GRANMA INTERNATIONAL

Havana. June 10, 2014

Nuria Barbosa León
Orlando Méndez Perera (Photos)

René González is one of the Cuban Five who were convicted and imprisoned in the U.S. for fighting terrorism against Cuba, organized and financed in Florida. After completing his unjust sentence, he returned to Cuba in May, 2013, as did Fernando González who arrived home in February, 2014. Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero and Ramón Labañino remain incarcerated in U.S. prisons, and millions of voices around the world continue to demand their freedom. Granma International spoke with René at the Cuban Friendship Institute.

What message would you send to your three imprisoned brothers?

First I would congratulate Gerardo and Ramón on their birthdays (June 4 and 9, respectively). Remind them that this is a happy occasion, even though they will complete 16 years in prison in September. They have been able to remain happy in adverse circumstances, in the prisons where they are confined, precisely because they defend Cuban children’s happiness, so they don’t grow up without parents, and so they can live without an act of terrorism or crime interrupting their lives.

We will continue the fight for their return home and we won’t rest until we bring this brutal and undeserved punishment to an end. A punishment which I have known, and remember every morning, when I wake up. I think about how they are waking up in a cell like the one I lived in, for more than 13 years, and I am overwhelmed by the urgent need to put an end to this punishment.

In your opinion, why is the 3rd Five Days for the Cuban Five in Washington so important?

Our fight has been to bring the truth about The Five to the U.S. – a truth which has been silenced, above all kept from the U.S. public. This event is important because this is an opportune moment to be heard by the White House. Millions of people are calling for resolution of the case and, to put it in astrological terms: the stars are aligned more than ever, due to political and historic reasons which are occurring right now.

We hope that the event will surpass the others and we will succeed, because we have organized ourselves well, have generated much support, and are well prepared. We want the city of Washington to feel the call for freedom for Gerardo, Antonio and Ramón, and that the U.S. government finally listens, and acts accordingly, to free our three compañeros.

After the events in Washington, what other activities are planned?

The most important thing is to organize to get the message to U.S. society. Other solidarity events in Cuba and other countries are planned, but the most important one is in Washington, this month of June. The most important thing is to unite a bit more, focus all the energy which has been generated towards other cities in the U.S., because only the solidarity of millions of people will open our compañeros’ cells.

We will continue to organize these types of activities to call attention to the issue, but once this event is over, we will be preparing for next year’s event because our interest is in systemizing the work.

The political discourse among the tenants of the White House is changing, we understand the reasons behind these efforts, but the important thing is that it changes. This is an opportune moment for the government to receive our message, which is why we must systemize the work.

Could you please send a message to the solidarity movements and committees calling for the freedom of The Five around the world.

First gratitude, secondly admiration, because these movements work in difficult conditions. In Cuba there exists a Revolution which has sown in the people, and in society, a feeling of solidarity, but in other countries this is unthinkable, with the predominance of individualism and selfishness. In this context, amidst these limitations, compañeros have remained in solidarity with Cuba, with The Five and this is worthy of admiration. I think they are extraordinary people and therefore deserve our respect and gratitude.

http://mltoday.com/the-collapse-of-the-soviet-union-reconsidered?utm

The Collapse of the Soviet Union Reconsidered

by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny

In 2004, Thomas Kenny and I wrote Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Since 2004, the book has been published and reviewed in Bulgaria, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Greece, Portugal, France, Cuba and Spain. One or both of the authors have been present for discussions of the book in Greece, Portugal, France and Cuba, and a number of critics have reviewed the book in leftwing journals. In this presentation, Kenny and I will respond to two criticisms and one question prompted by the book. In the book, we put forth an explanation for the collapse of the Soviet Union. We used the words “collapse” and “betrayal” in the title in spite of the possible misleading connotations of both words.

Still, there was no doubt as to what we were trying to explain, namely the radical transformation that displaced the political power of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, abolished most state ownership, centralized planning, and the system of social services, and fragmented the multi-national state. We argued that the Soviet Union did not collapse because socialism failed. Rather, the system of socialism based on collective or state ownership of property and state planning proved a remarkable success, particularly from the point of view of working people. The system proved itself capable of providing sustained economic growth over six decades, notable technical and scientific innovations, unprecedented economic and social benefits to all its citizens, all the while defending itself from external invasion, sabotage, and threats, and offering economic aid, technical assistance, and military protection to other nations struggling for independence and socialism.

The Soviet Union nonetheless had problems—some related to political and ideological ossification, some related to the quantity and quality of its economic output, and some related to the ongoing struggle with imperialism. These problems, however, did not cause the system’s collapse. What brought down Soviet socialism were the policies pursued by Mikhail Gorbachev. These policies emanated from a belief that the problems of socialism could be solved by making unilateral concessions to imperialism and by incorporating into socialism certain ideas and policies of capitalism. Gorbachev’s ideas had roots in Soviet political discourse, but they had never triumphed so completely as they did under Gorbachev.

What allowed these ideas to gain ascendancy was that in the previous thirty years a petty bourgeois sector rooted mainly in the illegal, private economy had developed within the Soviet Union. This so-called second economy had damaged the first economy, demoralized some of the population, corrupted segments of the Communist Party and government, and provided a social basis for the policies pursued by Gorbachev. Instead of curing the problems of socialism, Gorbachev’s policies in short order wreaked complete economic havoc and eventually toppled socialism.

Criticism #1

Some critics maintain that our explanation ignores a deep reason for the collapse, namely that the attempt to build socialism in the Soviet Union was doomed from the beginning by the insufficient development of the productive forces.

