[Marxism] Sam Farber and other, better, things...

[S. Artesian]

Odd, actually not so odd, that I find myself in agreement with JB when he 
writes:

"It took two more decades for history to deliver a verdict but when it did,
it was catastrophically conclusive: you could not defend the future of East
European and Soviet socialism by preserving its status quo. Only by purging
socialism of the criminal bureaucratic misrule covered up with the
ultra-euphemistic qualifier, "really existing," could the socialist
revolution, which in reality is MORE than property "forms" because it is at
bottom a mass movement of the working people, be rekindled."


That is indeed the lesson, and it took history awhile to not exactly deliver 
the verdict, but execute it.  Indeed the verdict was obvious for 60 years--  
the bureaucracy disarms the revolution, the bureaucracy administers the 
impulse to capitalist restoration, sometimes actively, sometimes passively.

However, if the verdict was obvious, then we needed to make obvious that the 
movements of resistance to the bureaucracy would   bear all the conflicts, 
confusion, differing currents that were generated in the economy itself; 
that such movements would at outset and beyond wed themselves to the ideal 
of bourgeois liberalism, to the freedoms that are so dependent upon free 
market relations-- speech, religion, petition; that the movement would 
demand a "civil society" in counterposition to the state; a kind of advanced 
uneven and combined development would be thrust upon the revolution, where 
it appears as a "democratic" struggle for liberalism, but must pass through 
and beyond that initial manifestion.

It must also be made obvious there is no alternative to engaging this 
"deformity" that is within the movement; that suppression by the bureaucracy 
only excites the impulse to capitalist restoration as it did in Hungary, as 
it did in Poland;  and that only through taking the risk of "losing 
socialism"  could the working class regain its revolution, which, again, 
oddly enough I am in agreement, is so much more than a property form,  the 
nationalized property form, since nationalized property embodies the very 
inability of the workers to achieve the resolution of their struggle which 
has its ORIGIN  OUTSIDE national boundaries.

All the more reason then to oppose Fidel's position back then.  And the 
reprises of those positions now.  Doesn't make the Cuban Revolution "state 
capitalist," a characterization that really throws Marx out the window IMO.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo at gmail.com>
To: <sartesian at earthlink.net>
Sent: Saturday, January 17, 2009 11:47 AM
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Sam Farber and other, better, things...