Showing posts with label bolshevik. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bolshevik. Show all posts

Saturday, November 09, 2019

On Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International*From The Pen Of Communist International Leader Karl Radek -The Labor Movement, Shop Committees And The Third International"

Click on title to link to the Karl Radek Internet Archive for other of the works of this important secondary Bolshevik leader and high Communist International official.


Markin comment:

No revolution can succeed without men and women of Radek's caliber. Although Radek had his ups and downs in his later days as a Comintern official he stood tall in October. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, still holds today.

Friday, November 08, 2019

From The Pages Of Workers Vanguard-Those Who Labor Must Rule!(Quote of the Week)

Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League (ICL) website.

Workers Vanguard No. 989
28 October 2011

Those Who Labor Must Rule!(Quote of the Week)

Emerging in the first half of the 19th century as a mass independent workers movement, the British Chartists advanced revolutionary republican principles while leading the workers in class struggle. James Bronterre O’Brien, an Irish-born leader of the movement, gave voice to the need for the working class to fight in its own interests instead of begging its oppressors.

I hate long discussions and disquisitions upon the rights and privileges of the oppressed. I hate such arguments as go to prove that hawks should not prey upon doves; wolves on lambs; or the idlers of society upon the productive classes; I hate all appeals to the morality of monsters....

We have had enough of moral and learned strictures upon abstract rights and duties, which have left the respective parties in statu quo—the one plundering, the other being plundered....

My motto is...“What you take you may have.” I will not attempt to deal with the abstract question of right, but will proceed to show that it is POWER, solid, substantial POWER, that the millions must obtain and retain, if they would enjoy the produce of their own labour and the privileges of freemen.

—James Bronterre O’Brien (1837), quoted in Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (1984)

Thursday, November 07, 2019

*From The Archives Of Marxism- Leon Trotsky On The Lessons Of The Russian Revolution- On The 94th Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution

Workers Vanguard No. 968

5 November 2010

In Honor of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution

For New October Revolutions!

(From the Archives of Marxism)

November 7 (October 25 by the calendar used in Russia at the time) marks the 93rd anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Led by the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the workers’ seizure of power in Russia gave flesh and blood reality to the Marxist understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Despite the subsequent Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet workers state, culminating in its counterrevolutionary destruction in 1991-92, the October Revolution was and is the international proletariat’s greatest victory; its final undoing, a world-historic defeat. The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) fought to the bitter end in defense of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe, while calling for workers political revolutions to oust the parasitic nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies that ruled these states. This is the same program we uphold today for the remaining workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.

Having been expelled from the USSR in 1929 by Stalin, Trotsky spent the remainder of his life in exile. In November 1932, he gave a speech to a Danish social-democratic student group in Copenhagen. He outlined the political conditions and the social forces that drove the Russian Revolution, stressing the decisive role of the Bolshevik Party. Illuminating the worldwide impact of the Russian Revolution and its place in history, Trotsky underlined the necessity of sweeping away the decaying capitalist order and replacing it with a scientifically planned international socialist economy that will lay the material basis for human freedom.

The ICL fights to forge workers parties modeled on Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks to lead the struggle for new October Revolutions around the globe.

* * *

Revolution means a change of the social order. It transfers the power from the hands of a class which has exhausted itself into those of another class, which is on the rise....

Without the armed insurrection of November 7, 1917, the Soviet state would not be in existence. But the insurrection itself did not drop from Heaven. A series of historical prerequisites was necessary for the October revolution.

1. The rotting away of the old ruling classes—the nobility, the monarchy, the bureaucracy.

2. The political weakness of the bourgeoisie, which had no roots in the masses of the people.

3. The revolutionary character of the peasant question.

4. The revolutionary character of the problem of the oppressed nations.

5. The significant social weight of the proletariat.

To these organic pre-conditions we must add certain conjunctural conditions of the highest importance:

6. The Revolution of 1905 was the great school, or in Lenin’s words, the “dress rehearsal” of the Revolution of 1917. The Soviets, as the irreplaceable organizational form of the proletarian united front in the revolution, were created for the first time in the year 1905.

7. The imperialist war sharpened all the contradictions, tore the backward masses out of their immobility and thereby prepared the grandiose scale of the catastrophe.

But all these conditions, which fully sufficed for the outbreak of the Revolution, were insufficient to assure the victory of the proletariat in the Revolution. For this victory one condition more was needed:

8. The Bolshevik Party....

In the year 1883 there arose among the emigres the first Marxist group. In the year 1898, at a secret meeting, the foundation of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was proclaimed (we all called ourselves Social-Democrats in those days). In the year 1903 occurred the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In the year 1912 the Bolshevist fraction finally became an independent Party.

It learned to recognize the class mechanics of society in struggle, in the grandiose events of twelve years (1905-1917). It educated cadres equally capable of initiative and of subordination. The discipline of its revolutionary action was based on the unity of its doctrine, on the tradition of common struggles and on confidence in its tested leadership.

Thus stood the Party in the year 1917. Despised by the official “public opinion” and the paper thunder of the intelligentsia press, it adapted itself to the movement of the masses. Firmly it kept in hand the control of factories and regiments. More and more the peasant masses turned toward it. If we understand by “nation,” not the privileged heads, but the majority of the people, that is, the workers and peasants, then Bolshevism became in the course of the year 1917 a truly national Russian Party.

In September 1917, Lenin, who was compelled to keep in hiding, gave the signal, “The crisis is ripe, the hour of the insurrection has approached.” He was right. The ruling classes had landed in a blind alley before the problems of the war, the land and national liberation. The bourgeoisie finally lost its head. The democratic parties, the Mensheviks and social-revolutionaries, wasted the remains of the confidence of the masses in them by their support of the imperialist war, by their policy of ineffectual compromise and concession to the bourgeois and feudal property-owners. The awakened army no longer wanted to fight for the alien aims of imperialism. Disregarding democratic advice, the peasantry smoked the landowners out of their estates. The oppressed nationalities at the periphery rose up against the bureaucracy of Petrograd. In the most important workers’ and soldiers’ Soviets the Bolsheviki were dominant. The workers and soldiers demanded action. The ulcer was ripe. It needed a cut of the lancet.

Only under these social and political conditions was the insurrection possible. And thus it also became inevitable. But there is no playing around with the insurrection. Woe to the surgeon who is careless in the use of the lancet! Insurrection is an art. It has its laws and its rules.

The Party carried through the October insurrection with cold calculation and with flaming determination. Thanks to this, it conquered almost without victims. Through the victorious Soviets the Bolsheviki placed themselves at the head of a country which occupies one sixth of the surface of the globe....

Let us now in closing attempt to ascertain the place of the October Revolution, not only in the history of Russia but in the history of the world. During the year 1917, in a period of eight months, two historical curves intersect. The February upheaval—that belated echo of the great struggles which had been carried out in past centuries on the territories of Holland, England, France, almost all of Continental Europe—takes its place in the series of bourgeois revolutions. The October Revolution proclaims and opens the domination of the proletariat. It was world capitalism that suffered its first great defeat on the territory of Russia. The chain broke at its weakest link. But it was the chain that broke, and not only the link.

Capitalism has outlived itself as a world system. It has ceased to fulfill its essential mission, the increase of human power and human wealth. Humanity cannot stand still at the level which it has reached. Only a powerful increase in productive force and a sound, planned, that is, Socialist organization of production and distribution can assure humanity—all humanity—of a decent standard of life and at the same time give it the precious feeling of freedom with respect to its own economy. Freedom in two senses—first of all, man will no longer be compelled to devote the greater part of his life to physical labor. Second, he will no longer be dependent on the laws of the market, that is, on the blind and dark forces which have grown up behind his back. He will build up his economy freely, that is, according to a plan, with compass in hand. This time it is a question of subjecting the anatomy of society to the X-ray through and through, of disclosing all its secrets and subjecting all its functions to the reason and the will of collective humanity. In this sense, Socialism must become a new step in the historical advance of mankind. Before our ancestor, who first armed himself with a stone axe, the whole of nature represented a conspiracy of secret and hostile forces. Since then, the natural sciences, hand in hand with practical technology, have illuminated nature down to its most secret depths. By means of electrical energy, the physicist passes judgment on the nucleus of the atom. The hour is not far when science will easily solve the task of the alchemists, and turn manure into gold and gold into manure. Where the demons and furies of nature once raged, now rules ever more courageously the industrial will of man.

But while he wrestled victoriously with nature, man built up his relations to other men blindly, almost like the bee or the ant. Belatedly and most undecidedly he approached the problems of human society. He began with religion, and passed on to politics. The Reformation represented the first victory of bourgeois individualism and rationalism in a domain which had been ruled by dead tradition. From the church, critical thought went on to the state. Born in the struggle with absolutism and the medieval estates, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people and of the rights of man and the citizen grew stronger. Thus arose the system of parliamentarism. Critical thought penetrated into the domain of government administration. The political rationalism of democracy was the highest achievement of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.

But between nature and the state stands economic life. Technology liberated man from the tyranny of the old elements—earth, water, fire and air—only to subject him to its own tyranny. Man ceased to be a slave to nature, to become a slave to the machine, and, still worse, a slave to supply and demand. The present world crisis testifies in especially tragic fashion how man, who dives to the bottom of the ocean, who rises up to the stratosphere, who converses on invisible waves with the Antipodes, how this proud and daring ruler of nature remains a slave to the blind forces of his own economy. The historical task of our epoch consists in replacing the uncontrolled play of the market by reasonable planning, in disciplining the forces of production, compelling them to work together in harmony and obediently serve the needs of mankind. Only on this new social basis will man be able to stretch his weary limbs and—every man and every woman, not only a selected few—become a full citizen in the realm of thought.

—“Leon Trotsky Defends the October Revolution” (Militant, 21 January 1933)

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

From The Pages Of Workers Vanguard- On The Police Question- Drop All the Charges!-Know Your Enemy: NYPD Arrests Hundreds

Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League (ICL) website.

