21st Centuary Socialism

Worth reading how the state-capitalist national 'Left' supports
party state dictatorship and also hails capitalist states which
supports 'strategic' alliances with China and Russia in something
which deserves to be called a nationalist front and 'socialism
in one country' with a parliamentarian strategy.

Nemo Etomer

- [www.geocities.com]
- [groups.yahoo.com]

*

A Trotskyist Criticism of stalinist Cuba. (By Bill Vann)

- [www.wsws.org]

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.

Che's revival

A fitting place to begin our analysis is with the recent
commemorations marking the 30th anniversary of the execution of
Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the most prominent exponent and practitioner
of the perspective of guerrilla warfare with which Castroism is
identified. In recent months we have witnessed a virtual Che revival,
though not the sort that the Argentine-born guerrilla could have
envisioned, even in his worst nightmare.

Che has become the object of commercialization in a manner which
seems quite incongruous with his radical reputation. His image itself
has been transformed into a commodity. The Swiss watchmaker Swatch
has come out with a "revolution" model, with the guerrilla's visage.
His face has also been used to advertise skis, to adorn the covers of
rock CDs and even to sell beer.

In Argentina, the government of Carlos Menem, the favorite of
Washington for his embrace of the IMF and enthusiastic support for
the Persian Gulf war, has even issued a commemorative stamp honoring
Che as a "great Argentine."

The Castro regime has also gotten into the act. It recently brought
back Guevara's remains from Bolivia, reintering them in Cuba with
pomp and circumstance. The Cuban government has organized Che tours
for foreign ex-radicals and markets Che T-shirts and trinkets,
providing a new source of hard currency for the crisis-ridden Cuban
economy.

What is it about Che that makes him so susceptible to being turned
into a harmless, though profitable, icon? The qualities which his
admirers cite are well-known. Physical bravery, self-sacrifice,
asceticism, giving his life for a cause. These can all be admirable
traits. No doubt they present a stark contrast to the prevailing
social ethic in which a man's worth is determined by the size of his
stock portfolio. But these qualities, in and of themselves, are by no
means indicators of the political and class character of those who
possess them. Religious sects and even fascist movements can claim to
have produced martyrs with similar qualities in their own struggles
for wholly reactionary ends.

A careful review of Guevara's career demonstrates that his political
conceptions had nothing to do with Marxism and that the panaceas of
armed struggle and guerrilla warfare with which he was identified
were fundamentally hostile to the revolutionary socialist struggle of
the working class.

In the midst of the recent revival of the image of Che there have
appeared several new biographies of the guerrilla leader. Those of
the Mexican author Jorge Castaneda and the American John Lee
Anderson, while by no means offering a Marxist political analysis, do
provide some useful insights into both Guevara's trajectory and that
of the Cuban revolution.

What emerges so clearly from the detailed recounting of Che's career
in these books is the abysmal shallowness and the tragic results of
his political perspective.

Alongside these factual accounts there has been a renewed attempt by
various petty-bourgeois left tendencies to portray Guevara as a
revolutionary leader and theoretician whose example and conceptions
continue to provide a meaningful perspective for the struggle against
capitalism. Unlike the biographers, these groups provide no fresh
insights or information. They combine a diseased nostalgia for the
glory days of middle class radicalism with what can only be described
as a falsification of Guevara's real views and their political
consequences.

Some, such as the Socialist Workers Party in the United States,
uncritically echo the official commemorations of the Cuban
government. Others, like the old Pabloite scoundrel Livio Maitan in
Italy or the Morenoite MAS in Argentina, attempt to portray Guevara
as having posed some sort of revolutionary alternative to both
Stalinism and the Castroite regime itself.

In a recent statement on the Cuban question, the Morenoites praise
Che's slogan of "One, two many Vietnams,'' and declare: "Even if with
disastrous methods -- guerrilla focos, isolation from the mass
movement, opposition to the construction of revolutionary workers
parties -- it expressed the necessity of extending the revolution
internationally.''

How a necessary and revolutionary perspective can be expressed
through disastrous methods, the Morenoites do not bother to explain.
This tendency, like all the Pabloite factions, has made a career out
of attempting to demonstrate how various forces -- Peronism,
Stalinism, guerrillaism -- are "expressing" the struggle for
socialism.

