Cuba for Sale

Cuba is going through a process of capitalist restoration. The 6th Cuban Communist Party Congress held in April 2011 resolved to make major changes for the Cuban economy to overcome its stagnation. They represent a wholesale embrace of the capitalist market. No longer limited to the ‘external sector’ where foreign corporates have made joint ventures with state corporates for years, but for the whole economy. Cubans are now being encouraged to adopt market practices such as buying state property as private property and employing wage workers. Thus the capitalist market will replace state allocation of resources as the main mechanism of the economy. Marxists analyse this as a shift from state planning to the law of value, and hence a shift from a Workers State, albeit deformed from its birth in 1959, to a Capitalist State.

The Cuban bureaucracy has ruled in place of workers, and thus deformed the character of the workers state since the revolution. It has played a counter-revolutionary role in the class struggle since it became dependent on the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. Cuba modelled itself on that Stalinist Degenerated Workers State and its theory of ‘socialism in one country’ cutting itself off from the workers in the rest of Latin America and Africa where it consistently backed the national bourgeois leaderships against popular anti-imperialist struggles. To cite one glaring example, Castro visited Chile to back Allende’s parliamentary road to socialism against the independent armed struggle of the organized workers. The 1973 Pinochet coup was the result.

Despite its loyalty to the Soviet Union the parasite bureaucrats of the Cuban CP learned the lesson from its collapse that workers’ property could no longer allow it to extract its privileges from workers labor. But to avoid the fate of the USSR which opened itself up to capitalism by means of rapid ‘shock treatment’, Cuba looked towards China’s gradual restoration of capitalism. It began to open a sector of the economy to foreign private investment and found that the new market relations with imperialism were much more lucrative for the bureaucracy than trying to defend the planned economy. So it now seeks to complete the process and turn itself into a new bourgeois class. The 6th Cuban CP Congress in April marks a decisive break from the revolution and the sealing of the capitalist counter-revolution as a world historic defeat of the international working class.

Following China’s ‘capitalist road’

The Cuban bureaucracy, desperate to become a new bourgeoisie has ‘sold’ capitalist restoration using the same language as that used by the Chinese CP to cover its restoration of capitalism - 'market socialism'. China underwent a deformed workers revolution in 1949 where the bourgeoisie were overthrown and expropriated, but where the bureaucracy usurped the working class to rule ‘Communist China’ as a privileged caste living off workers labor. But the planned economy underwent long term stagnation due to its isolation from the world economy and its failure to develop the forces of production.

A faction of the bureaucracy ‘the capitalist roaders’ took power and opened up the economy to the capitalist market. Resistance to restoration was decisively suppressed at Tiananmen in 1989. In 1992 at the 14th Chinese CP Congress and at the political committee meeting that immediately followed the Chinese bureaucracy formally took the decision to restore capitalism and the law of value to organize the economy in place of the state plan. The CCP ‘sold’ this fateful decision as ‘market socialism’ to disguise the end of the Deformed Workers State and the emergence of a new capitalist state.

Since that time China has reintroduced capitalism in the whole of the economy. It encouraged imperialist powers to play a central role in revolutionizing production in the export sectors, rapidly accumulated capital in the state sector and adopted new technology. Today China is an emerging imperialist economy now recognized not only as an economic rival to the US and EU imperialist powers, but also a political rival that has become a model for many semi-colonial countries to break away from the domination of US and EU powers. This is clearly the case in Cuba where the Castoite CP since the demise of the Soviet Union has looked to China as the ‘socialist’ alternative to US imperialism, and thus a successful model for Cuba to follow along its own ‘capitalist road’.

Chavista Popular Front

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.

Political Revolution, Social Revolution, Permanent Revolution

Reality is complex and Marxists know that simplifying it unnecessarily results in tragic outcomes for the toiling masses. We are not 'objectivists.' We do not believe the 1938 Transitional Program of Political Revolution against the usurpers of the workers' political power, the Stalinist parasite bureaucracy, will suffice in the Cuban case to produce a healthy workers state on the developmental path to socialism and communism. Methodologically speaking the 'Transitional Program' prepared us to analyse whatever situation would come the workers' way. But this is not at all to say that it gave us an exhaustive catalogue of historical possibilities, as some sectarians would have us believe.