This is not a new idea. In 1918, Karl Kautsky had said that Russia was not ready for socialism. This idea drew on Karl Marx and Frederick Engels who believed that only the full development of the productive forces under capitalism would create the pre-conditions for the abolition of classes and on Engels’s description in 1875 of the backwardness of Russia. According to this view, the Soviet Union could have moved to socialism only by first allowing private enterprise to flourish and by developing the productive forces by joint ventures with foreign capitalists, both of which would have happened if the Soviet Union had continued the so-called New Economic Program (NEP) which Lenin introduced in 1921. A corollary of this idea was that the Soviet Union could only have avoided a collapse by pursuing the path of China and Vietnam today, the path of “a market economy with socialist orientation.”

Major problems exist with this explanation. It is not at all clear what Marx and Engels would have thought was the appropriate course for Soviet Communists in the 1920s. Though the Soviet conditions may not have been ideal to build socialism, Marx was well aware, as he said in 1853, that “men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted by the past.”

Moreover, in 1917 Russia was not quite so backward as the country described by Engels in 1875. It possessed some of the largest industrial factories in the world, and 10 percent of its population worked in industry. Admittedly, the new Soviet Union remained a mainly peasant country, and Soviet leaders like Viacheslav Molotov later acknowledged that backwardness “adversely affected socialism.” Nevertheless, those who think backwardness not only adversely affected socialism but doomed it must confront three challenges. First, however backward the Soviet Union was in the early 1920s, it did not remain so. Having the advantage of rich natural resources, a resourceful leadership, and a motivated population, the Soviet Union steadily overcame its backwardness. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union had become an economic power second only to the United States. In 1984 the economist Harry Shaffer wrote: “The United States is still ahead of the Soviet Union in total and per capita output, in consumption, and in living standards. But the Soviet Union has been steadily gaining on the United States.”

So, even if the productive forces started in a state of underdevelopment, they hardly remained there by 1985. While Soviet industrial development could not be disputed, some believed that the original backwardness nonetheless fatally weakened the system. Erwin Marquit asserted that the original backwardness led the Soviets to resort to “the utopian model of a centrally planned economy” and that the centrally planned economy “proved unable to match the pace of market-driven technological development in the West.” This is not convincing. Indeed, the exact opposite was true. Through state ownership and planning, the Soviet economy made remarkable strides not only economically but also technologically. By the 1980s Soviet technological development did not equal that of the U.S., but it remained not far behind and was gaining. In a book on socialist science and technology published in 1989, John W. Kiser III argued that the whole idea of a “technology gap” was an overstatement born of “America’s belief in the inherent inferiority of the Soviet system.” Because the Soviet system lacked an incentive to commercialize its technological achievements, the West had “a persistent tendency to underestimate them.” Kiser pointed to technological breakthroughs the Soviets and eastern Europeans made in metallurgy, chemistry, food processing, biomedicine and elsewhere.

As for computer technology, in 1986 the CIA concluded that a software and hardware gap existed between the Soviet Union and the West, but that “the Soviets will still be making rapid progress in absolute terms” and that in ten to fifteen years “the top Soviet scientific institutions will probably have equipment comparable to that of the best US national laboratories at present.” In other words, technological gaps were small and narrowing. Thus, technological backwardness hardly provided a compelling explanation of the collapse. A second problem with the backwardness explanation was its assumption that the New Economic Program (NEP), i.e. fostering development through encouraging private enterprise and foreign investment, provided a live option. This was like arguing that the American Civil War could have been avoided had the North simply allowed slavery to die out naturally. Though this idea may appeal to those who wanted to blame the abolitionists for the carnage of the Civil War, few, if any, historians think that was a live option in 1860. Similarly, sticking with the NEP did not represent a live option for the Soviets in the 1920s. In 1921, the Soviets had turned to the NEP to deal with problems created by the policies of “war communism,” particularly the alienation of the peasants caused by the confiscation of their grain. In a short time, however, the NEP developed its own problems.

In explaining why the Soviets abandoned the NEP, the historian E. H. Carr pointed to three grave problems. First, in 1922-23, the so-called “scissors” crisis occurred, in which wildly fluctuating grain prices led to food shortages, unemployment and the suffering of poor and middle peasants. Second, most Soviet leaders came to realize that the NEP condemned the Soviet Union to a long period of industrial backwardness, and this was a fearsome and intolerable prospect in the face of the growing threat from external enemies. Third, in 1927-28 falling agricultural prices caused peasants to hoard their produce creating starvation in the cities. For these reasons, reliance on the market and private incentives became untenable. Thus, real economic problems, as well as ideological preferences, compelled Soviet leaders to adopt new policies and to embrace public ownership and centralized planning. Under these circumstances, to call the Soviet move to state ownership and central planning “utopian” is preposterous. By making this move the Soviets industrialized quickly, defeated the Nazi invasion, and rebuilt quickly after the war.

Moreover, they did so while steadily increasing the standard of living of Soviet workers. To imagine that the Soviets could have achieved the same results by continuing the problematic policies of the NEP constitutes wishful thinking in the extreme. The backwardness explanation of the Soviet collapse contained a third weakness. This weakness is exposed by examining the lessons inferred by this explanation. It is entirely appropriate to judge an explanation by its lessons. For example, if a shepherd died by falling off a mountain cliff, only a fool would draw the lesson that people must avoid sheepherding and mountains. If, however, at the time of the accident, the shepherd was drunk, a reasonable person would draw the lesson that one should avoid drinking while tending sheep on mountain cliffs. Some who subscribe to the backwardness explanation of the Soviet collapse, drew the lesson that the Soviet Union should have avoided central planning and followed the path of China. But this lesson was no more reasonable than that of avoiding sheepherding or mountain climbing. At the very least, this conclusion is rash. Not even the Chinese themselves draw this conclusion from the Soviet collapse. According to Arthur Waldron, “Today’s official China believes that nothing deep or fundamental was wrong with the Soviet Union even in the late 1980s. According to the official narrative, the failure of the Soviet regime to continue is not attributable to a broad systemic phenomenon, but rather to a very specific failure of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”

Moreover, where the Chinese path will ultimately lead and what it will mean for the working class remain open questions. In the short run, the Chinese path has produced economic growth and increased income for the urban population. Nonetheless, since 2008 both the decline of economic growth rates and the entanglements of the Chinese economy with a stagnating world market cast doubts about this model’s continued viability. According to the New York Times in March of this year, China’s “growth has decelerated to its slowest pace in more than a decade.”