Indeed, the Morenoites, at an earlier stage, even reached the point
of finding this expression in the Cuban dictator whom Castro
overthrew, Fulgencio Batista. Proclaiming him "Cuba's Peron", they
hailed the Cuban working class for failing to respond to a general
strike call issued by Castro's July 26th movement. After Castro won,
however, they placed his portrait alongside that of General Peron on
the masthead of their newspaper.

The political alchemy of the Morenoites notwithstanding, the
disastrous methods of Guevara were a faithful expression of the
political perspective -- or perhaps more accurately lack of any real
perspective -- which underlay them.

Neither the Morenoites nor any of the other Pabloite tendencies care
to make a class analysis of Castroism and Guevarism, trace their
historical origins and development, or draw up a balance sheet of the
experience with guerrillaism in Latin America over the past nearly
four decades.

That critical task can only be carried out by our movement, based on
the struggle it has undertaken throughout that period for the
political independence and international unity of the working class.

Proletarian socialism versus petty-bourgeois nationalism

The Pabloite revisionists, like the middle class ex-radicals in
general, are hostile to such an approach. They fervently hope for a
revival of Castroism. All of them were enthused by the appearance of
the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas, Mexico and
likewise applauded the actions of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary
Movement when it seized the Japanese embassy in Lima, a little more
than a year ago.

Our movement did not join in celebrating this apparent resurgence of
Guevarism and the hollow political formula of "armed struggle.'' We
have a long record of fighting against such conceptions, recognizing
that they embody not the revolutionary socialist strivings of the
proletariat, but rather the politics of petty-bourgeois nationalism.
They are directed not at resolving the vital questions of
revolutionary leadership within the working class, but rather at
denying the revolutionary role of this class altogether and diverting
radicalized layers of students, as well as workers and peasants, away
from the struggle for socialism.

They serve not to illuminate, but rather obscure, the strategic
problems of the socialist revolution that were elaborated by Trotsky
in his theory of Permanent Revolution. Such slogans as "the duty of
the revolutionary is to make the revolution,'' "armed struggle,'' and
"protracted peoples' war'' leave unanswered the issues of what class
will play the leading role in the revolution, what is the connection
between the revolution in one country and the world revolution, and
what is the relation between the struggle of the workers and
oppressed in the backward countries and that of the working class in
the advanced capitalist ones.

Behind their radical rhetoric, these movements have definite
conceptions about all these questions. Invariably, they are directed
at suppressing the independent revolutionary struggle of the
proletariat, and subordinating the oppressed masses as a whole to the
needs of the national bourgeoisie.

In this sense, no matter how radical these movements may appear, they
are, in the final analysis, one of the last bulwarks of imperialism
against the socialist revolution. It is this essential nature of
petty-bourgeois nationalism and guerrillaism which provides a key to
understanding the ease with which capitalism has appropriated the
image of Che for its own purposes.

If one examines carefully the politics of the Peruvian MRTA and the
Mexican Zapatistas, they are merely a different manifestation of the
accommodation with imperialism carried out by all bourgeois
nationalist regimes and movements. The Tupac Amaru group seized the
Japanese ambassador's residence with the aim of pressuring Japanese
imperialism to exert influence over the Fujimori regime to soften its
policy. The group's ultimate aim, communicated to some of the
hostages, was to force a negotiated settlement through which it could
transform itself from an armed movement into a legal petty-bourgeois
political party.

As for the Zapatista movement, it has been universally hailed
precisely because it has, from the beginning, renounced any
revolutionary aims. The vague demands of Subcomandante Marcos have
been for democratization, an end to corruption and increased cultural
rights for the indigenous population. These demands could and have
been embraced not only by the petty-bourgeois left, but by sections
of the ruling PRI and even the right-wing opposition party, PAN.
Marcos and the Zapatistas, rather than providing a revolutionary road
forward for the Mexican workers and oppressed peasantry, have been
converted into another instrument for settling political accounts
within the Mexican bourgeoisie.

