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| Then Vice-President Xi Jinping and Raul Castro, Havana, June 5, 2011 (photo: Forbes) |
In April 2011 in “Cuba for Sale” we reviewed the situation in Cuba following the 6th Congress of the CPC and the Guidelines
which it adopted. We concluded that Raul Castro was taking Cuba down
the ‘China Road’ to state capitalism. We did not think then that Cuba
had reached the point of restoring capitalism. We were wrong. We
predicted that Cuba was moving towards ‘market socialism’ and on the way
meeting Venezuelan ‘state capitalism’. Today looking back after two
years we think Cuba had already reached the point of restoring
capitalism. We missed the significance of the 6th Congress in
committing Cuba to a state capitalist ‘strategic partnership’ with
Chinese imperialism. Cuba’s fate has always hinged on the revolution in
Latin America. In the last decade the revolution has been strangled by
the Bolivarian popular front with China. While the Castroist and
Bolivarian regimes have made a great show of their opposition to US
imperialism, in reality they have been increasingly subordinated to
Chinese imperialism. We think that the intervention of imperialist China
has played a key role in strangling the Latin American revolution and
that as a result Cuba has gone capitalist. This means that a new
Catroist bourgeoisie has emerged alongside the Bolivarian bourgeoisie as
the main comprador agents of Chinese imperialist plunder of Latin
American workers. A socialist revolution is necessary to overthrow that
bourgeoisie and bring about a Socialist United States of Latin America!
[1] Cuba, China and Latin America
The Castroist Left takes Fidel Castro’s
view that the fate of the Cuban revolution depends on the Latin American
revolution. We agree completely. But for most of the so-called Left in
Latin America this revolution takes the form of an anti-imperialist
alliance against US imperialism. Virtually none on the Left recognises
the entry of China in Latin America as an emerging imperialist power.
They see China as an ally in the anti-imperialist front against the US.
In reality, this AIF is a popular front between Latin American workers
and Chinese imperialism strangling the workers’ revolution. That is why
for us China is not a “progressive” partner in the struggle against US
imperialism. For us, Cuba is not ‘renewing socialism’
under Raul Castro because of support from ‘socialist’ Venezuela or
‘market socialist’ China. Rather, Cuba’s links with Venezuela and China
have allowed it to force restoration in Cuba and present restoration as a
‘renewal of socialism’.
Our article Cuba for Sale
written in mid 2011 concludes that the restoration process was well on
the road to completion, and that a political revolution to stop it must
be based on the Latin American revolution and world revolution. The
Bolivarian popular front between the Bolivarian Alliance for the
Americas (ALBA) and China was a barrier to this revolution that had to be broken:
“Cuba’s ‘capitalist road’ converges
with the much vaunted Chavista ’21st century socialism’. This is the key
to the defeat of Latin American workers which is necessary to allow
Cuba to complete its historic counter-revolution. Chavez’ Bolivarian
revolution in Venezuela (and which leads the ALBA countries including
Bolivia and Ecuador) has trapped Latin American workers behind a popular
front with China. Chavez famously talks of walking hand in hand with
China towards ‘21st century socialism’. It is the counter-revolutionary
role of the Chavista popular front in Latin America that allows Cuba to
complete a historic counter-revolution by the Chinese method of many
defeats and repressions of workers over the decades and then to complete
that historic defeat. It follows that if the Cuban
counter-revolution is to be defeated before it is altogether victorious,
it is necessary to smash the Bolivarian popular front. We cannot stress
this enough. Chavez and Castro are part of an ‘anti-imperialist’ bloc
with China and semi-colonial semi-fascists like Gaddafi and Assad to
stop the new wave of workers’ uprisings against the global
crisis-uprising which can play the critical role of breaking up the
popular fronts and the fake ‘market socialism’ that ultimately serves
imperialism.
So will the Cuban bureaucracy
succeed in completing the restoration process before the world
revolution destroys the Stalinist/fake Trotskyist barrier to socialist
revolution in Latin America and brings a political revolution to Cuba?
It depends on whether the Arab revolution deepens and spreads into the
rest of Africa, into Europe, Asia and Latin America, where the strangle
hold of the Stalinist/Menshevik popular front which ties the workers to
imperialism is destroyed, and the international revolution advances to
victory. Of course this means first and foremost a program for Political
Revolution even at this late stage in Cuba.”
Yet even as we wrote these words, the
“strangle hold” of the popular front was proving decisive in allowing
the Cuban bureaucracy to transform the class character of the state from
a deformed workers state to a capitalist state. While we expected a
global struggle that was developing with the Arab Spring against paying
for the capitalist crisis to influence the Latin American revolution and
ultimately determine the outcome in Cuba, we underestimated the extent
to which the downward pressure of the crisis had allowed Chinese
imperialism to steal a march on the US and re-colonise Cuba as a
semi-colony.
[2] From Workers State to Capitalist State
What we missed in Cuba in April 2011 was
the insidious under-the-radar influence of imperialist China’s
‘state-to-state’ deals with Cuba. While we noted all the reforms that
introduced the Law of Value (LOV) passed by the 6th Congress
these could still be seen as falling short of the rejection of the Plan
and a commitment to restoring capitalism. We counted all the trees (e.g.
sacking 500,000 state workers, freeing up of self employment,
cooperatives with legal inheritance, subcontracting of state services,
monetary unity, etc.) but considered that a political revolution
responding to a widening global struggle could still reverse this
process. What we didn’t see was the ‘wood’ – the overall commitment on
the part of the state bureaucracy to restore capitalism.