Workers Vanguard No. 988
14 October 2011
Drop All the Charges!

Know Your Enemy: NYPD Arrests Hundreds

The hundreds of “Occupy Wall Street” protesters trapped and arrested on the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1 received a bitter lesson on the role of the police and the nature of the capitalist state, as did the young women whose pepper-spraying at pointblank range on September 24 drew international attention to the protests. If this was a first-time experience for many of the demonstrators, the arrest of black protester Hero Vincent called to mind the brutal treatment meted out to ghetto youth every day by the NYPD. In an interview with Democracy Now, Vincent recounted how four laughing officers yelled, “Stop resisting arrest” while kicking him in the stomach as he lay helpless on the ground. He now faces a trumped-up felony charge of assaulting a police officer. We demand: Drop all charges against the anti-Wall Street protesters!

Many protesters have bought the liberal organizers’ line that the “white shirt” commanders are the problem, while the “blue shirt” cops are themselves victims of Wall Street. Reinforcing this myth is the illusion that the cops who are beating and arresting protesters are just a few bad apples. In response to the September 24 police assault, an occupywallst.org statement calling for a march to NYPD headquarters bleated: “Let us also be clear that, when approached as individuals, members of the NYPD have expressed solidarity with our cause. It has been inspiring to receive this support.” On an October 5 march through Lower Manhattan, organizers led demonstrators in chanting, “Police, join us! They want your pensions, too!”

The cops are the hired guns of the capitalist class, “earning” their pay (and sweet retirement) by breaking strikes and terrorizing the ghettos and barrios to protect the interests of Wall Street. As revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky put it, “The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state, is a bourgeois cop, not a worker” (What Next?, January 1932). The pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucrats betray the interests of workers by organizing cops and security guards into the unions.

The nature of the police as guard dogs of capital is seen in any outbreak of class struggle. To punish the NYC Transport Workers Union for its 2005 strike, which for three days all but shut down the financial center of U.S. imperialism, the police dragged the union president off to jail. In the current vital struggle against union-busting in Longview, Washington, two International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 21 officials sought to aid a 57-year-old grandmother whose rotator cuff was torn by the cops. The Local 21 leaders were hurled to the ground and cuffed, their eyes directly and repeatedly maced. Now they’re charged with assaulting the police! (See “Defend Longview ILWU Against Bosses’ Cops and Courts!” WV No. 987, 30 September.)

Police violence is systematically employed in enforcing black oppression, a cornerstone of American capitalism. Just one day after the arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge, police fired multiple rounds into 57-year-old Yvonne McNeal, killing the black homeless woman in front of the shelter where she lived. A protest statement by Queers for Economic Justice (QEJ) noted: “When police targeted largely white Occupy Wall Street protesters, they used pepper spray. When faced with a vulnerable woman of color, they chose to use lethal force as their first option.” McNeal was affiliated with QEJ, which marched on Wall Street in her honor.

The capitalist class gives the police a license to kill, and they exercise that license with impunity in New York City as elsewhere. Amadou Diallo was shot dead in the Bronx in 1999 by cops who fired 41 bullets into him; Sean Bell died in Queens in a hail of 50 NYPD bullets in 2006. In 2010, Luis Soto was gunned down when cops emptied their semiautomatics into a crowd of hundreds at a Harlem block party.

In a speech that polarized the Occupy Wall Street crowd on October 8, a member of the Spartacus Youth Club fought against deadly illusions in the police, declaring: “Cops defend the capitalist system. Blue shirt, white shirt, a cop is a cop! They are not workers!”

From The Pages Of Workers Vanguard-Kenya’s Independence Struggle in the 1950s-The Mau Mau Uprising Against British Imperialism

Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League (ICL) website.

Workers Vanguard No. 988
14 October 2011

Kenya’s Independence Struggle in the 1950s

The Mau Mau Uprising Against British Imperialism

The following article originally appeared in Workers Hammer No. 215 (Summer 2011), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International Communist League.

In April four elderly black Kenyans appeared in the High Court in London seeking recognition of atrocities committed against them during British imperialism’s brutal colonial rule. The Kenyan claimants, Ndiku Mutua, Paulo Nzili, Wambugu Wa Nyingi and Jane Muthoni Mara, are survivors of the barbaric torture that was meted out to countless thousands of black Africans in detention camps between 1952 and 1961. Of the four claimants (a fifth died before the High Court hearing) Jane Mara was subjected to sexual abuse, one man was castrated and another was beaten unconscious during an atrocity in which eleven men were clubbed to death. British imperialism pillaged and exploited Kenya and used savage repression to crush the anti-colonial revolt known as the Mau Mau uprising.

The survivors are demanding that the British state take responsibility for their treatment in the camps and that the government pay around £2 million [$3.3 million], a trifling sum, into a welfare fund. With swinish racist arrogance, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) insists that Britain cannot be held responsible, and that any atrocities that may have been committed under colonial rule became the responsibility of the Kenyan government that took over at the time of independence in 1963. Furthermore, says the FCO, too much time has elapsed for the claims to be valid.

The High Court has yet to decide whether or not the case will proceed to trial. But if the British state had got its way, the evidence in this case would never have seen the light of day. Since independence, the former colonial overlords have kept a tight lid on the documentary record of repression in Kenya. Nonetheless, much effort by researchers and advocates for the survivors has resulted in a significant victory. In May the FCO was forced to hand over 300 boxes of files, some 17,000 pages, including material relating to the suppression of the Mau Mau revolt. The departing colonialists destroyed many of the files at independence and removed others, having “made a calculated decision not to hand over any of its colonial era files to the Kenyan government” (guardian.co.uk, 5 April). A letter dated 7 November 1967, issued under Harold Wilson’s Labour government, explains that the general practice at independence was not to hand over files that “might embarrass HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] or other governments” or members of the police or military forces (guardian.co.uk, 5 April).

The mass torture and imprisonment of Kenyans during the uprising has long been documented by historians. To this day, any attempt to expose the truth of what happened has been sharply contested by apologists for imperialism. Caroline Elkins, author of the book Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (2005), who is an expert witness for the survivors in the current court case, noted that: “My book was resoundingly criticised at the time of its publication. Historian Andrew Roberts wrote that I had committed ‘blood libels against Britain’” (Guardian, 14 April). Elkins estimates that between 160,000 and 320,000 people were detained in camps and at least 100,000 killed. David Anderson, author of another major work, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of the Empire (2005), documents 1,090 hangings of alleged Mau Mau. Mark Curtis in Web of Deceit (2003) estimates that 150,000 black Kenyans died as a result of British policy in this period.

The British capitalist rulers have carried out mass murder and torture on an immense scale, from the brutal occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq to the bombing of Libya today. Much of the wealth that laid the foundations of British capitalism was acquired from trade in African slaves. Brutal subjugation of the colonial world was part and parcel of imperialism’s drive to secure world markets, cheap labour and raw materials. From Kenya to Aden, Cyprus, Malaya, Nigeria and the Indian subcontinent, the globe is strewn with colonial victims of the British Empire’s pursuit of profits.

In Kenya the colonial rulers imprisoned in concentration camps a large proportion of the million and a half Kikuyu people, the country’s largest ethnic group. The Mau Mau rebellion was essentially a peasant-based revolt of the landless Kikuyu people against colonial rule that had dispossessed them of their lands, the basis of their existence. Although it was ultimately defeated, the uprising forced an end to colonial rule. In its terminal years, British rule consisted of naked state repression, culminating in an official “State of Emergency” lasting from 1952 to 1960. Arrayed against the Mau Mau was the armed might of the British colonialists combined with that of their Kenyan stooges, including the Home Guard and other forces. The colonial regime co-opted a layer of rich peasants composed of land-owning, educated Christians. These “loyalist” Kenyans included Kikuyu landowners who were deeply hostile to the landless Kikuyu masses and supported the British in suppressing them. This deep social polarisation within Kenyan society is key to understanding the independence struggle in Kenya and its outcome.

With independence in 1963 British imperialism was forced to relinquish direct rule over Kenya, just as it had been driven out of many of its other colonial holdings in Africa and Asia following World War II. Reverting to indirect domination, the imperialists now relied on the national bourgeoisie which in turn became more directly the oppressor of the masses. Nationalist leader Jomo Kenyatta, who had been locked up for supposed Mau Mau sympathies, was released from prison in 1961. He was correctly regarded by the imperialists as safe hands for maintaining their interests in the region. Kenyatta had denounced the Mau Mau and was regarded by the more militant leaders of the movement as a traitor to their goals of land and freedom, which indeed he was.

The national bourgeoisie that came to power in Kenya was incapable of resolving any of the fundamental problems forced on the Kenyan masses by imperialist subjugation—dire poverty, lack of education and all the attendant social and economic backwardness. The land-hungry peasants did not regain their lost lands; the plantations and large white-owned farms were not expropriated. The outcome of the Kenyan independence struggle confirms in the negative the programme of permanent revolution codified by Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, who with Lenin led the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution established the dictatorship of the proletariat, expropriated the landlords and capitalists and granted land to the peasants. The programme of permanent revolution means that in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the proletariat must draw behind it the millions of peasant poor to oust the colonial powers in a struggle for a socialist revolution against the local bourgeoisie. This requires a Leninist-Trotskyist party dedicated to international proletarian revolution both in the neo-colonial countries and in the imperialist centres.

Imperialist Subjugation of Kenya

Britain first laid claim to Kenya and other East African territory when Africa was carved up by the imperialist powers in the 1880s. The rapid expansion of the system of world trade fuelled competition between dominant capitalist powers to establish spheres of influence and to control land, raw materials, markets and sources of cheap labour. In contrast to Congo and South Africa, where the imperialists extracted enormous mineral wealth, British interest in Kenya was mainly strategic. To control access to the source of the Nile, the British built a railroad from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast to Lake Victoria in inland Kenya. Completed in 1901, the railway was financed by loans from the British government. The colonial overlords decided the loans would be repaid, and the cost of administering the colony would be met, through profitably farming the millions of acres of land through which the railway ran. To make this land productive, they brought in white settlers, mainly from Britain but also from South Africa, to produce cash crops.