The political role of the petty bourgeoisie

What precisely do we mean when we describe these different movements
as "petty-bourgeois nationalist"? This is not merely a political
epithet thrown by Marxists at their opponents. It is a scientific
definition of the class interests and methods which characterize
these movements. Marx, basing himself on the experience of the 1848
revolution, and Trotsky, in his theory of Permanent Revolution,
demonstrated that the petty-bourgeoisie is incapable of independent
and consistent political action. Its inconsistency is a reflection of
its intermediate social position. Caught between the two main classes
of society and continuously being differentiated into exploiter and
exploited, it is compelled to follow one or other of these classes --
either the proletariat or the bourgeoisie.

In the postwar period, imperialism created and came to depend upon a
new social layer identified as the middle class. In the advanced
capitalist countries, this consisted of functionaries who staffed
government bureaucracies and corporate offices, administered social
services of newly-created welfare states and ran the growing mass
media.

An analogous stratum emerged within the oppressed countries, and it
was to this layer that imperialism handed over power during the
period of decolonization. In Latin America, as in other areas of the
globe oppressed by imperialism, the opportunities presented to this
social layer were far more limited than what prevailed among their
counterparts in the advanced capitalist countries. Thousands of
students graduated from university with no prospect of a professional
career. In many cases those who did pursue a profession or attempted
to live off a small business enjoyed little more in terms of living
standards than the average worker. It was this social stratum which
provided the principal social base for petty-bourgeois nationalist
politics.

There was, therefore, an objective class basis for the emergence of
the Pabloite theories of a "new world reality", in which the struggle
for socialism could be undertaken, not by the working class and its
conscious revolutionary vanguard, but rather by the radicalized petty
bourgeoisie. Ultimately these revisionist formulations reflected both
the strivings of this particular social layer, as well as
imperialism's need for a buffer between itself and the threat of
proletarian revolution.

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.

The myth of guerrillaism

Like virtually all the nationalist regimes and tendencies that
emerged in the postwar period, Castroism has rested on a set of myths
concerning its own origins and development. Such mythologizing is
inevitable, given the class character of these movements, resting as
they do upon the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie,
while claiming to represent the interests of the oppressed masses.

After coming to power, Castro and his followers portrayed their
victory as the exclusive outcome of the armed struggle waged by the
guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra mountains: a military victory over
imperialism and the native bourgeoisie won by a small force through
sheer will and determination. As Che Guevara was to write, barely a
month after the toppling of the Batista dictatorship:

"We have demonstrated that a small group of men who are determined,
supported by the people, and without fear of dying... can overcome a
regular army... There is another lesson for our brothers in [Latin]
America, economically in the same agrarian category as ourselves,
which is that we must make agrarian revolutions, fight in the fields,
in the mountains, and from here take the revolution to the cities,
not try to make it in the latter..''

This conception, which became the official explanation of the Cuban
revolution, represented a radical distortion of events. In the course
of Batista's six years in power, some 20,000 Cubans lost their lives
at the hands of the regime. Of these, 19,000 were killed in Cuba's
cities. Acts of sabotage, political strikes and other forms of
resistance, the majority of them outside the control of Castro's July
26th movement, were widespread and ultimately provided the principal
impetus for the regime's downfall.

Castro's guerrillas amounted to, at most, a few thousand men. There
were no conclusive military battles and the largest engagement
involved no more than 200 guerrillas. Batista lost the support both
of the Cuban bourgeoisie -- a substantial section of which backed
Castro -- and Washington, which imposed an arms embargo on his
regime. Deprived of this support it rapidly disintegrated.

Within Cuba, this myth of Castro's guerrillas defeating both US
imperialism and the native ruling classes through sheer audacity and
military prowess served a very definite political purpose. It
justified the consolidation of a regime that placed all the reigns of
state power incontestably in Castro's own hands.

The myth developed by Castro and Guevara was to be exported with
catastrophic results. The so-called Cuban road was promoted
throughout Latin America as the only viable form of revolutionary
struggle. Thousands of Latin American youth were led to the slaughter
by the promise that all that was required to overthrow governments
and end social oppression was courage and a few guns.

