole procedure of extraordinary rendition. In the name of proportion it considers this aspect of the affair to outweigh the elements touted as central by the anti-Assange lobby - law, the legal system, and the rights of women. And the need for justice to be enforced to the letter. Proportionality reveals that this mountain of abstractions is wobbling atop a speck of fly shit in terms of substantial violation of law, legality and the rights of women - the shit is there, but if we compare every component of the accusations being made with similar or worse misdemeanours we know to be committed all day every day but which are never brought to court or given the same headline treatment, then we can see it is a speck of fly shit. No serious drive to discourage rape or other violence against women would use the methods or tone of the anti-Assange campaign or spray ideological filth all over the arena. 

In this affair substantial material interests are at stake, and it's worth noting that in such conflicts rational discourse is not the way things are done. People fight for their interests (or what they think are their interests) using any means they can. The British state spends thousands of pounds on an unprecedented show of police force around the Ecuadorian embassy, for instance. No rational discourse there. 

What we can do, in the interests of rationality, is to analyse the degree of reason in the arguments put forward by the conflicting sides. Where substantial state interests are concerned there is no such thing as an impartial judge, history is clear on that, so our analysis won't decide any conflict, but it will show us which side is closer to reality and the truth, and so which side is most likely to emerge victorious in the long run.

The US, Britain and Sweden will claim they are closest to truth and justice even while they are tumbling into the dustbin of history, and will heckle and bully the world to believe them.

But they look more and more like incompetent enemy agent Chico Marx in Duck Soup when he says: "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"

On Julian Assange seeking asylum in Ecuador

There's a trite little article in the Guardian purporting to give a Swedish view of the Assange case.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/16/julian-assange-few-friends-left-sweden
I commented:

Karin Olsson ignores the most important factors in this case.

The first and most obvious - the elephant in the room, the big picture - is the proportionality. 

Assange is NOT under official suspicion of any crime in Sweden. He is NOT charged with any crime, let alone absconding from a trial or a sentence. The offences in relation to which he is wanted for questioning BEAR NO RELATION to the issues relating to his fear of a miscarriage of justice leading to his rendition to the USA, neither in substance nor proportionality. Potential exemplary punishment of bad sexual behaviour during an otherwise consensual encounter would be better exacted in a case WITHOUT THE POLITICAL AND STRATEGIC ASPECTS of this one. 

In this case the severity and seriousness of the political and strategic tensions involved are beyond dispute, which can't be said for the severity and seriousness of the alleged sexual crimes involved. 

Sweden has a concrete record of handing people over to the USA in collaboration with the CIA in breach of international law - the case of the extraordinary rendition of two Egyptians in 2001 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition#Sweden) is the most flagrant.

The USA has demonstrated very clearly the kind of treatment Assange can expect if it gets hold of him by its treatment of Bradley Manning. Manning is alleged to have supplied Wikileaks with a great number of secret US documents. Assange is the head of Wikileaks and therefore responsible for annulling the secrecy not just of these documents but all the documents published on Wikileaks, most (but not all) of which are diplomatically and politically embarrassing to the USA. So Assange can reasonably expect even harsher treatment. 

And since threats should taken into account where a reasonable assessment of fear is concerned, the threats of execution and assassination made by senior public officials in the US are highly relevant.

There's a good article in the Guardian by Mark Weisbrot about the situation now:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/16/julian-assange-asylum-ecuador

Judging China using western economic criteria

China is different - as I argue below in a FaceBook discussion

China's epic hangover begins - Telegraph

www.telegraph.co.uk

China's credit bubble has finally popped. The property market is swinging wildly from boom to bust, the cautionary exhibit of a BRIC's dream that is at last coming down to earth with a thud.

