An article posted on a Marxist E-group in the US, in response to a posting attacking Cuban 'Stalinism'. Joachin Bustelo shows in his response the absurdity of the modern day middle class socialists in the US and Britain, who use readily constructed stencils like 'permanent revolution' to attack Cuban socialism for not fitting in with their designs. We, however, are Marxists. They are revisionists.

Carl Webb has a whole series of rhetorical questions meant to demonstrate the Menshevik-revisionist-Stalinist character of the Cuban Revolution and my positions. I'll take this up first and then add a few words about the permanent revolution debate.

Carl's questions are quite revealing about the sectarian method: "Is there anything that distiguishes Cuba from the former USSR or China?"

Just stop to consider that someone supposedly political and aware could ask, TODAY, in 2007, whether there is anything that distinguishes Cuba from the USSR. Well, for one thing, there's the reality that Cuba exists and the Soviet Union does not and has not for a decade and a half.

Anything to distinguish Cuba from China? Well what about the attitude of the imperialists? That China has a capitalist sector that dominates its economy? That Cuba exports doctors and China trade representatives? That China has a stock market and Cuba doesn't?

But all these things pertain to the real, material world, not the idealist world of the sectarian, where disembodied essences, like Stalinism and Proletarianism and so on, attach themselves to and manifest through vulgar and merely material phenomenon.

Was the July 26 Movement a proletarian movement? Let us consider the possibilities.

We could say no, it was a petty-bourgeois movement. That would mean, in keeping with the essence of petty-bourgeoisism, that it demonstrated its indecisive, vacillating character and lack of its own historical project as it veered between giving some concessions to the masses and capitulating before imperialism and the local rich.

Consider as the decisive period the one of approximately 15 months from August of 1959 when the revolutionary government was finally consolidated in the form of INRA (the agrarian reform institute) and October of 1960. This petty-bourgeois movement did the following things:

Launched an agrarian reform waged as a class war for the conscious, explicit, stated purpose of shattering the base and breaking the neck of capitalism in Cuba.

Formed the working-class based national revolutionary militias, arming the working people.

Established relations with the USSR and other socialist countries to diversify its supplies, especially of oil, in face of imperialist attempts to use oil, and their control of the world market in sugar, as a weapon.

Intervened and then expropriated the oil refineries of the imperialists.

Intervened and then expropriated ALL imperialist companies operating on the island, down to the level of individual retail establishments and subscription offices for foreign periodicals (with the sole exception of the long distance telephone and telegraph terminal facilities, since the other end of those was in Florida and you have to have both ends to make it work).

Expropriated ALL wage-labor employing businesses of any size or significance, down to businesses of purely local or neighborhood impact.

Joseph Hansen joked that when Fidel had said they would expropriate them down to the nails of their boots, he meant ALL the nails.

But perhaps that was just a "zig" of the vacillating p-b. Let us proceed to consider the subsequent "zag."

Following that they resisted and defeated the imperialist Bay of Pigs invasion, went through the October 1962 Crisis (socalled Cuban Missile Crisis), promoted and helped revolutionary forces throughout the Americas and other parts of the third world, kicked the ass of the ruling class so thoroughly in southern Africa that apartheid wound up in the dustbin of history, defied the imperialists continuously for nearly 50 years.

And when the Stalinist bureaucracies were restoring capitalism in Eastern Europe and China added the battle-cry "socialismo o muerte" to the traditional "patria o muerte"; and when the upswing of popular struggles in Latin America came in reaction to neoliberal globalization, they were there as living proof not only that a better world is possible, but that this better world is a socialist world, and have offered unstinting and invaluable aid to the Bolivarian revolutionary process and now the one beginning to unfold in Bolivia.

For the Carl Webbs of this world, all this is immaterial. The July 26 Movement was not of the body, of the Church of Saint Leon, and not just any old Trot sect, but the one true Spartazoid Church or whichever it is that has claimed Carl's allegiance.

For that reason, nothing that the Cuban Revolution has done matters; the July 26 Movement was born with the original sin of not being proletarian, not being of the Fourth International (and not just any old Fourth International but the one and only true Fourth International, which imparts the distilled essence of proletarianism to its sections, and which you can tell which one it is among the two, three ... many fourth internationals out there because it is the one that has the privilege of counting comrade Webb among its members).

Well, so much for the jokes at Carl's expense. Let's talk permanent revolution.

Given its trajectory, and given Marxist theory as it is usually conceived, you'd have to say that the July 26 Movement revealed itself, over time, to be a revolutionary proletarian movement -- yet I think cde. Webb has a point should he object to this characterization.

Because, as it was forming following the March 10, 1952 coup, how could you tell? Because this young lawyer Fidel Castro, who had been a candidate of the orthodox party in the elections the coup prevented, was the leader of it, did that make it proletarian? Because the first thing he did was to sue and demand that the courts apply the law that says coups are illegal? And their next step was the Moncada attack, which if looked at historically, really is most similar to the tactics of the Blanquists in the early 1800's, before the emergence of the modern working class movement. Hardly "proletarian" as that word was understood then or today.

And you'd have to say the famous internal dispute in 1957-58 over whether to prioritize the mountains or the plains -- the rural guerrilla column or the urban struggle -- revealed two currents, one more oriented towards the proletariat (the plains) and the other --led by Fidel-- one that was not so oriented.

I suggest that the effort to put the July 26 Movement in a CLASS bottle is mistaken. The fundamental political axis of its struggle wasn't "classist" but nationalist. It is best understood as a revolutionary democratic national movement, which did what needed to be done, launch a war to save the nation.

In this sense Fidel and other others are not too different from Ho Chi Minh and other Third World revolutionaries who come to communist conclusions not so much from the angle of class as from the angle of nation. What drives both the thinking process and the dynamic of the struggle is that the enemy of the nation is imperialism, which is just the way capitalism is configured today. And, yes, as a result of that, "only the workers and peasants will go all the way," as Sandino said.

That's just an expression of the reality that all-class national unity against the perceived common enemy of the nation tends to be a short and fleeting phenomenon, seen at moments of maximum political crisis, and quickly gone. You saw that in Cuba leading up to Jan. 1, 1959, and in Nicaragua leading up to July 19, 1979, and mutatis mutandis, last year among the Latino people against HR 4437, the Sensenbrenner Bill, in the United States and in February 1917 in Russia against the Tsarist regime.

Nevertheless, it is an extremely important moment because it signifies the breakdown of normal bourgeois political-ideological hegemony, which makes possible giant strides in the independent organization and mobilization of the toilers, and flowing from that in their consciousness, accomplishing in a matter of days, weeks or months what would otherwise take many years or decades, and most often history shows it was not accomplished at all.

What the sectarian interpretation of the theory of permanent revolution does is demand that the national struggle be transformed forthwith into a class struggle, rather than allowing and fostering the class differentiation and struggle to develop within the national movement and on the terms of the national movement itself.

Joaquín

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