ZANE BOYD has been a lifelong Canadian socialist. He was raised in a Communist Party family, but subsequently, after spending a year in Moscow, became a dedicated anti-Stalinist. From age 15, he participated in the movement against the war in Vietnam. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he was actively involved in defending Soviet and East European political prisoners. He has supported and identified with the Cuban revolution since his early youth.
A REMARKABLE DEBATE HAS opened up in the international left around the arrests and harsh sentences meted out to more than 70 opponents of the Cuban government and its execution of three hijackers earlier this year. The debate is an important one, because what's at stake is not only how best to respond to the U.S.'s criminal policy toward Cuba but, more importantly, how best to defend the Cuban revolution itself.
While there have
been numerous statements and counter-statements on this issue, I wish to focus on the
contribution by veteran Marxist and Latin America scholar James Petras, "The Responsibility of
the Intellectuals: Cuba, the U.S. and Human Rights," which he issued May 1, 2003.
While Petras
acknowledges various right-wing intellectuals who have predictably condemned the Cuban
government's actions, he makes it clear his primary target is "a small army of otherwise
progressive intellectuals -- Chomsky, Sontag, Zinn and Wallerstein." It is this "progressive" group
that he says "causes the greatest harm to the burgeoning anti-imperialist movement."
I WANT TO ANSWER WHAT I can only describe as slanders by Petras against these intellectuals. This is necessary since, after all, the very subject of Petras's piece is the responsibility of intellectuals.
Well, the first
responsibility is to integrity, honesty and truth. What is particularly galling (as well as unhelpful
for a healthy debate and exchange) is that, while waxing indignant over dishonesty, moral
blackmail and "mendacious moralizing," Petras himself engages in a defamation of his intellectual
targets.
For instance: ". .
. prestigious intellectuals brandish their past credentials as ‘critics' of U.S. foreign policy to give
credibility to their uninformed denunciation of alleged Cuban moral transgressions, equating
Cuba's arrest of paid functionaries of the U.S. State Department and the execution of three
terrorist kidnappers with the genocidal war crimes of U.S. imperialism. The practitioners of moral
equivalents apply a microscope to Cuba and a telescope to U.S. crimes -- which gives them a
certain acceptability among the liberal sectors of the empire."
What is this
about "past" credentials? The international statement against the Cuban regime's crackdown
signed by Chomsky, Wallerstein, Zinn and a host of other "otherwise progressive" intellectual
authors contains fully four out of six paragraphs focused clearly on the past and the
present crimes of the U.S. government. It is a demagogic smear to claim that these intellectuals
make a moral equation between the recent actions of the Cuban government with the manifold
crimes of U.S. imperialism.
The slander gets
worse. Again: "But our moralists are not bothered by context, by U.S. threats to Cuba immediate
or proximate, they are eager to ignore it all to demonstrate to the State Department that they not
only oppose U.S. foreign policy but also condemn every independent country, system and leader
who opposes the U.S. In other words, Mr. Ashcroft, when you crack down on the ‘apologists' for
Cuban ‘terror', remember that we are different, we too condemned Cuba, we too called for a
change of regime."
Incredible! The
real reason these so-called progressive intellectuals have condemned the Cuban regime's
crackdown is . . . to curry the favor of the U.S. State Department! Since when has Noam
Chomsky ever curried the U.S. State Department's favor, or any other of these other individuals
for that matter? It is to laugh! Or perhaps cry.
In the spirit of
free debate and openness of ideas -- that which, incidentally, should also prevail in any country
calling itself socialist -- Petras is of course fully entitled to criticize the response of various
intellectuals to the recent Cuban events. However, he has no justification for maligning or
impugning the motives of those he takes issue with based on fabrication, innuendo and hyperbole.
This makes it difficult to take any argument he may have seriously and effectively discourages
further debate.
ON A MORE CRITICAL MATTER, for someone who lectures about the importance of context, Petras himself displays a shameful lack of it in yet another noteworthy paragraph. "Let us remember," he writes, "the same intellectuals supported ‘dissidents' in Eastern Europe and Russia who were bankrolled by Soros and the U.S. State Department. The ‘dissidents' turned the country over to the Russian mafia, life expectancy declined five years (over 10 million Russians died prematurely with the sacking of the national health system), while in Eastern Europe ‘dissidents' closed the shipyards of Gdansk, enrolled in NATO and provided mercenaries for the U.S. conquest of Iraq. And never among these current supporters of Cuban ‘dissidents' is there any critical reflection on the catastrophic outcomes resulting from their anti-communist diatribes and their manifestos in favor of the ‘dissidents' who have become the soldiers of the U.S. Middle Eastern and Central European empire."
Context, indeed!
So, it was Adam Michnik, Jacek Kuron and their colleagues who single-handedly restored free
market capitalism in Poland. The kindly declaration of martial law by that great friend of
socialism, Wojciech Jaruzelski, and his Stalinist henchmen of course had nothing to do with
Poland's subsequent fate. And it was the likes of Leonid Pliushch and Ivan Dziuba who brought
Ukraine to its knees and not the years of Stalinist rot brought on by those Ukrainian socialist
paragons, Leonid Brezhnev and Konstantin Chernenko, and their cronies.
