Havana conference maps plans for a new international economic order

“The climate crisis cannot be solved within capitalism, and the sooner we face up to this fact the better.” – Jason Hickel.

Viva La Solidaridad Cubano-Palestina is emblematic of Cuba’s longstanding solidarity with Palestine – which predates this poster made by Marc Rudin in 1989 and still stands today.

Meeting in Havana, Cuba on April 28 to May 1, leading scholars, diplomats and policy-makers from 36 countries mapped plans to present a program of action for establishment of a New International Economic Order that will be presented to the September meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.

The Havana conference – co-convened by the Progressive International and the Asociación Nacional de Economistas y Contadores de Cuba – marked the 50th anniversary of an earlier version of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), a set of proposals to end economic colonialism and dependency adopted by the UN on May 1, 1974.

A keynote speaker at the Havana conference was Jason Hickel. He teaches at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) in Barcelona and is a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics. Hickel is best-known, perhaps for his book Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2020), which presents degrowth as an anticapitalist alternative to ecological imperialism and unequal exchange.

I will say more about the Havana congress following Hickel’s address, which I thank the Progressive International for making available. – Richard Fidler

* * *

Climate, Energy and Natural Resources

By Jason Hickel

Thank you to Progressive International for organizing this event, and thank you to our Cuban hosts, who have kept this revolution alive against extraordinary odds. The US blockade against Cuba, like the genocide in Gaza, is a constant reminder of the egregious violence of the imperialist world order and why we must overcome it.

So too is the ecological crisis. Comrades, I do not need to tell you about the severity of the situation we are in. It stares every sane observer in the face. But the dominant analysis of this crisis and what to do about it is woefully inadequate. We call it the Anthropocene, but we must be clear: it is not humans as such that are causing this crisis. Ecological breakdown is being driven by the capitalist economic system, and – like capitalism itself – is strongly characterized by colonial dynamics.

This is clear when it comes to climate change. The countries of the global North are responsible for around 90% of all cumulative emissions in excess of the safe planetary boundary – in other words, the emissions that are driving climate breakdown. By contrast the global South, by which I mean all of Asia, Africa and Latin America, are together responsible for only about 10%, and in fact most global South countries remain within their fair shares of the planetary boundary and have therefore not contributed to the crisis at all.

And yet, the overwhelming majority of the impacts of climate breakdown are set to affect the territories of the global South, and indeed this is already happening. The South suffers 80-90% of the economic costs and damages inflicted by climate breakdown, and around 99% of all climate-related deaths. It would be difficult to overstate the scale of this injustice. With present policy, we are headed for around 3 degrees of global warming. At this level some 2 billion people across the tropics will be exposed to extreme heat and substantially increased mortality risk; droughts will destabilize agricultural systems and lead to multi-breadbasket failures; and hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from their homes.

Climate breakdown is a process of atmospheric colonization. The atmosphere is a shared commons, on which all of us depend for our existence, and the core economies have appropriated it for their own enrichment, with devastating consequences for all of life on Earth, which are playing out along colonial lines. For the global South in particular, this crisis is existential and it must be stopped.

But so far our ruling classes are failing to do this. In 2015 the world’s governments agreed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees or “well below” 2 degrees, while upholding the principle of equity. To achieve this goal, high-income countries, which have extremely high per capita emissions, must achieve extremely rapid decarbonization.

This is not occurring. In fact, at existing rates, even the best-performing high-income countries will take on average more than 200 years to bring emissions to zero, burning their fair-shares of the Paris-compliant carbon budget many times over. Dealing with the climate crisis is not complicated. We know exactly what needs to be done, but we are not doing it. Why? Because of capitalism.

If I wish to get one point across today, it is this: the climate crisis cannot be solved within capitalism, and the sooner we face up to this fact the better. Let me briefly describe what I mean.

The core defining feature of capitalism is that it is fundamentally anti-democratic. Yes, many of us live in democratic political systems, where we get to elect candidates from time to time. But when it comes to the economic system, the system of production, not even the shallowest illusion of democracy is allowed to enter. Production is controlled by capital: large corporations, commercial banks, and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets… they are the ones who determine what to produce and how to use our collective labour and our planet’s resources.

And for capital, the purpose of production is not to meet human needs or achieve social and ecological objectives. Rather, it is to maximize and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. So we get perverse patterns of investment: massive investment in producing things like fossil fuels, SUVs, fast fashion, industrial beef, cruise ships and weapons, because these things are highly profitable to capital… but we get chronic underinvestment in necessary things like renewable energy, public transit and regenerative agriculture, because these are much less profitable to capital or not profitable at all. This is a critically important point to grasp. In many cases renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels! But they have much lower profit margins, because they are less conducive to monopoly power. So investment keeps flowing to fossil fuels, even while the world burns.

Relying on capital to deliver an energy transition is a dangerously bad strategy. The only way to deal with this crisis is with public planning. On the one hand, we need massive public investment in renewable energy, public transit and other decarbonization strategies. And this should not just be about derisking private capital – it should be about public production of public goods. To do this, simply issue the national currency to mobilize the productive forces for the necessary objectives, on the basis of need not on the basis of profit.

Now, massive public investment like this could drive inflation if it bumps up against the limits of the national productive capacity. To avoid this problem you need to reduce private demands on the productive forces. First, cut the purchasing power of the rich; and second, introduce credit regulations on commercial banks to limit their investments in ecologically destructive sectors that we want to get rid of anyway: fossil fuels, SUVs, fast fashion, etc.

What this does is it shifts labour and resources away from servicing the interests of capital accumulation and toward achieving socially and ecologically necessary objectives. This is a socialist ecological strategy, and it is the only thing that will save us. Solving the ecological crisis requires achieving democratic control over the means of production. We need to be clear about this fact and begin building now the political movements that are necessary to achieve such a transformation.

Now, it should be obvious to everyone at this point that for the global South, this requires economic sovereignty. You cannot do ecological planning if you do not have sovereign control over your national productive forces! Struggle for national economic liberation is the precondition for ecological transition, and it can be achieved with the steps that my colleagues Ndongo and Fadhel have outlined: industrial policy, regional planning, and progressive delinking from the imperial core.

So that is the horizon. But at the same time we must advance our multilateral bargaining positions. This is what we need to do:

First, we need to push for universal adoption of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. This treaty overcomes the major limitation of the Paris Agreement in that it focuses squarely on the objective of scaling down the fossil fuel industry on a binding annual schedule. The objective here is to do this in a fair and just way: rich countries must lead with rapid reductions, global South countries must be guaranteed access to sufficient energy for development, and those that are dependent on fossil fuel exports for foreign currency must be provided with a safe offramp that prevents any economic instability.

Second, global South negotiators must collaborate to demand much faster decarbonization in the global North, consistent with their fair-shares of the remaining carbon budget.

Third, we must demand substantial resource transfers to the global South. Because the global North has devoured most of the carbon budget, it owes compensation to the global South for the additional mitigation costs that this imposes on them. Our research shows that this is set to be $192 trillion between now and 2050, or about 6.4 trillion dollars per year. Conveniently, this amount can be provided by a 3.5% yearly wealth tax targeting the richest 10% in the global North.

Of course, we should be clear about the fact that Western governments will not do any of this voluntarily. And it is not reasonable for us to place our hope in the goodwill of states that have never cared about the interests of the South or the welfare of its people.

The alternative is for global South governments to unite and collectively leverage the specific forms of power that they have in the world system. Western economies are totally dependent on production in the South. In fact, around 50% of all materials consumed in the global North are net-appropriated from the South. This is a travesty of justice but it is also a crucial point of leverage. Global South governments can and should form cartels to force the imperialist states to take more radical action toward decarbonization and climate justice.

And, by the way, speaking of South-South solidarity, global South governments should negotiate access to renewable energy technologies by establishing swap lines with China so that these can be obtained outside of the imperialist currencies, and thus limit their exposure to unequal exchange.

Comrades. We stand at a fork in the road. We can stick with the status quo and watch helplessly as our world burns… or we can unite and set a new course for human history. The Southern struggle for liberation is the true agent of world-historical transformation. The world is waiting. This is the generation. Now is the moment. Hasta la victoria siempre.