So almost immediately after the April 6th Congress introduced a number of ‘market reforms’, in June, Cuba signed major new deals with China over oil and gas investments, banking and economic planning, and negotiated the first Five Year Plan of Cuban-Sino Cooperation.
It is now obvious that these deals were planned well in advance and
signed when Hu Jintao visited in June. We now recognise that the
decision to restore capitalism was made at the 6th Congress
and that the class character of the Cuban state changed from Workers’
State to Capitalist State. We have no excuse for overlooking this since
we had spent three years developing an analysis of China as an emerging imperialist power initially in a political struggle inside the FLTI. We were also preparing a polemic directed at the Spartacists showing that China’s road to restoration was via state capitalism.
This theoretical framework explains the
significance of the agreements signed in June 2011 which committed Cuba
to collaborate with China to develop along state capitalist lines and to
set up high level age joint agencies to implement this development. These
agreements marked the decisive turning point in the restoration process
when the bureaucratic regime abandoned the stagnating planned economy
and embarked consciously on capitalist development. The essential
criterion for the change in the class character of the state was the
decision of the bureaucracy to no longer defend the Plan and instead
defend the Law of Value.
To explain why this determines the point
at which the class character of the state changes, we have to show how
the state ceases to defend workers property by means of planned prices
of production and replaces these with prices of commodities set by the
global market. To see how this happened we first we need to explain the
Law of Value (LOV), then we need to show that the LOV doesn’t have to
manifest itself in the ‘privatisation’ of state property, and that
workers property can be converted into capitalist property while
remaining state property, as anticipated by Trotsky. This will
demonstrate how the Cuban bureaucracy has been able to use the state to
restore capitalist property via the Chinese model of state capitalism.
First, what is the Law of Value? The Law of Value states that the value of commodities is equal to the Socially Necessary Labour Time
expended in their production. The LOV existed before capitalism when
commodities were traded at roughly their labour cost. With capitalism
the LOV became fundamental to production because commodity production
was generalised to include the commodity labour-power. The exchange value
of commodities was arrived at in the market. Prices responding to
supply and demand fluctuated around the value of commodities. To sell,
all commodities had a use-value which now included labour power,
the unique commodity with a use- value to the capitalist to produce more
value than it costs to reproduce i.e. surplus-value. Hence
capital could expropriate surplus-value as the source of profits. This
was made possible by capitalists owning the means of production and
forcing workers to sell their labour power to lower the price of
production of commodities they produce (=wages + raw materials + average
profit).
This is why capitalism has a built-in motor force, the
contradiction between the two classes; labour and capital, which
constantly struggle over the share of the total value produced. The
historical development of capitalism as class struggle is expressed in
the laws of motion, the development of the forces of production, the
tendency for the rate of exploitation to increase, which lead to
periodic crises of falling profits (TRPF), and ultimately crises that
increasingly cause massive destruction of the forces of production in
depressions and imperialist wars, creating the conditions for socialist
revolution.
Marx envisaged that socialism could
succeed only if it overcame the destructive legacy of capitalism by
developing the forces of production. To do this it must put their
control into the hands of the working class to plan production to meet
social needs. This means replacing the LOV (which presupposes the global
capitalist market) with planned prices based on a valuation of labour
not as a commodity but as a social value. In this way the working class
determines how labour is distributed in society. How far the Russian
revolution and the other countries that followed its model more or less
achieved this is debatable. The main point is that these revolutions
fell far short of realising socialism. They failed to develop the forces
of production and stagnated. Most were forced to open up to the world
market and the LOV and capitalist exploitation to stimulate their
growth.
Such access to the LOV did not mean that
planning was abandoned. That required that the surplus value brought
into the planned economy be accumulated in the hands of an exploiting
class to restore capitalism. To achieve this, surplus value had to be
transferable or inheritable to signify the existence of an exploiting
class with an interest in capitalist exploitation. Thus Lenin and
Trotsky argued that because the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union did not
accumulate personal wealth by this means, workers property remained, and
capitalism was not restored. This is the theoretical tradition which we
follow. We shall now look at how Lenin and Trotsky envisaged the
restoration of capitalism allowing the bureaucracy to become a new
bourgeoisie. In particular, because it is China and Cuba that interests
us here, how can those who control the state convert state-owned workers
property into state-owned capitalist property?
[3] What is State Capitalist Restoration?
The key to understanding restoration in
Cuba is that it followed the Chinese path to restoration via state
capitalism. For us state capitalism refers only to the capitalist
economy where key means of production are highly concentrated in state
ownership. Usually these state assets are in the form of state
corporations (SOEs) in energy, transport, infrastructure or other
essential services. They are owned collectively by the capitalist class
since it alone benefits from their existence in providing
infrastructure, utilities etc at a price of production in which the
states sets a below average ‘profit’ as a subsidy to capital. This is
the sense in which it is used by Lenin and Trotsky. When Lenin spoke of
the Soviet Union as ‘state capitalist’ he did so to make a polemical
point. To disarm those who spoke idealistically of actually existing
socialism when it was not even on the horizon, he said that the soviet
state resembled ‘state capitalism’ being reliant on the LOV in private
agriculture and private industry. In Lenin’s specific sense then,
capitalism was the private agriculture and commercial trading, yet the
state was a workers state!