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 Castroite 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.

The Cuban working class remains the best hope in reversing this historic defeat by overthrowing the Castroist bureaucracy which is on the point of transforming itself into a copy of the Chinese ‘red’ bourgeoisie. Armed with a revolutionary workers' internationalist program, the Cuban workers need to mobilize and rally behind them the Latin American masses currently fenced in behind the Chavista Popular Front. Here we have a program for socialist revolution that must break from the popular front, exposing its leaders as bourgeois Bonapartists who, while posing left in the anti-imperialist fight, are actually the agents of imperialism. No better weapon to explode the Chavista popular front is the exposure of its complicity in defending the dictatorships in North Africa and the Middle East. Why does Chavez defend Gaddafi and Assad the two most murderous dictatorships posing as ‘socialist’? Because Chavez recognises in their bloody suppression of the masses, precisely what steps he will have to take to repress the masses when it becomes clear to them that he too is the agent of the imperialist bourgeoisie!

The role of revolutionaries today then is to awaken the youth vanguard who are leading the revolution in North Africa and the Middle East, with our program for Permanent Revolution, and to fight for the unity of this vanguard with the workers organized in the base of the unions, to fight for socialist revolution, defeating by armed struggle not only the dictatorships imposed by imperialism, and the facade of ‘democratic’ imperialism represented by social democracy in the imperialist countries, but also and most critically, the death trap of the Chavista popular front that ties the hands of the vanguard of the revolution behind Bonapartists whose role is to prepare for the full on fascist reaction when it becomes clear to imperialism that it faces a revolutionary challenge to its class rule. 

• Defend the right to a job! No Layoffs! 
• Defend Socialized Medicine! 
• Defend and expand socialized agriculture! 
• For workers control of the economic plan! 
• Stop the capitalist restorationists! 
• Drive out the Castroite fake communists! 
• No to 21st c. 'market socialism'! 
• Down with Canadian, Chinese and Spanish imperialist exploitation! 
• Defeat the stranglehold of US imperialism.   

Humanist Workers for Revolutionary Socialism and Communist Workers Group

June 1, 2011.

Te Mana Party

The Mana Party is the brainchild of the reformist left that sees the time is ripe to challenge Labour and mobilise against the New Right. Leading players include leader Hone Harawira, Chairman Matt McCarten, Maori lawyer Annette Sykes, pakeha radical Sue Bradford and pakeha activist John Minto. They are all democratic socialists or reformists who see social change being won through trade union and parliamentary struggle. They see that there is a rising tide of opposition to the NACTs but no Labour Party fightback. There is a danger that young workers, especially Maori youth who face terrible unemployment, family breakdown, alienation and self-destruction, will bear the brunt of the rabid extreme rightwing agenda that another NACT government will unleash on the working class.

The Mana party is the ideal vehicle to rally workers both Maori and non-Maori against these anti-worker attacks. Harawira’s mana with Maori workers survives despite his taking his grassroots activism into parliament. Harawira organised the 2004 Foreshore & Seabed (F&S) Hikoi. It was a great move but instead of staying on the streets it headed for parliament. It got co-opted by Turia who resigned from Labour and used her by-election victory to launch the Maori Party (MP) and join forces with National to defeat Labour's F&S Act. At the time we argued that instead of going to parliament Harawira should have taken his fight into occupations of the F&S that could be supported by Maori and non-Maori workers thus advancing the unity and strength of the labour movement. After nearly 3 years of sitting in the anti-worker/ anti-Maori NACT/MP govt Harawira finally reached breaking point and resigned. His break with the MP and forming Te Mana to force a Te Tai Tokerau by-election, created the opportunity for leftwing reformists to act.