* * *

More on the Congress

The 50th Anniversary Congress on the New International Economic Order adopted a “roadmap for a Global South insurgency to remake the world system.” (For a full list of participants, please click here.)

The assembled delegates debated strategies and tactics for winning a New International Economic Order and worked on major, structural reform proposals under five themes:

• Finance, Debt, and the International Monetary System

• Science, Technology, and Innovation

• Climate, Energy, and Natural Resources

• Commodities, Industry, and International Trade

• Governance, Multilateralism, and International Law

Proposals included a debtors club, cartels for critical minerals, coordination on commodity prices, BRICS financing for Southern state capacity, detailed programmes of regional integration including industrial strategy and collective public purchasing for medicines and components, reduction of material-technical dependency on the Global North, regaining national control over foreign exchange earnings, national and regional industrial policy, investment in food and renewable energy sovereignty, a global global, multilayered buffer stock system for essential commodities including food and critical minerals, coordinated exit from ICSID (International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes), denunciation of bilateral investment treaties, cross-border payment systems where international reserves are deposited, mobilisation of Special Drawing Rights for Southern development, establishing an association of raw material exporters, activate force majeure clauses so that all patents to combat climate change are ended, reparations for historical CO2 emissions from the Global North, and many more.

These proposals will be developed into a renewed and detailed Program of Action overseen by a technical committee of the Progressive International, and will be carried out through online fora and at further in-person conferences, with Algeria, Honduras, Mexico and Colombia all mooted as host nations.

The conference concluded with a presentation by President Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermúdez outlining the vision of the Cuban Presidency of the Group of 77 + China for the New International Economic Order.

See also: Proposals for Unilateral Decolonization and Economic Sovereignty, by Ndongo Samba Sylla (with Jason Hickel)

Havana conference maps plans for a new international economic order

“The climate crisis cannot be solved within capitalism, and the sooner we face up to this fact the better.” – Jason Hickel.

Viva La Solidaridad Cubano-Palestina is emblematic of Cuba’s longstanding solidarity with Palestine – which predates this poster made by Marc Rudin in 1989 and still stands today.

Meeting in Havana, Cuba on April 28 to May 1, leading scholars, diplomats and policy-makers from 36 countries mapped plans to present a program of action for establishment of a New International Economic Order that will be presented to the September meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.

The Havana conference – co-convened by the Progressive International and the Asociación Nacional de Economistas y Contadores de Cuba – marked the 50th anniversary of an earlier version of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), a set of proposals to end economic colonialism and dependency adopted by the UN on May 1, 1974.

A keynote speaker at the Havana conference was Jason Hickel. He teaches at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) in Barcelona and is a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics. Hickel is best-known, perhaps for his book Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2020), which presents degrowth as an anticapitalist alternative to ecological imperialism and unequal exchange.

I will say more about the Havana congress following Hickel’s address, which I thank the Progressive International for making available. – Richard Fidler

* * *

Climate, Energy and Natural Resources

By Jason Hickel

Thank you to Progressive International for organizing this event, and thank you to our Cuban hosts, who have kept this revolution alive against extraordinary odds. The US blockade against Cuba, like the genocide in Gaza, is a constant reminder of the egregious violence of the imperialist world order and why we must overcome it.

So too is the ecological crisis. Comrades, I do not need to tell you about the severity of the situation we are in. It stares every sane observer in the face. But the dominant analysis of this crisis and what to do about it is woefully inadequate. We call it the Anthropocene, but we must be clear: it is not humans as such that are causing this crisis. Ecological breakdown is being driven by the capitalist economic system, and – like capitalism itself – is strongly characterized by colonial dynamics.

This is clear when it comes to climate change. The countries of the global North are responsible for around 90% of all cumulative emissions in excess of the safe planetary boundary – in other words, the emissions that are driving climate breakdown. By contrast the global South, by which I mean all of Asia, Africa and Latin America, are together responsible for only about 10%, and in fact most global South countries remain within their fair shares of the planetary boundary and have therefore not contributed to the crisis at all.

And yet, the overwhelming majority of the impacts of climate breakdown are set to affect the territories of the global South, and indeed this is already happening. The South suffers 80-90% of the economic costs and damages inflicted by climate breakdown, and around 99% of all climate-related deaths. It would be difficult to overstate the scale of this injustice. With present policy, we are headed for around 3 degrees of global warming. At this level some 2 billion people across the tropics will be exposed to extreme heat and substantially increased mortality risk; droughts will destabilize agricultural systems and lead to multi-breadbasket failures; and hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from their homes.

Climate breakdown is a process of atmospheric colonization. The atmosphere is a shared commons, on which all of us depend for our existence, and the core economies have appropriated it for their own enrichment, with devastating consequences for all of life on Earth, which are playing out along colonial lines. For the global South in particular, this crisis is existential and it must be stopped.

But so far our ruling classes are failing to do this. In 2015 the world’s governments agreed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees or “well below” 2 degrees, while upholding the principle of equity. To achieve this goal, high-income countries, which have extremely high per capita emissions, must achieve extremely rapid decarbonization.

This is not occurring. In fact, at existing rates, even the best-performing high-income countries will take on average more than 200 years to bring emissions to zero, burning their fair-shares of the Paris-compliant carbon budget many times over. Dealing with the climate crisis is not complicated. We know exactly what needs to be done, but we are not doing it. Why? Because of capitalism.

If I wish to get one point across today, it is this: the climate crisis cannot be solved within capitalism, and the sooner we face up to this fact the better. Let me briefly describe what I mean.

The core defining feature of capitalism is that it is fundamentally anti-democratic. Yes, many of us live in democratic political systems, where we get to elect candidates from time to time. But when it comes to the economic system, the system of production, not even the shallowest illusion of democracy is allowed to enter. Production is controlled by capital: large corporations, commercial banks, and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets… they are the ones who determine what to produce and how to use our collective labour and our planet’s resources.

And for capital, the purpose of production is not to meet human needs or achieve social and ecological objectives. Rather, it is to maximize and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. So we get perverse patterns of investment: massive investment in producing things like fossil fuels, SUVs, fast fashion, industrial beef, cruise ships and weapons, because these things are highly profitable to capital… but we get chronic underinvestment in necessary things like renewable energy, public transit and regenerative agriculture, because these are much less profitable to capital or not profitable at all. This is a critically important point to grasp. In many cases renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels! But they have much lower profit margins, because they are less conducive to monopoly power. So investment keeps flowing to fossil fuels, even while the world burns.

Relying on capital to deliver an energy transition is a dangerously bad strategy. The only way to deal with this crisis is with public planning. On the one hand, we need massive public investment in renewable energy, public transit and other decarbonization strategies. And this should not just be about derisking private capital – it should be about public production of public goods. To do this, simply issue the national currency to mobilize the productive forces for the necessary objectives, on the basis of need not on the basis of profit.

Now, massive public investment like this could drive inflation if it bumps up against the limits of the national productive capacity. To avoid this problem you need to reduce private demands on the productive forces. First, cut the purchasing power of the rich; and second, introduce credit regulations on commercial banks to limit their investments in ecologically destructive sectors that we want to get rid of anyway: fossil fuels, SUVs, fast fashion, etc.

What this does is it shifts labour and resources away from servicing the interests of capital accumulation and toward achieving socially and ecologically necessary objectives. This is a socialist ecological strategy, and it is the only thing that will save us. Solving the ecological crisis requires achieving democratic control over the means of production. We need to be clear about this fact and begin building now the political movements that are necessary to achieve such a transformation.

Now, it should be obvious to everyone at this point that for the global South, this requires economic sovereignty. You cannot do ecological planning if you do not have sovereign control over your national productive forces! Struggle for national economic liberation is the precondition for ecological transition, and it can be achieved with the steps that my colleagues Ndongo and Fadhel have outlined: industrial policy, regional planning, and progressive delinking from the imperial core.

So that is the horizon. But at the same time we must advance our multilateral bargaining positions. This is what we need to do:

First, we need to push for universal adoption of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. This treaty overcomes the major limitation of the Paris Agreement in that it focuses squarely on the objective of scaling down the fossil fuel industry on a binding annual schedule. The objective here is to do this in a fair and just way: rich countries must lead with rapid reductions, global South countries must be guaranteed access to sufficient energy for development, and those that are dependent on fossil fuel exports for foreign currency must be provided with a safe offramp that prevents any economic instability.