On the question of ‘state capitalism’ applied to the Soviet Union Trotsky says:
“To summarize: under state capitalism,
in the strict sense of the word, we must understand the management of
industrial and other enterprises by the bourgeois state on its own
account, or the “regulating” intervention of the bourgeois state into
the workings of private capitalist enterprises. By state capitalism “in
quotes,” Lenin meant the control of the proletarian state over private
capitalist enterprises and relations. Not one of these definitions
applies from any side to the present Soviet economy.”
It is only the first sense in which we
apply the term to China and Cuba today. And here we refer to Trotsky’s
discussion of the possible course of restoration via ‘state capitalism’.
Trotsky writing in 1937
states that the class character of the state is defined by the social
relations it defends and that capitalist restoration will have to begin
with the nationalised economy:
“Should a bourgeois
counterrevolution succeed in the USSR, the new government for a lengthy
period would have to base itself upon the nationalized economy. But
what does such a type of temporary conflict between the economy and the
state mean? It means a revolution or a counter-revolution. The victory of one class over another signifies that it will reconstruct the economy in the interests of the victors.”
In other words the class character of the state will change from Workers state to Capitalist state, as the result of a counter-revolution, before
it is possible to ‘reconstruct’ a capitalist economy! In the
restoration process in the former Soviet Union (and Eastern Europe) this
has proven to be the case. This process was relatively rapid and
involved an open conflict between an openly pro-imperialist wing of the
bureaucracy (Yeltsin and Co) and a more conservative wing of the
bureaucracy (Yananev and Co) preferring a slow road in which the CPSU
would guide the process. The victory of the openly pro-imperialist
faction was a counter-revolution and marked a change in the class
character of the state. The process of restoring capitalism then began
as the state rapidly dissolved the Soviet Union, banned the CPSU, and
destroyed the plan.
In the case of China however, a slower
process of restoration by the CCP began in 1978 but only reached the
‘tipping point’ in 1992 at the 14th National Congress when
the leadership committed itself to restoration. The new capitalist state
then embarked on a process of ‘reconstructing’ the economy using the
concentrated power of the nationalised economy. We analyse this process
in detail in our recent paper on The Restoration of Capitalism in China.
It is clear to us that China’s capitalist restoration vindicates
Trotsky’s prediction. And the capitalist counter-revolution in China has
become the model for the Cuban counter-revolution.
[4] State Capitalism in Cuba
In the case of Cuba the
Catroist/Bolivarian Left is very confused by the restoration process.
They have forgotten Trotsky’s prediction in 1937. The Castroist Green Left
method is to equate capitalism with private ownership of the means of
production. This is because the revolution gained control of the state
and nationalised private property. Restoration reverses this process and
privatises state property. Therefore so long as the state owns the main
sectors of the economy there cannot be restoration. Obviously Cuba is a
long way from restoration using this method. In fact the CBL claim the
reforms under Raul Castro go hand in hand with the ‘socialist’
revolution in Venezuela. Unlike China under ‘market socialism’ – a
concept that disguises the restoration of capitalism – the Castro Bros
are held to be genuine socialists combating corruption and resisting the
return of capitalism. This method is impressionistic and opportunistic
and nothing to do with Marxism as we shall see.
On the other hand, equally impressionistic is the Morenoist view (LIT)
that claims restoration is already complete because the state has
abandoned the monopoly of foreign trade, the plan, and opened up to
private agriculture and small business. The LIT seems to think that
since the state has made some market reforms it has fallen short of its
blueprint of a Workers’ State. The bureaucracy hand in glove with US
imperialism (the LIT ignores China) has smashed the revolution. We could
call this the sectarian dogmatic view of restoration. The LIT would
have had great difficulty in defending the Soviet Union as a Workers
State during the period when Lenin referred to it as ‘state capitalist’
as we explained above.
The key is the commitment of the
bureaucracy in using the state to defend the plan, or to replace the
plan with the law of value. The CBL opportunists don’t see the
Castroist leadership as a bureaucracy so they take at face value its
reforms as ‘renewing socialism’. They don’t understand that the
bureaucracy has formed a strategic alliance with the Chinese
imperialists to convert Cuba into a capitalist client state.
The sectarians on the other hand read
into the intentions of the bureaucracy the plan to privatise the key
sectors of the economy. But for them the evidence is the inroads of
private FDI which as we shall see are relatively insignificant. They do
not see the elephant hiding in the wood, the special strategic
relationship built between Raul Castro, the army and the Chinese ruling
class. While they are looking with contempt at the Castro’s and the
expatriate gusanos in Miami, they ignore the looming shadow of imperialist China.
We argue that neither of these faulty methods arrives at the reality. Even the non-Marxist Feinberg
of the Brookings Institute writing on FDI in Cuba shows that the
experiments in market measures are not sufficient to show the state is
sacrificing the plan for the market. FDI is now in the form of joint
ventures and since 2004 Cuba has moved to impose 51% state ownership.
The restrictions imposed on FDI do not allow foreign firms to dictate
world prices or transmit them into the dual economy. They have to
operate within strict price controls. As Feinberg
shows, private FDI into Cuba is not free to compete on the basis of
international competitiveness. The main motive for private FDI is the
expectation of future windfall profits when the US embargo is lifted.
Thus if projected profits do not justify current losses, major
multinationals will leave as in the case of Unilever. When forced to
renegotiate its contract to cede 51% control of its JV to the state and
export 20% of its product at a loss, Unilever abandoned Cuba.