Moreover, the Chinese working class is paying a high price for a path that steadily diverges from socialist goals. For a decade, unofficial urban unemployment has consistently been over 8 percent. Foreign ownership and investment as a share of total manufacturing sales in China has gone from 2.3 percent in 1990 to 31.3 percent in 2000. Since direct foreign investment in China ($124 billion in 2011) has been increasing yearly and is now second only to the United States, the percentage of foreign ownership is undoubtedly much greater now than in 2000. Moreover, according to a recent study, “the inevitable outcomes of China’s capitalist development” has included “growing unemployment, inequality, and insecurity; the cutbacks in communal health care and education; worsening oppression of women; the marginalization of agriculture; and the multiplication of environmental crises.” To the extent that a market economy with a socialist orientation remains a dubious path to socialism, so it remains a dubious lesson to draw from the Soviet collapse.

In sum, the backwardness explanation must be rejected for three reasons. First, however backward the Soviet Union was in 1917, the productive forces did not remain undeveloped by 1985. Second, the explanation implied that the Soviet Union should have and could have continued the NEP. This idea was untenable at the time and is entirely fanciful in retrospect. Third, whether the Chinese path to socialism is more reliable than the Soviet one remains to be seen.

Criticism #2

A second criticism of our book arose from the treatment of Joseph Stalin. For some critics, the failure to denounce Stalin as a paranoiac, a criminal, an anti-Semite, a demon, a dictator and a mass murderer, constituted a fatal flaw. For some critics nothing would have been satisfactory short of subscribing to what Domenico Losurdo calls “une legende noire.” For some critics, our failure to condemn the cruelty under Stalin was an unpardonable omission. To this we would like to respond as Lenin did when Maxim Gorky’s expressed concern about “the cruelty of revolutionary tactics.” Lenin said, “‘What do you want?….Is it possible to act humanely in a struggle of such unprecedented ferocity? Where is there any place for soft-heartedness or generosity? We are being blockaded by Europe, we are deprived of the help of the European proletariat, counter-revolution is creeping like a bear on us from every side. What do you want? Are we not right? Ought we not to struggle and resist? We are not a set of fools….What is your criterion for judging which blows are necessary and which are superfluous in a fight?”

The truth is that we did not provide an overall assessment of Stalin, because we thought it too important to do in a cursory fashion in a study devoted to something else. As any historian, we raised a specific question—in this case the causes of the Soviet collapse—and confined ourselves to trying to answer it. We dealt with Stalin’s ideas and policies only as they related to our explanation.

To the extent that criticism of our treatment of Stalin relates to our explanation of the collapse, it deserves a response. Here a distinction must be made. As is well-known, a line of thought stretches from the 1920s to the present that socialism in the Soviet Union began an inexorable decline ever since it rejected the ideas of Leon Trotsky on the need to pursue a permanent, worldwide revolution and the futility of trying to build socialism in one country. From this point of view, the Soviet Union did not constitute socialism, and its collapse represented no more than a footnote to the exile of Trotsky. Only those who accepted these premises about the importance of Trotsky and the lack of socialism in the Soviet Union (which are really more political than historical judgments) could be satisfied by a Trotskyist explanation of Soviet history.

There are, however, other views of Stalin and his role in the Soviet collapse. One such view claimed that the Soviet collapse resulted from a “Stalinist deformation,” a kind of delayed result of Stalin’s policies. This view held that the Soviet Union built a socialist society based on public ownership and planning that worked well at delivering economic growth, securing military defense, and providing employment, economic security, health care, education and a high cultural level for workers. Nevertheless, coping with its own backwardness and with internal and external threats as well as other challenges led to anti-democratic deformations. These deformations took the form of “the cult of the individual personality, the authoritarian incorporation of all social activity under the disciplined control of the CPSU, and the subordination of all scientific and cultural thought and practice to political ideology.”

According to this view, a planned economy presented no problem in the Soviet Union, rather the problem resided in a legacy of Stalin’s authoritarianism. Stalin’s authoritarianism undermined attempts to decentralize control and responsibility, sapped initiative, and kept the socialist economy from realizing its potential. Anyone casually acquainted with the Western historiography of Stalin and the Soviet Union would hardly be surprised that some would blame him for the collapse of the Soviet Union, since one writer or another has held him responsible for nearly every calamity of the twentieth century. Any figure as complex as Stalin, the leader of a vast country going through numerous crises over an extended period of time, was bound to leave a complicated legacy. Thus, one can readily grant the existence of the problems adduced by those who hold the theory of Stalin deformation. For example, in a planned economy where the nature and size of production are set from above, there is an endemic problem of stifling initiative and responsibility below. The Soviet Union grappled with this problem for years, and Cuba grapples with it today. This problem did nor uniquely result from Stalin. Moreover, without giving them the name Stalinist deformation, we acknowledge that the size and methods of the repression “undoubtedly left a legacy of bitterness, timidity, servility, shame, and heaven knows what else.”