Guevara's most well-known writing, "Guerra de Guerrillas'' or
guerrilla warfare, served as a handbook for this doomed strategy. It
summed up what he described as the three great lessons of the Cuban
experience for the "mechanics of revolutionary movements in America'':
1. Popular forces can win a war against the army.
2. It is not necessary for all conditions to be present to make a
revolution; the insurrectional foco [term for guerrilla unit] can
create them.
3. In the underdeveloped Americas the terrain of the armed struggle
must be primarily the countryside.[3]

What little political analysis these writings contained was radically
false. Latin America's path of development had been capitalist for
many years. The essential foundation of oppression in Latin America
was not, as Guevara claimed, Latifundia - that is the concentration
of land in the hands of a tiny minority - but rather capitalist
relations of wage labor and profit. Even as these works were being
written, the continent was undergoing major structural changes that
were further proletarianizing the population and leading to massive
migration from the rural areas to the cities.

None of this was analyzed. Revolutionary preparation was reduced to
the impressionistic process of picking the appropriate rural arena
for guerrilla war. Those who followed this advice ended up trapped in
jungles and backland, where they were condemned to one-on-one combat
with the Latin American armies.

What emerges again and again in Guevara's politics is the rejection
of the working class as a revolutionary class and contempt for the
ability of the workers and oppressed masses to become politically
conscious and carry out their own struggle for liberation.

While he proposed the countryside as the only possible venue for
armed struggle, it was not a matter of mobilizing the peasantry on
social demands. On the contrary, Che's conception was one based on
the utilization of violence in order to "oblige the dictatorship to
resort to violence, thereby unmasking its true nature as the
dictatorship of the reactionary social classes." In other words, the
aim of the guerrilla band was to provoke repression against the
peasantry, who would supposedly respond by supporting the struggle
against the government.

For such a struggle, neither theory nor politics were required, much
less an active intervention in the struggles of the working class and
oppressed masses. As Guevara set about to build guerrilla groups in
Latin America, he insisted that they exclude all political
controversy and discussion. Unity was to be based solely on an
agreement on the tactic of "armed struggle".

The fiasco of Guevarism

The results were predictably disastrous. It was in his native
Argentina where Che set up one of the first guerrilla groups, under
the leadership of the journalist Jorge Masetti. In his biography of
Che, Anderson provides a particularly chilling account of this
fiasco. The guerrillas never saw combat. Some became lost and
apparently starved in the wilderness. Others fell into the hands of
the police. Before the decimation of the group, however, Masetti had
ordered the execution of three of its members for alleged
disciplinary infractions. The author cites one of the survivors of
this debacle, who notes that all three of the condemned men were
Jewish. It turned out that Masetti, before his alignment with
Castroism, had been a member of an extreme right-wing nationalist and
anti-Semitic organization in Argentina.

Che's own group in Bolivia came to a similar end. What is most
noteworthy about his activities there was his complete indifference
to the social and political situation in the country itself. The tin
miners, the most powerful force in the Bolivian revolution of 1951,
were engaged in strikes and confrontations with the army in the
months preceding Che's arrival in the country. In his diary he merely
noted these events as part of the scenic backdrop to his own
activity. He had no perspective or policy to present to the Bolivian
workers. As for the Bolivian peasantry, its reaction to the
initiation of armed struggle was not to back the guerrillas but
rather to turn them in to the military.

In Bolivia, the Castroites had counted on the support of the pro-
Moscow Communist Party. This support was never forthcoming and many
have blamed the Stalinists and the Moscow bureaucracy itself for
condemning the guerrillas to total isolation and perhaps even
providing US intelligence with information on Che's whereabouts.

This is plausible. The secretary general of the Bolivian CP, Monje,
was apparently a KGB asset who moved to permanent residence in Moscow
shortly after Guevara's death. One thing that emerges from
Castaneda's biography is the extraordinary domination of all of the
principal Communist Parties of Latin America by such figures, in many
cases men who had a direct role in Trotsky's assassination in 1940.
He also establishes, through formerly secret documents from the
Soviet archives, how these parties were funded through direct
subsidies from Moscow. The Soviet bureaucracy was financing reliable
political agencies whose purpose was to further its own quest for
peaceful coexistence with Washington.