The free trade zones have failed because
the terms were not attractive enough for FDI. This is because the state
has only relinquished control over foreign trade or agreed to the dollar
zone so long as these concessions earn foreign exchange.
Micro-enterprises are a full employment measure and based on short-term
leases so limit the formation of a new capitalist class. It appears
that the state, driven by crisis has tried to attract FDI, set up export
zones, opened up a tourism industry in an attempt to produce exports
and obtain foreign exchange. These are not in themselves sufficient
evidence that the bureaucracy has committed itself to overturn the plan
and impose the global market.
What both opportunist and sectarian
approaches to Cuba’s economy do is focus on these relatively minor
concessions to FDI and petty capitalism, etc., and ignore the much more
fateful state-to-state deals done by the Cuban state – in particular
with China. Much more decisive in pressuring Cuba towards capitalist
restoration has been the decade of state-to-state deals with China which
have converted it into a semi-colony of Chinese imperialism.
“The case of Cuba is instructive, as
no other country is so openly condemned by Washington and so publicly
praised by Beijing. With bilateral trade exceeding 1.8 billion USD in
2010 (down from a pre-GFC high of 2.3 billion USD in 2008), China is
Cuba’s second-largest trading partner,[after Venezuela] and the two
countries have pursued state-led cooperation in sectors as diverse as
biomedicine, tourism, industrial manufacturing, nickel and oil mining,
and oil refining (UN-COMTRADE 2011). The workings of Sino-Cuban
initiatives are guarded as state secrets, provoking concerns from
external observers about their intentions, capacities, and potential
threats to the United States. These apprehensions dovetail with a
broader discourse on the negative influence that China may bear on
development and democracy in Latin America.” Hearn,157
Both private sector FDI and Cuban
expatriate capital is extremely impatient for the US to lift its
economic embargo on Cuba. Neither is able to make a sufficient profit
that justifies investing in a backward, closed economy where China’s
influence is dominant. If the US drops the embargo will it be satisfied
with investing in tightly managed export zones while China, having moved
into the driver’s seat left vacant by the Soviet Union, is able to
exploit Cuba’s best resources, or will it look for a neo-liberal faction
in the Cuban bourgeoisie to remove the pro-China faction and push the
usual demands of a FTA to create an open economy that can be dominated
by the US?
The official US embargo
proved unable to break the Cuban regime or create a
counter-revolutionary threat to the Catroist regime. Now that China has
staged a backdoor capitalist coup, the exile community is split between
hardline anti-communists and pragmatists who want the Obama
administration to continue relaxing the embargo to allow US trade and
capital investment. The émigrés in Miami together with the pressure from
small business in the Cuban economy to demand more economic rights
(e.g. private property rights of small businesses and cooperatives) and
political ‘freedoms’ (i.e. multiparty bourgeois democracy) could provide
a base for a neoliberal political party as a Trojan Horse to promote US
interests to break China’s grip on Cuba. This would increase the
pressure for the state to adopt more market reforms and privatise the
profitable sectors of the economy currently dominated by China such as
oil, nickel, infrastructure etc.
[5] What’s in it for China?
The Castroist/Bolivarian Left (CBL) has
pink rose tinted classes when it comes to China. In the same way as some
African regimes like the ANC look to China for ‘win-win’ development
deals, the CBL views China as more or less ‘market socialist’ and not
interested in profiteering at the expense of the development of the ALBA
countries. The ‘win-win’ formula holds that China gets its resources
while its clients get economic development. Not true. The ‘winners’ are
the Chinese ruling class and its national bourgeois agents in its
‘partner’ states. The losers are the workers and poor peasants in the
semi-colonies and China itself. The new bourgeois regime in Cuba is
planning to turn workers into a source of cheap labour in collaboration
with Chinese imperialism.
We denounce the muddle headedness of the
petty bourgeois CBL whose tendencies continue to portray the Castros as
revolutionary leaders of a healthy workers state. Workers of the world
need to know that Fidel Castro said the following in introducing the
lash of large scale unemployment and in contrast to Marx’s assertion
that the goal of communism is to make of work life’s chief want:
“Without people feeling the need to work to make a living, sheltered by
state regulations that are excessively paternalistic and irrational, we
will never stimulate a love for work,” said Castro in April 2010. Since that time and especially with the 6th
Congress a joint planning committee of Chinese Capitalists and PCC
leaders has supervised the “rationalization” of Cuban industry. With
unemployment results you can see on the following chart.
What is not admitted by the CBL is
that such ‘win-wins’ are done on the terms of Chinese imperialism
following the success of its own capitalist restoration. China demands
repayment of its investments/loans etc on terms set by global
capitalism. In our investigation of China’s relations with South Africa we asked “Can South Africa develop like China?”
“Let’s look at this prospect. The
global crisis and the slump in demand for minerals as well as the
hardship facing workers that led to Marikana, may speed up the China
connection. China continues to keep the economies of the BRICS steaming
along so long as its own economy is still growing rapidly. The current slowdown
in China from 8% to maybe 7% is still a raging boom by comparison with
Western imperialist states. In this sense China appears to be different
from the established imperialist powers in continuing to keep the world
economy from slumping into deep depression.
Deborah Brautigam of China in Africa: The Real Story sees China as different from the European powers, but still expecting a commercial advantage from its investments in Africa.
China is not copying European colonisation which sucks out resources
and labour power without concern for upstream or downstream development,
but can see the benefits in developing Africa after the Chinese model.
