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User avatar
By Parvus
#13242322
Guerilla warfare is just a tactic for fighting against the state, which heavily depends on rural support. Which is irrelevant to socialism since it is heavily an urban movement. Socialism must be the majority's rule, and it is only created by the working class movement. Which guerilla warfare has nothing to do. Millions of workers cannot implement guerilla warfare.

The real and the only weapon of the working class is the mass strike. Mass strikes damage capitalism at its very core, where it is created in the first place. More than that, the mass strikes teach the working class how to establish their own rule. In almost all mass strikes which last for more than just a few days, the workers themselves began to organize the production: production and distribution of food, public transport etc. In the Paris Commune and especially the Russian revolutions, they in fact founded their very own state. Which completely differs from the bourgeouis state with its wider democracy, precautions against bureaucratization and a new type of army consisting of armed workers. The mass strike carries the potentials for both the destruction of the current state and the birth of a new one.

The Cuban revolution was indeed a revolution, but definitely not a socialist one. Even Castro claimed that theirs was a communist revolution 2 years after the revolution. At first, he even openly stated that they were not communists: "I know the world thinks of us, we are Communists, and of course I have said very clear that we are not Communists; very clear." Then, when it became clear that the USA was not going to support them in any ways, they turned their faces towards Russia and claimed to have become communist. Ironic, but typical for a national movement.

As the Cuban experience has shown us, guerilla warfare can be useful for a nation liberation movement. But only at times when the current state is almost tearing apart on its own. Other than that, it's pretty difficult to takeover the government with a bunch of guerillas.

And I shall repeat that it's nothing like socialism. It didn't destroy the state, but it was a takeover. And more importantly, it didn't transform the society, or the working class itself. Because they were only passive supporters of the guerillas. Direct action is the way to change, not passive support.

goldberk wrote:
But it is for that very reason why a socialist state is an oxymoron, the imposition of a minority view/interest on a majoraty cannot be socialist. During the time of the hague congress of the first international, marx and his followers finally and for good departed from the socialist lineiage, the embracing of state power and parlimentry means is and was in direct contrast with socialost thought, this is why marxists are not socialists.

It's not an oxymoron. What Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and co said was, that the socialist state is not an imposition of a minority on a majority, but the opposite. It is built to suppress the minority, not the majority. And that's the reason why it has to wither away. You don't need a state machinery to suppress the minority forever. Once you can abolish the bonds of capitalism, the state is no more needed.

But the point here is that, the working class cannot takeover the current state, which is a bourgeouis state and transform it for its own interests. The current state's purpose is to suppress the majority against the minority, it was built according to that purpose. It's useless for the working class. Instead of taking it over and trying to transform it, the working class should destroy it and build its own, temporary state-like mechanism.

Lenin's work "The State and Revolution" is a great source for Marxist theory of state. Those who haven't read it should definitely take a look.
User avatar
By ingliz
#13242399
I would argue for a synthesis of Koroptokin and anarcho-primitivism, such a system would have no fundamental relation with capitalist forms of production.

Kropotkin's vision of an anarchic society retains the complexity, integration, and interdependence of a modern industrial economy. He does not reject 'large scale' production and retreat into pastoralism. This seems to be in complete opposition to the anarcho primitivists who maintain that "the enormous size, complex interconnections and stratification of tasks which make up modern technological systems make authoritarian command necessary and independent, individual decision-making impossible."

How will you effect a synthesis of two opposites?

the market is nothing but a term to describe a set of relations and exchanges

A market is an opportunity to trade.

In anarcho-communism:

Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread wrote:...houses, fields, and factories will no longer be private property, and that they will belong to the commune or the nation and money, wages, and trade would be abolished.

Barter:

I talk about methods of exchange not based on money such as barter

A barter economy is not a gift economy, barter means money, the idea that you should use trade as the basic means of distributing goods leads effectively to the creation of money.
User avatar
By Goldberk
#13247588
"Only anarcho-primitivism opposes civilization, the context within which the various forms of oppression proliferate and become pervasive - and, indeed, possible."