That, however, is not the end of the story. In evaluating Stalin’s legacy, one must distinguish between moral and political judgments—that is, whether certain behavior or policy was good or bad, justified or unjustified, positive or negative—and historical judgments about causation and consequences. Both kinds of judgment have a legitimate place, but the question before us is a matter of historical judgment. That is: did Stalin’s policies actually figure in the Soviet collapse? Frankly, those who hold the Stalin deformation view have done little to move the discussion from moral outrage to historical explanation. Stalin left a contradictory legacy on the question of authoritarianism and democracy. Those who subscribe to the Stalinist deformation explanation see only one side, that Stalin undermined socialist democracy and demoralized and demobilized the Soviet people and that this ultimately undermined the efficiency and productiveness of the socialist system and hence led to the collapse. But where is the evidence of this demoralization and demobilization? The great accomplishments of the Soviet people between 1930 and 1950, the collectivization of agriculture, the rapid industrialization, the raising of the educational and cultural level of the people, the defeat of Hitler’s invasion, the reconstruction of the country in four years after the devastation of the war, hardly suggested the work of a demoralized and demobilized population. The very opposite. These achievements required active, popular participation. Moreover, a clear-eyed view of Stalin’s legacy must admit that it contained elements of democracy and popular participation as well as autocracy and repression. The Soviet Constitution of 1936 symbolized this ambiguous legacy.

On the one hand, despite the Constitution’s democratic promises, the Soviet Union would remain a state where power was concentrated in the Communist party and increasingly in the leader of that party, where nominations for office and other initiatives came from the top, and where other institutions including the Soviets and trade unions served a consultative and implementing function at best. On the other hand, the Constitution represented an attempt for the first time in history, and under unfavorable circumstances, to give meaning to the idea of socialist democracy. The Constitution resulted from a two year process of discussion that involved large segments of workers, peasants and others in a nationwide debate of a draft document followed by a national referendum. The Constitution expanded the democratic rights of Soviet citizens by lifting voting restrictions on people associated with the tsarist regime, and while legitimizing the Communist Party’s exclusive role, it also called for multi-candidate, secret-ballot, direct elections. In a revolutionary departure from bourgeois constitutions, the Soviet Constitution included economic rights including: the rights to employment, annual vacations with pay, free medical services, free education up to and including seventh grade, equal pay, state aid to mothers of large families and unmarried mothers, maternity leave with full pay and maternity homes, nurseries and kindergartens. [1]

The 1936 Constitution reflected another democratic legacy, namely Soviet policies toward national minorities. Historian Terry Martin characterized the Soviet Union as “the world’s first Affirmative Action Empire.” What Martin meant by that was that the Soviet Union “created not just a dozen large national republics, but tens of thousands of national territories scattered across the entire expanse of the Soviet Union. New national elites were trained and promoted to leadership positions in the government, school, and industrial enterprises of these newly formed territories. In each territory, the national language was declared the official language of government. In dozens of cases, this necessitated the creation of a written language where one did not exist. The Soviet state financed the mass production of books, journals, newspapers, movies, operas, museums, folk music ensembles, and other cultural output in the non-Russian languages. Nothing comparable to it has been attempted before…and no multiethnic state has subsequently matched the scope of Soviet Affirmative Action.”[2] In an opinion survey of several hundred Soviet citizens done by the Harvard Interview Project in 1950-51, the “overwhelming majority” of those asked about the 1936 Constitution agreed that its guarantees of national equality were in fact true.[3]

The ambiguity Stalin’s autocratic and democratic legacy even manifested itself in the repression of the 1930s. The campaign against Trotskyites and wreckers in 1937, which sent millions to prison and thousands to death, corresponded with a mass movement in the trade unions and workplaces for greater democracy. The head of the trade unions, Nikolai M. Shvernik, launched this movement in order to bring to the trade unions the promises of the 1936 Constitution, that is to say, secret ballots, multi-candidate elections, greater involvement of the rank and file, and greater accountability of trade union leaders. This movement went hand in hand with a campaign to end leadership cults and get rid of corrupt leaders, secret oppositionists and other “enemies of the people” who were embezzling union funds, violating safety rules, and wrecking housing, social services and production. As a result of this upsurge from below, by the end of 1937, “more that 1,230,000 people had been elected to positions in 146 unions in hundreds of thousands of union groups and shop committees….Final election returns showed a serious shake-up of personnel. More than 70 percent of the old factory committee members, 66 percent of the 94,000 factory committee chairman, and 92 percent of the 30,723 members of the regional committee plenums had been replaced.”[4] What took place in the trade unions in workplaces in 1937 embodied nothing less than a mass democratic movement from below to remove and punish certain trade union leaders. Historian Wendy Goldman called it “democratic repression,” and said, “repression was not something done to the Soviet people by an evil ‘other.’ It was actively supported and spread by people in every institution….”[5]

In short, if one looks at the Stalin legacy objectively, no direct line runs from Stalin to authoritarianism to popular demobilization to Soviet collapse. At least in the formulation of the 1936 Constitution, in the policy toward nationalities, and in the trade union democracy movement of 1937, Stalin mobilized rather than demobilized the masses. Moreover, if Stalin’s policies had really served to demobilize and demoralize the Soviet people, one would hardly have expected the Soviet people to have mourned his passing as they did or to have continued to revere him fifty years after his death. Yet, this is precisely what polls showed.[6]

In short, one can readily acknowledge that Stalin’s democratic legacy was ambiguous. Still, only a very one-sided and distorted view of Stalin could lead one to think that a Stalinist deformation so politically demobilized the mass of Soviet workers that it above all else caused of the Soviet collapse.

A Third Reaction
A third reaction to our book was not so much a criticism as a question expressed like this: why didn’t the Communist Party and the Soviet working class oppose the policies of Gorbachev and rise to the defense of socialism? In the book, we discuss this question on pp. 268-273. Certainly, the fact that rank and file resistance was not greater and more successful than it was constituted the most disturbing aspect of the whole process of Soviet dissolution. However disturbing, this fact in and of itself did not warrant jumping to the conclusion that there was something fundamentally amiss in Soviet socialism or that Soviet socialism had failed the Soviet workers in some fundamental way.