Second, global South negotiators must collaborate to demand much faster decarbonization in the global North, consistent with their fair-shares of the remaining carbon budget.

Third, we must demand substantial resource transfers to the global South. Because the global North has devoured most of the carbon budget, it owes compensation to the global South for the additional mitigation costs that this imposes on them. Our research shows that this is set to be $192 trillion between now and 2050, or about 6.4 trillion dollars per year. Conveniently, this amount can be provided by a 3.5% yearly wealth tax targeting the richest 10% in the global North.

Of course, we should be clear about the fact that Western governments will not do any of this voluntarily. And it is not reasonable for us to place our hope in the goodwill of states that have never cared about the interests of the South or the welfare of its people.

The alternative is for global South governments to unite and collectively leverage the specific forms of power that they have in the world system. Western economies are totally dependent on production in the South. In fact, around 50% of all materials consumed in the global North are net-appropriated from the South. This is a travesty of justice but it is also a crucial point of leverage. Global South governments can and should form cartels to force the imperialist states to take more radical action toward decarbonization and climate justice.

And, by the way, speaking of South-South solidarity, global South governments should negotiate access to renewable energy technologies by establishing swap lines with China so that these can be obtained outside of the imperialist currencies, and thus limit their exposure to unequal exchange.

Comrades. We stand at a fork in the road. We can stick with the status quo and watch helplessly as our world burns… or we can unite and set a new course for human history. The Southern struggle for liberation is the true agent of world-historical transformation. The world is waiting. This is the generation. Now is the moment. Hasta la victoria siempre.

* * *

More on the Congress

The 50th Anniversary Congress on the New International Economic Order adopted a “roadmap for a Global South insurgency to remake the world system.” (For a full list of participants, please click here.)

The assembled delegates debated strategies and tactics for winning a New International Economic Order and worked on major, structural reform proposals under five themes:

• Finance, Debt, and the International Monetary System

• Science, Technology, and Innovation

• Climate, Energy, and Natural Resources

• Commodities, Industry, and International Trade

• Governance, Multilateralism, and International Law

Proposals included a debtors club, cartels for critical minerals, coordination on commodity prices, BRICS financing for Southern state capacity, detailed programmes of regional integration including industrial strategy and collective public purchasing for medicines and components, reduction of material-technical dependency on the Global North, regaining national control over foreign exchange earnings, national and regional industrial policy, investment in food and renewable energy sovereignty, a global global, multilayered buffer stock system for essential commodities including food and critical minerals, coordinated exit from ICSID (International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes), denunciation of bilateral investment treaties, cross-border payment systems where international reserves are deposited, mobilisation of Special Drawing Rights for Southern development, establishing an association of raw material exporters, activate force majeure clauses so that all patents to combat climate change are ended, reparations for historical CO2 emissions from the Global North, and many more.

These proposals will be developed into a renewed and detailed Program of Action overseen by a technical committee of the Progressive International, and will be carried out through online fora and at further in-person conferences, with Algeria, Honduras, Mexico and Colombia all mooted as host nations.

The conference concluded with a presentation by President Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermúdez outlining the vision of the Cuban Presidency of the Group of 77 + China for the New International Economic Order.

See also: Proposals for Unilateral Decolonization and Economic Sovereignty, by Ndongo Samba Sylla (with Jason Hickel)

That other 9-11: The coup that ended Chile’s Popular Unity government

By Richard Fidler

This year, on September 11, we mark the 50^th anniversary of the coup in Chile. The violent military overthrow of the Popular Unity government put an end to a turbulent experiment in the parliamentary road to socialism initiated with the presidential election of Salvador Allende just three years earlier. The coup government headed by General Augusto Pinochet launched massive and deadly repression and inaugurated the capitalist world’s first major wave of neoliberal economic “reforms,” many of which remain in force today.

It seems appropriate to look back at the Chilean experience – the first breakthrough for the Left in Latin America after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 – and to think about the lessons to be learned for today’s Left and progressive movements. Allende’s electoral base, the Unidad Popular (UP), or Popular Unity, was a coalition of his Socialist party with the Communist party and several much smaller parties around a programmatic agreement that promised “revolutionary changes” to “liberate Chile from imperialism, exploitation and poverty.” And it pledged to do this in full respect for and compliance with the country’s parliamentary, legal and other institutions.

For an initial balance sheet, I recommend an important article by Ralph Miliband first published in the 1973 edition of Socialist Register. Miliband was a prominent sociologist and author of numerous books on socialism and politics, including Parliamentary Socialism and The State in Capitalist Society. His essay, too lengthy to be reproduced here, merits reading in its entirety. But here is a brief excerpt, from its concluding section, on “the question of the state and the exercise of power.”

It was noted earlier that a major change in the state’s personnel is an urgent and essential task for a government bent on really serious change; and that this needs to be allied to a variety of institutional reforms and innovations, designed to push forward the process of the state’s democratization. But in this latter respect, much more needs to be done, not only to realize a set of long-term socialist objectives concerning the socialist exercise of power, but as a means either of avoiding armed confrontation, or of meeting it on the most advantageous and least costly terms if it turns out to be inevitable.

What this means is not simply ‘mobilizing the masses’ or ‘arming the workers’. These are slogans – important slogans – which need to be given effective institutional content. In other words, a new regime bent on fundamental changes in the economic, social and political structures must from the start begin to build and encourage the building of a network of organs of power, parallel to and complementing the state power, and constituting a solid infrastructure for the timely ‘mobilization of the masses’ and the effective direction of its actions. The forms which this assumes – workers’ committees at their place of work, civic committees in districts and sub-districts, etc. – and the manner in which these organs ‘mesh’ with the state may not be susceptible to blueprinting. But the need is there, and it is imperative that it should be met, in whatever forms are most appropriate.

This is not, to all appearances, how the Allende regime moved. Some of the things that needed doing were done; but such ‘mobilization’ as occurred, and such preparations as were made, very late in the day, for a possible confrontation, lacked direction, coherence, in many cases even encouragement. Had the regime really encouraged the creation of a parallel infra-structure, it might have lived; and, incidentally, it might have had less trouble with its opponents and critics on the left, for instance in the MIR, since its members might not then have found the need so great to engage in actions of their own, which greatly embarrassed the government: they might have been more ready to cooperate with a government in whose revolutionary will they could have had greater confidence. In part at least, ‘ultra-leftism’ is the product of ‘citra-leftism’.

Salvador Allende was a noble figure and he died a heroic death. But hard though it is to say it, that is not the point. What matters, in the end, is not how he died, but whether he could have survived by pursuing different policies; and it is wrong to claim that there was no alternative to the policies that were pursued. In this as in many other realms, and here more than in most, facts only become compelling as one allows them to be so. Allende was not a revolutionary who was also a parliamentary politician. He was a parliamentary politician who, remarkably enough, had genuine revolutionary tendencies. But these tendencies could not overcome a political style which was not suitable to the purposes he wanted to achieve.

Miliband focused his analysis on the trials and tribulations encountered by the UP government as it sought to pursue, and then retreat from, its reform program in the face of strenuous and mounting opposition by Chile’s capitalists backed by Washington. Writing from afar, he was unable to assess the reactions among the popular forces that constituted the government’s social base. That, however, is the subject matter of a remarkable study of “constituent popular power and the politics of conflict” in Chile from 1970 to 1973 that – in the words of its author Franck Gaudichaud – are “keys to understanding a thousand days that shook the world.”[1] Gaudichaud’s text, adapted from his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Michael Löwy, is a detailed analysis of the forms of “popular power(s)” created in their struggles by the workers, peasants and “pobladores” of the shanty-towns during the UP regime.