An opposition to civilization is not a recipiee for grubs and roots barbarism.

"Technology is not a simple tool which can be used in any way we like. It is a form of social organization, a set of social relations. It has its own laws. If we are to engage in its use, we must accept its authority. The enormous size, complex interconnections and stratification of tasks which make up modern technological systems make authoritarian command necessary and independent, individual decision-making impossible."


There are many anarcho primativists who can differentiate between technology, and technological forms of production and relations, and can theorise ways that technologies can be used withion radically different relations, however i do hold it to be true that the relations touched on in the above passage are fundamental in creating the space for authoritarian forms of social organization.

Primitive anarchy begins to be dismantled by civilized social relations... number, language, time, art and later, agriculture - [are] the means of transition from human freedom to a state of domestication.


I don't agree with all of this. Agriculture allowed specific forms of social orhanization, it did not make them inevetible, as for time, a critique of time and its use within civilization for subjugation is usefull.

The real and the only weapon of the working class is the mass strike.


Why a weapon that only bargins for a better position in an unjust set of social relations

the mass strikes teach the working class how to establish their own rule.


Or the rule of union oligarchies.

The mass strike carries the potentials for both the destruction of the current state and the birth of a new one.


However the essentaial charataristics of the "state" remain, hierachaey, oppression and minority rule.

How will you effect a synthesis of two opposites?


The two are not as far apart as you might think.

The more essental elements of the primitivist view concern the rejection of "civilization" and civilized norms, such as the family, concepts of gender and childhood, divison of labour, time etc, it is those elements combined with Koroptokin economics.

A market is an opportunity to trade.


A market is a description of trade, it exists only when trade takes place not before or after.

A barter economy is not a gift economy, barter means money, the idea that you should use trade as the basic means of distributing goods leads effectively to the creation of money.


No. It leads to an econemy based on co-operation, ecxhange between groups and individuals is essential, to expect that exchange is ever only one way is absurd at the very least staus and esteem are traded for goods. "Mutual Aid" contains elements of this.
User avatar
By ingliz
#13247673
Those who proudly proclaim their 'total opposition' to all compromise, all authority, all organisation, all theory, all technology, etc., usually turn out to have no revolutionary perspective whatsoever -- no practical conception of how the present system might be overthrown or how a post-revolutionary society might work. Some even attempt to justify this lack by declaring that a mere revolution could never be radical enough to satisfy their eternal ontological rebelliousness. Such all-or-nothing bombast may temporarily impress a few spectators, but its ultimate effect is simply to make people blasé.
(Knabb, The Poverty of Primitivism)

Agriculture allowed specific forms of social organization, it did not make them inevitable

Industrial agricuture requires specific forms of social organisation, without them industrial agricuture would not be possible. It is a complex operation, integrated with, and dependent on other sectors of the modern industrial economy

Marx, Das Kapital Vol.III wrote:production proceeds under definite material conditions which are, however, simultaneously the bearers of definite social relations

Marx, The Gundrisse wrote:A distinct mode of production thus determines the specific mode of consumption, distribution, exchange and the specific relations of these different phases to one another.


A practical argument:

30,000 years ago hunter-gatherer behavior fed 6 million people
3,000 years ago primitive agriculture fed 60 million people
300 years ago intensive agriculture fed 600 million people
Today industrial agriculture feeds 6 billion people

Primitive agriculture would not be efficient enough to feed everyone, that is certain, so we can assume a transition period after the primitivist revolution?

I mean, you wouldn't set up 'death camps' to deliberately kill off the excess population or stand around, twiddling your thumbs, doing nothing to alleviate famine. Six billion people, or more, are a lot of mouths to fill without resorting to industrial farming methods.

