Cuba's Destiny

[Rakesh Bhandari]

I thank Mark for the kind words (I think). I did not respond to him
privately on Stalinism because I have neither studied the violence of
the collectivization process nor the liquidation of
Bukharin and Preobrazhensky in the Soviet Union nor the council communist
critiques of the Soviet Union (before Hitler's power grab  as well as
after) nor critical histories of the twist and turns of the Comintern
(e.g., Borkenau) not  only vis a vis the German Communists but also the
Chinese and Indian Communists. So much for being a member of the
illuminati. 

I do think Richard B Day's critique of Stalinist political economy in the
Crisis and the Crash (Verso, 1981) tellingly reveals the degeneration of
debate and theory in the 1920s and 1930s. The degeneration in philosophy
seems only more monstrous. 

I do have a theoretical interest in several Stalinists: TA
Jackson, Christopher Caudwell, Alfred Sohn Rethel,  William J Blake and of
course Henryk Grossmann, but it seems to each and every one of them was
either expelled or marginalized--bearing out the critique of the
Bolsheviks by Luxemburg and the left communists: Pannekoek, Gorter, Rolst
(those dismissed by Lenin as infantile as he backtracked from  the radical
promises of State and Revolution).

By the way,  I tried to recheck out of the
library Paresh Chattophyay's The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet
Experience, but it was missing. Hope to find it later.  
> What does it mean for a Cuban to 'be free'? Does it mean, to have a 
> right to earn dollars freely, go on day trips to Miami to spend them 
> freely on gorceries, souvenirs and whores? Or does Rakesh's vision 
> of freedom denied to Cubans encompass something a little less philistine?

No freedom means that the product no longer dominates the producer; it
means a free association of prouducers as they build relations among each 
other from the bottom up. It does not mean the state control
of production; freedom is not state communism. Marx's view of freedom can
only be recovered via a critique of the state communism defended in his
name by revisionists like the Austro Marxists and the Bolsheviks alike. I
am presently reading a remarkable council communist critique from the
1930s of the Soviet Union; it also speaks to Marx's Critique of the Gotha
Programme. Will have to read it carefully first.

Yours, Rakesh