This research shows that at the heart of this period of social confrontations and political upheavals, various attempts at what we have proposed to call popular constituent power arose. A notion defined as ‘the creation of social and political experiments of organized counter-power and counter-hegemonies’ leading to ‘new forms of popular collective appropriations’ and ‘a calling into question – total or relative – of relations of production, forms of work organization, social and spatial hierarchies and material or symbolic mechanisms of domination’. It is precisely in the specific (and historically determined) configuration taken by these forms of popular power that the true originality of the Chilean process, its transformative capacity and its historical force are located. This, beyond the unprecedented nature of Allende’s project of transition to socialism or a supposed intangible stability of the democratic institutions of the ‘compromise State’. And it seems to us that there is here a path worth taking, to explore, in the study of other great political crises or Latin American revolutionary processes.

If we examine the various facets of this collective turmoil which mobilized several tens of thousands of employees, pobladores and left-wing activists, we see the emergence of a ‘grammar of protest’ little known to Popular Unity. This idée-force is that of popular power, but in this turbulent sky, one star shone more brightly than others: that of the industrial cordones.[2] Certainly, ‘the theme of the industrial cordones refers to one of the most important and successful experiences of Popular Unity, perhaps approaching one of the most realized utopias of Chilean socialism: that in which the workers built themselves as an historical actor with strong collective economic and political responsibility within the ongoing process. Appearing most of the time on the outskirts of the major cities, these are territorial bodies of class coordination, bringing together the unions of several companies in a specific urban area, with the immediate aim of realizing demands such as the extension of the nationalized sector, workers’ control of production, the self-defense of factories, the increase in wages or even, in the medium term, the establishment of a new institutional architecture, based on municipal and provincial popular councils. The cordones thus draw a new topography of struggles in urban areas, alongside other actors in the social movement. They gradually anchor themselves in a city in struggle and territories appropriated by and for massively mobilized popular classes.

A militant in the Chilean process in the early 1970s was the Peruvian peasant leader and ecosocialist Hugo Blanco, who died this year at the age of 89. Released from prison in 1970 by Peru’s revolutionary military junta, Blanco made his way to Chile. He authored many articles on the grassroots mobilizations and political conflicts under the UP government. Some were translated and published in English in Intercontinental Press, a socialist newsweekly published in New York City.[3] They provide insightful analyses into the class dynamics of the events, and can be accessed on line. Here is a representative sample:

Chilean Workers Organize Distribution, April 23, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1115.pdf#page=16&view=FitV,35

Right Wing in Popular Unity Consolidates, April 30, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1116.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

Fascist Threat Mounting in Chile, May 7, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1117.pdf#page=8&view=FitV,35

The Sharpening Struggle in Chile, May 28, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1120.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

Fascist Provocations, Labor Unrest in Chile, June 4, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1121.pdf#page=11&view=FitV,35

Chilean Workers Organize to Meet the Rightist Threat, June 11, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1122.pdf#page=18&view=FitV,35

The Workers’ Cordones Challenge the Reformists, June 18, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1123.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

The Role of the Cordones Industriales, November 26, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1142.pdf#page=19&view=FitV,35

Also worth reading:

Allende’s dream, Pinochet’s coup and Chile’s present By Carmen Aguirre.

People in Chile never stopped resisting the dictatorship that began 50 years ago, or seeking to revive the social reforms of the 1970s. A childhood in exile has made it impossible for me to forget that.

This article, published in the Toronto Globe & Mail September 8, is remarkable not least because it is almost unique, amongst the coverage of Chile’s coup in the business media, to remind us of the complicity of Pierre Trudeau’s government in related events before, during and after the Pinochet coup.

---

[1] Franck Gaudichaud, Chile 1970-1973, Mille jours qui ébranlèrent le monde (Presses universitaires de Rennes 2013, free on-line since 2017). In French only, at present.

[2] The Spanish word cordones could be roughly translated in English as “lanyards,” that is, interlaced bodies of workers in different workplaces or geographic units.

[3] As a staff writer for Intercontinental Press in the early 1970s, I met Hugo Blanco for the first time in 1974, in Italy, at the Tenth World Congress of the Fourth International.

That other 9-11: The coup that ended Chile’s Popular Unity government

By Richard Fidler

This year, on September 11, we mark the 50^th anniversary of the coup in Chile. The violent military overthrow of the Popular Unity government put an end to a turbulent experiment in the parliamentary road to socialism initiated with the presidential election of Salvador Allende just three years earlier. The coup government headed by General Augusto Pinochet launched massive and deadly repression and inaugurated the capitalist world’s first major wave of neoliberal economic “reforms,” many of which remain in force today.

It seems appropriate to look back at the Chilean experience – the first breakthrough for the Left in Latin America after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 – and to think about the lessons to be learned for today’s Left and progressive movements. Allende’s electoral base, the Unidad Popular (UP), or Popular Unity, was a coalition of his Socialist party with the Communist party and several much smaller parties around a programmatic agreement that promised “revolutionary changes” to “liberate Chile from imperialism, exploitation and poverty.” And it pledged to do this in full respect for and compliance with the country’s parliamentary, legal and other institutions.

For an initial balance sheet, I recommend an important article by Ralph Miliband first published in the 1973 edition of Socialist Register. Miliband was a prominent sociologist and author of numerous books on socialism and politics, including Parliamentary Socialism and The State in Capitalist Society. His essay, too lengthy to be reproduced here, merits reading in its entirety. But here is a brief excerpt, from its concluding section, on “the question of the state and the exercise of power.”

It was noted earlier that a major change in the state’s personnel is an urgent and essential task for a government bent on really serious change; and that this needs to be allied to a variety of institutional reforms and innovations, designed to push forward the process of the state’s democratization. But in this latter respect, much more needs to be done, not only to realize a set of long-term socialist objectives concerning the socialist exercise of power, but as a means either of avoiding armed confrontation, or of meeting it on the most advantageous and least costly terms if it turns out to be inevitable.

What this means is not simply ‘mobilizing the masses’ or ‘arming the workers’. These are slogans – important slogans – which need to be given effective institutional content. In other words, a new regime bent on fundamental changes in the economic, social and political structures must from the start begin to build and encourage the building of a network of organs of power, parallel to and complementing the state power, and constituting a solid infrastructure for the timely ‘mobilization of the masses’ and the effective direction of its actions. The forms which this assumes – workers’ committees at their place of work, civic committees in districts and sub-districts, etc. – and the manner in which these organs ‘mesh’ with the state may not be susceptible to blueprinting. But the need is there, and it is imperative that it should be met, in whatever forms are most appropriate.

This is not, to all appearances, how the Allende regime moved. Some of the things that needed doing were done; but such ‘mobilization’ as occurred, and such preparations as were made, very late in the day, for a possible confrontation, lacked direction, coherence, in many cases even encouragement. Had the regime really encouraged the creation of a parallel infra-structure, it might have lived; and, incidentally, it might have had less trouble with its opponents and critics on the left, for instance in the MIR, since its members might not then have found the need so great to engage in actions of their own, which greatly embarrassed the government: they might have been more ready to cooperate with a government in whose revolutionary will they could have had greater confidence. In part at least, ‘ultra-leftism’ is the product of ‘citra-leftism’.

Salvador Allende was a noble figure and he died a heroic death. But hard though it is to say it, that is not the point. What matters, in the end, is not how he died, but whether he could have survived by pursuing different policies; and it is wrong to claim that there was no alternative to the policies that were pursued. In this as in many other realms, and here more than in most, facts only become compelling as one allows them to be so. Allende was not a revolutionary who was also a parliamentary politician. He was a parliamentary politician who, remarkably enough, had genuine revolutionary tendencies. But these tendencies could not overcome a political style which was not suitable to the purposes he wanted to achieve.

Miliband focused his analysis on the trials and tribulations encountered by the UP government as it sought to pursue, and then retreat from, its reform program in the face of strenuous and mounting opposition by Chile’s capitalists backed by Washington. Writing from afar, he was unable to assess the reactions among the popular forces that constituted the government’s social base. That, however, is the subject matter of a remarkable study of “constituent popular power and the politics of conflict” in Chile from 1970 to 1973 that – in the words of its author Franck Gaudichaud – are “keys to understanding a thousand days that shook the world.”[1] Gaudichaud’s text, adapted from his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Michael Löwy, is a detailed analysis of the forms of “popular power(s)” created in their struggles by the workers, peasants and “pobladores” of the shanty-towns during the UP regime.