You would want that transition period to allow for the necessary die off to take place slowly, and naturally, so as not to scare the populace into counterrevolution, wouldn't you?

If that is your intent;

"and if what primitivists argue about technology, industry and mass society are all true, then any primitivist transition would, by definition, not be libertarian. This is because "mass society" will have to remain for some time (at the very least decades, more likely centuries) after a successful revolution and, consequently from a primitivist perspective, be based on forms of coercion and control.

There is an ideology which proclaims the need for a transitional system which will be based on coercion, control and hierarchy which will, in time, disappear into a stateless society. It also, like primitivism, stresses that industry and large scale organisation is impossible without hierarchy and authority."

Can you guess what that other ideology is? ;)

Shamelessly nicked from here

The more essental elements of the primitivist view concern the rejection of "civilization"

Here, identified, are several essential elements of "civilisation"

In 1936, the archeologist V. Gordon Childe published his book Man Makes Himself. Childe identified several elements which he believed were essential for a civilization to exist. He included: the plow, wheeled cart and draft animals, sailing ships, the smelting of copper and bronze, a solar calendar, writing, standards of measurement, irrigation ditches, specialized craftsmen, urban centers and a surplus of food necessary to support non-agricultural workers who lived within the walls of the city. Childe's list concerns human achievements and pays less attention to human organization.

If you are rejecting civilisation, you are, among other things, rejecting the plough, wheeled cart and draft animals, sailing ships, the smelting of copper and bronze, a solar calendar, writing, standards of measurement, irrigation ditches, and specialised craftsmen.

There are many anarcho primativists who can differentiate between technology, and technological forms of production and relations

In your utopia being able to differentiate between technology, and technological forms of production and relations wouldn't really matter, would it? It would be an empty intellectual exercise.

If you are rejecting the plough, wheeled cart and draft animals, sailing ships, the smelting of copper and bronze, a solar calendar, writing, standards of measurement, irrigation ditches, and specialised craftsmen, you are rejecting industrial production.

I would argue for a synthesis of Koroptokin and anarcho-primitivism

Why even bother going 'Kropotkin'?

You have already rejected Kropotkin's gift economy; his federally organised 'state', made up of temporary, semi-permanent, and permanently sitting committees; his advanced industrial economic base; the nation, and nationally owned production.



Your ideas, to put it kindly, are very confused, impractical and ill thought out.
User avatar
By Parvus
#13249606
goldberk wrote:
Why a weapon that only bargins for a better position in an unjust set of social relations

It's more than that actually. It's an attack to the core of the system. Yes, it may be used for bargaining, but when that doesn't work and the strike gets longer, the working class people start organizing the society on their own.
Or the rule of union oligarchies.

Not really. In a revolutionary moment, the union leaders "betray" the strikes. Then comes the crucial point which the people will decide whether to continue the strike on their own or let it be drowned.
That's pretty much why we need a revolutionary party after all.
However the essentaial charataristics of the "state" remain, hierachaey, oppression and minority rule.

No, a state built from below by the working class can be an antidote to that.
User avatar
By ingliz
#13249867
No

Barter: The origins of Money;

Direct barter, the spontaneous form of exchange, signifies the beginning of the transformation of use-values into commodities rather than the transformation of commodities into money.
(Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)

Nomad races are the first to develop the money-form, because all their worldly goods consist of moveable objects and are therefore directly alienable; and because their mode of life, by continually bringing them into contact with foreign communities, solicits the exchange of products.
(Marx, Capital, Vol. 1)

In fact, the exchange of commodities evolves originally not within primitive communities, but on their margins, on their borders, the few points where they come into contact with other communities...This is where barter begins and moves thence into the interior of the community, exerting a disintegrating influence upon it. The particular use-values which, as a result of barter between different communities, become commodities, e.g., slaves, cattle, metals, usually serve also as the first money within these communities.
(Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)