The first British settlers arrived in 1902, lured by the British government’s promise of cheap land and unlimited cheap labour. Writer Colin Leys describes the rationale behind it thus: “The settlers would invest capital and produce crops; the railway would earn revenue by carrying them to the coast, and by carrying the imports inland they would earn abroad,” while “the government would finance its activities by levying tariffs on these imports.” The British capitalist rulers were determined to force the toiling black masses to bear the cost of imperialist domination over them. As Leys describes it:

“The highlands were ‘alienated’ to Europeans; that is, Europeans bought the land at nominal prices from the colonial administration. But at first they had neither the knowledge nor the capital to farm it very differently from the Africans on their land. They had not, moreover, come to Kenya to work as peasants. Their ‘farms’ were extremely large—an average of over 2,400 acres per ‘occupier’ in 1932. There was therefore only one solution, to make the Africans work for them. This the Africans had no reason to do, unless the Europeans had been willing to pay in wages more than Africans could earn from farming on their own account. But such wages would have meant little or no profit for the Europeans. Therefore Africans had to be compelled to work, partly by force, partly by taxation, and partly by preventing them from having access to enough land or profitable crops to enable them to pay taxes without working for wages.”

— Underdevelopment in Kenya (1975)

Roots of Nationalist Revolt

In order to claim the farmlands of the Central Highlands, part of the Great Rift Valley, the British slaughtered Kikuyus by the thousands. Many indigenous Kenyans driven off their lands were pushed onto “native reserves” set up by the colonial regime in 1915. These reserves were separated by ethnic grouping as part of reinforcing divisions among the Kenyans. As the population in the Kikuyu reserves grew and more British settlers seized the arable land, subsistence became even more difficult. The landless and impoverished black population was subjected to a system of racist laws regulating land, as well as a poll tax and a hut tax. There were also pass laws (kipande) like those in South Africa, prohibiting free movement including in the search for employment. Access to education for the poorest was nil; a small privileged layer was able to attend schools run by Christian churches.

The early British settlers were heavily drawn from the notoriously racist aristocracy. According to Robert Edgerton (Mau Mau, An African Crucible, 1990) “the Norfolk hotel, where they congregated when they visited Nairobi, quickly became known as the ‘House of Lords’” and “their goal was to recreate the Virginia plantocracy in which white gentlemen of breeding and leisure oversaw vast plantations worked by black men.” Sir Charles Eliot, the High Commissioner appointed to rule the East Africa Protectorate, as it was then known, proclaimed Kenya a “white man’s country.”

Outside the reserves other displaced Kikuyu became squatters on the white settlers’ farms in conditions akin to serfdom, raising their own livestock and crops for local sale in return for working the settler’s plantation. Beginning in 1925, with a surplus of available workers, the colonial government and settlers turned the screw on squatters. Rights of tenancy and to own livestock were cut back to the point where squatters laboured for the white farmers for below-subsistence wages. During the depression and World War II, forced labour was instituted to keep the settlers’ plantations functioning. By the mid-1940s there were over 200,000 registered squatters in the so-called White Highlands. With market prices for their produce set far below what the settlers earned for the same crop, the squatters were reduced to starvation conditions. Floggings by landlords were commonplace and squatters were evicted if they refused to sign new labour contracts on worse terms.

In the years leading up to the revolt the squatters were transformed from independent tenant-producers to rural, desperately impoverished wage labourers. Resistance among squatters took the form of illegal cultivation and sale of produce, mass refusal to sign new contracts and in some areas organised strikes. As described in a study by Frank Furedi, by the late 1940s, this resistance became “transformed into a militant wing of Kenyan nationalism.” The Mau Mau revolt was “the last stand of the Kikuyu squatter before his final destruction as an independent peasant producer” (The Mau Mau War in Perspective, 1989).

Although there were other ethnic groups among the squatter population, the Kikuyus were the most numerous and were subjected to special repressive measures. Pastoral groups such as the Nandi people, who included many police, were regarded by the colonialists as potential allies and largely exempted from the anti-squatter measures. By the late 1940s the movement of resistance among the squatters had linked up with resistance in the reserves and Kikuyu radicals in Nairobi.

Kenya’s agricultural resources—principally coffee, tea and sisal—were profitable cash crops grown for the export market. World War II led to increased British investment in mechanisation, resulting in vastly increased profits for the settlers while forcing more black labourers off the farms and onto the reserves, which were already unable to support their population. This fed the disparity between the landed elite and the desperate and landless masses among the black population. By 1948 the population of the colony comprised some 30,000 European settlers, 5.2 million indigenous black Africans, and 98,000 Asians who were brought in as cheap labour but were banned from owning arable land and composed a mercantile layer. The White Highlands—the best farmland in the colony—was in the hands of the white settlers, some 0.7 per cent of the population.

During WWII more than 75,000 black Kenyans joined the British Army and fought in the King’s African Rifles and other regiments in Africa, Asia and the Near East. But in contrast to white settlers who served in the British Army and were rewarded with land and low-interest loans, blacks returned to worse conditions than when they left. Many returning black soldiers were inspired by independence movements like those sweeping the Indian subcontinent. With no land, some gravitated to Nairobi where the scarcity of jobs and housing forced many into an urban lumpenproletariat. Amid mounting bitterness towards the colonial power for which they had risked their lives, landless war veterans formed an organisation called the Forty Group which would go on to play a key role in the Mau Mau.

Divisions Within African Nationalism

The Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) had been founded in 1924 in opposition to the theft of Kikuyu land and lack of education. Jomo Kenyatta, an educated Kikuyu who had spent some 16 years in Europe, was a leading member of the KCA at this time. On behalf of the KCA he went to London in 1929 to pressure the colonial government for better terms for the Kikuyu. But contrary to a perspective for independence, his programme was for “meaningful cooperation between the colonial state and his people” (Mau Mau and Kenya, Wunyabari Maloba, 1993). Kenyatta returned to Kenya in 1946 where he was widely revered as the Kikuyus’ leader, the “Burning Spear” who symbolised the growing anti-colonial sentiment among the black population. After the KCA was outlawed in 1941 the Kenya African Union (KAU) was formed in 1944. In 1947 Kenyatta became the leader of the KAU, nominally a nationalist party of all African ethnic groups but dominated by the Kikuyu. The KAU included some trade union militants; its leaders were educated and some had lived abroad. Its demands centred on better conditions for the black population under colonial rule. Although the KAU was for independence in principle it did not see this as attainable in the near future.

The organised working class was relatively weak, but was young and combative. The trade union component of the KAU leadership represented urban workers including government clerks, taxi drivers, shop workers and others. The African Workers Federation was formed by Chege Kibachia, who organised a strike of dockers—a potentially strategic workforce—in the port city of Mombasa. He was arrested in 1947 while fighting for a general strike in Nairobi and detained in a remote outpost for ten years. In 1949 the East African Trade Union Congress was formed by Fred Kubai, who was later imprisoned, and an Asian communist, Makhan Singh. This organisation was banned in 1950 and Singh was deported and held in a remote area near the Ethiopian border for eleven years.

By late 1947 evicted squatters had become frustrated at the lack of any gains through the gradualist methods of the KAU. Members of the KCA led a militant illegal society and began using the Kikuyu oath to cement unity in struggle. The Kikuyu fighters referred to themselves as the Land Freedom Army or “the movement” but came to be called Mau Mau. The colonial rulers seized on the oathing to demonise Mau Mau and to legitimise savage repression against the Kikuyu people. The Mau Mau became the vehicle for mass resistance to the eviction of squatters from white farms. The core of the guerrilla fighters, led by WWII veterans, trained and lived in the forests of the Aberdare Mountains and Mount Kenya. Their weaponry was sparse and they were barely fed and clothed—and then only due to the heroic efforts of sympathisers in the reserves.

It is impossible to overstate the extent of racist hysteria among the settlers and colonial government, which reverberated in the pages of the Daily Mail in Britain. Whole pseudoscientific theories were concocted about the “illness” particular to black Africans. Typical was the ranting of colonial secretary Oliver Lyttelton who wrote: “The Mau Mau oath is the most bestial, filthy, nauseating incantation which perverted minds can ever have brewed” (quoted in Mau Mau, An African Crucible).

The colonial state used widespread repression between 1950-52. However, the audacious daylight killing by Mau Mau of a prominent loyalist chief in October 1952 was seized on by the new colonial governor, Evelyn Baring, as a pretext for declaring a State of Emergency and letting loose a reign of terror by the security forces. Kenyatta and other KAU leaders were imprisoned and later convicted of masterminding Mau Mau in a sensationalised and rigged show trial.

The deep division between wealthy loyalist Kikuyu and the landless poor was brought home in the Lari massacre in March 1953. Lari, near the Aberdare forest not far from Nairobi, symbolised the dispossession of land once farmed by peasants and systematically stolen, much of it now in the hands of wealthy loyalists. Mau Mau fighters killed a major loyalist chief and some 97 others at Lari, indiscriminately targeting families, including many women and children. In retaliation, up to 400 Kikuyu were slaughtered by the government forces, including the Home Guard, which was a key military force alongside the British Army and the colonial forces. Eventually 71 people were hanged for the Lari killings. This episode sharply fed the racist frenzy among the settlers and in Britain and increased the polarisation among the Kikuyu people.