This research shows that at the heart of this period of social confrontations and political upheavals, various attempts at what we have proposed to call popular constituent power arose. A notion defined as ‘the creation of social and political experiments of organized counter-power and counter-hegemonies’ leading to ‘new forms of popular collective appropriations’ and ‘a calling into question – total or relative – of relations of production, forms of work organization, social and spatial hierarchies and material or symbolic mechanisms of domination’. It is precisely in the specific (and historically determined) configuration taken by these forms of popular power that the true originality of the Chilean process, its transformative capacity and its historical force are located. This, beyond the unprecedented nature of Allende’s project of transition to socialism or a supposed intangible stability of the democratic institutions of the ‘compromise State’. And it seems to us that there is here a path worth taking, to explore, in the study of other great political crises or Latin American revolutionary processes.

If we examine the various facets of this collective turmoil which mobilized several tens of thousands of employees, pobladores and left-wing activists, we see the emergence of a ‘grammar of protest’ little known to Popular Unity. This idée-force is that of popular power, but in this turbulent sky, one star shone more brightly than others: that of the industrial cordones.[2] Certainly, ‘the theme of the industrial cordones refers to one of the most important and successful experiences of Popular Unity, perhaps approaching one of the most realized utopias of Chilean socialism: that in which the workers built themselves as an historical actor with strong collective economic and political responsibility within the ongoing process. Appearing most of the time on the outskirts of the major cities, these are territorial bodies of class coordination, bringing together the unions of several companies in a specific urban area, with the immediate aim of realizing demands such as the extension of the nationalized sector, workers’ control of production, the self-defense of factories, the increase in wages or even, in the medium term, the establishment of a new institutional architecture, based on municipal and provincial popular councils. The cordones thus draw a new topography of struggles in urban areas, alongside other actors in the social movement. They gradually anchor themselves in a city in struggle and territories appropriated by and for massively mobilized popular classes.

A militant in the Chilean process in the early 1970s was the Peruvian peasant leader and ecosocialist Hugo Blanco, who died this year at the age of 89. Released from prison in 1970 by Peru’s revolutionary military junta, Blanco made his way to Chile. He authored many articles on the grassroots mobilizations and political conflicts under the UP government. Some were translated and published in English in Intercontinental Press, a socialist newsweekly published in New York City.[3] They provide insightful analyses into the class dynamics of the events, and can be accessed on line. Here is a representative sample:

Chilean Workers Organize Distribution, April 23, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1115.pdf#page=16&view=FitV,35

Right Wing in Popular Unity Consolidates, April 30, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1116.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

Fascist Threat Mounting in Chile, May 7, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1117.pdf#page=8&view=FitV,35

The Sharpening Struggle in Chile, May 28, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1120.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

Fascist Provocations, Labor Unrest in Chile, June 4, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1121.pdf#page=11&view=FitV,35

Chilean Workers Organize to Meet the Rightist Threat, June 11, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1122.pdf#page=18&view=FitV,35

The Workers’ Cordones Challenge the Reformists, June 18, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1123.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

The Role of the Cordones Industriales, November 26, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1142.pdf#page=19&view=FitV,35

Also worth reading:

Allende’s dream, Pinochet’s coup and Chile’s present By Carmen Aguirre.

People in Chile never stopped resisting the dictatorship that began 50 years ago, or seeking to revive the social reforms of the 1970s. A childhood in exile has made it impossible for me to forget that.

This article, published in the Toronto Globe & Mail September 8, is remarkable not least because it is almost unique, amongst the coverage of Chile’s coup in the business media, to remind us of the complicity of Pierre Trudeau’s government in related events before, during and after the Pinochet coup.

---

[1] Franck Gaudichaud, Chile 1970-1973, Mille jours qui ébranlèrent le monde (Presses universitaires de Rennes 2013, free on-line since 2017). In French only, at present.

[2] The Spanish word cordones could be roughly translated in English as “lanyards,” that is, interlaced bodies of workers in different workplaces or geographic units.

[3] As a staff writer for Intercontinental Press in the early 1970s, I met Hugo Blanco for the first time in 1974, in Italy, at the Tenth World Congress of the Fourth International.

Cuba: The single party system confronts the crisis

A critical perspective from a Cuban historian

None of the ostensibly post-capitalist regimes established since 1917 has managed to find a way to sustain mass democratic forms of governance and to build the popular consciousness and capacities needed for the transition to socialist society. Whatever their origins, these regimes have come to rely on monolithic party formations that function essentially as a part of the institutional structure of the state, not independently of it. Cuba is no exception, notwithstanding its heroic history of mobilization against imperialist threats and in internationalist solidarity.

In the following article Cuban historian Alina Bárbara López Hernández explores this dilemma in the context of the social protests that occurred throughout Cuba on July 11. She focuses in particular on the way in which the single-Party system has shielded the government from popular concerns and demands, curtailed public political debate, alienated the youth, and fostered the growth of bureaucratic lethargy that hinders efforts at economic and social reform. Although she does not suggest a solution to this problem, she emphasizes the need to open up a debate on it within Cuba, and to encourage all forms of democratic expression within that process.

Alina Bárbara López Hernández is a professor, writer and historian based in Matanzas. She is the coordinator of the on-line publication La Joven Cuba, in which this article appeared. I have revised the English translation published in International Viewpoint. – Richard Fidler

* * *

The single party system faced with the crisis

by Alina Bárbara López Hernández

A political party that governs alone, does not compete with another organization, and does not have to run in an election to be in power, would seem to have a great advantage. Paradoxically, that privilege is, at the same time, its greatest weakness.

Not having to negotiate power, taking it for granted that it will not be disputed, leads politically to a harmful attitude that assumes any hint of social pressure is unacceptable. When it occurs, the consequent reaction shows absolute ineptitude shielded with recklessness.

This authoritarian perspective is also strengthened by the teleological, mechanistic and anti-Marxist approach to history which assumes that the socialist revolution, once victorious, cannot retreat. This over-optimism closes off the possibility of any process of successful improvement or reform.

The collapse of the socialist camp shattered many constitutions that declared it irreversible. It is not the text in a legal treatise that counts, but the involvement of the people who find in that system the embodiment of their aspirations and who can modify it with that objective in mind.

The pressure of the majorities from below is what has made political systems evolve from ancient times until today. In the one-party model of bureaucratic socialism, the real and spontaneous participation of the citizenry in political activity is not allowed. This discriminatory condition explains why, faced with the July 11 social outburst, the Party reacted with brutality, in an authoritarian way rather than politically.

The lesson of thirty years ago was not learned in Cuba. In 2002, more than ten years after the disintegration of the USSR, a constitutional article declared socialism was irreversible, while the 2019 Constitution established that the Party is the “superior leading force of society and the State (...).” From that vantage point, the Party should have been in a better position to see that the conditions for a social explosion existed in Cuba. But not only was it not, but it has also demonstrated its incapacity to interpret the true causes of the conflict and to act accordingly.

The real causes of 11-J

The internal contradictions of social processes are the fundamental and determining factors. This principle of materialist dialectics is not applied by the Party in spite of its declared Marxist affiliation. Therefore, in the face of the social unrest, it has preferred to stick to a narrative that explains what happened based solely on external factors, real but not decisive: the pressures of the US blockade on Cuba, a soft coup, a fourth generation war.

Up to now, there has not been a deep and self-critical analysis by the Party concerning itself and its responsibility for the crisis. If there were, they would have admitted that none of the key proposals that in recent times created hope for changes to transform socialism from above came to anything. They were:

1. A reform process announced in 2007, fourteen years ago now, which promised – clarifying that it would do so “without haste” – “structural and conceptual changes” that we are still awaiting in the Cuban economy. And I say “in the economy” because the reform process never included the political dimension.

2. A Constitution approved in 2019 that, despite the debate it generated and the expectations it raised by including the concept of a Socialist Rule of Law, excluded any approach aimed at the transformation of the political system.

3. Three Party Congresses: the 6th, 7th and 8th, which in less than 15 years actually engaged less and less with the idea of reforming the model. In the last one, a little more than three months ago, a bucket of cold water was basically poured over the people, by perpetuating the thesis of stagnation and failing to address the serious social and political problems that had generated concern, not only among the youth but also in society as a whole.

