Though it is telling that you are focussing on Cuba rather than China.
:)
There is an interesting idea that has peeped out from time to time in this whole debate, although it has not been made explicit: Is Stalinism not in fact fascism? I think there is both a yes and a no answer.
The no answer has been more or less covered by some people here: Stalinism (and/or Marxism-Leninism) has a different attitude towards the working class, deriving from the roots that it does have in Marx, and so on. True. But what about a possible yes answer?
I defined fascism as ultranationalism in one of my previous posts. I think what is really serviceable in this definition is that it captures a generality across a wide variety of contexts. This apparent imprecision is actually its virtue, I think. You can include here everyone from Mussolini to Franco to Hitler to Pinochet to Mugabe. Yes the anti-imperialist, Chinese-aligned Mugabe. Well then, what about Stalin, Castro and Mao? I would say that in certain respects there is no daylight showing between the latter froup and the former. And that is where the NATION comes into it. All of the so-called communist revolutions have been national in character. There has never been one that was a revolution against the nation state. In other words these 'communists' always turn out to be the administrators of nation states, within a chain of other nation states. As such their priority is to run a successful nation state. The success of this project is measured in the "tons of concrete and steel" that it produces (relative to other nations), says Trotsky. "We will bury you," says Kruschev to the other nations.
To use the phraseology of Zizek: What if 'revolution' is inherently national, in the core of its concept? What if Jacobinism is the only kind of revolutionary ideology after all? (Lenin seems to have thought so). Are not all revolutions in fact bourgeois and nationalist in nature?
So, when the stalinists are at their most fascist is in fact when they are at their most nationalist. Stalin certainly promoted Russian nationalism, to the extent of subordinating the class struggles in other countries to this national project. For example he cynically manipulated the communist forces in Spain, and his dupes like Togliatti, in such a way that the war would not be won but would go on for a long time and tie up the Germans and Italians there. There are too many examples of this sort of thing to detail here. But Bordiga stunned Stalin by telling him to his face in the 1920s already that he was subordinating the Comintern to Russian interests (and he lived to tell the tale!).
Castro rails and blusters at times in a very nationalist way, and that is when he is at his most fascist. Mao was often more of a nationalist in his thinking than Chiang Kai Shek. Now nationalism creates internal enemies. There are all sorts of reasons for that. People are suspected of being internal agents of external countries when they offer criticisms of the regime (and of course they often are such agents). And the bourgeois nature of the nationalist project means that class inequalities persist, and yes those inequalities are also power inequalities. Struggles around these internal inequalities breed opposition movements; members of particular groups, particularly more cosmopolitan types, are regarded as being more likely to join such groups, and so on. In other words the 'communist' countries really do turn out to be capitalist and repressive in their essence. Fascist, in other words.
The similarities go further, because they're deeper. This process happens in underdeveloped countries only. Germany resembled an underdeveloped country in the wake of Versailles. But the fact that it wasn't your conventionally backward country is what gave nazism its particular character as fascism, and provided its relatively sophisticated ideology, the aestheticisation of politics that Benajmin drew attention to. Spain and Italy were underdeveloped and knew it. Their ruling classes wanted their 'iron surgeons' to lead them out of backwardness into capitalist modernity. This backwardness also characterises the countries in which the 'communist' regimes arose and determines their character and fate, whatever their conscious intentions might have been.
I have offered this criticism to people on this very list who support such regimes as that of Castro. I have challenged and still do challenge people to tell me in exactly what sense did Castro deliver a better modernised state than what Franco did. Remember its not the intention that we are talking about, its the consequences, whether intended or not. Is Cuba a more just, balanced, and sustainable nation than Spain is today? In what sense? In each case you can point to pros and cons, but it is very difficult to make a decent judegement about this.
I am perhaps privileged, in a sense, to have visited both Spain more than once during Franco's time and also Cuba more than once in Castro's time. I have also had the privilege of visiting Spain in the post-Franco period a couple of times, but not, as yet, of visiting a post-Castro Cuba. These were both authoritarian, paternalistic, Spanish speaking countries. Similar in many ways. But there were differences. Cubans generally were jollier and more friendly. But I didn't long to live there. In the longer term I'm not sure that the results of these experiments in non-democracy will really turn out to have been different in their true nature: the project of capitalist modernisation.
So to me fascism, as ultra-nationalism, is not so much a way of classifying people as it is an aspect of modernisation in the context of extreme global inequality. All nations have the potential for fascism, but it is rare in countries that have passed through a successful 19th century bourgeois revolution. It is for exactly the same reaons that successful CPs are not found in the latter type of country.
Tahir
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