Under the State of Emergency the settlers, British Army and Home Guard were permitted to summarily execute anyone who failed to stop when ordered. Thousands of Kikuyu were shot on sight. The Kenya Regiment and Kenya Police Reserve, both made up of settlers, were notoriously brutal. However, many authors also stress the extreme brutality of the Home Guard, loyalists who often had personal scores to settle with their neighbours. And they were not few: there was in fact an aspect of civil war to the Mau Mau uprising, between those who had benefited from co-operation with colonialism and those who were dispossessed and recipients only of brutality and exploitation. There is a similarity to the French colonial war in Algeria that took place at the same time, in which the French imperialists killed a million people—over a tenth of the population. In both cases there was a colonial settler population and a large loyalist militia co-opted from among the indigenous population.

Virtually the entire population of one and a half million Kikuyu were rounded up and “screened” during the Emergency. In Nairobi, where the rebel command was based, the colonial forces carried out a devastating month-long siege in April 1954 known as Operation Anvil, in which all Kikuyu in the city were rounded up and up to 30,000 were taken away for further “interrogation.” Screenings were usually performed by loyalist Kikuyu who wore hoods to conceal their identities from people they had often known their entire lives. With a nod of the head, these stooges sent their neighbours to detention camps. The camps were part of a vast system of prisons, interrogation centres and torture outposts known as the “Pipeline.” This included over a hundred camps and prisons, not counting the camps run by individual loyalist chiefs and white settlers throughout the Rift Valley and central provinces. In the camps, jails and screening centres Kikuyu were starved, beaten and tortured until they “confessed.”

In 1954 the government began the “villagisation” policy of uprooting Kikuyu and resettling them in new villages—actually barbed wire-enclosed concentration camps under the control of the Home Guard and military. The villages the Kikuyu left behind were burned down and their livestock confiscated. The aim was to cut off the Mau Mau fighters’ supply lines by virtually imprisoning that part of the Kikuyu population not already in detention camps. Between June 1954 and October 1955, 1,077,500 Kikuyu were relocated to 854 “villages.” One survivor recounted to Caroline Elkins the treatment of the “villagers” by the Home Guard and British:

“Some people who had refused to confess were being put in sacks, one covering the lower part of their bodies while the other covered the upper part. Then petrol or paraffin would be poured over the sacks, and those in charge would order them to be lit. The people inside would die writhing in the flames. Many people were dying every day. And it was the people who refused to confess, even after all the bad things that were being done to them; they were always killed in order to instill fear into others who might think of concealing the truth.”

— The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya

By 1954-55, the colonial government undertook a programme of land consolidation called the Swynnerton Plan which anticipated the land settlement that would be agreed at independence. The plan aimed to reinforce class divisions, rewarding loyalists with large parcels of land, declaring: “Former government policy will be reversed and able, energetic or rich Africans will be able to acquire more land and bad or poor farmers less, creating a landed and a landless class. This is a normal step in the evolution of a country” (quoted in Underdevelopment in Kenya).

By late 1956 the guerrillas had been militarily defeated but mass detention and torture continued into 1959. That same year, public opinion in Britain turned sharply against colonial rule in Kenya when evidence came to light of a massacre in Hola camp, a particularly brutal detention centre for Mau Mau, in which eleven men were beaten to death in March.

Kenya achieved independence in an international context in which British imperialism had suffered profound decline following WWII and national independence struggles had forced an end to colonial rule in India and were raging throughout Africa. The war on the part of Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the United States was an interimperialist conflict in which the working people and oppressed masses had no side. The working class did however have a side in defence of the Soviet workers state. The Soviet Union was no longer the revolutionary workers state that it was under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, having undergone a political degeneration, beginning in 1923-24, under the bureaucratic caste led by Joseph Stalin. Nevertheless it remained a degenerated workers state until counterrevolution triumphed in 1991-92. It was the Soviet army’s victory over the imperialist armies of Nazi Germany that ended the carnage of WWII.

Following the war the imperialists ramped up their anti-Soviet Cold War and in the 1950s a central preoccupation of the colonial powers in Africa was to curtail the influence of the Soviet Union, which had provided support to nationalist movements, albeit within the framework of “peaceful co-existence” with imperialism. At the time, “anti-imperialist” rhetoric poured forth from bourgeois-nationalist leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, leader of newly independent Ghana, and Patrice Lumumba in the former Belgian Congo, who was murdered by the CIA in 1961. In 1960 South African troops massacred 69 black activists at Sharpeville who were protesting the hated apartheid pass laws. The CIA worked with South African armed forces and in 1962 tipped them off to Nelson Mandela’s whereabouts, leading to his 27-year imprisonment.

Kenyatta: Henchman of Imperialism

In a 1957 speech then-British prime minister Harold Macmillan said, referring to the peoples of Africa, “if they are exposed to the full force of nationalism, it is up to us to see that they are steered away from Communism” (quoted in African Affairs, January 1970). Jomo Kenyatta was certainly an asset to the imperialists in that regard. When released from detention in August 1961 he was still widely revered by the masses and seen as the leader who would take Kenya to Uhuru (freedom). As the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who was imprisoned for his outspoken criticisms of the Kenyatta government, noted: “Looking at Kenyatta people tended to see what they wanted to see rather than what there was: petty bourgeois vacillations and opportunism” (quoted in Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya).

Kenyatta preached “forgiveness” towards the murderous chiefs and Home Guard who had been the eager jailers and torturers of the Kikuyu masses, saying they were “all brothers and sisters and there should be no revenge.” He assured the European landowners their property rights were safe. He became the leader of the Kenya African National Union party, composed of mainly Kikuyu and Luo people, which saw itself as successor to the KAU and which was voted into government in 1963. Formal independence of Kenya was granted in December of that year.

With regard to the all-important question of land ownership, Kenyatta & Co. accepted a rotten deal which allowed for the rich Kikuyu to buy land from the white settlers, for which they could obtain loans from the British government. The large plantations and ranches owned by foreign capital were untouched. Needless to say the mass of peasants remained landless. Kenyatta and his cronies were prepared to give the white settlers everything; the black peasants received only continued poverty and repression. Mau Mau veterans who rejected the deal formed a new Kenya Land and Freedom Army demanding the return of stolen lands. The Kenyatta government cracked down on these fighters, sentencing them to long prison terms. As one of the former leaders of the radical wing of the KAU, B.M. Kaggia, commented bitterly: “We were struggling to regain our own lands which were stolen by the British colonial government. We were not fighting for the right to buy our own land” (East African Standard, 22 April 1965). Kenyatta turned to the police and army, just like the British who had detained him. A famous anecdote tells of a meeting two years after independence between president Kenyatta and former colonial governor Baring who was visiting. Baring said: “By the way, I was sitting at that actual desk when I signed your detention order twenty years ago.” Kenyatta replied: “If I had been in your shoes at the time I would have done exactly the same.”

Under capitalist rule, much of the wealth of the former colony continued to flow into the coffers of the erstwhile colonial masters. After independence Britain continued to dominate the economy in Kenya. The rising black bourgeoisie were at one with the propertied settlers in stifling the Asian entrepreneurs and ensuring racist economic policies and legislation discriminating against Asian-owned enterprise. Such policies culminated in the mass expulsion of Asians in 1967-68 in Kenya under so-called “Africanisation.” Soon after in Uganda, this same policy was carried out by Idi Amin to a particularly brutal degree.

The bourgeois nationalists who came to power in Kenya reinforced tribal divisions and upheld backward anti-woman practices. From the 1920s, the Kikuyu-based KCA was a vigorous defender of female genital mutilation (FGM). In response to a 1929 campaign waged by the Christian churches in Kenya in alliance with the educated elite against FGM, the KCA and Kenyatta defended FGM as part of “African culture,” thus condoning this retrograde and barbaric practice which is widespread today in parts of Africa, Asia and the Near East. There is nothing new in the British imperialist rulers hypocritically purporting to defend women’s rights in the colonial world—such as opposing suttee (immolation of widows) in India and the veil in the Islamic world—as a cynical ploy to dress up imperialist occupation as a “civilising mission.” While we fight every aspect of imperialist oppression, we vehemently oppose practices such as FGM, an especially brutal aspect of the oppression of women which maims them and means a lifetime of excruciating pain. (See “The Crime of Female Genital Mutilation,” Women and Revolution No. 41, Summer/Autumn 1992.)

For Permanent Revolution Throughout Africa

To this day Kenyan society is riven by murderous tribal and ethnic violence which is a legacy of colonial rule. At the time of Kenyatta’s death we wrote that the “Grand Old Man” of Kenya rose to the presidency as a Kikuyu tribalist. We added:

“An Oxford-educated elite may be at home in the capitals of Europe, but as soon as any serious social unrest breaks out, the underlying tribalism and other indices of backwardness are quickly bared. This is not merely a holdover from the past: imperialism actually intensified and formalized ethnic rivalries with its divide-and-rule policies. Today the same patterns are fostered by the requirements of maintaining a political base in an environment of massive poverty.”

— Workers Vanguard No. 214, 8 September 1978

A workers and peasants government in Kenya would expropriate the highly mechanised and capital-intensive large white-owned farms and transform them into modern large-scale collective and state farms. Councils of workers and rural toilers would decide on land distribution. A collectivised economy must be extended to neighbouring countries in the context of a socialist federation in sub-Saharan Africa.

The proletariat is the only class with the social power to bring the capitalist system to its knees and replace it with the dictatorship of the proletariat. The powerful South African proletariat is key to a revolutionary perspective in the whole region. Our comrades of Spartacist South Africa (SSA) fight to build a Leninist-Trotskyist party to lead the struggle for socialist revolution—for a black-centred workers government. Adequate housing for the millions in the townships, squatter camps and villages, electricity and water for the entire population, free quality education, the eradication of lobola (bride price) and other traditional patriarchal practices oppressive to women: these desperately needed measures require the socialist transformation of the economy and society under the dictatorship of the proletariat, fighting to promote socialist revolution throughout the African continent and worldwide. As a recent article written by the SSA said:

“As part of a socialist federation of Southern Africa, a black-centred workers government would fight to extend revolution to the imperialist centres of the U.S., West Europe and Japan. It will take an international socialist planned economy to lift the urban and rural masses out of poverty and create a classless society of material abundance—the beginning of a communist society. This is the essence of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.”