Not only is China exporting its model to semi-colonies like South Africa
but since 2000 and the policy to “Go Out” and membership of WTO, it is
demonstrating this process of going up the value stream from cheap
labour to high tech in its FDI in SA. This shows that China has used FDI in semi-colonies like South Africa to launch its “Go Global”.”
So far from acting as a boost to
‘socialism’ in the ALBA countries, China has created a sphere of
interest in ALBA to base its intervention in Latin America. In all of
its economic deals and political agreements, it is seeking to maximise
its super-profits from cheap labour and raw materials. Under the impact
of the global crisis China is forced to compete with the established
imperialist powers to re-divide the world economy. Its special
partnership with Cuba is the centrepiece of its Latin American strategy.
This is why China has put massive pressure on Cuba to restore
capitalism at least since 2004 and dressed to kill as the ‘renewal’ of
‘socialism’. This is how China has provided a ‘socialist’ spin for
selling the process of capitalist restoration.
[6] China ‘goes global’ with State Capitalism
Despite the secrecy over the details of
its state-to-state deals with Cuba, China’s economic stake clearly
dwarfs FDI from Brazil, Spain and Britain. China has taken over from the
Soviet Union as the main strategic partner and pushed Cuba down the
state capitalist road. As we have seen China must value its loans and
investments in Cuba in terms of international prices (the LOV) as it
operates in the global capitalist economy. It will always seek deals
that allow it preferential prices (i.e. super-profits or monopoly rent)
over its rivals calculated over a longer period than private capitalist
corporations. This means that it expects to get returns at least on a
par with its imperialist rivals, and its national bourgeois partners get
their small share of the profits, extracted from its state-to-state
deals. This is as true of Cuba as the numerous other client states where
‘nationalist populist’ governments look to China for better deals than
those of its imperialist rivals.
As Hearn points out,
China kept the global economy from collapsing during the GFC and added
25% of global output between 2006 and 2011. On the strength of its state
capitalist development model it has influenced the IMF and the UN to
accept a greater role for the state in promoting growth. It has used its
prominent role in G20 and BRICS to challenge the US dominated
market-driven growth model based on ripping out resources for short term
super-profits, and gain support for its state driven growth model where
China factors in future long-term super-profits by investing in
‘developing’ its economic partners.
China’s economic stake in Cuba reflects
this approach to economic ‘development’. It involves state-to-state
agreements and a high level political collaboration to steer this
development. But this is not a partnership of equals but between the
fast rising No 2 global imperialist power and a tiny semi-colony.
‘Development’ actually means the extraction of super-profits for China.
Typically when the projected profits do not materialise, China quickly
re-adjusts its ‘development’ plans. We can illustrate this point by
looking at the $5 billion deal to expand the oil refinery at Cienfuegos.
One of the deals signed in 2011 was for China to take over from
Venezuela the task of expanding the refinery in the expectation that
exploratory deep sea drilling in the North Cuba Basin would strike big
oil fields and bring a huge oil boom to Cuba’s economy. Since three
major attempts to find oil have failed China has not come up with the
money forcing Cuba to look elsewhere to fund the refinery. When it comes
to the balance sheet there is nothing ‘socialist’ about China’s
imperialism.
[7] China as Cuba’s IMF?
Our method allows us to critique the
Castro-Bolivarian Left who claim Raul Castro is ‘renewing’ socialism,
and at the other extreme, currents like the LIT who claim Cuba is
already capitalist because of MNCs in the dollar zone are paying
millions into the foreign bank accounts of a new bourgeoisie. Neither
sees state capitalism as the route to restoration. So while the Cuban
state is using the plan to regulate and quarantine the LOV built into
the deals with private FDI, putting strict limits on its NEP-type petty
capitalist agriculture, and allowing informal capital into the peso
sector from expatriate Cubans, it is the state-to-state deals with China
going under the radar that has re-introduced the LOV and allowed the
Cuban state to restore capitalism.
We have to turn to the academic
literature to find serious documentation of the influence China has
exerted on Cuba, and to show how this has made Cuba a semi-colony of
China. Let’s look at China’s influence in Cuba and show how this has
brought about an historic defeat of the revolution in that country that
can only be reversed by a socialist revolution in the whole of Latin
America.
According to Hearn China and Cuba are on a “Long march to the market”:
“State-to-state cooperation has
focused on building critical infrastructure as a basis for Cuban
economic growth. Bilateral projects have targeted the upgrading of Cuban
manufacturing, the gradual opening of markets, the coordination of
industrial sectors, and more recently the controlled introduction of
private entrepreneurship. As Chinese enterprises become increasingly
comfortable with the rules of market exchange, Cuba’s slow
implementation of reforms has generated bilateral tensions. However,
since Raúl Castro replaced his brother as Cuba’s president, the pace of
change has quickened, and China’s domestic experience with economic
reform has assumed growing relevance for the island… China’s incremental
approach to market expansion in Cuba is one component of a broader
strategy of state-guided development that has proven successful across
East Asia (Hira 2007: 87-96). A related component is the linkage of
distinct industrial sectors into an integrated system, a process that
analysts argue has given the Chinese government an unusual degree of
control over international production chains (Ellis 2005)”
China’s growing stake in Cuba prepared the ground for the 2011 reforms:
“Effective implementation of the
2011 reforms will require a phased and coordinated approach, and in this
regard China can provide some useful lessons. Among the insights Cuba
has derived from China – with varying degrees of attentiveness – are the
gradual sequencing of reforms under the management of a state-appointed
reform commission (Laverty 2011:65; Lopez-Levy 2011b: 9, 2011c: 43-44),
the adaptation of socialist principles to national conditions (Mao et
al. 2011: 199), the military management of commercial activities (Klepak
2010), the attraction of investment from emigrants (Ratliff 2004:
21-22), and the testing of liberalisation in target territories prior to
wider implementation (Heilmann 2008)” Hearn, ibid.
