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Período especial - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

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Special Period - Wikipedia

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Dirty Havana Trilogy​

• Editorial:Anagrama
• Year of publication:1998
• Topics:Narrative

Summary and synopsis of Dirty Havana Trilogy, by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez :​

"This is the testimony of a disbelieving Havana resident, during the Special Period of Cuba :
A man who returns exhausted from a long journey that ultimately led him nowhere. But he is not pessimistic. Pedro Juan knows that he has to move forward. And the best way to do so is smiling, with a drink of rum, music and sex. Pedro Juan Gutiérrez catharses in this hard and largely autobiographical book, which brings together three collections of short stories: "Anclado en tierra de nadie", "Nada que hacer" and "Sabor a mí".
A strong and tight language is the only one capable of expressing the rage of someone who lives in the vortex of the hurricane. Pedro Juan lives on the edge of the precipice. Marginal, although his hovel is in the heart of Havana today. He dissects his surroundings with the skill of an expert surgeon. Without fear he plunges his sharp scalpel, digs into the entrails, and turns everything upside down, disrespectfully: sex, hunger, politics, eroticism, disenchantment, yearnings, rum and good humor.
Written at a relentless pace, halfway between tropical exuberance and the black desolation of a Bukowski, the "Dirty Havana Trilogy" is a dazzling set of stories orchestrated like a novel. Tough, moving and true, they reveal to us a writer of pure breed, a relentless chronicler of a country and times that are contradictory, terrible, fascinating."

Pedro Juan Gutiérrez in Cuba.

Pedro Juan Gutiérrez - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

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Pedro Juan Gutiérrez - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Pedro Juan Gutiérrez (Matanzas, Cuba, 1950) is internationally recognized as one of the most talented writers of current Hispanic American narrative. His Centro Habana Cycle has been published in its entirety by Anagrama, and has appeared in other languages in more than twenty countries: Dirty Havana Trilogy (also published in individual titles: Anchored in No Man's Land , Nothing to Do and Taste of Me ), The King of Havana (which has been adapted to film by the prestigious director Agustí Villaronga), Tropical Animal (Alfonso García-Ramos Prize), The Insatiable Spider Man and Dog Meat (Sur del Mundo Narrative Prize). He has also published the novels Our GG in Havana , The Snake's Nest. Memoirs of the Ice Cream Man's Son , Fabian and Chaos and Stoic and Frugal , as well as the book of self-interviews Dialogue with my Shadow. On the Writer's Craft, with Anagrama . He lives in Havana and devotes himself exclusively to literature and painting. His most recent work is the book of short stories Mecánica popular .

The King of Havana​

• Editorial:Anagrama
• Año publicación:1999
• Temas:Narrativa

Summary and synopsis of The King of Havana, by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez :​

This is the story of a young teenager thrown into the streets of Havana in the nineties, during the Special Period of Cuba :
A novel based on real events, written crudely, without embellishments, in the best tradition of dirty realism. Pedro Juan Gutiérrez continues here his saga about the Caribbean city and its poorest and most marginal people: beggars, prostitutes, transvestites, street vendors, rogues, drunks, the inhabitants of an abandoned and ruined building, penniless guys, hungry, always on the verge of death. A terrible and apocalyptic fauna.
“This is the voice of the voiceless,” says the author about his characters. “Those who have to scratch the earth every day to find something to eat, have neither time nor energy for anything else. Their only goal is to survive. Whatever it takes. Any way. They themselves don’t know why or what for. They insist on surviving one more day. Just that.” Despite everything, love, sex and tenderness mark the lives of these tormented beings.
Following his dazzling debut with Havana Trilogy, hailed by critics as one of the most impressive revelations in recent Latin American literature, this novel confirmed the many hopes placed in Pedro Juan Gutiérrez.
«Sex and survival are intertwined in the same inseparable texture... The best thing is the laconic power of the style, the impeccable verbal forcefulness, the brutal dryness, as well as the capture of colloquial registers» (Miguel García-Posada, El País).