— Workers Vanguard No. 964, 10 September 2010

From The Pages Of Workers Vanguard- The Necessity of Revolutionary Leadership

Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League (ICL) website.

The Necessity of Revolutionary Leadership

(Quote of the Week)

The ongoing world economic depression emphatically underscores the need to forge revolutionary workers parties to lead the proletariat to power and sweep away the capitalist system once and for all. This point was stressed in a document adopted at the 1961 Annual Conference of the Socialist Labour League in Britain that addressed capitalism's recurrent crises and imperialist rivalries and the upsurge of liberation movements in the colonial world. The document was endorsed by the Spartacist League’s forebears in the Revolutionary Tendency of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party.

Reformists and opportunists of all varieties echo the spokesmen of the bourgeoisie in supposing, and hoping, that the separate manifestations of the fundamental world crisis can be taken one by one and separately remedied. Marxists claim that this is impossible. All such problems are related because of the inextricable connections between them established by imperialism itself. They do not assume, however, that imperialism will somehow collapse because the contradictions which it secretes will eventually bring the system to a halt. Such an idea of automatic downfall is no part of Marxism. The history of the last 40 years has driven home the lesson so often repeated by Lenin and Trotsky, that there are no impossible situations for the bourgeoisie. It survived the challenge of revolution and economic depression between the wars by resort to fascism. It survived the Second World War with the complicity of the Stalinist and Social Democratic leaderships—which ensured that the working class would not make a bid for power—and used the breathing space to elaborate new methods of rule and strengthen the economy. Even the most desperate situations can be overcome if only the active intervention of the workers as a class for themselves, with a party and leadership with a perspective of overthrowing capitalism, is not prepared in time.

—“The World Prospect for Socialism,” Labour Review (Winter 1961)

Friday, October 18, 2019

In Honor Of John Brown Late Of Harpers Ferry-1859- From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin -A Note On Revolutionary Abolitionist John Brown

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the revolutionary abolitionist John Brown.

In Honor Of John Brown-1800-1859


I would like to make a few comments on the role of Captain John Brown and his struggle at Harpers Ferry in 1859 in the history of the black liberation struggle. This appropriate as I am writing this review during the 151st anniversary of the start of the American Civil War. Unfortunately John Brown continues to remain one of the very few white heroes of the struggle for black liberation.

From fairly early in my youth I knew the name John Brown and was swept up by the romance surrounding his exploits at Harpers Ferry. For example, I knew that the great anthem of the Civil War -The Battle Hymn of the Republic had a prior existence as a tribute to John Brown. I, however, was then neither familiar with the import of his exploits for the black liberation struggle nor knew much about the specifics of the politics of the various tendencies in the struggle against slavery. I certainly knew nothing then of Brown’s (and his sons) prior military exploits in the Kansas wars against the expansion of slavery. If one understands the ongoing nature of his commitment to struggle one can only conclude that his was indeed a man on a mission. Those exploits also render absurd a very convenient myth about his ‘madness’. This is a political man and to these eyes a very worthy one. In the context of the turmoil of the times he was only the most courageous and audacious revolutionary in the struggle against the abolition of slavery in America.

Whether or not John Brown knew that his strategy would, in the short term, be defeated is a matter of dispute. Reams of paper have been spent proving the military foolhardiness of his scheme at Harpers Ferry. This focus missing the essential political point that militant action not continuing parliamentary maneuvering advocated by other abolitionists had become necessary. What is not in dispute is that Brown considered himself a true Calvinist avenging angel in the struggle against slavery and more importantly acted on that belief. In short, he was committed to bring justice to the black masses. This is why his exploits and memory stay alive after over 150 years.

Brown and his small integrated band of brothers fought bravely and coolly against great odds. Ten of Brown's men were killed including two of his sons. Five were captured, tried and executed, including Brown. These results are almost inevitable when one takes up a revolutionary struggle against the old order and one is not victorious. One need only think of, for example, the fate of the defenders of the Paris Commune in 1871. One can fault Brown on this or that tactical maneuver. Nevertheless he and the others bore themselves bravely in defeat. As we are all too painfully familiar there are defeats of the oppressed that lead nowhere. One thinks of the defeat of the Chinese Revolution in the 1920’s. There are other defeats that galvanize others into action. This is how Brown’s actions should be measured by history.

Militarily defeated at Harpers Ferry, Brown's political mission to destroy slavery by force of arms nevertheless continued to galvanize important elements in the North at the expense of the pacifistic non-resistant Garrisonian political program for struggle against slavery. Many writers on Brown who reduce his actions to that of a ‘madman’ still cannot believe that his road proved more appropriate to end slavery than either non-resistance or gradualism. That alone makes short shrift of such theories. Historians and others have misinterpreted later events such as the Bolshevik strategy which led to Russian Revolution in October 1917. More recently, we saw this same incomprehension concerning the victory of the Vietnamese against overwhelming military superior forces. Needless to say, all these events continue to be revised by some historians to take the sting out of there proper political implications.

On The 60th Anniversary Defend The Gains Of The Cuban Revolution- From The Pages of "Workers Vanguard"-Cuba: Economic Crisis and “Market Reforms”-Defend Gains of Cuban Revolution!


In Honor of Anniversary Of The July 26th Movement


From The Pen Of Frank Jackman (2015)


Every leftist, hell, everybody who stands on the democratic principle that each nation has the right to self-determination should cautiously rejoice at the “defrosting” of the long-time diplomatic relations between the American imperial behemoth and the island of Cuba (and the freedom of the remaining Cuban Five in the bargain). Every leftist militant should understand that each non-capitalist like Cuba going back to the establishment of the now defunct Soviet Union has had the right (maybe until we win our socialist future the duty) to make whatever advantageous agreements they can with the capitalist world. That despite whatever disagreements we have with the political regimes ruling those non-capitalist states. That is a question for us to work out not the imperialists.

For those who have defended the Cuban Revolution since its victory in 1959 under whatever political rationale (pro-socialist, right to self-determination, or some other hands off policy) watching on black and white television the rebels entering Havana this day which commemorates the heroic if unsuccessful efforts at Moncada we should affirm our continued defense of the Cuban revolution. Oh yes, and tell the American government to give back Guantanamo while we are at it.    



Workers Vanguard No. 986
16 September 2011

Defend Gains of Cuban Revolution!

Cuba: Economic Crisis and “Market Reforms”

For Workers Political Revolution! For Socialist Revolution Throughout the Americas!

In early August, Cuba’s National Assembly endorsed a five-year program of market-oriented economic reforms that had been adopted by the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party in the spring. The projected measures include the elimination of over a million state jobs (20 percent of the workforce), major cuts to state subsidies, a greatly expanded small-business sector and enhanced incentives to attract foreign investment.

From the time they were first announced, in August 2010, the centerpiece of the “market reforms” has been the call to eliminate a million state jobs. The bureaucracy of the state-controlled Cuban Workers Federation (CTC) has been prominent in promoting these cuts, shamelessly claiming they are essential to “continue perfecting socialism.” At this year’s May Day demonstration in Havana, the CTC marched under a call for “unity, productivity and efficiency.”

Originally, half the job cuts were supposed to take effect by March, but this deadline came and went. The Communist Party congress the following month was then supposed to set them in motion, but it decided to again postpone their implementation in the face of reported widespread discontent. As early as last October, Reuters news agency reported that party officials had to be brought to the Habana Libre Hotel to “calm workers down” when they learned of the planned job losses. Laid-off workers will only briefly get severance payments of up to 60 percent of lost monthly wages.

The stated aim of the “reforms” is to revive Cuba’s stagnant economy, which has never fully recovered from the severe crisis that followed the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union some two decades ago. Despite the rule of a Stalinist bureaucracy, the Soviet workers state provided a crucial economic lifeline for this small, impoverished island struggling to survive under the shadow of the American imperialist behemoth. The Soviet Union also represented a military obstacle to Washington’s revanchist counterrevolutionary ambitions.

The severe economic problems of the post-Soviet period were heightened in 2008 when Cuba was hit hard by the global capitalist financial crisis. The price of nickel, Cuba’s main export commodity, fell by as much as 80 percent, while remittances from Cubans living in the U.S. declined substantially. In the same year, hurricanes destroyed $10 billion of infrastructure. Facing a trade deficit of nearly $12 billion, Cuba had to default on payments to foreign creditors. The fact that Cuban doctors and other professionals working abroad account for about 60 percent of the country’s hard-currency earnings, with the tourist industry second, speaks to the dire state of the Cuban economy.

Bourgeois and leftist commentators alike have seized on the regime’s recent announcements to make wildly varying predictions. These range from fatuous optimism about isolated Cuba’s prospects for advancing toward socialism to claims that capitalism is being, or has been, restored on the island. To understand why such views are fallacious requires a Marxist understanding of the class nature of the Cuban state and its ruling Stalinist bureaucracy.

We Trotskyists do not take a side in the debate between advocates of market reforms/decentralization and those who would return to a more rigidly centralized economy. Our starting point is the understanding that Cuba is a bureaucratically deformed workers state, a society where capitalism has been overthrown but political power is monopolized by a parasitic ruling caste whose privileges derive from administering the collectivized economy. As the example of China shows, there is an inherent tendency for such regimes to abandon bureaucratized central planning in favor of market mechanisms. Intrinsically hostile to workers democracy, they resort to the discipline of the market (and the unemployment line) as a whip to raise labor productivity.

Despite the distortions of bureaucratic rule, first under Fidel Castro and now under his brother and longtime lieutenant Raúl, Cuba’s workers and peasants have gained enormously from the overthrow of capitalism. The elimination of production for profit through collectivization of the means of production, combined with central economic planning and a state monopoly over foreign trade and investment, provided jobs, housing and education for everyone and removed the yoke of direct imperialist domination. Cuba has one of the highest literacy rates in the world and a renowned health care system. Infant mortality is lower than in the U.S., Canada and the European Union. Abortion is a free, readily available health service.