Concluding this point, Hearn as a
bourgeois academic recognises the inevitability of the ‘Long March to
the Market’. However what he can’t see as he doesn’t have a Marxist
method is that the class character or the Cuban state has to change to
carry through this long march. At some point the Cuban state ceases to
defend the workers’ plan (albeit deformed and imposed top down by the
bureaucracy) and commits to restoring capitalism. Hearn’s analysis backs
up our view that the change in the class character of the state came in
2011 with the 6th Congress and the first Five Year joint plan signed between China and Cuba:
“In November 2010,
president of the Cuban National Assembly Ricardo Alarcón visited Beijing
and officially recognised the relevance of China’s economic evolution
to Cuba’s development. Raúl Castro had already expressed this sentiment
during his visits in 1997 and 2005, which focused on labour market
reform and the creation of hybrid state–market economic structures. In
China’s experience, particularly since joining the World Trade
Organization, these transformations were achieved through a blend of
state oversight and privatisation, an approach that Chinese officials
now routinely recommend to Cuba. When Chinese Vice-President Xi
Jinping and CNPC President Jiang Jiemin visited Havana in June 2011,
they not only signed memorandums of understanding on oil and gas
investments, but also discussed banking and economic planning. According
to Feinberg, the Chinese government would like to see Cuba quicken the
pace of reform, and has offered to help lay the groundwork: “Cuba”, said
a Chinese official, “needs assistance in making five-year plans”
(quoted in Feinberg 2011: 31-32). As Feinberg notes, “Some observers
opine, albeit with some exaggeration, that China has become Cuba’s IMF!” (Feinberg 2011: 42).” Hearn, ibid [our emphasis]
If we sum up the cumulative
state-to-state deals between China and Cuba (and add the indirect
influence of Venezuela’s subsidised oil and JVs with Cuba) it’s obvious
that Cuba is as dependent on China today as it was on the Soviet Union
before its collapse in 1992. But more important, China has actively
steered Cuba towards re-entering the global capitalist economy as its
flagship semi-colony in Latin America, setting up a confrontation with
the US in its traditional ‘backyard’. This is like waving a red flag in
the face of the US and the hostile ex-patriot gusanos in
Miami. No doubt in their minds, despite the massive base at Guantanamo,
in Cuba the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ is now checkmated by the ‘Mao Doctrine’.
They will have seen the death of Chavez as a significant turning point
in US fortunes in Cuba and in Latin America. Are we about to witness a
revival of US imperialism re-asserting its hegemony over Latin America?
[8] Chavez is Dead: long live Chavismo?
Now that Chavez is dead will Maduro be capable of holding the line?
Will he balance, repress, or win further concessions from US
imperialism? What is not understood by the pro-Chavista left is that
Chavismo rhetorically fights US imperialism but Maduro can only continue
to offer concessions to the masses by falling into the arms of Chinese imperialism.
Most of the Latin American self-proclaimed Trotskyists are so fixated
on US imperialism they don’t see China as a threat. Most (e.g. LIT,
FT-CI) think China is still a Degenerate Workers State. Some (FLTI) see
China as a capitalist semi-colony of the US. . So the FLTI position
which claims that Maduro and Capriles are in a deal with Obama to keep
the lid on the popular front with Obama is blind to the elephant in the
wood – China. Chavismo looks to China as its saviour without realising
that this is a pact with the ‘red’ devil.
We re-assert what we said in the Chavez’ Death article,
that the popular front that is most dangerous in Latin America is the
one with China, not the US. And this is the key to restoration in Cuba.
Since 2004 with the first visit of the Hu Jintao to the region,
Venezuela and Cuba have led an alliance (ALBA) as the two main regimes
in a Latin American popular front with China. Of course Chavez promoted
this as an alliance with ‘socialist’ China. During these years China
built up special relationships with both countries that grew out of
China’s ‘Go Out’ policy. This alliance was formed as an alternative to
US alliances in Latin America (FTAA, etc) As with China’s ventures in
other continents the basis of these special relationships were promoted
by all parties as ‘win-win’ deals and the quid pro quo was recognising
Taiwan, Gaddafi and Al Assad!
Chavez death will not alter China’s interests in ALBA. China will continue to make new loans
just as it expects its existing loans to be paid off. This may allow
the Bolivarian movement to make further concessions to workers. Green
Left seems to think so with the new labour laws cutting hours, increasing maternity leave, etc. coming into effect.
Is this a sign that China is subsidising
the Bolivarian ‘socialist’ bloc and Cuba’s ‘socialist renewal’? We don’t
think so, but the CBL by promoting the Bolivarian bloc will try to keep
it alive to suppress the socialist revolution in all the ALBA countries.
In Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador it will continue to give left cover
to the popular front regimes. In Cuba it will help disguise the
underlying relationship with China that has allowed Cuba to restore
capitalism, and hold back the struggle to expose and overthrow the new
Cuban bourgeoisie, create workers soviets and a workers plan for the
first time, opening the road to socialist revolution in all the
Americas.