But in the end one is left with the fact that such a betrayal was not
really that necessary. The idea that a revolution would be made by
bringing less than two dozen armed men into a region where they had
no political antecedents, no support or even a worked out program and
perspective to win such support, was doomed from the outset. It is a
measure of the pathetic character of this adventure that in his final
days, surrounded by the Bolivian army, Guevara was planning to appeal
for international support... by addressing letters to Bertrand
Russell and Jean Paul Sartre.

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.

The perspective elaborated by the SWP's Joseph Hansen in relation to
Cuba was founded upon a gross vulgarization of Marxism. He took as
his point of departure the previous decision by the Trotskyist
movement to use the highly conditional and somewhat makeshift
definition of "deformed workers state" in describing China and the
Eastern European buffer states.

In these earlier discussions, the SWP had placed the emphasis on the
adjective "deformed", to indicate that these states were historically
unviable. They had opposed Pablo's attempt to use this definition as
a means of endowing Stalinism with a revolutionary potential.

Hansen, however, in an even cruder fashion than Pablo, set out to
demonstrate how Cuba met a series of abstract criteria -- above all
economic nationalization -- which supposedly placed it in the
category of workers state.

The working class had not made the revolution, and it exercised no
control over the state apparatus in the revolution's aftermath. But
these facts were taken merely as a few more normative criteria the
Cuban revolution had failed to meet, demonstrating that progress was
still to be made, and that uncritical support was all the more
necessary.

As Hansen wrote at the time: "The Cuban government has not yet
instituted democratic proletarian forms of power as workers, soldiers
and peasants councils. However, as it has moved in a socialist
direction it has likewise proved itself to be democratic in tendency.
It did not hesitate to arm the people and set up a popular militia.
It has guaranteed freedom of expression to all groupings that support
the revolution. In this respect it stands in welcome contrast to the
other non-capitalist states, which have been tainted with Stalinism.

"If the Cuban revolution were permitted to develop freely, its
democratic tendency would undoubtedly lead to the early creation of
proletarian democratic forms adapted to Cuba's own needs. One of the
strongest reasons for vigorously supporting the revolution,
therefore, is to give the maximum possibility for this tendency to
operate."[4]

Cuban reality was quite different from the rosy scenario painted by
Hansen. The Cuban Trotskyists, for example, were ruthlessly
repressed, their leaders jailed and their press smashed. The island
has long held one of the largest number of political prisoners of any
country in the world, not a few of them Castro's former comrades in
the July 26 movement.

From a theoretical standpoint, the most deceptive aspect of Hansen's
assessment was his suggestion that, if given the opportunity, the
Castro regime would "institute democratic proletarian forms of
power"; i.e., workers councils or, to use the term forged in the
Russian revolution, soviets.

Such organs of workers power, however, are not instituted or granted
from above by a regime created by the petty-bourgeois nationalists.
Such institutions, whether created by Castro, Gaddafi or Saddam
Hussein, are never more than window dressing for a bonapartist
regime. Genuine workers councils or soviets can be created only by
the workers themselves, as a means of organizing the masses,
overthrowing capitalism and establishing a new proletarian state
power.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not hand soviets down to the workers
after seizing power. Rather, they led the struggle for power through
these organs that the Russian proletariat had created itself, based
on the development of its class struggle and the growth of political
class consciousness produced by the protracted intervention of the
Russian Marxists.

The Pabloites adopted the position that Castro's national-izations,
and his self-proclamation as a Marxist-Leninist, constituted the
confirmation of the Permanent Revolution.

In reality, Cuba, like so many other oppressed countries in the
course of the decades following the Second World War, provided a
confirmation of Permanent Revolution, but in the negative. That is,
where the working class lacked a revolutionary party, and therefore
was incapable of providing leadership to the masses of oppressed,
representatives of the national bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeois
nationalists were able to step in and impose their own solution.
Nasser, Nehru, Peron, Ben Bella, Sukharno, the Baathists and, in a
later period, the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran and the Sandinistas
in Nicaragua, were all examples of this process. In virtually all of
these cases nationalizations were also carried out.

In a document sent by the Socialist Labour League to the SWP in 1961,
the British Trotskyists sharply criticized Hansen's adulation of the
petty-bourgeois nationalist leaderships.