The International Communist League stands for the unconditional military defense of the Cuban deformed workers state against imperialism and internal capitalist counterrevolution. We call for an end to Washington’s crippling economic embargo and demand that the U.S. get out of Guantánamo Bay. At the same time, we call on the Cuban proletariat to sweep away the Castroite bureaucracy through a political revolution, establishing a regime of workers democracy. This is the only way to redress the endemic corruption, inefficiencies and shortages due to bureaucratic mismanagement, which arrest economic growth and create huge dislocations.

Leon Trotsky’s explanation of the material roots of the Soviet bureaucracy in his 1937 book The Revolution Betrayed can equally be applied to the Cuban regime today:

“The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there are enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It ‘knows’ who is to get something and who has to wait.”

From the inception of the Cuban workers state, the ruling bureaucracy has acted as an obstacle to the further advance toward socialism—a classless, egalitarian society requiring qualitatively higher levels of production than even the most advanced capitalist country. Instead the Stalinists purvey the myth of “socialism in one country,” which in practice means opposition to the perspective of workers revolution internationally and accommodation to world imperialism and its neocolonial clients through a policy of “peaceful coexistence.”

A Cuba ruled by elected workers and peasants councils—open to all parties that defend the revolution—would be a beacon for working people throughout Latin America and beyond. The ultimate answer to Cuba’s economic backwardness and the only road to a future of material abundance, social equality and personal freedom is international proletarian revolution—not least in the U.S. imperialist bastion—leading to rational global economic planning and an egalitarian socialist order. The necessary corollary to this perspective is the forging of a Trotskyist party in Cuba, part of a reborn Fourth International, to lead a proletarian political revolution to victory.

The “Special Period” and Bureaucratic “Reform”

While the proposed “market reforms” are deepgoing, the kind of policies they represent are hardly new for Cuba. Starting around 1993, i.e., shortly after the destruction of the Soviet Union, the Castro regime undertook a set of market-oriented policies to address the self-described “Special Period.” These included the legalization of self-employment and individual U.S. dollar holdings and a major expansion of foreign tourism, including through joint ventures.

The most dramatic effect of these measures was to greatly increase inequality on the island. Amid pervasive petty and not so petty corruption, the scramble for hard currency has come to dominate the lives of Cuba’s working people. Under the country’s dual currency system, workers are paid in domestic Cuban pesos, but most goods can only be purchased in special stores or on the black market using a currency called the convertible peso (CUC), which is valued at 24 Cuban pesos and is the currency used by tourists. This has forced most workers to take on second or third jobs to secure basic needs, in turn greatly affecting labor productivity. Cuba has also witnessed a resurgence of prostitution.

Those with access to hard currency through remittances from abroad, the tourist industry or other means now have much higher living standards than other Cubans. Among the latter are most Cuban blacks, who are far less likely to have relatives in Miami and are underrepresented in jobs in the tourist sector. While black people gained tremendously from the Cuban Revolution, many of these advances are being rolled back.

Beginning in 1996, Cuba managed to emerge from the depths of the Special Period and achieved some economic growth, albeit from a low base. In 2002, some 40 percent of the sugar mills, whose produce had earlier largely been exported to the USSR, were shut down in an attempt to diversify agriculture and feed the population. But with a continued lack of equipment and fuel and amid considerable disorganization, food production continued to stagnate. By 2006, 40 percent of the trucks available to the state agency responsible for procuring and distributing agricultural produce were out of service, and the rest were at least 20 years old.

With half of all agricultural land still unproductive, Cuba has to import 80 percent of its food, much of it from the U.S. An article by University of Glasgow professor Brian Pollitt summarizes the dire situation: “While Cuba’s sugar exports alone could finance the island’s total food imports some four times over in 1989, during the years 2004-06 her exports of sugar, tobacco, other agricultural products and fisheries combined could not finance even one half of her food imports” (International Journal of Cuban Studies, June 2009).

The Threat of Mass Layoffs

The economic lineamientos (guidelines) approved by the regime are all about improving economic performance through harsher conditions for the Cuban people. They state that it is necessary to “reduce or eliminate excessive social expenditure…and evaluate all activities that can move from a budgeted [state] sector to the business system.” In 2009, the government ordered the closing of all workplace cafeterias, while giving workers a wage increase of 15 Cuban pesos (about 70¢ U.S.). Meanwhile, the meager package of basic foodstuffs at cheap prices available through ration cards is being further reduced.

The new measures seek to foster greater investment by European, Canadian and other foreign companies by easing restrictions on offshore real estate ownership, including 99-year leases, and legalizing the sale and purchase of homes. Greater direct foreign investment through joint ventures and special economic zones is also contemplated. The reforms aim to encourage the growth of the hitherto very constrained private sector by various means: lifting restrictions on self-employment; loosening controls on the sale of private agricultural produce; and formalizing the existence of small private businesses in an attempt to regulate and tax the informal economy. These businesses will be allowed to hire labor outside their own families for the first time since 1968. Such measures can only lead to even greater inequality. They will also serve to increase the economic influence of right-wing Cuban exiles, as Cubans with families in the U.S. will be among the few with enough capital to launch businesses.

The campaign by a sector of the U.S. imperialists (centered in agribusiness) to relax the embargo while continuing to impose diplomatic/political pressure on Cuba points to another possible road to subverting the socialized economy: flooding it with cheap imports. This approach is in line with the long-standing policy of the West European and Canadian rulers. Cuba should of course have the right to trade and have diplomatic relations with capitalist countries. However, this underlines the importance of the state monopoly of foreign trade—i.e., strict government control of imports and exports.

The government says it expects that 40 percent of the workers who lose their jobs will redeploy into cooperatives, while the rest will be urged to set up small businesses, become self-employed or seek work elsewhere. A party document admits that a large proportion of new businesses could fail within a year due to lack of access to credit and raw materials. And the prospect of many workers getting by in subsistence occupations like food vending and shoe repair amid the ongoing economic troubles is grim, to say the least.

Wider autonomy is also being given to state companies, which will be expected to finance their own operations or be liquidated. As we explained in the context of the “market reforms” introduced in the final years of the Soviet Union, such measures impel state managers to compete with each other to buy and produce cheap and sell dear. This in turn tends to undermine the state control of foreign trade and further fuel pro-capitalist appetites among sections of the bureaucracy. As for the regime’s scheme for “perfecting state companies” by linking wages to productivity, this is just another name for piecework wages, which serve to undermine the basic social solidarity of the working class by turning workers into individual competitors for higher wages. Under Stalinist rule, such schemes, which pose economic anarchy and greater social inequality, are the only available “answer” to the distortions created by bureaucratic rigidity and commandism.

Origins of the Cuban Deformed Workers State

To understand Cuba’s current predicament, it is necessary to examine the origins of the deformed workers state. The guerrilla forces that marched into Havana under Fidel Castro’s leadership in January 1959 were a heterogeneous petty-bourgeois movement initially committed to no more than a program of radical democratic reforms. Importantly, however, their victory meant not only the downfall of the widely despised U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship but the shattering of the army and the rest of the capitalist state apparatus, allowing the new petty-bourgeois government wide latitude.

The new government had to confront U.S. imperialism’s mounting attempts to bring it to heel through economic pressure. When Washington sought to lower the U.S. quota for Cuban sugar in early 1960, Castro signed an agreement to sell a million tons yearly to the Soviet Union. The refusal by imperialist-owned refineries to process Soviet crude oil led to the nationalization of U.S.-owned properties in Cuba in August 1960, including sugar mills, oil companies and the power and telephone companies. By October of that year, 80 percent of the country’s industry had been nationalized. Cuba became a deformed workers state with these pervasive nationalizations, which liquidated the bourgeoisie as a class.

The forerunner of the ICL, the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) of the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the early 1960s, was forged in the struggle for a Marxist perspective in Cuba. While defending the Cuban Revolution against imperialism, the RT sharply opposed the SWP’s adulation of Castro as an “unconscious” Trotskyist and the program of rural guerrillaism associated with the fidelistas and, earlier, the Chinese Maoists. As we wrote in the 1966 Declaration of Principles of the Spartacist League/U.S.:

“The Spartacist League fundamentally opposes the Maoist doctrine, rooted in Menshevism and Stalinist reformism, which rejects the vanguard role of the working class and substitutes peasant-based guerrilla warfare as the road to socialism. Movements of this sort can under certain conditions, i.e., the extreme disorganization of the capitalist class in the colonial country and the absence of the working class contending in its own right for social power, smash capitalist property relations; however, they cannot bring the working class to political power. Rather, they create bureaucratic anti-working-class regimes which suppress any further development of these revolutions towards socialism. Experience since the Second World War has completely validated the Trotskyist theory of the Permanent Revolution which declares that in the modern world the bourgeois-democratic revolution can be completed only by a proletarian dictatorship supported by the peasantry. Only under the leadership of the revolutionary proletariat can the colonial and semi-colonial countries obtain the complete and genuine solution to their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation.”

—“Basic Documents of
the Spartacist League,”
Marxist Bulletin No. 9

In the absence of the proletarian democracy of a state directly won by the working people, the decisive section of Castro’s forces made the transition to a bureaucratic caste resting atop the newly nationalized economy. By virtue of their newly acquired social position, the Castroites were compelled to embrace the ersatz Marxism (“socialism in one country”) that is the necessary ideological reflection of a Stalinist bureaucracy, in the process merging with the wretched pro-Moscow Popular Socialist Party, which had at one point served in the Batista government. The existence of the Soviet degenerated workers state provided a model and, more importantly, the material support that made this outcome possible.

The Cuban Revolution demonstrated yet again that there is no “third road” between the dictatorship of capital and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In this sense, it confirmed Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. But the Cuban Revolution was a far cry from the Russian Revolution of October 1917, which was carried out by a class-conscious urban working class, supported by the poor peasantry, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party.