The first transformation of the commodity into money brings about the second transformation of money into a commodity.
User avatar
By Tainari88
#13249898
Quite true Ingliz. Money becomes a commodity. When before it wasn't. Good point.
User avatar
By Kasu
#13286820
http://www.wsws.org/exhibits/castro/index.htm

Bill Vann in Castroism and the Politics of Petty Bourgeois Nationalism wrote:Castroism has been the subject of immense confusion, not a small part of it created by the Pabloite revisionist tendency which emerged within the Fourth International. The Pabloites presented -- and some of them still present -- Castroism as a new road to socialism, as confirmation that the socialist revolution could be carried out, and a workers' state established, without the conscious participation of the working class.

Led by Joseph Hansen in the US and Ernest Mandel in Europe, the Pabloite revisionists abandoned the struggle for revolutionary leadership in the working class, and ceded the historical tasks of the proletariat in the backward countries to the petty-bourgeois nationalists.

In so doing, they helped prepare some of the most terrible defeats suffered by the working class in the latter half of the 20th century.

The International Committee of the Fourth International waged an implacable struggle against this perspective, thereby defending and developing the theoretical and political weapons forged by Marxism over the whole previous period. Involved in this struggle were the most essential questions relating to the tasks of Marxists.

Our movement fought against those who saw Marxism merely as a means of discovering, describing and adapting themselves to supposedly unstoppable objective processes that were compelling other, non-working class, forces to lead the struggle for socialism. It defended the perspective that the only road to socialism lay in building revolutionary parties, based on the international proletariat, in a relentless struggle against the dominant bureaucracies and petty-bourgeois leaderships, no matter how powerful or popular they might appear.

In dealing with Castroism 35 years later, we are entitled to ask who was right in this dispute? Did Castroism provide a new road to socialism or did it turn out to be a blind alley and a trap for the working class? What were the consequences of the Pabloites' renunciation of the role of the working class and its conscious revolutionary vanguard? We will take the opportunity in this lecture to review this strategic experience and its lessons for the working class movement...


The roots of the Cuban Revolution

Like every major event, the revolution led by Fidel Castro in 1959 had deep roots in preceding historical developments. These historical roots, generally ignored by the cheerleaders of Castro among the Pabloites and the petty-bourgeois left in general, must be examined to understand the class content and political significance of Castroism.

Cuba's history was shaped principally by the abortive character of its independence struggle, which effectively transferred its status from a colonial possession of moribund Spanish colonialism, to an economic and political semi-colony of the rising imperialist power, the United States.

The US intervened in Cuba in 1898 following a 30-year war waged for Cuban independence. The intervention was short and decisive. The Spanish were relieved of their colonies in the Treaty of Paris, a settlement in which the Cubans themselves had no participation.

This settlement produced what became known as the Platt Amendment Republic. Named for the US senator who drafted it, the legislation was passed in Washington and then imposed as an amendment to the first Cuban constitution. It included a prohibition against the nominally independent Cuban republic entering into any international treaty deemed prejudicial to US interests. It also guaranteed the US the right to intervene militarily: "for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual liberty, and for discharging the obligations with respect to Cuba imposed by the Treaty of Paris.'' The US would avail itself of this "right" repeatedly in the first part of the 20th century.

Cuba's dependence upon US imperialism was not merely the formal one embodied in the Platt Amendment. It rested upon the Cuban export of sugar to the US market. This single crop accounted for the vast majority of the island's export earnings and was shipped almost exclusively to the United States. The sugar monoculture condemned the majority of the population to backwardness, poverty and chronic unemployment.

The political and social relations that came to prevail in Cuba were bound up with the uncompleted character of the bourgeois democratic struggle for national independence. While Cuba's semi-colonial status was among the more blatant in the world, it was by no means unique.

