blindpig
04-06-2010, 11:26 AM
This is a pretty long piece which examines the realities of creating a socialist society
[div class="excerpt"]How to Visit a Socialist Country
Richard Levins
Travelers from the United States to Cuba cross more than ninety miles of sea: they cross decades of history. They may be limited to one suitcase, but they carry trunks full of ideological baggage, including biases about Cuba, beliefs about communists, commitments as to what a good society should be like, and a collection of conventional poli-sci formulas about power, government, and human behavior.
One Cuban commentator notes:
Coming from North America or Europe to a typical Cuban urban neighborhood, the visitor’s first impression might be one of poverty: crumbling or poorly maintained buildings, pot-holed streets, ancient cars, homes where there are few “extras” etc. On the other hand, if you arrive from Latin America or another developing country, other aspects of Cuban life might get your attention: no street kids, no malnourished faces, no beggars, and people walking the streets at night with almost no fear.1
snip
Sympathizers with the Cuban process, as well as anticommunist leftists, sometimes carry a clipboard and grade sheet so that they can grade Cuba for health care, sexism, racism, pollution, homophobia, elections, number of political parties, a free press, strikes, or whatever else is on their minds. In the end, depending on the grade point average Cuba accumulates, they can decide if Cuba “is”or “is not” socialist (or whether socialism is or is not a good thing). Then they write praise or denunciations when they get home. The items on the grade sheet may be liberal, a list of rights we fight for under capitalism and then turn into universal principles. Or they may come from a priori schemes for socialism, principles such as “bottom up, not top down,” or “workers’ councils running the factories.”
snip
Socialism is not a thing but a process, the process by which the working classes of the city and countryside and their allies seize the reins of society to satisfy their shared needs. Through a telescope, we get a glimpse of the world-historic significance of the first efforts to replace not only capitalism but also all class society by a more generous, just, and sustainable way of life. That is, we are trying to overcome a ten-thousand-year detour during which our species adopted agriculture, deforested much of the planet, grew in numbers, and extended our life span and knowledge and destructive capacity, divided into classes so that we were no longer a “we,” and expanded our productive capacity to the point where we can dispense with classes and become a “we” again.
This is more important in looking at the first century of socialist innovation than how well these revolutionaries do it, the particular decisions and those unexpected changes that surprisingly occur, and even the enormous difficulties and deficiencies of this effort. But, through the microscope of daily life, all these details are of overwhelming importance, and world history is no compensation for a lack of protein in the diet. We need both the telescope and the microscope.
snip
The “Logic” of Socialist Development
If a socialist revolution does survive, there is a distinct kind of logic to its development that gradually asserts itself. “Logic,” in this sense, is no mystical spirit of the times or universal laws above human activity. (“Laws” never govern a historical process. They are intellectual constructs extracted from real processes and used to interpret observations). It is the set of social relations, challenges, commitments, categories of analysis, and dominant ideas that set the conditions within which human beings make decisions. It is the set of principles that determines the array of possible, acceptable, sometimes obvious, decisions and excludes others. It is the range of options for confronting all the urgencies that must be met in order to continue the socialist project. Sometimes some of these have to be postponed because of material limitations, lack of qualified people, lack of consensus, or the hostility of neighbors. But if too many of these imperatives are denied for too long for any of these reasons, the whole trajectory might collapse and the society revert to capitalism. History is not a smooth advance from backward to modern but a branching and looping process structured by social relations. These branch points are very much influenced by which people are doing the deciding and how they do it.
But for a socialist society, with its guarantee that everybody eats, dismissing workers into unemployment does not improve social efficiency. It is simply not an option. There are other possibilities. Sometimes it is best to over-staff and use working hours also for education. With surplus labor, enterprises can release people temporarily to harvest crops or build houses. Or jobs can be eliminated and workers given other jobs with at least the same pay, or they can be retrained for other work, or be paid to study. Cuba has adopted a “study as work” principle for workers displaced from the closed sugar mills. No matter what the decision, in all cases, the criterion of social efficiency at the level of the whole, not the enterprise, is present as a counterforce to shortsighted financial targets.
http://www.monthlyreview.org/100401levins.php[/quote]
[div class="excerpt"]How to Visit a Socialist Country
Richard Levins
Travelers from the United States to Cuba cross more than ninety miles of sea: they cross decades of history. They may be limited to one suitcase, but they carry trunks full of ideological baggage, including biases about Cuba, beliefs about communists, commitments as to what a good society should be like, and a collection of conventional poli-sci formulas about power, government, and human behavior.