The "critical
reflection" that Petras so rightly demands on the recent history of the former "socialist" states of
the USSR and Eastern Europe is not a matter of mere idle theoretical and historical interest to
socialist Cuba. It is vital, given the urgency of the Cuba's own current crisis.
Unfortunately,
Petras himself turns reality on its head on this subject. It wasn't dissidents who sold off the Soviet
economy and took over along with the Russian mafia. Rather, it was those with the power to do
so -- former state apparatchiks themselves, especially those within the managerial
bureaucracy.
This was also
largely the case on the political level. Boris Yeltsin and now Vladimir Putin were former
Communist Party stalwarts, as was Byelorus's Alexander Lukachenko. In Eastern Europe,
meanwhile, ex-Communist bosses morphed into "social democrats" or adopted some other new
guise, and have moved in and out of political power over the past decade. It's hard to believe that
Petras doesn't know all this already. Or, has the vehemence of his vitriol against his intellectual
nemeses simply clouded his memory?
In any event,
does Petras actually believe that none of this would have happened -- that there would have been
no collapse of the Soviet and East European systems, no restoration of capitalism -- had the
"dissidents" simply kept their mouths shut or perhaps been eliminated? Petras should instead be
asking himself how it is that these former "socialist" governments collapsed with such
overwhelming popular approval with nary a peep of protest or ounce of resistance from any of the
working classes of these countries.
What we have
here is conspiracy theory substituting for serious social analysis. There is nothing regarding the
corruption, decadence and oppression of Stalinist rule. There is nothing on the role (or passive
lack thereof) played by the Soviet and East European working class. There is nothing about the
absence of socialist democracy. There is nothing even regarding the U.S. and NATO's
bankrupting the Soviet economy through the four-decades-long arms and space race.
No, the entire
socio-economic evolution of these countries over the past fifteen years is chalked up to the
scheming of a ragtag bunch of dissidents fostered and funded by Western capitalists and the U.S.
State Department -- and, of course, the perfidious support of our "otherwise progressive"
Western intellectuals.
To put it
bluntly, this is precisely the kind of hysterical response that infected millions of Communist Party
members and their intellectual fellow travelers in the West when confronted with any opposition
to or criticism of Soviet Stalinism in the 1930s.
Back then as
well, any problems within the Soviet Union were blamed entirely on the threats and machinations
of Western imperialism, fascism and various plotters -- including Trotskyists, anarchists and social
democrats. Then as well, it was "you're with us or against us." Back then, too, anyone who
criticized or denounced the Soviet regime was branded either a willing or pliant accomplice in the
pay of (read: "apologist" or "paid functionary") the CIA and Hitler.
On a more
contemporary note, Petras here (like so many "otherwise progressive" intellectuals on the left
before him) again trots out the same old slander and misrepresentation of the historic Solidarnosc
movement in Poland. In the early 1980s, "Solidarity" conducted perhaps the most militant and
massive workers' uprising in modern times. These "dissidents" didn't "close" the Gdansk
shipyards, they occupied them! And they also struck and occupied factories, mines, schools and
offices throughout the entire country.
These
"dissidents" in fact comprised virtually Poland's entire working class organized in regionally
coordinated local workers' self-management bodies that had sprung up spontaneously during the
strike wave in 1980. The 1981 draft program of Solidarnosc called for a national system of
workers' self-management within the framework of a "socialized" (vs. merely "nationalized")
economy. Meanwhile, Jaruzelski's bureaucrats and their Moscow mentors fought frantically to
retain rigid, central command of a decaying and bureaucratically manipulated structure with an
implacable hostility to any element of genuine workers' democracy. In fact, Jaruzelski declared
martial law in December 1981 on the very eve of a planned national gathering of workers, self-
management delegates -- what would in effect have amounted to a full-fledged dual power
situation.
It appears that
Petras finds more kinship with the Stalinist "defenders" of "actually existing socialism" than with
the Polish working class and its intellectual defenders.
Just imagine for
a moment if Solidarnosc had succeeded in establishing workers' power in Poland through a self-
managed economy and democratic political system. What might Poland and possibly all of Europe
for that matter have looked like today? Would the world have seen in Poland the real possibilities
of socialism as opposed to the dead hand of bureaucratism? And would not the liberating promise
of socialism have retained some cachet among the new generation of anti-globalization and anti-
capitalist activists who instead have largely turned their backs on socialism?
THROUGHOUT HIS ARTICLE, Petras repeatedly sounds the alarm on the indirect and overt threats of a U.S. military intervention in Cuba, U.S. covert operations in funding and fomenting oppositional activity within the country, international U.S. imperialist aggression, Miami-based terrorism, and the like. In fact, Petras frames the dangers facing the Cuban revolution exclusively within this singular context.