As the Fourth International was to warn on the eve of the Second World War: "Belated national states can no longer count upon an independent democratic development. Surrounded by decaying capitalism and enmeshed in the imperialist contradictions, the independence of a backward state inevitably will be semi-fictitious and the political regime, under the influence of internal class contradictions and external pressure, will unavoidably fall into dictatorship against the people.''[1]

Another statement, written in the same year, stressed that there was no possibility of ending imperialist oppression outside of the world socialist revolution: "The hopes of liberation of the colonial peoples are therefore bound up even more decisively than before with the emancipation of the workers of the whole world. The colonies shall be freed politically, economically and culturally, only when the workers of the advanced countries put an end to capitalist rule and set out, together with the backward peoples, to reorganize world economy on a new level, gearing it to social needs and not monopoly profits.''[2]

As we shall see, Cuba's subsequent history has proven this thesis, albeit in the negative. Without such a united and international struggle of the working class, genuine economic, political and cultural liberation has proven impossible.

The relationship between the US and Cuba gave rise to a bourgeois political setup which was notable for its impotence, extreme corruption and frequent eruptions of violence. US domination of the economy, combined with a predominance of foreign immigrants in both the business and landowning classes, also bred a Cuban nationalism which was characterized by extreme anti-Americanism and even a xenophobic strain.

Another perspective, however, did emerge in Cuba. In 1925, the Cuban Communist Party was formed, affiliating itself to the Third International. Its most prominent figure was Julio Antonio Mella, a law student who became the leader of a university reform movement in the early 1920s and sought to turn the students to the working class.

Mella and his comrades led the struggle against the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, whom Mella described as a "tropical Mussolini.'' Jailed by the dictatorship, he was freed under popular pressure and then fled the country, traveling to the Soviet Union, Europe and finally Mexico.

Mella broke with the Communist Party in Mexico in 1929, declaring his support for Trotsky's struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy. Shortly thereafter he was assassinated.

Mella had emerged out of a broad movement of Cuban students and intellectuals seeking to change the island's corrupt political system and its domination by US imperialism. But he renounced the prevailing nationalist conceptions and adopted the perspective of socialist internationalism.

Stalinism was to prevent the working class from providing its own solution to Cuba's historic problems based on such a perspective. It can be said, therefore, that Stalinism helped prepare Fidel Castro's rise to power long before he and the Cuban Communist Party ever considered joining forces. By suppressing the perspective for which Mella and the first generation of Cuban Marxists had fought, Stalinism promoted the growth of radical petty-bourgeois nationalism.

In the first lecture at this school, David North dealt at some length with how history consisted, not merely of "what happened" and "who won", but rather, what alternatives existed, what were the consequences of those which were taken and those which were not. What would have happened had the Left Opposition prevailed? The same question can be posed in relation to Cuba, albeit on a smaller scale.

There are limits, of course, on what we can safely say about "what might have been". One cannot assert with any assurance, for example, that had there been a genuine communist party in Cuba, a socialist revolution would have taken place in such and such a year. We can state with certainty, however, that had there existed a genuine revolutionary party of the working class, as opposed to the corrupt political apparatus of Cuban Stalinism, the emergence of the specific tendency known as Castroism would have been impossible.

In the wake of the Stalinist degeneration of the Communist Party in Cuba, the country passed through a profound revolutionary crisis. A nationwide insurrection erupted in 1933, forcing the dictator Machado to flee the country. The high point of this movement was a general strike by the working class, which saw the seizure of factories, sugar mills and estates.

As the general strike grew in intensity and scope, the Stalinist Cuban Communist Party, which dominated the unions, issued a back-to-work order, claiming that the strike threatened to provoke a US intervention. While the vast majority of workers ignored the order, the CP nonetheless entered into secret talks with Machado, obtaining concessions for the party in exchange for its responsible role in seeking to end the walkout.

This deal, short-lived only because of Machado's subsequent flight into exile, was to set a pattern which the CP would follow for the next 25 years. The Stalinists continued their domination of the labor movement, while forging a series of alliances with conservative bourgeois parties and even military regimes. In the 1940s, the Stalinists entered the government of US-backed strongman, Batista.