A socialist system that cannot be influenced from below is a pipedream, and ours is trapped in a flagrant contradiction: we have approved a Constitution that is not viable. One part of it tends to sustain a situation of infringement of freedoms – especially in its Article 5 which declares the superiority of the single Party – while another part recognizes these rights and freedoms under a Socialist Rule of Law.

No exclusively economic reformist process is feasible because, when the citizenry is not actively involved in controlling the direction, results and speed of the transformations, changes run the risk of being dismantled or curtailed. Cuba has been no exception. The bureaucracy has become a “class for itself” within society and hinders changes and reforms that, although it accepts them on paper, it has delayed in practice.

A great unresolved conflict, wherever bureaucratic socialism is established, is that of converting state property into true social property. This aspiration has been utopian due to the lack of democratization, the lack of citizen participation in economic decisions, and the fact that the unions are no longer organizations that defend the interests of the workers.

The arrogant attitude of the Party is typical of a political model that failed. In February 1989, the Soviet magazine Sputnik devoted an issue to the stagnation that characterized the period of Leonid Brezhnev, and it asked these questions:

“Should the Party leadership become a special organ of power, which is above all other organs? If the Central Committee is a special organ of power, how do we control it? Can its decisions be protested as unconstitutional? Who is responsible in the event of failure of a decreed measure? If this superior organ in fact directs the country, then shouldn’t it be elected by all the people?”

In this political model the Party is selective, a “vanguard,” and not a popular party open to all, so that if it declares itself as a force superior to society it also sets itself above the people. For this not to be so, the people should be able to elect those who head the Party, and this is not allowed. If it is over and above everybody, and it is not “an electoral party,” it is out of the people’s control. That’s the political model that must be changed.

The younger sectors have no memory of the initial and most successful social policy stages in the revolutionary process. To them, the revolutionary narrative, the evident transformations and the benefits of the first decades have little impact.

They have known the last thirty years, with its legacy of poverty, a sustained increase in inequality, failed life prospects and the anticipation of emigration at ever-younger ages. The arrival of the Internet has coordinated them as a generation, allowing them to contrast opinions, build virtual spaces for participation that the political model denies them, and to generate actions.

So we must recognize that the main contradictions that led to the 11th July outburst are eminently political. The demands were not only for food and medicine or against the power cuts. These may have been the catalyst, but the “freedom” slogans that swept the island indicate the demand of the citizens to be recognized in a political process that has ignored them up to now.

Bread, circuses… and Senate

The party was totally disoriented by the 11th July events. This was shown by:

• the brutal scenes of repression against the demonstrators;
• the declarations calling for violence by the newly appointed first secretary of the Party – later toned down;
• an urgent meeting of the Political Bureau the day after the events – of which nothing has been revealed;
• and the usual organized acts of revolutionary reaffirmation almost a week later.

However, although it never acknowledges or apologizes, the Party knows that it made a very costly mistake.

Voices have been raised from sectors of the left and some prestigious figures and organizations, demanding respect for the political rights of peaceful demonstration and for freedom of expression in Cuba. Several governments, and the European Union as a bloc, have criticized the violent repression, surely unconstitutional.

Palliative measures are now beginning to be taken to alleviate the tragic shortages: an increase in the amount of rice, a staple in the standard food basket, effective this month until December; free distribution of products donated to Cuba (grains, pasta, sugar, and in some cases oil and meat products); a price reduction in some services of Etecsa, the communications monopoly.

In addition, long-standing requests that would have served to mitigate the crisis much earlier have now been approved: imports of food and medicines without restrictions and free of customs charges; credit sales in stores. Others may be announced in the coming days.

There is no doubt that the situation will be somewhat alleviated, but the Party must be very aware that none of these decisions will solve the Cuban dilemma which is, as I have already stated, of a political nature.

Perhaps they believe that by applying these palliatives they are discovering a new politics. They are wrong. Thousands of years ago, the Latin poet Juvenal, in his Satire X, immortalized a phrase that designated the practice of the rulers of his time: “Bread and circuses.”[1] It was the plan of Roman politicians to win over the urban plebs in exchange for wheat and entertainments so that they would lose their critical spirit, feeling satisfied by the false generosity of the rulers.

In Cuba we need bread and circuses, we are a suffering people, but – above all – we need to govern from below. We need to be the Senate, since our Senate has disappeared from the political scene. There is not a single statement from any member of the National Assembly of People’s Power, as such, in spite of the seriousness of the violent acts against a part of the people they are supposed to represent.

They have violated the legislative schedule saying it is impossible to meet in the middle of a pandemic. However, under the same conditions, the Party held its 8th congress and, after July 11, massive activities were organised in support of the government in all the provinces.

There has not yet been an official pronouncement from the Party leadership analyzing the facts, offering exact figures of the cities and towns involved, participants in the protests, people arrested and prosecuted. It was of no use to the single Party to have analyzed in the Political Bureau, a few days before the 8th Congress, a report entitled: “Study of the socio-political climate of Cuban society.” They understood nothing of that climate, or those who wrote the report did not portray reality.

Single Party bureaucratic socialism creates a kind of political demiurge that escapes the rule of law, since it places itself above it, accentuates political extremism and separates itself from the citizenry. So far all models with these characteristics, far from leading to a socialist society, have disguised a state capitalism with features of corruption and elitism.

It is time to debate this and organize ourselves to change it. It is possible now. As the president of the People’s Supreme Court declared to the international press, in Cuba the Constitution guarantees the right to peaceful demonstration.

July 30, 2021

---

[1] “Panem et circenses,” Juvenal suggests, are the only remaining cares of a Roman populace which has given up its birthright of political freedom. https://www.ancient-literature.com/rome_juvenal_satire_x.html. – RF.

Cuba: The single party system confronts the crisis

A critical perspective from a Cuban historian

None of the ostensibly post-capitalist regimes established since 1917 has managed to find a way to sustain mass democratic forms of governance and to build the popular consciousness and capacities needed for the transition to socialist society. Whatever their origins, these regimes have come to rely on monolithic party formations that function essentially as a part of the institutional structure of the state, not independently of it. Cuba is no exception, notwithstanding its heroic history of mobilization against imperialist threats and in internationalist solidarity.

In the following article Cuban historian Alina Bárbara López Hernández explores this dilemma in the context of the social protests that occurred throughout Cuba on July 11. She focuses in particular on the way in which the single-Party system has shielded the government from popular concerns and demands, curtailed public political debate, alienated the youth, and fostered the growth of bureaucratic lethargy that hinders efforts at economic and social reform. Although she does not suggest a solution to this problem, she emphasizes the need to open up a debate on it within Cuba, and to encourage all forms of democratic expression within that process.

Alina Bárbara López Hernández is a professor, writer and historian based in Matanzas. She is the coordinator of the on-line publication La Joven Cuba, in which this article appeared. I have revised the English translation published in International Viewpoint. – Richard Fidler

* * *

The single party system faced with the crisis

by Alina Bárbara López Hernández

A political party that governs alone, does not compete with another organization, and does not have to run in an election to be in power, would seem to have a great advantage. Paradoxically, that privilege is, at the same time, its greatest weakness.

Not having to negotiate power, taking it for granted that it will not be disputed, leads politically to a harmful attitude that assumes any hint of social pressure is unacceptable. When it occurs, the consequent reaction shows absolute ineptitude shielded with recklessness.

This authoritarian perspective is also strengthened by the teleological, mechanistic and anti-Marxist approach to history which assumes that the socialist revolution, once victorious, cannot retreat. This over-optimism closes off the possibility of any process of successful improvement or reform.

The collapse of the socialist camp shattered many constitutions that declared it irreversible. It is not the text in a legal treatise that counts, but the involvement of the people who find in that system the embodiment of their aspirations and who can modify it with that objective in mind.

The pressure of the majorities from below is what has made political systems evolve from ancient times until today. In the one-party model of bureaucratic socialism, the real and spontaneous participation of the citizenry in political activity is not allowed. This discriminatory condition explains why, faced with the July 11 social outburst, the Party reacted with brutality, in an authoritarian way rather than politically.

