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On 3/11/2011 1:43 PM, Néstor Gorojovsky wrote:
What strikes me as true is that Manuel and the majority of this list
are almost desperate to continue denying the murderer news agencies of
imperialist nations a benefit of doubt.
Frankly, I wouldn't care if not a single jet had been deployed
against the revolutionaries.
The real issue is a despot's control of society for 41 years. Even
if he ruled more benevolently than he has since the neoliberal
turn in 2004, there is still the question of how revolutionary
socialists should regard absolutism of this sort.
For many reasons, Fidel Castro has not been as sensitive to
questions of popular rule as Marx, Engels, Lenin and other
classical Marxists have been. Considering the close connections he
had at one time to the USSR, it was understandable why--for
example--he backed the suppression of the Czechoslovakian
experiment in socialism with a human face in 1968.
But it is becoming more and more necessary for the socialism of
the 21st century to stake out a new approach to democratic norms.
That is why it is so dismaying to see Hugo Chavez equivocating on
Libya.
http://monthlyreview.org/100701harneckerPart2-1.php
A Socialist Society, Fundamentally Democratic
Chávez has stressed the fundamentally democratic nature of
twenty-first century socialism. He warns that “we must not slip
into the errors of the past,” into the “Stalinist deviation,”
which bureaucratized the party and ended up eliminating people’s
protagonism.71
The practical and negative experience of real socialism in the
political sphere cannot make us forget that, according to classic
Marxist tenets, post-capitalist society always has been associated
with full democracy. Marx and some of his followers called it
communism, others have called it socialism, and I agree with
García Linera that it doesn’t really matter what term we use. What
does matter is the content.
Few people are familiar with a brief text about the state by
Lenin, which is contained in a notebook and predates his book The
State and Revolution. In it, he says that socialism must be
conceived of as the most democratic society, in contrast to
bourgeois society, where there is democracy for a minority only.
Comparing socialism to capitalism, Lenin observes that, in the
latter, there is democracy for the rich only and for a small layer
of the proletariat, whereas in the transition to socialism, there
is almost full democracy. Democracy, at this stage, is not yet
complete because of the unignorable will of the majority, which
must be imposed on those who do not wish to submit to the majority
will. However, once communist society is reached, democracy will
be finally complete.72
This view was inspired by the writings of Marx and Engels, who
said that the society of the future would make possible the full
development of all human potential. Fully developed human beings
would replace the fragmented human beings produced by capitalism.
As Friedrich Engels writes, in his first draft of The Communist
Manifesto, we must “organize society in such a way that every
member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers
in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic
conditions of this society.” “In Marx’s final version of the
Manifesto,” this new society appears as an “association, in which
the free development of each is the condition for the free
development of all.”73
But how long will it take us to reach this goal? History has shown
that “heaven” cannot be taken by storm, that a long historical
period is needed to make the transition from capitalism to a
socialist society. Some talk in terms of decades, others in terms
of hundreds of years, still others think that socialism is the
goal we must pursue but that perhaps we may never completely reach.
We call this historical period “the transition to socialism.”
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