"It is not the job of Trotskyists to boost the role of such
nationalist leaders,'' they stated. "They can command the support of
the masses only because of the betrayal of leadership by the Social
Democracy and particularly Stalinism, and in this way they become
buffers between imperialism and the masses of workers and peasants.
The possibility of economic aid from the Soviet Union often enables
them to strike a harder bargain with the imperialists, even enables
more radical elements among the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaders
to attack imperialist holdings and gain further support from the
masses. But, for us, in every case the vital question is one of the
working class in these countries gaining political independence
through a Marxist party, leading the poor peasantry to the building
of Soviets, and recognizing the necessary connections with the
international socialist revolution. In no case, in our opinion,
should Trotskyists substitute for that the hope that the nationalist
leadership should become socialists.''[5]

Those familiar with the subsequent degeneration of the Workers
Revolutionary Party know that this passage reads like a direct
indictment of the line which Healy, Banda and Slaughter would begin
pursuing barely a decade later, in relation to the PLO and various
Arab regimes. This only demonstrates the acuteness of the analysis,
and the fact that the revisionist attack on the Fourth International
was rooted in objective class forces. Having abandoned the struggle
against Pabloism, the leadership of the British section was to fall
victim to the same class forces that had fatally undermined the SWP.

What was involved in proclaiming Cuba a workers state, and its
revolution a new road to socialism, was the renunciation of the
entire perspective of Permanent Revolution. The working class no
longer had to play the leading role in the backward countries, nor
was it necessary to fight for the development of socialist
consciousness within this class. Instead, bands of guerrillas, basing
themselves on the peasantry, could bring about socialism without, and
even in spite of, the workers.

This marked the rejection of the most essential foundation of
Marxism. The struggle for socialism was separated from the
proletariat. No longer was the liberation of the working class the
task of the working class itself. Instead it was turned into a mute
spectator of the actions of heroic guerrillas.

In considering this perspective, one can clearly grasp the class
basis for the enduring infatuation of the petty-bourgeois left as a
whole with Fidel Castro. What they see in Castro is the ability of
the petty-bourgeoisie to dominate the working class and to play a
seemingly independent role. Cuba, for them, served as proof that the
leftist intellectual, the student radical or middle class protester
did not have to subordinate themselves to the working class and the
difficult and protracted struggle for the development of socialist
consciousness among the workers. Rather, they could revolutionize
society through their own spontaneous activity.

In combating this revisionist attack on Marxism, the SLL traced the
dispute over Cuba to fundamental methodological questions. It
demonstrated that the SWP was engaged in what Trotsky had described
as the "worshipping of the accomplished fact," that is, adapting
themselves to the so-called reality determined by the existing social
structure, the existing leaderships in the working class and the
bourgeois forms of consciousness prevailing among the broad masses of
workers and oppressed. All of these were accepted as objective,
determining factors, entirely separated from the conscious struggle
of the revolutionary proletarian party.

The SWP's method was one of passive contemplation of these "facts'',
and an adaptation to existing leaderships, in search of what appeared
to offer the most immediate prospects for political success. Thus
they became apologists for these leaderships, justifying their every
action with the argument that, given the circumstances, what else
could they do? These "circumstances" however, always excluded the
conscious struggle of Trotskyists to mobilize the working class
independently on its own socialist and internationalist program.

The SLL defended the theoretical conquests made by the Trotskyist
movement in the struggle against Stalinism. It insisted that the
strategic experiences of the whole imperialist epoch had demonstrated
that non-working class leaderships could not carry through to
completion the struggles for liberation from imperialist oppression
and backwardness in the colonial and former colonial countries.

These struggles could be completed only through the conquest of power
by the working class and the extension of the world socialist
revolution. The principal task flowing from this analysis was the
building of independent revolutionary parties of the working class,
based on a struggle against all opportunist trends, particularly the
Stalinists, who sought to subordinate the working class to
nationalism and nationalist leaderships.

Above all, Pabloism denied that the achievement of the socialist
revolution required the development of a high level of socialist
political consciousness within the leading sections of the working
class. The political consciousness of the workers was, in the
Pabloite scheme of things, a matter of indifference. To the extent
that the working class was seen as having any relation to the
socialist revolution, it was merely as an objective force led and
manipulated by others.