The lesson of thirty years ago was not learned in Cuba. In 2002, more than ten years after the disintegration of the USSR, a constitutional article declared socialism was irreversible, while the 2019 Constitution established that the Party is the “superior leading force of society and the State (...).” From that vantage point, the Party should have been in a better position to see that the conditions for a social explosion existed in Cuba. But not only was it not, but it has also demonstrated its incapacity to interpret the true causes of the conflict and to act accordingly.

The real causes of 11-J

The internal contradictions of social processes are the fundamental and determining factors. This principle of materialist dialectics is not applied by the Party in spite of its declared Marxist affiliation. Therefore, in the face of the social unrest, it has preferred to stick to a narrative that explains what happened based solely on external factors, real but not decisive: the pressures of the US blockade on Cuba, a soft coup, a fourth generation war.

Up to now, there has not been a deep and self-critical analysis by the Party concerning itself and its responsibility for the crisis. If there were, they would have admitted that none of the key proposals that in recent times created hope for changes to transform socialism from above came to anything. They were:

1. A reform process announced in 2007, fourteen years ago now, which promised – clarifying that it would do so “without haste” – “structural and conceptual changes” that we are still awaiting in the Cuban economy. And I say “in the economy” because the reform process never included the political dimension.

2. A Constitution approved in 2019 that, despite the debate it generated and the expectations it raised by including the concept of a Socialist Rule of Law, excluded any approach aimed at the transformation of the political system.

3. Three Party Congresses: the 6th, 7th and 8th, which in less than 15 years actually engaged less and less with the idea of reforming the model. In the last one, a little more than three months ago, a bucket of cold water was basically poured over the people, by perpetuating the thesis of stagnation and failing to address the serious social and political problems that had generated concern, not only among the youth but also in society as a whole.

A socialist system that cannot be influenced from below is a pipedream, and ours is trapped in a flagrant contradiction: we have approved a Constitution that is not viable. One part of it tends to sustain a situation of infringement of freedoms – especially in its Article 5 which declares the superiority of the single Party – while another part recognizes these rights and freedoms under a Socialist Rule of Law.

No exclusively economic reformist process is feasible because, when the citizenry is not actively involved in controlling the direction, results and speed of the transformations, changes run the risk of being dismantled or curtailed. Cuba has been no exception. The bureaucracy has become a “class for itself” within society and hinders changes and reforms that, although it accepts them on paper, it has delayed in practice.

A great unresolved conflict, wherever bureaucratic socialism is established, is that of converting state property into true social property. This aspiration has been utopian due to the lack of democratization, the lack of citizen participation in economic decisions, and the fact that the unions are no longer organizations that defend the interests of the workers.

The arrogant attitude of the Party is typical of a political model that failed. In February 1989, the Soviet magazine Sputnik devoted an issue to the stagnation that characterized the period of Leonid Brezhnev, and it asked these questions:

“Should the Party leadership become a special organ of power, which is above all other organs? If the Central Committee is a special organ of power, how do we control it? Can its decisions be protested as unconstitutional? Who is responsible in the event of failure of a decreed measure? If this superior organ in fact directs the country, then shouldn’t it be elected by all the people?”

In this political model the Party is selective, a “vanguard,” and not a popular party open to all, so that if it declares itself as a force superior to society it also sets itself above the people. For this not to be so, the people should be able to elect those who head the Party, and this is not allowed. If it is over and above everybody, and it is not “an electoral party,” it is out of the people’s control. That’s the political model that must be changed.

The younger sectors have no memory of the initial and most successful social policy stages in the revolutionary process. To them, the revolutionary narrative, the evident transformations and the benefits of the first decades have little impact.

They have known the last thirty years, with its legacy of poverty, a sustained increase in inequality, failed life prospects and the anticipation of emigration at ever-younger ages. The arrival of the Internet has coordinated them as a generation, allowing them to contrast opinions, build virtual spaces for participation that the political model denies them, and to generate actions.

So we must recognize that the main contradictions that led to the 11th July outburst are eminently political. The demands were not only for food and medicine or against the power cuts. These may have been the catalyst, but the “freedom” slogans that swept the island indicate the demand of the citizens to be recognized in a political process that has ignored them up to now.

Bread, circuses… and Senate

The party was totally disoriented by the 11th July events. This was shown by:

• the brutal scenes of repression against the demonstrators;
• the declarations calling for violence by the newly appointed first secretary of the Party – later toned down;
• an urgent meeting of the Political Bureau the day after the events – of which nothing has been revealed;
• and the usual organized acts of revolutionary reaffirmation almost a week later.

However, although it never acknowledges or apologizes, the Party knows that it made a very costly mistake.

Voices have been raised from sectors of the left and some prestigious figures and organizations, demanding respect for the political rights of peaceful demonstration and for freedom of expression in Cuba. Several governments, and the European Union as a bloc, have criticized the violent repression, surely unconstitutional.

Palliative measures are now beginning to be taken to alleviate the tragic shortages: an increase in the amount of rice, a staple in the standard food basket, effective this month until December; free distribution of products donated to Cuba (grains, pasta, sugar, and in some cases oil and meat products); a price reduction in some services of Etecsa, the communications monopoly.

In addition, long-standing requests that would have served to mitigate the crisis much earlier have now been approved: imports of food and medicines without restrictions and free of customs charges; credit sales in stores. Others may be announced in the coming days.

There is no doubt that the situation will be somewhat alleviated, but the Party must be very aware that none of these decisions will solve the Cuban dilemma which is, as I have already stated, of a political nature.

Perhaps they believe that by applying these palliatives they are discovering a new politics. They are wrong. Thousands of years ago, the Latin poet Juvenal, in his Satire X, immortalized a phrase that designated the practice of the rulers of his time: “Bread and circuses.”[1] It was the plan of Roman politicians to win over the urban plebs in exchange for wheat and entertainments so that they would lose their critical spirit, feeling satisfied by the false generosity of the rulers.

In Cuba we need bread and circuses, we are a suffering people, but – above all – we need to govern from below. We need to be the Senate, since our Senate has disappeared from the political scene. There is not a single statement from any member of the National Assembly of People’s Power, as such, in spite of the seriousness of the violent acts against a part of the people they are supposed to represent.

They have violated the legislative schedule saying it is impossible to meet in the middle of a pandemic. However, under the same conditions, the Party held its 8th congress and, after July 11, massive activities were organised in support of the government in all the provinces.

There has not yet been an official pronouncement from the Party leadership analyzing the facts, offering exact figures of the cities and towns involved, participants in the protests, people arrested and prosecuted. It was of no use to the single Party to have analyzed in the Political Bureau, a few days before the 8th Congress, a report entitled: “Study of the socio-political climate of Cuban society.” They understood nothing of that climate, or those who wrote the report did not portray reality.

Single Party bureaucratic socialism creates a kind of political demiurge that escapes the rule of law, since it places itself above it, accentuates political extremism and separates itself from the citizenry. So far all models with these characteristics, far from leading to a socialist society, have disguised a state capitalism with features of corruption and elitism.

It is time to debate this and organize ourselves to change it. It is possible now. As the president of the People’s Supreme Court declared to the international press, in Cuba the Constitution guarantees the right to peaceful demonstration.

July 30, 2021

---

[1] “Panem et circenses,” Juvenal suggests, are the only remaining cares of a Roman populace which has given up its birthright of political freedom. https://www.ancient-literature.com/rome_juvenal_satire_x.html. – RF.

Cuba’s Crisis, Our Response

With Cuba at a crossroads, we must respond to recent protests by listening to the Cuban people and recognizing the country’s accomplishments and its shortcomings, its past and its potential.

Margaret Randall is a feminist poet with a long history of social activism in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, as well as the United States. In Mexico, she  cofounded the bilingual journal, El Corno Emplumado. Among her best-known books are Cuban Women Now, Sandino’s Daughters, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, and When I Look into the Mirror and see You: Women, Terror and Resistance (all oral history with essay). In this article, which appeared first on the NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America) website, Randall imparts some well-chosen and necessary advice to everyone sympathetic to revolutionary Cuba and its people.

– Richard Fidler

* * *

Cuba’s Crisis, Our Response

By Margaret Randall

The recent protests in Cuba, especially those on July 11, 2021 have provoked consternation in some and hope in others. The protests, which began in the Havana suburb of San Antonio de Los Baños, the eastern city of Palma Soriano, and quickly spread nationwide, are the first examples of visible large scale discontent since the demonstrations that took place in 1994 at the height of the economic crisis brought on by the Soviet Union’s collapse.