[9] Workers international action to smash the Castroist and Bolivarian popular fronts
A growing global antagonism between the
US and China may turn Cuba into a flashpoint in Latin America dragging
workers into local wars. This will not be isolated to Cuba but rather
will involve all the ALBA states for the obvious reason that they form a
political bloc with China. If the US and China go head to head in Latin
America this will drag workers who are trapped in the CBL popular front
with China to defend China against the US in any local or regional
wars. The CBL claim to be ‘Trotskyists’ but all act as the servants of
the popular fronts with US or Chinese imperialism. The danger is that
this popular front with China masquerading as ‘market socialism’ would
in any conflict between the US and China prevent workers from organising
independently of both US and Chinese imperialism. The national
bourgeoisies, including the Boli bourgeoisie, and now the Cuban
bourgeoisie, will pose as ‘progressive’ on the side of China against the
US. We have to have a clear program for socialist revolution that is
independent of both US and Chinese imperialism. Only the independent
class organisation of the working class in all the ALBA countries has
any prospect for defeating the national bourgeoisies that have already
shown that their class interests are with Chinese imperialism and so
turn their guns on the workers.
In the wider ALBA bloc the popular front
is with both US and Chinese imperialisms. But the US front is not
popular among workers and peasants. In any US/China conflict the CBL
will side with China. China will be seen as a victim of US global
oppression. For those who see China as ‘market socialist’ this will be a
clear political alliance. For those who acknowledge China is
capitalist, it will be a military bloc in defence of China against the
US. Few, if any, in Latin America understand that China is imperialist
and that the Bolivarian bloc with China is an international popular
front tying the hands of workers to make them submit to the main
challenger to US hegemony.
We can see this in the core Alba
countries, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. The CBL is in popular
fronts with bourgeois Bonapartist regimes where their ‘populism’ is
based on ‘nationalising’ US investments, and at the same time opening up
to Chinese state-to-state deals. Thus the left calls for repudiating
the external debt and expropriating US property but not for the end to
‘win-win’ deals with China. Its anti-imperialism is one-eyed. So long
as populism is funded by China, the working class is trapped in a new
more insidious popular front, painted as one that bankrolls the ALBA
bloc to ‘develop’ along the road of the “Andean Capitalism” of Alvaro
Garcia Linera or the “21st century socialism” of Hugo Chavez,
and now the ‘renewed’ socialism of the Castros. Socialist revolution in
the ALBA countries means breaking with both the Castroist bourgeoisie
and the Bolivarian bourgeoisie and mobilising workers and poor peasant
alliances for the seizure of state power and the founding of Workers’
and Peasants’ Governments.
[10] Cuba: for socialist revolution!
The CBL acts as the left cover of the
popular front with China claiming that Cuba is a ‘socialist state’ in an
alliance with the Bolivarian revolution and Chinese revolution. On the
far left however, are the self-proclaimed Trotskyist groups who provide
cover for the CBL left. As we have argued above by failing to understand
the role that Chinese imperialism plays in the world and in particular,
Latin America, they prevent workers from breaking with the Bolivarian
popular front with China and disarm them in the front of
inter-imperialist wars. In April 2011 we called for a hybrid program
that combined the tasks of a political and social revolution since we
did not then believe that the class character of the state had changed:
“As the capitalist restoration has
been underway for some time and has now, with the firing of a half
million workers, [it] has gathered speed and force, increasingly the
transitional demands of the program for socialist revolution are
objectively called for. As the Castroist bureaucracy goes about
transforming itself into a Chinese-model ‘red’ bourgeoisie, the Cuban
working class must see in itself its own best hope for reversing this
historic defeat by overthrowing the usurpers of the workers’ political
power and ‘expropriating the expropriators’ of the social wealth, of the
labor of the revolutionary generations. Today combined tasks of the
political revolution (against the bureaucracy) and social revolution (to
defend social property, seize capitalist property, and put it under
workers’ control) are on the agenda. To accomplish these tasks moreover,
they need more than hope; they need a vanguard internationalist workers
party of their own making, a new International, a World Party of
Socialism, based on the 1938 Transitional Program, one which never
subordinates their well being or future to alien class interests.
Today we now believe that the decisive change in the class character of the state took place at the 6th
Congress which took the decision to follow the logic of restoration to
completion. This decision was immediately reflected in further decisions
taken by the Cuban State to enter a ‘strategic alliance’ with
imperialist China. We now have to amend our program recognising that
from that point political revolution was no longer sufficient in Cuba. A
political revolution overthrows the bureaucracy without smashing the
state. Workers property still exists despite the dictatorship of the
bureaucracy. By removing the bureaucracy workers property is put under
workers control and a new workers plan based on workers councils is the
foundation of a healthy workers state. Now that the Cuban state is
committed to abolishing the plan and guarding state capitalist property
as a new bourgeoisie, we must not only overthrow the new bourgeoisie but
smash the state that defends capitalist property. Our demands must be
those that are necessary to complete that historic task in Cuba and in
all Latin America.
For Workers Democracy!
The democratic rights of workers have
been sacrificed as the Castroist bureaucracy usurped state power from
the workers substituting fake organs of popular power covered by the
personality cults of Che and Fidel. The rights of socialist opposition
parties have been denied while opposition inside the PCC is stifled.