December 15, 2011 at 10:53am

Choppa Morph China can't be judged using western economic criteria. In the first place western economic theory is bollocks - they can't understand their own economy (nation-based imperialism and world capitalism) for starters - just look at the mess in the US and Europe that they are helpless before and can't give any coherent explanation for. In the second place - and I assert this with tremendous confidence - China is not fundamentally capitalist. It's still a deformed workers state. The Stalinist USSR degenerated monstrously in the political field, less in the economic. China is monstrously deformed economically, less in the political field (Trotsky made direct comparisons with fascism, and was right - this can't be done with China, however much we detest its repression.
So it's a proto-socialist state that is mismanaging this appallingly - cos it doesn't understand or want to understand Marx's economic theory. But as such it isn't subject to capitalist laws of investment or credit. Above all it doesn't need to subject itself to western-style demands for short and medium term returns on infrastructural/large-scale productive investment. The USSR outperformed all the imperialists in terms of pave of development throughout the 30s. (Good stuff on this in The Revolution Betrayed by Trotsky, of course.)
Mistakes will be made and losses and lurches - how not?! - but they will have nothing   the effect such things have in the imperialist world.
If China fucks up it will be because of political action by the top bureaucracy changing horses and selling out to imperialism - as in the USSR. I don't think the conditions for this are present now, for lots of reasons. The most obvious one at the moment is that imperialism is an visibly stinking and bubbling economic cesspool and who would voluntarily jump into that? The top bureaucrats can do very well thank you expanding their present positions as is.

December 15, 2011 at 10:53am ·   ·  1

Kriya Zur I don't think real estate and "property market" constitutes fixed capital investments... That is allowed greater flexibility in China than fixed Capital investments . Additionally, since land below the structure is all nationalized in China the real estate market appears very different than what it does in India which also means that the property market "swindling" in China would have much lesser effect

December 15, 2011 at 11:58am · 

R H S ‎> since land below the structure is all nationalized in China...
Just   in Australia....

December 15, 2011 at 12:06pm · 

Kriya Zur Eminent domain ?

December 15, 2011 at 12:07pm · 

Kriya Zur ‎@Robert : What acc. to you would be non-capitalist ownership of land then ?

December 15, 2011 at 12:24pm · 

R H S Not sure if state ownership is necessarily non-capitalist. In Australia you only can rent land, not buy. This gives income to the state and a certain 'grip' on real estate, but the overall effect does not seem to be very different from owning land and pay taxes over it perceived value.

December 15, 2011 at 12:45pm · 

Kriya Zur That still doesn't answer my question. Presuming that government ownership of land is merely another form of capitalism where private property technically doesn't exist, what then IS non-capitalist property ? Also there's a contradiction and vagueness in your comment you say that the government has a "grip" over real estate but then say that "the overall effects don't seem to be very different from owning land and pay taxes over it perceived value" . The contradiction is that there is no ownership of land by private persons and all land is owned by the government so how is the tenant able to SELL the land which he does not own ?

December 15, 2011 at 12:57pm · 

R H S The very word property is a capitalist concept, so I'm at a loss what you're looking for.
When the stae owns all land, the possesor of a certain piece of land does not sell, it, but just passes the lease contract to somebody else. He can charge whatever he  s, providing he finds a candidate. I assume however that 'the state' (/municipality/whatever) has a veto. Not very different from the western concept where the state may veto or regulate the *use* of any land, whoever the owner.

December 15, 2011 at 1:04pm · 

O C China is not so strong than we believe. Not all people live well. There is a big difference between towns and country. The last people live   Mao´s times.

December 15, 2011 at 3:11pm · 

Adhiraj Bose ‎@Robert : There cannot not be a Socialist property that is an impossibility. Every social form be it Capitalist or Socialist is based on how property is used and organized. In fact the very difference between systems in how property is organized between one and the other. Capitalism differs from Feudalism in that it can be freely transferred and owned by private persons excersizing their free will based on their wealth rather than their birth as it was with feudal nobility. Under Socialism the private aspect of ownership logically would stand abolished in favor of Social ownership. In transition this necessarily means the state having complete ownership of property. More important than that of course ... is who controls the state i.e. which class controls the state.

December 15, 2011 at 5:09pm · 

R H S Evidently we live a world apart, both geographically and historically. When we had a feudal system, in what we call the Middle Ages, a big and wealthy middle class existed and they transferred property between them all the time.
"Social ownership" as in 'Everything belongs to all of us and nobody is responsable'? I wish you a great future.
The question 'Which class controls the state' reveals where you're coming from; in a functional democracy there are no classes and the state is controilled by whover won the last elections.
BTW My son H S lived in Pune the last half year!

December 15, 2011 at 7:39pm · 

Kriya Zur ‎@Robert : Read up some English history then :-) and see how Common law came into existence. On the point of 'responsibility' have you heard of such things as COOPERATIVES ! :-) *( P.S : Amul cooperative is a $3bn enterprise :) )

December 16, 2011 at 9:35am ·  

Cuba - imperialism, bureaucracy, socialism

An article in Havana Times dealt with some pressing issues, and got a dismissive "workers control of the workplace" response, so I responded to both the article and the comment.