Gorbachev’s whole approach was one of trying to solve the problems of socialism by making concessions to the imperialists and by incorporating capitalist ideas into socialism. Part of this involved introducing aspects of bourgeois democracy while undermining and circumventing the traditional institutions of socialist democracy. To understand the ineffectuality of working class resistance, one does not have to look much beyond this. Soviet Communists and workers were denied traditional outlets of expression while their nominal leader steadily introduced capitalist ideas under the befogging notion of perfecting socialism. We argue that it did not have to be this way. Different reforms and a different process of reforms that mobilized the Communist Party and working class might have produced different outcomes. This had been attempted by Yuri Andropov, but the effort was cut short by his sickness and death.

Two recent trips to Cuba and a study of the recent Cuban reforms called “actualization” or “updating” have reinforced our conclusion about the fate of Soviet socialism. Obviously, the Soviet Union and Cuba represent two entirely different countries with very different histories and situations. A significant difference has been the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the U.S. on Cuba. Though the Soviet Union also experienced an economic blockade for two decades, the Cuban blockade has lasted longer and cost comparatively more. Now over fifty years old, the blockade has cost the Cubans by conservative estimates more than $104 billion in current prices and, if one takes into account the devaluation of the dollar against the price of gold, $975 billion.[7] Without the boycott, the Cuban standard of living today might well equal that of Western Europe.[8]

In spite of obvious differences, Cuba and the Soviet Union shared some features. Both the Soviet Union and Cuba had economies based on public ownership and centralized planning and had the political leadership of a Communist Party, and both Soviet society in 1985 and Cuban society in 2011 faced some similar problems, though to different degrees. For example, both societies had two currencies, a hard currency geared to international currencies and a domestic currency. The Soviet hard currency, whose use was illegal for most citizens, was limited to tourists, diplomats and a few others and was used only in hard currency shops. The Cuban hard currency, however, is not illegal, and many Cubans earn it legally by working in the tourist industry, by earning it as bonuses in certain workplaces, or by receiving it legally as remittances from relatives abroad.

The existence of two currencies creates more problems in Cuba than it did in the Soviet Union. The great disparity in value between pesos (CUP) and hard currency (CUC) (25 to 1) led to a number of problems including a growing inequality between those with access to hard currency and those without, and a brain drain from the professions without access to hard currency to those like tourism with such access. Driving a cab and receiving hard currency tips could gain more income than teaching. This was clearly demoralizing and inefficient. In another example, a second economy, or black market existed in both societies. In the Soviet Union, however, it represented a greater problem than in Cuba. Compared to the second economy in Cuba, that in the Soviet Union had existed for a longer period, was more widespread and highly developed, and was often linked to national minorities and an organized “mafia.” [9]

In some ways, the Cuban and Soviet problems resembled each other. There was a lack of productivity and efficiency, an insufficiency of quality consumer goods, a shortage of initiative and sense of ownership and responsibility in the workplace, an inadequate diffusion of computer technology, and so forth. Moreover, one could easily find similarities between the economic remedies proposed by Yuri Andropov in 1983 or even the early Gorbachev policies and the Cuban program of actualization proposed in 2011. For example, both reforms efforts hoped to increase efficiency, productivity, motivation and quality by linking compensation to effort, by decentralizing control and responsibility, developing joint ventures with foreign capitalists, encouraging cooperatives, and allowing more latitude to private enterprise.

The Soviet and Cuban situations differed in one outstanding way. The Cuban process of reform involved rank and file Communists and workers to a much greater extent than the Soviet one. In Cuba, from the development of the reform guidelines in 2010 through their ongoing implementation in 2014, the entire process embraced mass involvement and the building of mass consensus. The process began in December 2010 through February 2011 with discussions by the people as a whole, followed by discussions by the party in every province, and then followed by discussions at the Sixth PCC Congress in April. In total 163,079 meetings occurred, involving 8,913,838 participants. These discussions modified or incorporated with others 68 percent of the original 291 guidelines, modified 181 others, and created 36 new guidelines. [10] Discussion of the guidelines also occurred in the letters page of Granma, radio phone-ins, internet blogs and trade unions.[11] One observer noted: “A key point here is that the drafting of new employment law involves a process of consultation with the CTC (the central confederation of trade unions) so detailed and extensive that unions have a de facto veto.”[12]

In the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov initiated economic reforms with workplace discussions. Under Gorbachev, however, rank and file discussion of changes took the form mainly of public relations and photo opportunities. The broad discussions, encouragement of criticism, and building of consensus were mostly missing from the Gorbachev reform process. Otherwise we would not be wondering today where were the Soviet Communists and workers?

If both criticism # 1 “Soviet backwardness” and criticism # 2 “the Stalin deformation” are unpersuasive, why do they remain so popular? We would suggest that the reason for the continued popularity of these explanations is that they draw upon and depend upon the ubiquitous ideology of anti-Stalinism and anti-Communism. Anti-Communism and anti-Stalinism are not merely disagreements with the socialist system or the policies of Stalin, but rather the treatment of this system and this man as the main evil in the world. Among most Western intellectuals, the Stalin-as-Monster dogma is not up for discussion. It is axiomatic. Even worse, it is a shibboleth. It is a passkey into the family of writers acceptable to the ideological establishment. U.S. academics, even those with unorthodox views, routinely include hostile references to Stalin in their work, even work unrelated to Soviet history, as a way of ensuring political acceptability.