Cuba and its
problems are viewed entirely within the perspective of a hostile American regime bent on world
domination. And it is this narrow alarmist framework that, in fact, defines his attitudes to all
dissenters and critics of Cuban government policies, above all our "progressive" intellectuals.
Everything with
Petras is U.S. vs. Cuba, state vs. state. There is nothing regarding Cuba's internal situation. Petras
scarcely mentions the U.S. embargo and its effects. More significantly, he fails to address the
question of how the base of Cuban society -- workers, students, intellectuals -- are expected to
fulfill their essential function in defense of the revolution. Instead, they are relegated to a passive
role, while the entire burden of the revolution seems to be shouldered by the Fidelista
leadership.
Of course, the
threat of U.S. intervention is real. It always has been. And admittedly there is a greater urgency
under the current U.S. administration. And yes, the U.S. engages in covert and overt destabilizing
operations in Cuba as well as many other countries. And yes, the Bush administration is bent on
world domination. However, is this exactly news? Especially after 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq?
And how does any of this justify the Cuban regime taking undemocratic actions against its critics
and opponents, however serious the charges it may have against them?
It is ludicrous in
any case for Petras to think that the intellectuals he denounces would not strongly oppose any
imminent or actual U.S. invasion of Cuba, as they have on Iraq?
More
importantly -- and this is something Petras never addresses -- the revolution is not just in danger
from U.S. intervention, subversion and terrorism. There is also the dire internal crisis facing the
country with its profound social consequences. The economic reforms introduced by the Cuban
government over the past decade (many of them pro-market and even pro-capital, by the way)
have spawned dangerous divisions among the Cuban population, virtual two-tiered health care,
and serious unemployment. While some of these reforms may be necessary simply to keep the
economy afloat, there is a very real danger that the revolution could eventually implode from
within.
This is the
actual context -- external threat and internal crisis -- in which the various problems
facing the Cuban revolution must be considered, including that of organized opposition. In this
context, internal dissatisfaction and criticism are inevitable. The challenge is, how best to harness
the creative and critical energies of the Cuban people? How best to preserve, extend
and in some cases restore the gains of the revolution?
TO BEGIN WITH, the larger strategic context must always be kept in mind: if it was impossible to achieve socialism in a single isolated country as it was in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s (what was realized was, in fact, a grotesque caricature of socialism), it is that much more impossible in tiny, even more impoverished and isolated Cuba. But, for this very reason, the revolution requires the institution of genuine, full-fledged socialist democracy. The National Assembly, the People's Councils, the official unions, and other popular bodies are not in themselves sufficient. They do allow for some participation by much of the population. But the Cuban Communist Party maintains a monopoly of power -- with dominant influence and control within these and other popular bodies.
In defense of the
revolution itself, it is urgent that the Cuban government establish a system of real popular political
and economic power (not mere participation), especially local and national structures of workers'
self-management and control. At the same time, it is imperative that a plurality of workers' and
other popularly based political parties be introduced, along with free elections within all bodies,
the right to free assembly for all citizens, and freedom of the press. Let the Communist Party
demonstrate the superiority of its vision, program and leadership within the full light and debate of
public opinion -- public opinion that is fully engaged and active in actually running the
country.
Think of the
beacon and example such a system of democratic socialism would be to all of Latin America and
the rest of the world, including the United States itself, with its pathetic, transparently sham
bourgeois democracy. On the other hand, if the Cuban leadership continues to balk at such a
prospect (perhaps on the grounds it would "destabilize" the country), then it will be responding
all-too-typically like the bureaucrats Rosa Luxemburg warned us about.
All socialists, as
well as others, should be reminded that the Bolshevik Party's monopoly of power during the
nascent years of the Soviet Union was to be a temporary measure. It was imposed during the
then-raging Civil War, initiated by the armed opposition to Soviet power of the Russian White
armies and the invasion by 15 imperialist armies including those of the U.S. and Canada. In fact,
before the Civil War began, the Bolsheviks reserved seats in the Congress of Soviets for the
absent Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who had opposed the establishment of Soviet
power and were at the time boycotting the Congress.
HINDSIGHT IS ALWAYS BEST SIGHT. However, the continued Soviet Communist Party monopoly on power through the 1920s and beyond, it must be said, was a disastrous policy and egregious error. Had the Soviet workers and peasants been able to enjoy real Soviet (viz., Council) democracy during that time and had there been a plurality of parties, freedom of assembly and of the press, they might have been able to prevent the consolidation of the heinous Stalinist regime, the resultant deaths and misery of millions, and the corruption and emasculation of communist parties throughout the world which under the Kremlin's direction, it should again be pointed out, thwarted several potential socialist revolutions.
Our challenge is
to learn from history. The Cuban revolution has survived now for over forty years. It is high time
to invigorate Cuba's political system. Socialism is incompatible with continued exclusive centralist
rule by the Cuban Communist Party. The defense of the Cuban revolution requires the ongoing,
active engagement of the entire Cuban population enjoying complete socialist democracy.
Otherwise, the revolution itself ultimately cannot survive.
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