Cuba: Counter-revolution vs. Socialist Utopia

http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=58814 

Pedro Campos
HAVANA TIMES, Jan 1 — The genuine counter-revolution doesn’t conceal itself, it protests openly against socialist utopia with arguments like this:

“No. It’s not possible. It can’t be done under the current conditions. We cannot develop large-scale cooperativism, self-management and the consequent democratization of society. The objective and subjective conditions don’t exist.

“We have to first develop capitalism, letting domestic and foreign capital develop the country. They will return to modernize the sugar industry and all other industries, ports and communications for us, though we need a strong and organized working class. Furthermore, imperialism is right here; it could easily appropriate self-managed cooperatives and enterprises and take advantage of democratization to get rid of the historic leaders and put the old oligarchy back in power.”
Those who express such notions — and reveal their leanings toward the new Chinese imperialism — cannot even fool elementary school children. In any case, imperialism, which is one sole entity, can paint itself blue, yellow or red and it would be very easy to appropriate the assets of the government.

These assets belong to “all” in words, but which in truth, the only ones who feel like they are owners are the members of the bureaucratic class, who are increasingly isolated from the people.

If properties belong to the people — to individuals or collectives, to work groups or community groups, to freely associated workers or the self-employed — then all of this would indeed be very difficult for imperialism.

It would not be the same to confront and expropriate a bureaucratic state, ready and willing to share economic power with foreign capital, as it would be to take on people who own the means of production and control their destiny.

The supporters of statism spout a line that sounds orthodoxly Marxist (“the great development of the productive forces of capitalism and the wealth it generates is what will bring on socialism”).

Yet they have destroyed the country’s economy, squandered its resources and compelled its youth, professionals and technicians trained by the Cultural Revolution to choose between leaving the country or selling churros [strips of fried dough] and ice cream cones.

They have in fact become the main brake on the development of new forms of socialist production.

The enemies of de-statization are opposed to the turning over the management and control of the profits of state-run enterprises to workers’ councils. The statists are the ones who are blocking the establishment of an extensive cooperative law for industry and services, while at the same time they prioritize wage exploitation by private wealth.

They are preventing the elimination of the multitude of absurd state monopoly regulations on the market, rejecting the urgently needed unification of the currency and impeding other changes.

In short, they are the ones who are retarding the development and strengthening of the Cuban revolutionary process. They are obstructing the socialization and democratization of economic and political power.

Whether they achieve their objectives or not, only time will tell. What is clear is that many young people, workers, professionals, technicians, homemakers and retirees who have spent their lives for this lamentable system of “state socialism” are unwilling to continue putting up with the deceit.

They’re demanding radical changes to the state-centric economic and social policies of the party/government.

These same people from below — on their own and without waiting for the readiness or approval of the established bureau-bourgeoisie — are carrying out various life-important economic, social, cultural and political initiatives outside of state institutions.

It is within those institutions where many are grabbing on, attempting to control everything possible in society while accusing their opponents complicity with the imperialist enemy.

Any initiatives from outside bureaucratic control are met with the slogan, “Either you are with us, or you are with the imperialist enemy.” For them, then, there are no more options.

One has to ask themself: Who have been the true accomplices of the imperialist enemy?

Have they been those who have shown through their policies that “socialism” — which has never existed — has been a social, economic and political disaster. Are they those who have succeeded in making most people not even want to hear the word “socialism”? Those who have made Latin Americans reject socialism as an approach to people bettering their lives and living more freely?

Are the true accomplices of the imperialist enemy those of us who want socializing and democratizing changes now, with less state and bureaucratic control over the economy and politics?

Alternatively, are they the supporters of counter-revolutionary immobilism, who are counting on foreign investment and private capitalism to save their state-centered bureaucratic wage-labor model of the neo-Stalinist cut, to later “try” to reintroduce the cycle of bourgeoisie expropriation by the “working class”?

Are the accomplices of the enemy the ones who have never set out to change production relations of capitalism?

Are they the ones who wish to deepen the revolution and change everything that resists it or are they those who in the name of change don’t want to change anything, so that everything remains the same, especially the same bureaucracy that has held political power for a half a century and has led the country to the current disaster?