The Agustí Villaronga's adapted film:​

The King of Havana - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The King of Havana (Spanish: El rey de La Habana) is a 2015 Spanish-Dominican drama film directed by Agustí Villaronga which adapts Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's dirty realist novel El rey de La Habana.[1] It stars Maykol David Tortolo, Yordanka Ariosa and Héctor Medina. It is set in the Cuban capital during the Special Period.

The King of Havana
Theatrical release poster

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Credits, and first quarter of an hour of the film (in Spanish);

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Interwiew with Raymar Aguado Hernández:​

The Cuban critical left vs. authoritarian government:​

Towards a neo-Marxist, decolonial and democratic path in Cuba.​

By Alexander Hall Lujardo | 01/27/2024 | Cuba
Sources: @abolishtheusa

Raymar Aguado Hernández, Havana, 2000;

is a young activist of the Cuban critical Marxist left , and one of the most prominent intellectual voices of the young Cuban left.

Its political projection, identified with the historical values of justice to which the victorious revolution of 1959 against neocolonialism aspired, aims to rescue the desires and ideals that mobilized a large part of the movements for the liberation of the underdeveloped peoples of the Third World, subjected to the globalized schemes of capital, from an updated Marxism consistent with contemporary philosophical currents.

His narrative manages to transmit with radical lucidity, accurate criticisms of the facts that characterize the current scenario of internal colonialism and economic pragmatism on the Island. This operationalization of the crisis by the Party/Government is the result of the debacle following the fall of the so-called East European socialist camp and the division of the planet in a deadly struggle waged in what was then understood as a pitched battle between two alternatives of society: socialism and capitalism. In Cuba, the crisis of the model chosen by the leaders provoked the emergence of technocratic measures that led to the reappearance of inequalities, understood as overcome by a large part of the national population, due to the egalitarian social policies of the revolution. However, the ideals of popular sovereignty, workers' power, democracy as a full socialization of wealth and self-management as a productive form from the social bases were frustrated, broken by the authoritarian one-party system of the rebel forces, which led the transformation process and hegemonized the State apparatus for the reproduction of their caudillo-like power relations, inspired by guerrilla warfare.

In this sense, this interview, marked more by contextual analysis rather than the rigor that distinguishes the great historiographical accounts of social scientists, could be understood not only as a declaration of principles, but also as a programmatic manifesto that points out the emancipatory path and the fundamental guidelines that mark the neo-Marxist, decolonial and revolutionary theoretical path, accompanied by a praxis of justice, aspiring to position another path before the great paradigms in the ideological dispute in Cuba, between political liberalism and post-totalitarian Stalinism, which today stand as the main currents of thought in the face of the systemic-structural crisis that the Caribbean nation is suffering. On the other hand, the current positioning is framed before this struggle from respect for republican freedoms, in order to achieve the establishment of a democratic-popular socialist alternative, protected by the tradition of Cuban patriotic thought.

Many young people who deeply believe in socialism, anti-imperialism and decolonization have been placed under house arrest and detained by the Cuban government in recent years. Why is a supposedly socialist government detaining young socialists?

The Cuban Revolution was the most important turning point for politics in Latin America in a context of uncertainty dictated by the "Cold War" and the polarization of world hegemony between two so-called "ideological" segments; although we know that the struggle was always geopolitical and economic. For decades, the process that began in Cuba in 1959 represented a very important reference and emblem for many anti-imperialist struggle fronts in the region.

The Cuban Revolution was seen by almost the entire world left as the materialization of the dream of justice for which the working class fought so hard and for which it had sacrificed so much. And although it never enjoyed the support of many recognized revolutionaries and lost much of its legitimacy after the so-called "Padilla Case," the Mariel exodus, the so-called Causes 1 and 2 of 1989; the Rafter Crisis and the Maleconazo of 1994, it reached the 21st century, after the fall of so-called "real socialism" in Eastern Europe, as the supposed last bastion of resistance to capitalist and neoliberal expansion.

It is very sad, but what we can call the Cuban Revolution — in capital letters and free of the doctrinal propagandistic tone — in my opinion, died in 1976, when the bases of statist centralization and accelerated Sovietization were established; after the Constitution of the Republic was approved, the leading role of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) was made official, and the political reduction to a single party, as well as the presidential investiture of Fidel Castro, who, although he always had the political power of the Island in his hands without much secret, assumed a position that symbolically enjoyed greater relevance, given that he lasted 32 years in office (as Prime Minister of the Republic).