Castro and Castroism

With Stalinism held in contempt for its collaboration with right-wing parties and dictatorships, the rhetoric of anti-imperialism and social revolution became increasingly the monopoly of radicalized middle class nationalist elements particularly centered among the students of Havana University. It was in this hothouse environment that Fidel Castro got his start.

Born to a Spanish landowning family, Castro's awakening to political life began as a student in a Jesuit high school. There, he came under the influence of Spanish priests who supported Franco fascism. He read all of the works of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Spanish Falange and was, according to his classmates, strongly attracted to fascist ideology.

In the late 40s and early 50s Castro was involved in the activities of the armed student gangs that dominated the university. The ideology of these gangs was both nationalistic and explicitly anti-communist.

Castro entered a struggle against Batista as a member of the bourgeois Ortodoxo Party. He had stood as a candidate to the Cuban legislature in 1952, but Batista's coup of that year thwarted his parliamentary ambitions. He then began organizing a small group of followers for armed action. He led an assault on the Moncada army barracks in July 1953. All of the 200 participants were either killed or jailed.

Castro's actions were not unique. Throughout this period, followers of various parties and petty-bourgeois factions carried out attacks on garrisons, assassination attempts and even the seizure of Batista's palace. There is little in Castro's political statements during the period leading up to the 1959 revolution to differentiate him from the run-of-the-mill politics of anti-Batista Cuban nationalism. His most famous speech, "History will absolve me,'' prepared in his defense at the trial on the Moncada assault, consisted of denunciations of the dictatorship's repression and a list of fairly mild democratic reforms.

Following a brief jail sentence, Castro went to Mexico, from where, at the end of 1956, he organized a landing of some 80 armed men. Like Moncada, the landing was a catastrophe with barely a dozen surviving the first encounters with Batista's repressive forces. Yet, barely two years later Castro was to take power.

Power literally fell into the hands of Castro's guerrillas because there existed no other credible political force on the island.

This political vacuum was a function, above all, of the absence of any revolutionary leadership in the Cuban working class. Whatever the limitations of Castro's reformism, his social policies were far more radical than those put forward by the Stalinists. Moreover, his armed actions, as limited as they were, won wide popular support at a time when the Cuban Stalinists were seen as accomplices of the dictatorship.

Castro's original intentions were to reach an accommodation with the US. On his first trip to the United States, four months after coming to power, Castro declared the following; "I have stated in a clear and definitive manner that we are not communists. The doors are open to private investments that contribute to the development of industry in Cuba. It is absolutely impossible for us to make progress if we do not reach an understanding with the United States.''

Castro's movement, however, had committed itself to a limited agrarian reform as well as social measures to benefit the Cuban people. In its first months it had decreed a redistribution of unused land, a reduction in rents, wage increases and various measures expanding education and health care.

Washington would have none of it.

The US sought to discipline Castro with naked economic pressure. In a spiraling conflict with the Cuban regime, the US cut Cuba's sugar export quota, its principal economic lifeline and then refused to provide it with oil.

The Cuban regime responded with nationalizations, first of US property, then Cuban-owned enterprises, and a turn to the Soviet bureaucracy for assistance.

US foreign policy was rigidly ideological and vindictive. Britain had handled similar developments in a quite different way. African leaders like Nkrumah, Kuanda and Kenyatta were cultivated despite their radical and even "socialist" rhetoric, thereby preserving British imperialism's influence and interests in the region.

Ironically, US arrogance and stupidity has proven to be one of the central pillars of Castro's rule over the past 40 years. They have has allowed him to pose as the embodiment of Cuban nationalism and to cast any opposition as a tool of Yankee imperialism.