By and large, the “news” reflects entrenched positions. Corporate media publishes opinion pieces about a people bravely seeking freedom and treats these protests as if they are the beginning of the end of the Cuban revolution. The virulent Right screams about fake disappearances and invented torture, while remaining silent about countries such as Colombia and Nicaragua where such horrors are actually being perpetrated. Meanwhile, acritical sectors of the Left deny any sort of official violence or justify it in the name of the revolution’s survival. None of these lenses reflect the real story. Unsurprisingly, the most factual and complete accounts come from Cubans who live in the country and have for years contributed to constructing its revolution.

It has been 40 years since I’ve lived in Cuba and, although I visit frequently, I know it makes a difference that I am not there on the ground right now, experiencing current events for myself. When reading the variety of interpretations that have emerged over the past several weeks, it is important to take into account not only the writer’s political position but where she or he lives. A Cuban who resides in Cuba, a Cuban who is part of the vast diaspora, or a foreigner defending a particular political position: each of these placements has its lens. And in a country that has surprised us for so long, any opinion may be nothing more than a snapshot of the moment.

The Cuban government’s response to the mass demonstrations set a disturbing tone for their immediate aftermath. President Díaz-Canel went to San Antonio de los Baños hoping to calm the crowd as Fidel Castro had so often been able to do. But Díaz-Canel misjudged the protest’s importance and temperature. Phrases such as “the streets belong to the revolutionaries” and “we are prepared for anything” met genuine discontent with thoughtless dogmatism. To say that this was a poor response is an understatement. Inside as well as outside of Cuba criticism came swiftly.

Díaz-Canel apologized, and the Cuban government announced conciliatory measures on July 14 in an attempt to address the people’s legitimate concerns. The changes, which included lifting some taxes and import limits on medications and food, announcing changes to the state sector’s salary scale, and loosening some restrictions on food rationing, may be all that are possible given the country’s dire economic situation. However, they probably won’t be enough to placate long frustrated demands.

The Cuban Communist Party has demonstrated its ability to remain in power through decades of crises. And those of us who know and love the revolution fear that the focus on survival at any cost will leave us with a situation that is far from the one envisioned by the revolution’s creators. I speak as someone who experienced the revolution’s glory years: nationalized natural resources, newly acquired literacy, free education and healthcare, almost full employment, an equitable distribution of food and other necessities, a legal system with real input from people who discussed new law at neighborhood meetings, extraordinary promotion of the arts and sports. Cuba also developed programs of international solidarity and disaster relief beyond anything carried out by much wealthier countries. While the rich nations offer their surplus, what Cuba offers often means sacrifice for its own population. During the decade (1969-1980) I lived and raised four children there, these achievements weren’t statistics but the day-to-day reality.

Cuba’s reality today is one in which education and healthcare are still free and universal, but also one in which important constitutional changes and party promises aimed at producing a more equitable society have been enacted in word only. In the midst of tremendous economic and social stress, follow-through has not materialized or been too slow.

It isn’t unusual for politicians to promise more than they can produce. It happens on a daily basis in the United States and in most of the world’s countries. But in Cuba, where a genuine people’s revolution created mechanisms for transparency and change, this contradiction is not acceptable. Not to the old timers who remember what life under the Batista dictatorship was like, and not to the youth who, like youth everywhere, demand justice and demand it now.

In Cuba, the list of challenges seems endless. On top of the extreme economic problems brought on by 62 years of blockade and a difficult transition from a socialist system to one that can function in today’s world, Covid-19 is out of control. The country’s excellent biochemical industry has developed two proven vaccines, Soberana (91.2 percent efficacy) and Abdala (92.28 percent efficacy) and is attempting to vaccinate its entire population. But even with Cuba’s organizational expertise, a shortage of syringes—one outcome of the blockade—has rendered this a slow process. The severity of the pandemic has also devastated tourism, putting an additional strain on the country’s economy. A long-awaited consolidation of the monetary system has been rocky. In July, a major power plant suffered a breakdown, causing frequent blackouts. Scarcities became more acute. Tropical storm Elsa was another blow. Many Cubans are frustrated beyond their ability to wait for incremental change.

Over the past decade Cuba has foolishly cracked down on artists and others whose work has protested the status quo, creating the current complex situation. Despite this pattern of repression, authoritative voices from inside Cuba—including Andrés Perdomo Guanche, Jorge Fornet, Arturo Arango, Margarita Alarcón, and Víctor Heredia, to name just a few—are attempting to situate the protests in context.

La Tizza, an independent Cuban news source that describes itself as “a venue for thinking and making socialism,” in its July 15 editorial wrote: “Those who came out to protest the State and socialism in Cuba were ordinary people….Those who continue to read Cuba as if the Caribbean were the Baltic are excitedly sharing via social media images of Berlin or Prague at the moment of European socialism’s demise. They don’t know that the Cuban Revolution won’t melt like some merengue because it’s never been made of merengue. Not because it hasn’t been sweet, but rather because it’s also had its moments of bitterness, which up to now we’ve been able to transform into strength.”

The La Tizza editorial goes on to describe protests not between the people and the state but between two groups of people with two very different social projects. One group, victim of capitalist propaganda, has given up on its dream of a just society. The other is unwilling to relinquish the revolutionary aspirations it has nurtured for generations, the legality of a socialist constitution ratified by democratic referendum, or the idea of a nation of peace, social justice, and national dignity exemplified by a revolution resting on tarnished laurels rather than opening new pathways to the future.

Beloved singer-songwriter and truth-teller Silvio Rodríguez asks, “who are the comrades responsible for the fact that, after two Communist Party congresses and what is set forth in the Constitution, what needs to change hasn’t changed? Who,” he asks again, “in the upper echelons of government? I want names and positions. And I want to hear what they have to say for themselves.”

Marcia Leiseca, one of the founders of Casa de las Américas, who even at an advanced age is still active in cultural work, writes, “it’s time to speak, to exercise opinions and offer ideas.…We must establish a dialogue with young people, encourage their participation in a new present and future. What happened on July 11 has been manipulated by the extreme Left and the extreme Right, the former blaming the unjust blockade and outside interference, overstating the resultant vandalism and absolving us of all responsibility. The latter exaggerates what took place, invents horrors such as disappearances, torture, and violation of human rights.”

Cuba is at a crossroads, and how the current crisis is handled may well determine the revolution’s survival. The U.S. government needs to repeal its blockade and stop the overt and covert operations designed to destroy the revolution. Cuba’s leaders must issue verifiable lists of detainees and name and punish those officials who beat protestors or otherwise failed to follow Cuba’s own civil guarantees.

Cuba is rightly indignant that the United States continues to interfere in its internal affairs. An analysis of social media bots shows that many, although not all, of the protests are being organized and funded from outside the country, by U.S. government agencies and rightwing Cuban forces. During the protests, people received repeated messages claiming that provincial governments had fallen to the demonstrators and urging people to join a victorious situation that didn’t exist. This is understandably a sore point in a country that has endured attacks from the United States throughout the history of its revolution. I hope the Cuban government will begin to answer the protests with dialogue rather than repression.

Before July 11, dissent in Cuba was sporadic and limited to specific social groups or isolated experiences of censorship or repression. On that day, they were larger and more comprehensive. Thousands have protested excessive government control. I believe they should be heard.

I also believe that the Cuban government has a responsibility to issue information about incidents of violence on both sides, make available lists of those currently being detained, and name and punish police and other officials who have gone against the country’s own constitutional guarantees of freedom of assembly and dissent. At the same time, I think it is worth noting that Cuba is a nation of eleven million. The recent protests are far from constituting a tipping point.

I urge people on all sides to think about how extraordinary it is that a tiny island 90 miles from U.S. shores has been able to survive for more than half a century against every sort of covert and overt attack. Let us help Cuba become what its revolution has promised rather than try to mold it to some specious image in which profit obliterates justice and equality.

August 11, 2021

For more on Margaret Randall and her works, see Margaret Randall (Wikipedia) and her website: http://www.margaretrandall.org/.