Harawira has a history of activism as a Maori nationalist. This led him into the Maori party where Maori nationalism was the uniting force. But Te Mana has appeal to non-Maori youth and other activists too. Has Harawira realised that Maoridom is divided along class lines that he must represent Maori workers against the MP representation of iwi capitalism? Perhaps he now agrees that only a united working class can advance the interests of Maori workers. This realisation would sit well with that of Matt McCarten, the Maori President of Unite union, and Mike Treen, the pakeha National Secretary of Unite. Unite under their leadership has recruited around 8000 young lowpaid workers in the last 5 years many of them young Maori and Pasifika as well as recent immigrants.

Te Mana is the ideal vehicle to project Unite’s politics into parliament. McCarten is a tried and true politician who took the Alliance into a decade of parliamentary dead end deals but still has huge mana with political activists. Mike Treen, a long-time supporter of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, argues that Te Mana is a progressive step towards the overthrow of NZ capitalism. He offers a more hard left alternative to the dominant parliamentary focus of Mana seeing socialist revolution as the ultimate goal of its program. Treen therefore offers to young activists turning left the scenario that paints Mana as a radical breakthrough in NZ politics.

Te Mana has already got several strong political demands including the (re) nationalising of power, water and housing; an end to asset sales; and end to the 90 Day Fire at Will Act; and a Hone Heke tax (sometimes called financial transactions tax) that would replace GST. On the face of it these are anti-neoliberal demands. They are more against the new right’s market politics than against the capitalist system itself. They are similar to 'anti-capitalist' demands that try to make the market serve socialism. Many of today's left reformists look to China’s brand of ‘market socialism’ as an alternative to capitalism. For example the Castro brothers and Hugo Chavez are seen as building ‘market socialism’ influenced by China, though Chavez calls it ‘21st century socialism’ and the Castro brothers see it as defending Cuba's 20th century 'socialism'. 

The problem is that this perspective is unreal as China’s ‘market socialism’ has nothing to do with socialism. The re-introduction of the market to China led to the restoration of capitalism. China is now a state capitalist and imperialist country. In Cuba the re-introduction of the market is at the point of restoring capitalism. Only a major upsurge of Latin American workers can stop this and the defeat of the Cuban revolution. The common theme of 'market socialists' is that it can be introduced from 'above' by a  bureaucratic or bourgeois leadership rather than an independent working class from 'below'. So long as Mana Party is led by left reformists, its focus will be on returning activists like Harawira, Bradford and Minto as MPs to pressure Labour and the Greens to the left, rather than a working class movement that challenges capitalism from below. 

What is progressive about Te Mana is that its program will appeal to many angry workers, especially youth like those we see rising up in North Africa, the Middle East and Europe. They will see it as a forum and movement that can defend the working class against the right wing attacks of National and Act parties. But they will find that so long as Te Mana limits itself to putting pressure on parliament that it cannot win any major gains, or be able to defend what gains have been won in the past by strikes and protests. All those historic victories were forced on parliament by struggles outside parliament. To get a living wage and benefit and to create jobs for all Te Mana will have to build a party that is capable of taking the fight to the capitalist class directly by rebuilding the unions as fighting, democratic organs capable of strikes, occupations, and defence committees, and ultimately capable of creating a workers government and planned socialist economy.

We will participate in Te Mana Party so long as we are free to promote our revolutionary program and argue for the following proposals within the democratic norms of the Constitution.

• Propose that the Te Mana Party Constitution states its purpose is anti-capitalist and pro-socialist and that its objective is a society in which production is cooperative and for need and not profit.

• Propose that the Te Mana Party develops as a democratic, activist party whose main base is in the Maori and non-Maori working class. Members of Parliament act as the representatives of the Party and not its executive.

• Propose that internal democracy is based on an annual Congress where decisions including elections of leaders are based on votes delegated proportionately to representatives of recognised constituent groups such as Maori, migrants, youth, women, unions, etc.