Why anti-Stalinism remains such a touchstone deserves more attention than it has received. Recently, such scholars as Domenico Losurdo and Grover Furr[13] have shed light on this question. One factor, surely, is that the Stalin demonization has the support from the “Left,” a “Left” cover, thanks to Trotsky and Khrushchev. Another reason is that Stalin serves as a handy personal symbol of the USSR in 1924-53, the time of its successful construction and also the time when the Soviet state was the main enemy of imperialism. Whatever the reason, for Marxists, like some of our critics, to indulge in anti-Stalin stereotypes and to press them into polemical service, is best understood as an opportunist concession to the pressure of ruling class ideology. Of course, the undoing of anti-Stalinism will not come about by beatifying Stalin, by heaping praise on him, or still less by ignoring the problems associated with his leadership. It will come about, rather, by patient scholarly work that uses the same standards to evaluate him as would be used to evaluate any 20th century leader.

Conclusion

The major criticisms that have been advanced against the argument of Socialism Betrayed do not stand up under careful scrutiny. The idea that the Soviet Union was done in by a birth defect, namely the backwardness of the productive forces, appeals mainly to those who dream of an easy and gradual path to socialism and those who think the Chinese have found the golden pathway to the future. It, however, requires ignoring the problems that beset the NEP in the 1920s and the Chinese today, and it means underestimating the hard choices the Soviets faced in the 1920s and 1930s and the tremendous progress they made in overcoming backwardness.

The idea that the Soviet collapse in 1991 was due to Stalin’s authoritarianism in the 1930s rests on a mountain of prejudice against Stalin and a one-sided reading of his legacy that ignores its strong, democratic elements. Finally, the ineffectuality of rank and file Communists and workers in resisting the destruction of socialism did not provide evidence of deep-seated problems of Soviet socialism. It did show, however, that undermining socialist ownership, planning, social benefits and internationalism required the simultaneous erosion of the authority of the Communist Party and the institutions of socialist democracy. If any good has come of the Soviet collapse, it is that Cuba seems to have learned this lesson.

Endnotes

[1] Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), 409; Kenneth Neill Cameron, Stalin: Man of Contradiction (Toronto, NC Press Limited, 1987), 80-81.
[2] Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 1-2.
[3] Martin, 387-389.
[4] Goldman, 14.
[5] Goldman, 19.
[6] Richard Pipes, “Flight from Freedom: What Russians Think and Want,” Foreign Affairs (May/June, 2004), 14.
[7] Cuba vs Bloqueo: Cuba’s Report on Resolution 65/6 of the United Nations General Assembl entitled “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States of America against Cuba” (July 2011), 54.
[8] Interview of Manual Yepe, Havana, Cuba, February 18, 2014.
[9] Interview of Marta Nunez, Havana, Cuba, February 18, 2014.
[10] “Information on the results of the debate on the Economic and Social Policy Guidelines for the Party and the Revolution,” translated by Marce Cameron, [http://cubasocialistrenewal.blogspot.om/2011/05translation-guidelines-debate-summary-1.html], 2.
[11] Steve Ludlam, “Cuba’s Socialist Development Strategy,” Science & Society 76, no. 1 (January 2012), 47.
[12] Ludlam, 51.
[13] Domenico Losurdo, Staline: Histoire et Critique D’Une Légende Noire and Grover Furr, Khrushchev Lied (Kettering, Ohio: Erythros Press and Media, 2011).

Sun Jun 15, 2014 9:9AM GMT

Cuban President Raul Castro has urged allies to defend Venezuela against foreign conspiracies, amid months of anti-government protests in Venezuela.

Castro said in a speech at a Group 77 (G-77) plus China meeting in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz that Venezuela deserves strong support from its allies.

“Imperialism and the oligarchs who were no match for President (Hugo) Chavez… they think that the time to destroy the Bolivarian revolution has come and overthrow President [Nicolas] Maduro’s government using unconventional warfare methods, as they have done lately in different countries,” said Castro.

Bolivian President Evo Morales also commented on the situation in Venezuela, saying that if the United States meddles militarily in the country, it would have a new Vietnam on its hands.

“If [US President] Mr. [Barack] Obama keeps assailing the people of Venezuela, I am convinced that, faced with provocation and aggression, Venezuela and Latin America will be a second Vietnam for the United States,” said Morales.

“Let us defend democracy, natural resources, our sovereignty and our dignity,” Morales added.

Last month, Caracas announced it would file a complaint against Washington at the United Nations (UN). Maduro accused the US of supporting the Venezuelan opposition in an attempt to topple his government.

Venezuela has been witnessing protests against and in support of the administration of President Maduro since February.

The opposition says it refuses to return to the negotiating table until the government accepts their demands, including amnesty for opposition prisoners. The government, on the other hand, accuses the opposition of making impossible requests that are akin to blackmail.

The protests have lost momentum since April 7, when the government and opposition leaders held talks for the first time to end tensions.

The opponents of the government have criticized the Maduro administration for the country’s high crime rate and economic hardships, claiming that its policies have led to a shortage of essential goods and high inflation.

GRANMA INTERNATIONAL

Havana. June 11, 2014

A multipolar world
Emir Sader

The most important shift in contemporary history came with the end of the Cold War, as it had been known, when one camp in the bipolar world disappeared, opening the door to the hegemony of U.S. imperialism.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, signed an agreement in Shanghai to broaden cooperation in all areas, and coordinate diplomatic efforts, to consolidate a comprehensive strategic relationship.

The United States immediately took advantage of its unquestioned superiority, taking smoldering conflicts to the level of military confrontation. This militarization was seen most acutely in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Although each of these conflicts had distinct characteristics, they were all resolved militarily, following the pattern of invasion, occupation, bombing and overthrowing of the government.

Despite complications, this strategy was imposed without the presentation of serious obstacles to U.S. domination, until recently, when the conflict in Syria took an unexpected turn. Bombing of the territory was imminent, when a proposal formulated by the Russian foreign minister was accepted by the United States.