The resolution drafted by the Pabloites after reunification with the
SWP spelled out the political implications of the theoretical
revisions developed on the Cuban question. It stated the following:
"The weakness of the enemy in the backward countries has opened the
possibility of coming to power even with a blunted instrument.''[6]
In other words, workers states could be established without even
building parties of the working class.

In these countries, they declared, and particularly in Latin America,
the conditions of mass poverty and the relative weakness of the
bourgeois state structures "create situations in which the failure of
one revolutionary wave does not lead automatically to relative or
even temporary social or economic stabilization. A seemingly
inexhaustible succession of mass struggles continues... The weakness
of the enemy offers the revolution fuller means of recovery from
temporary defeats than is the case in imperialist countries."[7]

This was a gross distortion of Trotsky's theory of Permanent
Revolution. When Trotsky pointed to the weakness of the bourgeoisie
in Tsarist Russia it was not in some kind of timeless vacuum, but
rather in relation to the domination of imperialism on the one hand
and the objective strength of the small, but concentrated, Russian
working class on the other. The bourgeoisie was never too weak to
either crush or control the petty-bourgeois democracy. It was weak in
that it confronted a young proletariat with a revolutionary
leadership at its head.

The Pabloites, however, had rejected the role of the industrial
proletariat and had assigned the task of revolution to just such
petty-bourgeois forces.

Their theory of "blunted instruments" and "inexhaustible mass
struggles" was elaborated on the eve of the first in a series of US-
backed coups -- led by General Castelo Branco in Brazil -- which were
to plunge Latin America into a decade of nightmarish repression,
whose shadow still hangs over the continent.

The Pabloites not only failed to prepare the working class for these
events, they helped facilitate them by insisting that the revolution
could be carried out by forces other than the working class and
endorsing the Castroite perspective of armed actions by isolated
guerrilla bands.

... ...

(Shortened due to storage capacity of this list. Please, go to the link above.)

*

A lecture by Bill Vann

This lecture was delivered on January 7, 1998 to the International
Summer School on Marxism and the Fundamental Problems of the 20th
Century, organised by the Socialist Equality Party (Australia) in
Sydney, from January 3-10, 1998.

Bill Vann is the international editor of the World Socialist Web
Site, and author of several critical works on the struggles of the
oppressed masses in Latin America, South Africa and the Middle East
throughout the post-war period.

Bill Vann and the “World Socialist Web” have never participated in a single social revolution but they have the foolish audacity to preach false neo liberal propaganda to the people of Cuba and Latin America, disguised as ultra revolutionary critic.

Bill Van says: “The myth developed by Castro and Guevara was to be exported with catastrophic results. The so-called Cuban road was promoted
throughout Latin America as the only viable form of revolutionary
struggle. Thousands of Latin American youth were led to the slaughter
by the promise that all that was required to overthrow governments
and end social oppression was courage and a few guns.”

So according to Bill Van: Latin America’s military dictators and their CIA backers are not guilty of mass murder of workers, peasants and left wing activists. He believes that Fidel and Che are really responsible for the fascist terror of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. God save Uncle Sam. Lets say no more.

Antonia Mella has a wrong understanding of the written text by Bill Vann. He is critical to elitism and especially to party-dictatorships. And he dismiss any 'Che Guevara' road to guerilla wars and a strategy where the cities is surrounded by an army under charge of an elitist party with visions of a totalitarian state.

Nemo Etomer

Interesting, though I throughly disagree. Then again, Trotskyists - millstones 'round our necks, stuck in their 19th century Karl Marx worldview - always did give me a splitting headache. But, as the Trotskyist numbers decrease, and the Pathfinders increase, hope for socialism starts looking better every day.

Nemo Etomer, you should read Fidel Castro's new autobiography - 'My Life'. Without that, I really doubt anyone is in a fit place to comment on That Great Man.

cheers,

-Aidan.

PS. I hope you're not offended, if'n you are a Trotskyist, since all ideological differences aside we're both still on the left of the fence. But I've never been known to mince my words.