Are they the ones who turn to various forms of violence and repression to combat those who peacefully advocate different ideas?

Likewise, the following will also have to be answered: Can the majority of those old, reactionary, conservative, stiff and accustomed brains, with their old, authoritarian, bureaucratic-centralism-educated ways of command and control change their mindsets, as is demanded by those at the heights of power when self-recognizing the incapacity of the centralized system?

Wouldn’t it be better to set aside those stuck in neo-Stalinism thought and instead empower the people, the younger generations, to democratically develop new forms of social, economic and political organization and new leaders demanded by the changing situation, instead of seeking a “cadre policy” aimed at ensuring the perpetuation of “everything that must be changed”?

I hope the party conference this January will help in finding answers to these questions, whether by action or omission.

2 RESPONSES TO “CUBA: COUNTER-REVOLUTION VS. SOCIALIST UTOPIA”

1. Grady Ross Daugherty says:

   January 3, 2012 at 2:32 am

   Like all Marxists, comrade Pedro apparently believes that only state property is socialist, and that socialist property can only be that owned by the state. The fact that he calls for democratic running of state-owned enterprise by the workers does not alter the fact that he is, in a programmatic sense, a state monopoly socialist.

   The old Utopians made the programmatic error of abolishing private productive property rights immediately. Those entering their exemplary communes put everything into the communal pot, and this was going to show the world how communism could be exampled and built right now, without a multi-generation bridge to is elimination.

   The Marxists speak of socialism as a bridge to a society without private property, then force the abolition of private property onto society at the beginning of the bridge journey. It has never worked.

   Marxism makes the same programmatic error as the Utopians, by making everything productive common, state property, as did Cuba by 1968. Pedro Campos still cannot understand that workers can only achieve democratic self-management of the workplace by owning it directly. He clings to the fantasy that someday, somehow the workers could and would achieve workplace democracy under state monopoly ownership socialism.

   Reply
   • 
     

     
     

     THIS IS MY RESPONSE:

     
     

     January 4, 2012 at 4:57 am

     Grady thinks that direct workers ownership of the workplace will bring socialism. If that ownership is capitalist – which it will be if the state hasn’t expropriated the capitalist bourgeoisie – then the workers will start off exploiting themselves and before long transform themselves into capitalists using the labour of workers imported from outside the workplace. This is anarchist, autonomist utopianism.

     
     But for a state to expropriate capitalism, it can’t be a bourgeois state – the bourgeoisie won’t expropriate itself. Individual bourgeois rivals – of course! But not the whole class. And to create a non-bourgeois non-capitalist state you need an anti-capitalist revolution that tears the means of production (land, factories, finance) out of the hands of the bourgeoisie, and takes them into its own hands defending them against the raging bourgeoisie/imperialism by force of arms.

     
     The problem of a non-capitalist state run by a reactionary privileged bureaucracy is one facing every workers (plus peasants) revolution. Revolutions can degenerate, and the harsher the pressure from imperialism, and the less well-developed the material preconditions for modern production, the easier this degeneration is. This was seen in the USSR in the 1920s in the losing battle fought by the revolutionary Left Opposition against the degenerating Stalin-led wing of the Communist Party. The defeat of the revolutionaries led to the political degeneration of the USSR and ultimately to its capitulation to imperialism in 1991. And made the successful anti-capitalist revolutions in Yugoslavia, Vietnam and China deformed from the start, since they took the degenerated Soviet Union as their model. No workers democracy – in fact, anything but workers democracy!

     
     Before the threat of imperialist restoration in China (the biggest threat) or Cuba (most important for Latin America and the Americas including the US) can be properly tackled, all this historical experience needs to be examined, understood and assimilated. Which means spreading and discussing in depth the issues and arguments in the 1920s when the revolutionary fire was still bright in the Soviet Union. Which means discussing the Left Opposition and most significantly the arguments and positions of its leader, Leon Trotsky, whose role in the October Revolution together with Lenin can be compared to the teamwork of Fidel and Che in Cuba, with the difference that Lenin and Trotsky were incomparably better versed in Marxism and more deeply rooted in working class revolutionary activity.

     
     Pedro passes over this completely. And this makes his well-meaning words a bit like foam on the waves. History and the workers revolutionary movement are the ocean and the Gulf Stream, speeches detached from these are liable to be flung in the air by a rock and swept away by the wind.