Cuba and the Soviet Collapse: Background to the Crisis

Contrary to the falsehood spread by various self-styled leftists that the USSR was an “imperialist” power, the Soviet Union was a workers state that issued out of the first victorious socialist revolution in history. Internationalist to the core, Lenin, Trotsky and the other Bolshevik leaders saw the revolution in economically backward Russia as the first step in a worldwide socialist revolution, crucially including the advanced capitalist countries. But the failure of a number of revolutionary opportunities in the period after World War I—particularly the defeat of the 1923 German Revolution—deepened the isolation of the Soviet state. This, combined with the economic devastation of World War I and the subsequent Civil War, allowed for the emergence of a conservative bureaucratic layer in the party and state apparatus.

Beginning in 1923-24, the USSR underwent a qualitative bureaucratic degeneration, a political counterrevolution in which the working class was deprived of political power. The nationally narrow conservatism of the consolidating bureaucratic caste was given ideological expression by Stalin’s promulgation in late 1924 of the theory that socialism could be built in a single country. This anti-Marxist dogma served as a rationale for increasingly blatant rejection of Bolshevik internationalism—leading to overt betrayal of proletarian revolutions abroad, as in the case of Spain in the 1930s—in favor of futile attempts to accommodate imperialism.

Despite bureaucratic rule, the workers state’s ability to marshal the economic resources of Soviet society through economic planning produced great advances, transforming the USSR from a backward, largely peasant country into a modern industrial power. That fact stands out ever more sharply today as the capitalist world is again mired in a global economic crisis. However, as Trotsky noted in The Revolution Betrayed:

“The farther you go, the more the economy runs into the problem of quality, which slips out of the hands of a bureaucracy like a shadow. The Soviet products are as though branded with the gray label of indifference. Under a nationalized economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative—conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery.”

Growing economic stagnation, exacerbated by the need to keep pace with U.S. imperialism’s massive anti-Soviet military buildup, came to a head in the 1980s. The regime of Mikhail Gorbachev introduced a program of market-oriented measures (perestroika), which precipitated the fracturing of the bureaucracy, including along national lines. In August 1991, seizing on a failed coup attempt by Gorbachev’s lieutenants, the openly pro-capitalist Boris Yeltsin seized power in league with the U.S. imperialist government of George H.W. Bush. In those pivotal days, the ICL issued and distributed more than 100,000 copies of a Russian-language statement calling on Soviet workers to “Defeat Yeltsin-Bush counterrevolution!” But decades of Stalinist misrule had left the proletariat atomized and demoralized, and the absence of proletarian resistance to the counterrevolutionary tide paved the way for the final destruction of the gains of the October Revolution.

The false notion that the Soviet Union was an exploitative “imperialist” power is completely disproved by its support to Cuba, which was crucial to that country’s economic progress. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union subsidized up to 36 percent of Cuba’s national income, bartering oil and its derivatives for sugar under extremely favorable conditions for the island. The huge advances in Cuban health care and education were also conditioned by the Soviet subsidies, which in the 1970s allowed the country to open free public universities, including medical schools in all of its 14 provinces.

After the USSR’s destruction, Cuban imports dropped by 80 percent and its Gross Domestic Product plunged by 35 percent. With no Soviet-supplied fuel, machinery or spare parts, half of Cuba’s industrial plants had to be closed, as the country underwent an economic collapse proportionally greater than the Great Depression in the U.S. We see here in the language of cold, hard statistics the historic gains that were made possible by the existence of the Soviet Union—and the disaster that unfolded with its destruction. This stands as a sharp indictment of the fake-socialist groups that made common cause with the Yeltsinite forces of imperialist-backed counterrevolution and now vituperate against Cuba’s “market reforms” as a sellout!

The “Chinese Model”

The introduction of “market reforms” has intersected and provoked hot debate among Cuban intellectuals on the road forward. Influential economists like Omar Everleny, deputy director of the Center for Studies on the Cuban Economy, applaud the proposed changes, arguing that they can bring modernization and indefinite economic growth. Everleny, among others, advocates following a Chinese- or Vietnamese-style economic model of encouraging foreign investment. Some others are concerned that “market reforms” might lead Cuba to the abyss, looking at the fate of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev’s perestroika policy.

In comparing China to Cuba today, it is important to note that by the last two decades of the Cold War (the 1970s and ’80s) China had become a strategic ally of U.S. imperialism against the Soviet Union. The Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s was a reflection on both sides of the counterrevolutionary implications of “socialism in one country.” The Chinese Stalinists’ criminal policy of allying with Washington against Moscow, which began under Mao, helped set the stage for the Deng Xiaoping bureaucracy’s opening of China to large-scale industrial investment by Western imperialism. In contrast, U.S. imperialism has remained implacably hostile to Cuba and shows no sign of easing its brutal embargo. This is despite overtures by the Havana regime, such as the release of over 120 right-wing “dissidents” beginning last year, in which the reactionary Catholic church played a crucial role.

Washington’s hardline stance toward Cuba not only blocks American investment, it also constricts investment from West Europe and Canada, given the long reach of U.S. extraterritorial law. Moreover, Cuba has neither the pre-existing industrial base nor the vast reservoir of cheap labor that fueled China’s economic advance over the past three decades. The idea that Cuba could successfully undertake an export-driven form of economic expansion via substantial imperialist investment is a fantasy.

Despite the pro-market measures introduced since the late 1970s, the main economic sectors in China (as in Cuba) remain nationalized and under state control. Large-scale investment by Western and Japanese corporations and the offshore Chinese bourgeoisie has, on the one hand, resulted in high levels of economic growth and a huge increase in the weight of China’s industrial proletariat, a progressive development of historic importance. On the other hand, “market socialism” has greatly increased inequalities, including the creation of a sizable class of indigenous capitalist entrepreneurs on the mainland, many with familial and financial ties to the Communist Party officialdom. This has made China a cauldron of economic and social contradictions and explosive labor unrest. Meanwhile, the imperialists continue to pursue a two-pronged strategy to foment counterrevolution, supplementing economic penetration with military pressure and provocations along with championing anti-Communist “dissidents.”

Cuban Bureaucracy: A Contradictory Caste

Against the views propounded by the likes of Everleny, others, both in Cuba and internationally, argue against following the “market socialism” model implemented in China, a country they consider to be capitalist or even imperialist. An example is the Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo (LTS), Mexican section of the Trotskyist Fraction-Fourth International (FT-CI), a split from the tendency led by the late Argentine political chameleon Nahuel Moreno. In a September 2010 statement on Cuba, the FT-CI writes: “Despite a ‘socialist’ and ‘anti-imperialist’ discourse, the ruling bureaucracy has for years justified the so-called ‘Chinese,’ or Vietnamese, ‘model,’ i.e., a program of marching toward a gradual process of capitalist restoration under the leadership of the PCC [Cuban Communist Party], and they are already taking measures in that direction” (www.cubarevolucion.org).

Contrary to what the LTS/FT-CI contends, there cannot be a “gradual process of capitalist restoration” either in China or in Cuba. Capitalist counterrevolution would have to triumph on the political level—in the conquest of state power. It would not come about through a process of ever more quantitative extensions of the private sector, whether domestic or foreign. The Stalinist bureaucracy is incapable of a cold, gradual restoration of capitalism from above. As the events in the Soviet Union in 1991-92 showed clearly, a major social crisis in a deformed workers state would be accompanied by the collapse of Stalinist bonapartism and the political fracturing of the ruling Communist Party. What would emerge from such a situation—capitalist restoration or proletarian political revolution—would depend on the outcome of the struggle of these counterposed class forces. The key to a working-class victory will be the timely forging of a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party rooted in the most advanced layers of the proletariat.

The LTS/FT-CI treats the Cuban bureaucracy as if it were committed to the destruction of the workers state. Thus it states that Cuba’s army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces, is “the vanguard of capitalist restoration” in Cuba today. This notion contradicts the very essence of Trotsky’s understanding of the Stalinist bureaucracy as a contradictory caste, a parasitic growth on the workers state and its collectivized property forms. With its stifling bureaucratism, lies, corruption and concessions to capitalism, the bureaucracy certainly helps prepare the way for a possible counterrevolution. But to label it (or a section of it) “the vanguard of capitalist restoration” is an outrageous whitewash of U.S. imperialism, the Catholic church, the counterrevolutionary Cuban exiles, and right-wingers within Cuba like the “dissidents” of Las Damas de Blanco (“Ladies in White”).

To cover its tracks, the LTS/FT-CI seeks to draw a distinction between the current ruling bureaucrats and Che Guevara, Fidel Castro’s comrade-in-arms. Like many others on the left, the LTS/FT-CI lauds Che’s “internationalism,” asserting in its article that he approached “a consistent strategy for international socialist revolution.” Guevara’s murder by the CIA in Bolivia in 1967 while leading a small band of peasant guerrillas makes him a heroic figure. But his peasant-based strategy, which has brought so many militants to tragic ends, was a flat rejection of Marxism, in no way distinguishable from that of other “Third World” Stalinist guerrillaists.

The LTS/FT-CI also endorses Guevara’s economic policies in the early 1960s, when he served as Minister of Industry, against Cuba’s more recent policies of economic liberalization and decentralization. No less than his fellow Stalinists, Guevara accepted the framework of “building socialism” on one small, poor and besieged island. What defined his economic views was a particularly voluntarist and utopian brand of Stalinism characterized by upholding “moral incentives” over material ones as a purported road to rapid industrialization. This led to gross misuse and squandering of material and human resources. In dismissing workers’ aspirations for decent living standards as “bourgeois ideology,” Guevara helped to enforce the Cuban government’s complete political disenfranchisement of the proletariat.