Military conflicts were unleashed by the U.S. in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya during the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, all following a pattern of invasion, occupation, bombing and overthrowing of the government.

The burden of previous military operations had begun to erode the hegemonic capability of the United States. It was significant that the first refusal to participate in the bombing of Syria came from the principal U.S. ally – Britain. Parliament refused to approve the country’s participation in another adventure, as a direct consequence of the invasion of Iraq, which led to the undoing of former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Moreover, Obama was obliged to accept the Russian proposal since U.S. public opinion was not inclined to support another war with an uncertain outcome. Nor was the military convinced that a ‘surgical’ bombing operation would be successful. Not even his family supported a military solution.

The U.S. and European powers could not prevent Crimea from joining the Russian Federation, after a referendum on the issue was held.

Support for negotiation in Syria was extended to Iran – a related conflict. There has been progress, despite difficulties, in both cases, with Russia as the new protagonist within the process. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has seen its military options limited and been obliged to accept political terms negotiated in agreements between governments.

The situation in Ukraine, with its distinctive features, reflects this same trend.

Brazil, India, Russia, China and South Africa, as members of the BRICS alliance, are gaining influence economically and politically on an international level, as evidenced in this graphic from the St. Petersburg Summit.

With the disappearance of the USSR, western powers avariciously approached Eastern Europe, looking to incorporate the former Soviet Republics into the European Union and NATO.

Ukraine is a special case, since it is located directly on the Russian border and the ports of Crimea are essential to Russia, both militarily and commercially. The violent actions of pro-European Union forces – including the prohibition of the Russian language – have weakened their ability to unify a country with much regional diversity.

Clearly a dynamic has developed in which western powers and their media are denouncing Russia as supporting the dismembering of Ukraine, but find themselves prevented from intervening directly, generating a situation in which their options are limited.

The process of integration underway in Latin America and the Caribbean is indicative of what could become a multipolar world.

While western powers resorted to innocuous sanctions of Russia, Putin was meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping to sign a broad energy agreement, as well as a plan to limit use of the U.S. dollar in trade between the two countries. The agreements contribute to the development an independent field of action, in opposition to that of the U.S. led bloc. The change is already noticeable in the Ukrainian situation, in which the U.S. has its allies – some more compliant than others – while Russia enjoys the support of BRICS countries, Brazil, India, China and South Africa.

The agreements reached by China and Russia; the strengthening of the BRICS alliance; and the process of integration underway in Latin America and the Caribbean are indicative of what could become a multipolar world. The coming years will confirm, or invalidate, this perspective.

http://cpusa.org/convention-discussion-some-thoughts-on-changing-our-name/

by: Jarvis Tyner
May 29 2014
Submitted by Jarvis Tyner, Executive Vice-Chair, CPUSA

I am not for changing our name.

I think we can build a large and influential CPUSA in the 21st Century.

We can change our name but there is no way it won’t be widely viewed by right, left and center as a retreat from the struggle against the menace of anti communism.

I assume that comrades pushing for dropping “Communist” from our name see it as positive step forward. I don’t think it will be. I think it will send the message that we no longer think it is possible or necessary to overcome the slanderous attacks against our courageous Party.

Defeating anti Communist intimidation and fear is connected to the fight against racism, for peace and social progress in general. It remains a basic part of the struggle toward advance democracy and Socialism.

There is uneven development but our actual party experience today is that we are growing, we do have influence and we are not isolated. This is a reality that comrades in every region of the country are experiencing on one level or the other.

But even if we were stagnating organizationally and with diminishing influence politically, I still don’t think we should panic. We need a measured and sober assessment of our real situation and fact-based analysis of how we should improve our situation and ultimately accelerate our rate of growth and influence.

We need to study the polls not just recite the numbers. The numbers mean something. There are real human beings expressing views today that 30 year ago were only whispered.

The polls on Socialism I’ve seen are very promising. Most people think socialist and communist are cut from the same ideological cloths and while Socialism is more popular, they are related.

I am encouraged by those polls that show our country trending towards a more favorable attitude towards Socialism. The results that show most youth prefer Socialism to Capitalism are very important to our Party. How could it be otherwise?

Our goal is Bill of Rights Socialism and it is in harmony with what is trending among the youth.

There was also a Rasmussen poll, conducted March 12-13 2011 on Capitalism vs Communism as reported in the People’s World article by Dan Margolis.That poll showed that 11% of those polled consider Communism “morally superior to Capitalism”.

The fact that more than 1 in 10 adult Americans ( we assume they did not poll children) thought Communism was morally superior to the system they are living under everyday should have set in motion a serious effort by our Party to analyze and figure out the real meaning of those figures. Those polls have pages of data and information that could be very valuable to us in developing a campaign to build our party in a new way. But we did not take it seriously.

We kind of let it pass us by. We all should be self critical on that point.

If 11% think Communism is morally superior, what is the percentage that does not support anti-communism or don’t like the right wing red baiting every decent ideal that’s proposed. The media is definitely playing the new anti-communist/anti-Russian card on the Ukraine crisis. Does the lack of any enthusiasm for US military intervention there have to do with the diminishing impact of anti communism? I think it does.

That 2011 poll showed an additional 13% said they were not sure which system is morally superior. I consider, the “not sure” people to be a group in political transition. It is safe to assume that most people have not heard an honest presentation of existing Socialism nor of our Party’s views. These are people living in the richest and most powerful capitalist country in the world in the midst of all the anti communist propaganda yet they are “not sure”. That says a lot.

In pure numbers not counting children 11% is around 25 million people.

And it is very important; that the 2011 poll was taken 20 years after the tragic collapse of the Soviet Union and most of the other Communist Party led Socialist countries. It was a big set back.The collapse was supposed to have made world communism “irreversibly irrelevant.” I don’t think it did.