Along with the turn to Moscow, Castro forged an alliance with the Cuban Stalinists. This move was hailed by the Pabloites, and the petty-bourgeois left in general, as a further indication of the revolution's radicalization and its socialist character. It was nothing of the sort. As we have seen, Cuba's Popular Socialist Party, as the Stalinists were then known, was a thoroughly reactionary and discredited political force. It represented part of the existing bourgeois political setup in Cuba, having faithfully served even the Batista regime.

Having found himself unexpectedly catapulted into power, Castro turned to the PSP out of necessity. He had neither a party, a program nor even a real army. The Cuban Stalinists provided him with an apparatus and an ideology through which he could rule.

Castro subsequently would reinterpret his own political past, declaring that he had become a "Marxist- Leninist'' long before the Batista coup, though "not quite'' a communist. All of his political adventures, from his days with the armed anti-communist gangs on the university to his campaign as a Congressional candidate for a bourgeois party, were recast as mere tactical initiatives aimed at preparing the conditions for a socialist revolution.

What was it that Castro, as well as other left bourgeois nationalists, found in "Marxism-Leninism"? Clearly, they were not seeking a scientific perspective to guide the struggle of the working class for its own social and political emancipation. At the same time it was more than just a pretense aimed at winning support from Moscow.

They saw the Marxism-Leninism they learned from the Stalinists as a policy which promoted the use of the state to effect desired changes in the social order. They also found in it a justification for their own unrestricted control over this state, ruling through an omnipotent "revolutionary party" headed by an infallible and irreplaceable national leader. It should be recalled that Chiang kai shek also modeled his party, the Kuomintang, on what he learned from Stalinism.


Cuba and the Fourth International

The Cuban revolution proved to be a crucial turning point in the history of the Fourth International.

After leading the struggle against Pabloism in 1953, the American section, the Socialist Workers Party, reunified with the main Pabloite tendency led by Ernest Mandel a decade later. The reunification was based primarily on their common assessment of Castroism and the role of petty-bourgeois nationalism. They determined, based on the nationalization of the bulk of the productive forces in Cuba, that it had become a workers state. Furthermore, they advanced the perspective that Castroism could become an international tendency, giving rise to a new revolutionary leadership of the world working class.

This perspective had implications reaching far beyond Cuba. As Trotsky had pointed out in relation to the debate over the definition of the Soviet state in 1939-1940, behind every sociological definition lies a historical prognosis. Bound up with the designation of Cuba as a workers' state was a break with the entire historical and theoretical conception of the socialist revolution developed from Marx onwards.

In Cuba, power had fallen into the hands of a guerrilla army which was clearly of a petty-bourgeois nationalist character, without any serious ties to the workers. The workers themselves had played no significant role in the formation of the new regime, nor had they established any means of exerting democratic control over the state once it was formed.

To designate such a regime as a "workers state" had immense ramifications. It meant abandoning the entire struggle waged by the Marxist movement for the political and organizational independence of the working class. Instead, it indicated that the path to socialism lay through subordinating the working class to the nationalist leaderships. It would be the Castroites, the guerrilla armies and other nationalists rooted in the petty-bourgeoisie who would lead the socialist revolution, not the working class, educated and organized by parties of the Fourth International. That was the central historical prognosis flowing from the sociological definition of a Cuban workers state put forward by the Pabloites.
User avatar
By ozone
#13736162
The best practitioner of guerrilla warfare was Che Guevarra. He knows how to size up his men-whether genuine communist or a plant. Genuine members of the Communist Party of the PHilippines-New Peoples Army have great difficulty assessing its recruits. I do not initially believed that they are infiltrated but every five years they detect a high ranking officer mole in its midst. The Armed Forces of the Philippines is burdened with massive corruption. So it is possible that CPP-NPA has unmasked all spies. I do not knnow. I am not a party to these matters. But Vietnam finished their revolution in 10 years and Fidel Castro in 7, It has already been 50 years and still communist insurgency in the Philippines shows no progress. I'd rather think and hope that they are nnot infiltrated. Relieves me of some qualmms about some of my friends.

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