At that time, the so-called “Gray Five-Year Period/Decade” was taking place, a period of recurrent censorship and institutional violence, which had its genesis in 1959 itself, through excesses, labor separations, violation of human rights (the best example being the Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP), which constituted forced concentration camps for people whose projection did not fit the archetype of the so-called new socialist man ), political annulment of opposition sectors and marked authoritarianism from the government management.
The impact of the Revolution on Cuban life is undeniable, where many disadvantaged social sectors felt the benefit of a process that, according to Fidel, was born “from the humble, by the humble and for the humble.”

The national dynamic changed completely during those years. Much was done and achieved for the benefit of the people, much was transformed by the Revolution in the heart of a country that had been plundered and impoverished during the colonial period, and that had been sentenced to inequality and exclusion during the Republic. But, at the same time, the groundwork was beginning to be laid for what would later turn out to be the complete opposite. There are plenty of examples in this regard, but Fidel's speeches in those years, his abuses of power and his anti-democratic stance are very revealing, as can be seen in episodes such as the conversations in the National Library in 1961, the conclusion of which went down in history under the title of "Words to the Intellectuals."

Years later came the suffering special period (1990-1994), a time of total scarcity. As a result of dependence on the powers of the “socialist” bloc, Cuba was plunged into a moment that laid bare the arbitrary economic and productive management that the country’s leadership had opted for. Without the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CAME), without the USSR, the commercial allies, or the colloquially named “Russian breast,” the Island became a scene of desolation. It was there that the leadership of the Cuban government—increasingly centralized and totalitarian—took the functional and convenient idea of opening up to foreign investment, transnational exploitation, tourism, and a whole series of measures that openly announced that it was moving more deeply toward state neo-capitalism. Such a process, whose genesis dates back to 1959 itself, configured a new oligarchic re-stratification that would end in business monopolies in the hands of the military elite.

The following years showed how far such measures were from achieving a popular benefit; instead, they contributed, increasingly openly, to empowering a dominant class on the Island, where the division between military and business management was non-existent. Joint ventures, business groups such as GAESA and figures such as Julio Casas or Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja gained prominence in this area. The much-debated Guidelines for Economic and Social Policy approved at the VI Congress of the PCC, where the discursive change became very evident, as well as throughout the presidential administration of Raúl Castro (2006-2018), also date from those years.

These economic and production dynamics, during the years of normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba governments, during the Obama period , reached a certain splendor that boosted private property, self-employment and even more foreign investment, mainly in the tourism sector. This generated a much more significant social gap, especially among populations close to tourist centers and places of interest, such as Varadero, Trinidad or Havana, and other more remote regions where the supposed "progress" of that stage did not even remotely arrive. The narrative of those years was marked by the apparent opening to "development", to "prosperity", and not a few placebos for the people were left by the political power and its opportunistic, not to say opportunistic allies, with the typical Roman formula of bread and circuses, in order to strengthen alliances that would lead to the emergence of commercial empires; some still active.

At the same time, while millions of dollars were invested in the repair of the historic center of Old Havana and the construction of hotels on the northern coast, millions of Cubans survived in dilapidated housing, multi-family housing complexes, the so-called "arrive and put" and many others in shelters with inhumane conditions. At the same time that Havana was sold as a Wonder City and Cuba as a tourist paradise in the Caribbean, the majority of the Cuban population experienced tremendous degrees of impoverishment and the class gap between specific sectors that benefited from these unequal economic policies and the remaining 99% of the national population grew ever wider.

Then Trump came to the White House with his 243 unilateral coercive measures; in 2018, a performance of supposed generational change in the direction of the Cuban Government was carried out, the historic 11M march took place in 2019 where LGBTIQ+ activism took to the streets demanding government accountability, a new constitution was approved, in 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, arbitrary economic measures were taken that caused a catastrophe on the Island, such as the so-called Ordering Task, a crisis comparable to that of the 1990s is experienced, the people are increasingly asking for their rights and well-being, the margins of mobility in Cuba are increasingly narrow in all areas, the protest in front of the Mincult takes place on November 27, 2020 and a different historical moment begins to be breathed. Thus came 11J and the largest popular demonstrations in post-59 Cuba, where political power brought out its dictatorial accent, repressing protesters, harassing anyone who dissented and deploying an entire system of political violence that persists.