If we all agree that we need a larger party to play the role we must play in order to advance towards greater democracy and socialism I think we must take these poll results seriously. A lot of most active comrades will tell you that these polls results do reflect their experiences.

Every day people are joining our party on the internet.Where comrades are successful building the size and influence of our party today they are tapping into that 1 in ten group (a group that is growing). The People’s World now has over 64,000 likes.

Through honest struggle, coalition building, debate and discussion, we can convince many more that the slanders against our Party are wrong and our party is a force for good.

The view that as long as we are called Communist Party we will have no future I don’t think can be proven. There is 95 year of struggle that refutes that. The polls and political trends among the American people are saying it is other wise.

Today, more progressive, left-of-center, openly socialist, are winning elections even when they are viciously red-baited. A year after the 2011 poll, Obama ran and was red-baited and he won reelection. Again these polls need to be thoroughly analyzed.

The polls certainly mean a lot more than the empirical arguments like, “comrades don’t feel comfortable admitting they are communist.” Or, “some people think being a communist is silly”.

We all know that everybody doesn’t have to be public to be effective. And of course some people who don’t agree love to make cynical and slanderous remarks about our Party. The question is, do we answer them and engage them? We cannot give in to these cynical insults.

Rather than panic and change the name; a move that will cause great division and raise many more negative questions, we need to unite around a long-range effort to intensify our mass work, to greatly elevate our internet presents with our focus on the primacy of the working class and the immediate fight against extreme right. We need to build the party and the YCL.

Back in the mid 90’s Gus Hall gave his New Years’ speech on CSPAN and we put our 800 number right under Gus as he was speaking.

When it was aired Joe Sims and I were at the national office to answer the calls.We thought we would get a few dozen mostly negative calls. Within a few minutes of Gus’s speech our phone system was overwhelmed with 100s of calls.

We were able to talk to maybe 20% and there were very few right wingers calling.

We did set up a few new clubs but did not have the structure then that we have today to follow through and build functioning clubs.

The CSPAN experience took place just 4 years after the tragic collapse of the USSR and 13 years before Obama’s run for President.

Today the struggle is on a higher level. The historic battles against inequality that helped defeat the right 08 and 12 have created whole a new movements.

To me these developments bring with it heighten consciousness and the necessity to reject racism, anti immigrant, homophobia, anti Semitism: all forms of bigotry and anti communism in order to build unity. Most significantly, today these movements do not exclude Communist.

Where is our evidence that changing the name will bring great results for us? I think calls to change the name are also related to proposals to stop calling our ideology, Marxism Leninism.

I think we need to be very careful that what may be intended to be a change in style and approach, can easily evolve into a change in our ideology and the basic character of the Party.

I know most of the comrades who are pushing for the name change have the best interest of the party at heart. But I think to change our name is objectively a retreat from a principled and honorable struggle for our right to exist, that we have waged for 95 years.

I propose that we table the issue of name change, make a real study of the growing mass sentiments against anti communism. That we examine the many options we have to seriously think through not only why people don’t join our party but why people are joining our party and how to step up our efforts to combat anti communism and build unity of all the progressive forces.

We must step up our efforts to build our party.

Forward!

HAVANA, Cuba, Jun 13 (acn) The final declaration to be adopted by the upcoming Summit of the Group of 77 plus China will condemn US’s unilateral and offensive actions against Cuba, including the most recent and subversive Twitter program Zunzuneo.

According to the island’s permanent mission at the United Nations, the draft document strongly rejects the sanctions imposed by North countries against nations in the South, based on issues like terrorism, traffic in persons and drug traffic.

The forum, made up of 133 nations, is also expected to reject the use of information technologies in violation of international law and in this regards the Group of 77 plus China has noted that the US-sponsored program known as Zunzuneo against Cuba exposes its illegal use of such modern technologies.

The summit will also back Havana against Washington’s blacklisting of Cuba as a state sponsoring terrorism, which is an excuse to justify the over-50-year economic blockade against the Cuban people.

The Group of 77 agenda also includes initiatives about climate change, migration, agriculture, health and education, the millennium goals and the post 2005 working agenda for sustainable development.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/xinhua-news-agency/140612/interview-cubas-science-going-through-good-moment-official

SANTIAGO, June 11 (Xinhua) — Science in Cuba “is going through a good moment,” according to Danilo Alfonso Mederos, Cuba’s deputy Minister of Science, Technology and Environment.

In an interview with Xinhua in Santiago, Chile on Wednesday, Mederos explained: “it’s a good moment because (science) has increasingly developed in recent years, and kept with the main interests and challenges for the development of the country.”

Mederos was in Santiago to attend the first meeting of the Conference on Science, Innovation and Information and Communications Technologies on Tuesday, which was organized by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

In Cuba, “science is acknowledged as one of the pillars of sustainable development,” said Mederos.

The last Cuban Communist Party congress has given “a prominent place” to the policies of the Science, Technology and Environment Ministry, said Mederos.

“The goal is to make the island’s development sustainable, to prevent the waste of resources and always use them to benefit the general development of the country,” he said.

The minister especially mentioned Cuba’s advances in biotechnology, which was praised during the conference, saying they are “homegrown” and wholly developed in Cuba.

Several decades ago, he said, former Cuban leader Fidel Castro identified biotechnology as a field of vital importance to Cuba’s future development and gave primacy to the sector.

Mederos quoted Castro as saying: “we cannot be strong in everything, we have to choose in which fields we can be strong and biotechnology was a primary option, in which Cuba has developed highly.”

Mederos also mentioned Cuba’s cooperation with China in the field of biotechnology. “Cuba and China have set up biotech companies in the Asian country … to jointly produce biotech products.”

Such cooperation “has great development potential,” said Mederos.