One Cuban commentator notes:
Coming from North America or Europe to a typical Cuban urban neighborhood, the visitor’s first impression might be one of poverty: crumbling or poorly maintained buildings, pot-holed streets, ancient cars, homes where there are few “extras” etc. On the other hand, if you arrive from Latin America or another developing country, other aspects of Cuban life might get your attention: no street kids, no malnourished faces, no beggars, and people walking the streets at night with almost no fear.1
snip
Sympathizers with the Cuban process, as well as anticommunist leftists, sometimes carry a clipboard and grade sheet so that they can grade Cuba for health care, sexism, racism, pollution, homophobia, elections, number of political parties, a free press, strikes, or whatever else is on their minds. In the end, depending on the grade point average Cuba accumulates, they can decide if Cuba “is”or “is not” socialist (or whether socialism is or is not a good thing). Then they write praise or denunciations when they get home. The items on the grade sheet may be liberal, a list of rights we fight for under capitalism and then turn into universal principles. Or they may come from a priori schemes for socialism, principles such as “bottom up, not top down,” or “workers’ councils running the factories.”
snip
Socialism is not a thing but a process, the process by which the working classes of the city and countryside and their allies seize the reins of society to satisfy their shared needs. Through a telescope, we get a glimpse of the world-historic significance of the first efforts to replace not only capitalism but also all class society by a more generous, just, and sustainable way of life. That is, we are trying to overcome a ten-thousand-year detour during which our species adopted agriculture, deforested much of the planet, grew in numbers, and extended our life span and knowledge and destructive capacity, divided into classes so that we were no longer a “we,” and expanded our productive capacity to the point where we can dispense with classes and become a “we” again.
This is more important in looking at the first century of socialist innovation than how well these revolutionaries do it, the particular decisions and those unexpected changes that surprisingly occur, and even the enormous difficulties and deficiencies of this effort. But, through the microscope of daily life, all these details are of overwhelming importance, and world history is no compensation for a lack of protein in the diet. We need both the telescope and the microscope.
snip
The “Logic” of Socialist Development
If a socialist revolution does survive, there is a distinct kind of logic to its development that gradually asserts itself. “Logic,” in this sense, is no mystical spirit of the times or universal laws above human activity. (“Laws” never govern a historical process. They are intellectual constructs extracted from real processes and used to interpret observations). It is the set of social relations, challenges, commitments, categories of analysis, and dominant ideas that set the conditions within which human beings make decisions. It is the set of principles that determines the array of possible, acceptable, sometimes obvious, decisions and excludes others. It is the range of options for confronting all the urgencies that must be met in order to continue the socialist project. Sometimes some of these have to be postponed because of material limitations, lack of qualified people, lack of consensus, or the hostility of neighbors. But if too many of these imperatives are denied for too long for any of these reasons, the whole trajectory might collapse and the society revert to capitalism. History is not a smooth advance from backward to modern but a branching and looping process structured by social relations. These branch points are very much influenced by which people are doing the deciding and how they do it.
But for a socialist society, with its guarantee that everybody eats, dismissing workers into unemployment does not improve social efficiency. It is simply not an option. There are other possibilities. Sometimes it is best to over-staff and use working hours also for education. With surplus labor, enterprises can release people temporarily to harvest crops or build houses. Or jobs can be eliminated and workers given other jobs with at least the same pay, or they can be retrained for other work, or be paid to study. Cuba has adopted a “study as work” principle for workers displaced from the closed sugar mills. No matter what the decision, in all cases, the criterion of social efficiency at the level of the whole, not the enterprise, is present as a counterforce to shortsighted financial targets.
http://www.monthlyreview.org/100401levins.php[/quote]