The LTS/FT-CI’s claim that capitalist restoration is underway in Cuba is designed to facilitate their dropping defense of the deformed workers state against counterrevolution, which is precisely what this outfit did two decades ago in supporting pro-capitalist forces in the USSR, East Germany (the DDR) and the East European deformed workers states. The LTS’s cothinkers in the Argentine Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas even raised the scandalous call for “the defense of the right of the German masses to unite however they wish, even if they decide to do so in the framework of capitalism” (Avanzada Socialista, 30 March 1990)! This amounted to a blank check for the capitalist annexation of the DDR by West German imperialism.

False Parallels to Lenin’s NEP

Some academic apologists for the proposed pro-market policies in Cuba have pointed to Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), adopted in the Soviet republics in 1921, which allowed concessions to the peasants in the form of an internal market where agricultural produce would be exchanged for industrial goods. In his book Russia: From Real Socialism to Real Capitalism (2005), Cuban historian Ariel Dacal argued that “the great merit of this policy, albeit contradictory,” was as “an alternative for development against capitalism” in non-developed countries. Such views are echoed by sections of the left internationally. Making heavy reference to the NEP, a statement justifying the Cuban reforms by the U.S. Party for Socialism and Liberation asserts: “This is not the first time that a communist-led government has reverted to the expansion of a private market” (“A Marxist Analysis of Cuba’s New Economic Reforms,” PSLweb.org).

The Soviet NEP was not a model for sustained development but a temporary retreat after the devastation of the Civil War in a backward, overwhelmingly peasant economy in which industry had broken down and was utterly disorganized. While the NEP did succeed in reviving economic life, it also enriched a layer of speculators, small traders and well-off peasants, who became a corrosive influence on the apparatus of the workers state. The early NEP legislation, drawn up under Lenin’s direct guidance, had severely restricted the hiring of labor and acquisition of land. However, in 1925 these restrictions were greatly liberalized by Stalin’s regime. Trotsky’s Left Opposition, which formed to fight the growing bureaucratic degeneration, called to increase taxation of the rich peasants to finance industrialization and for the systematic introduction of large-scale, mechanized collective agriculture. By the end of the 1920s, as the counterrevolutionary threat from the new stratum of rich peasants and merchants brought the USSR to the brink of disaster, Stalin belatedly turned against his former ally Nikolai Bukharin and moved to collectivize agriculture, in his own characteristically brutal and administrative fashion.

Even as they implemented the NEP, Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks fought with all their might to extend the gains of October to the workers of the world. They built the Third (Communist) International to guide and unite the struggles of revolutionary Marxists internationally. Such policies are utterly counterposed to those of the Stalinists, who instead subordinate the interests of the world proletariat to their efforts to curry favor with “progressive” capitalist regimes.

Stalinism: Class-Collaborationist Betrayal

Cuba’s defiance of the U.S. imperialist colossus over the years has inspired large numbers of militant workers and radical youth in Latin America and elsewhere. But this does not mean that the Cuban regime is intrinsically more radical than its Stalinist counterparts elsewhere. During its first two decades under Mao, the Beijing regime was likewise viewed by impressionistic Western leftists as a revolutionary alternative to Moscow. We warned as early as 1969 against the growing objective possibility—given the tremendous industrial and military capacity of the Soviet Union—of a U.S. deal with China, a prediction which soon came to pass. The bottom line is that whatever their particular immediate policies and pressures, all Stalinist bureaucracies are characterized by class collaboration on the international level. Differences in posture and rhetoric are explained simply by the degree to which these regimes are under the gun of direct imperialist hostility.

The foreign policy of the Cuban bureaucracy has criminally betrayed the interests of the working masses of Latin America. In the 1960s, Fidel Castro supported bourgeois nationalists such as João Goulart in Brazil and saluted the Peruvian military junta as “a group of progressive officers playing a revolutionary role.” In the early ’70s, he endorsed Salvador Allende’s popular-front bourgeois regime in Chile, whose political and physical disarming of the proletariat paved the way to Pinochet’s 1973 military coup and the massacre of more than 30,000 leftists and workers.

When the masses of Nicaragua, under the leadership of the radical petty-bourgeois nationalist Sandinistas, overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, shattering the capitalist state, the road was opened to a social revolution. We said: “Defend, complete, extend the Nicaraguan revolution!” But Castro advised the Sandinista government to “avoid the early mistakes we made in Cuba,” such as “premature frontal attacks on the bourgeoisie.” The Sandinistas maintained a “mixed economy,” which meant that the capitalists were never destroyed as a class. With the U.S. bankrolling a dirty war by CIA-backed “contras,” the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie was able to reassert control a decade later, defeating the revolution. The net result of the Cuban leaders’ policies of “peaceful coexistence” has been the continued immiseration of the Latin American masses and further isolation for the Cuban Revolution.

Prominent among the pseudo-Marxist tendencies that have given political support to Cuba’s Castroite bureaucracy is the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) of Alan Woods. In recent years, Woods has been able to posture as a “Trotskyist” inside Cuba, including in occasional speaking tours. The precondition for such activities is the IMT’s outright adulation of Fidel Castro and its adamant opposition to the Trotskyist call for proletarian political revolution.

The IMT has a decades-long history of liquidation into social-democratic or outright capitalist parties, from the British Labour Party to Mexico’s bourgeois Party of the Democratic Revolution. Today, like the Cuban bureaucracy, Woods & Co. give political support to Venezuelan capitalist strongman Hugo Chávez and his supposed “socialism of the 21st century.” They write:

“The Venezuelan Revolution, together with Cuba, has provided a rallying point for the revolution in Bolivia, Ecuador and other countries. The initiative taken by President Chavez to launch the Fifth International, dedicated to the overthrow of imperialism and capitalism, should receive the most enthusiastic support of the Cuban revolutionaries. This is the hope for the future!”

—“Where Is Cuba Going? Towards Capitalism or
Socialism?” marxist.com,
17 September 2010

Chávez, a former army colonel, came to power through the bourgeois electoral process and rules a capitalist state in which the Venezuelan bourgeoisie and the imperialists continue to carry on a booming business, however hostile Washington has been toward his regime. His piecemeal nationalizations do not challenge capitalist private property, any more than did nationalizations by other national-populist caudillos, such as Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico in the 1930s or Juan Perón in Argentina in the 1940s (see “Venezuela: Break with Bourgeois Populism! For Workers Revolution!” WV No. 907, 1 February 2008). In passing off this bourgeois politician as “anti-capitalist,” the IMT does its own small part in keeping the Venezuelan working masses under the boot of imperialist plunderers.

Since 2000, Venezuela has been Cuba’s main trade partner, providing oil in exchange for some 20,000 Cuban doctors and teachers. Cuba’s present dependence on Chávez’s ability (and desire) to continue subsidizing his populist literacy and health campaigns by importing skilled Cuban professionals is, to say the least, an extremely unstable basis for economic survival.

Cuba at the Crossroads

In April 2010, a senior black Communist Party intellectual, Esteban Morales, director of the U.S. Studies Center at the University of Havana and a regular political commentator on Cuban television, wrote an article titled “Corruption: The True Counterrevolution?” He argued:

“When we closely observe Cuba’s internal situation today, we can have no doubt that the counterrevolution, little by little, is taking positions at certain levels of the State and Government. Without a doubt, it is becoming evident that there are people in positions of government and state who are girding themselves financially for when the Revolution falls, and others may have everything almost ready to transfer state-owned assets to private hands, as happened in the old USSR.”

A month after the publication of this article it was announced that Morales had been expelled from the Communist Party; following an appeal, he was reinstated this summer.

The Castro regime asserts that corruption originates with opportunistic individuals who have made their way into the state administrative apparatus, while the core of the historic Communist Party leadership remains irreversibly loyal to maintaining the Cuban workers state. In fact, corruption is a direct product of Stalinist bureaucratic rule, and it seeps into every pore of Cuban society. Everyone knows that if you know the right person you can obtain the necessary goods, so why work hard for nothing? Only a regime of workers democracy can instill the necessary labor morale, prevent bureaucratic misuse of resources and check tendencies toward capitalist restoration.

The Cuban regime has tried to shield itself against criticism through periodic purges and “anti-corruption” campaigns and has at times reversed some of its own “liberalizing” measures. This is not because these Stalinists are irrevocably committed to the defense of the collectivized economy. The Havana bureaucracy is not a social class; its components do not own stocks in state industry and cannot transmit ownership of the means of production to the bureaucrats’ heirs. Rather, it is a parasitic and contradictory formation balancing between the imperialist bourgeoisie and the Cuban working class. As Trotsky wrote of the Soviet bureaucracy, “It continues to preserve state property only to the extent that it fears the proletariat.”

Insofar as the Cuban Stalinists’ reform program creates a new layer of small capitalists, they will necessarily develop their own interests counterposed to those of the workers state. At the same time, it is possible that the regime’s moves will generate significant popular dissent and that the political hold of the bureaucracy will start to fracture, providing fertile ground for forging a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party among workers and advanced intellectuals seeking a road to authentic Marxism.

In outlining the road forward for the Soviet working class in the 1930s, Trotsky emphasized: “It is not a question of substituting one ruling clique for another, but of changing the very methods of administering the economy and guiding the culture of the country. Bureaucratic autocracy must give place to Soviet democracy.” The 1938 Transitional Program, the founding document of the Fourth International, laid out key elements of the program for proletarian political revolution, including:

“A revision of planned economy from top to bottom in the interests of producers and consumers! Factory committees should be returned the right to control production. A democratically organized consumers’ cooperative should control the quality and price of products.

“Reorganization of the collective farms in accordance with the will and in the interests of the workers there engaged!

“The reactionary international policy of the bureaucracy should be replaced by the policy of proletarian internationalism.”

An isolated and backward workers state, even one much larger and more resource-rich than Cuba, cannot reach, much less surpass, the levels of labor productivity in the advanced capitalist countries. Only successful socialist revolutions internationally, particularly in the imperialist centers, can eliminate scarcity and open the road to a world communist society. The ICL seeks to reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution, as the necessary leadership in this struggle.