The CBL, Stalinists, neo-Stalinists, Barnesites, Fraserites and
Mandelista’s alike
have for decades suppressed/abandoned the fight for democracy in Cuba
for fear of being lumped with the Gusanos and counter-revolution. What
they did not tell you was that the lack of democracy within the PCC and
the popular organizations, the constraining role of the bureaucracy
would become incapable of defending and advancing the revolution and
would become itself the agent of counter-revolution. What they were
hiding and what these fake Trotskyists have to show is when did the
Cuban workers ever vote to create the privileges the Party leadership
and bureaucracy enjoyed? When did the workers approve the agency of the
separate currency paid to bureaucrats? When did the workers approve
separate shopping privileges for the bureaucracy and Party elite? Who
gets to play in the Maseratis and ride in the limousines?
The limits to workers democracy which
long protected the privileged bureaucracy and the party leadership from
exposure and challenge now serves to protect the restoration process and
the subjugation of the workers to the LOV and the ‘development’ of Cuba
into a semi-colony of the Chinese capitalist class. Therefore the
battle to improve the workers lives begins with the fight to restore the
social wage and the inseparable fight for democratic freedoms of
expression, assembly, the press and the independent self organization of
the workers as they see fit.
- For the right to freedom of expression, assembly, and the media!
- For a Free Press for the working class!
- Free all political prisoners! For a Workers Court to penalise corruption!
- Throw the bureaucracy and new bourgeoisie out of the PCC!
- For the right of all anti-restorationist tendencies to form parties!
- For the formation of democratic Workers, poor Farmers and Soldiers councils!
- For an emergency Congress of Revolutionary Councils to make an Emergency Plan!
- Disband the State army and Police and for the formation of a Workers’ Militia!
- For a Workers’ and poor Farmers’ Government based on the Revolutionary Councils!
The task of revolutionaries in the DWS was to defend against counter-revolution, resist bureaucratic privileges and growth of bourgeois consumption appetites and the consciousness that goes with it. These appetites are the sea bed of capitalist restoration. The collapse of the Soviet Union left the Castroist bureaucracy with a massive cut in their privileges. Venezuelan oil proved a stopgap but the bureaucracy found in China a new source of privilege, this time not as a bureaucracy but as a new Castroist bourgeoisie. When the bureaucrats put their own desires first this led directly to the destruction of the monopoly of foreign trade, first illegal and then with open private business; the circumvention of the plan and later the abandonment of the plan via its conversion into its opposite the 5 year Cuba-Chinese Cooperation Plan. To do this the party leadership had to refashion itself as a bourgeoisie-in-fact and further separate its decision making further away from the eyes of the masses into a high-level state institution to implement China’s imperialist plan for Cuba. The task of revolutionaries today is to fight for a Workers Government to expropriate the workers property that has been converted to capitalist property and create an Emergency Socialist Plan!
- Jobs for All! All unemployed and self-employed provided with productive work! Reward necessary labour with a living wage! Down with the labour market!
- For independent trades unions and workplace councils!
- For Wage and Price committees that report to workers councils! For a sliding scale of wages that stops inflation of wages and prices to pay for the capitalist crisis!
- Open the Books of the State, the SEOs and all Joint Ventures!
- For an Emergency Socialist Plan!
- Expropriate imperialist property and the property of the Cuban bourgeoisie!
- A single State Bank under council control!
- For the socialisation of private land! State aid to farmers’ cooperatives and collectives!
- For the monopoly of Foreign Trade!
As a Deformed Workers State, Cuba's foreign policy was Stalinist so that while workers property was an inspiration and support for the LA revolution, its Stalinist regime locked the working classes on the sub-continent into popular fronts which suppressed the LA revolution. Thus under the Castroist regime Cuba in Latin America backed populist regimes against arming the workers (Chile ‘73, Central America ‘80s). Today the bourgeois regime in Cuba and its CBL fake left cover acts as an agent of US and Chinese imperialism in CEPAC and ALBA to make the Latin American working class and poor farmers pay for the global capitalist crisis, and drawing them into imperialist wars. A new Cuban Revolution is necessary to overthrow the regime that provides the left cover for the popular front with China, strangling the workers revolution. A Revolutionary Cuba will lead the Latin American revolution by the example of its revolutionary foreign policy. It will also impel the US and Chinese revolutions as workers refuse to go to war and turn their guns on their respective imperialist ruling classes. For Cuban revolutionaries this means the export of revolution by any means necessary. For example, instead of providing cover for the Bolivarian popular front with China, it will expose this front and break from it by setting the example of repudiating imperialism and expropriating its property. Most important, the new Cuban Bolshevik/Leninist Party and its revolutionary program will inspire the world’s workers in the same way the Bolsheviks inspired them in 1917 with the real prospect of socialist revolution today. It will lead by example to build a new revolutionary international, a new World Party of Revolution, based on the program of the 4th international of 1938 and incorporating the revolutionary tradition of the Communist movement!
- Open the books to all secret treaties! Repudiate all treaties with imperialist powers!
- Down with China’s imperialist agreements to plunder Cuba!
- Down with the Castroist foreign policy of support for bourgeois regimes! For Revolutionary Cuban aid to revolutionary movements in the Bolivarian states!
- Down with the Bolivarian bourgeoisies in the ALBA countries who tie the workers to the popular front with China!
- Down with the fake Trotskyists and their ‘anti-imperialist united fronts’ that subordinate the workers and oppressed masses to imperialist China!
- For socialist revolution and Workers’ and Poor Peasants Governments in Latin America!
- For a United Socialist States of all the Americas!
- For a New World Party of Socialist Revolution!
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