Thus we come to the present day, where, like many of other political affiliations, anti-imperialist, socialist and decolonial youth are repressed, violated and insulted by a political power that claims to follow the ideas of Marx, socialism and anti-imperialism. But it is clear that this is nothing more than a doctrinal discourse.

The many measures taken to the detriment of the Cuban working class, which is in a notable state of precariousness; the human exploitation of the working people, the opening to the interference of convenient foreign investors who apply their extractive formulas in Cuba, the establishment of a political/military/business caste that functions as the owner of the country and amasses large sums of money, the unconditional support of the official discourse to imperialist and authoritarian powers of today such as Russia and China, as well as the repressive formulas applied from above to coerce the people and maintain power in a country in ruins, are clear examples of how the Cuban government's policy is the enemy of Marxism, socialism and any anti-hegemonic formula that does not serve its interests.

The pamphletary discourse they sell may be deceptive, but reality is not, it exists unchallengeable: any person who stands up against the political management carried out by the Cuban government - which is capitalist and totalitarian - is prone to be cowardly repressed, no matter how much one is a Marxist, embraces socialism and condemns the foreign policy of, for example, the United States.

As a young socialist in Cuba, what do you have to say to the world that believes that you should fully and uncritically support the Cuban government, or that you should embrace the hyper-conservative politics of part of the Cuban diaspora?

The Cuban political scene is too mediatized and often turns out to be a circus of extremes. It is very common that, within the prevailing narratives, which are the official one that responds to the Government and the one presented as "opposition", which only includes the traditional sectors of the conventional Cuban right, any position that does not go along these lines ends up being annulled or that is simply associated, as a formula of discredit, with the "enemy" side. In this sense, the critical Cuban left is totally invisible, ignored and questioned, while at the same time repressed and harassed by the State apparatus.

The great lie that was constructed by the political power, and of Soviet heritage, of painting the Cuban Government as socialist or as continuing the Marxist legacy created an environment of general rejection of this philosophical praxis. At the same time, the indoctrination in schools, through which this lie was spread, forced many generations to associate Cuba with socialism, socialism with scarcity, scarcity with Fidel Castro and this one with Karl Marx; very similar happened in the USSR. That did a lot of damage. Even, in my case, I reject being labeled with categories like "communist", when/if it reminds me of Stalin or the PCC and their multiple abuses against life and the oppressed.

In this sense, it happens that the Government tells you that “socialism” is their thing and that the critical left is the liar that supports the right, and on the other hand, the right tells you that we are playing along with the Government or we want to make Cuba miserable. Nothing, all epistemological errors, cultural violence and indoctrination. It is very complex to live in this scenario and maintain a position consistent with your ideals, your studies and your future aspirations, your idea of the country; that is why many people desert, and then we find them with speeches that are convenient for one side or the other. The truth is that the critical left has a titanic political task, because it faces two very large powers, without even having 1% of the resources available to the neoliberalism that one side proposes or the Stalinism that the other clings to.
Like Paco de Lucía, we are between two waters...


At this very moment, I could say that we suffer more from government violence, I think there is no doubt about that, because in a certain way it is easy to ignore a little the insults that come from spokesmen of the other side, but in previous moments and in possible future scenarios the story was and will be different. The ideological violence that is experienced in the Cuban political framework, mainly in virtual spaces, is too great. This is very dangerous, because any idea of future democracy is trampled on and it is simply left to embrace the ideology of the victor, as is happening now. Political indoctrination is one of the most terrible things that the Cuban people have suffered in recent decades, wherever it comes from, because in most cases it is based on a violent and exclusive idea, where individualism and submission to a dominant ideological power are the key. Thus, essential things such as popular well-being, the conquest of rights for all, horizontality and the construction of an equitable country where its inhabitants have a dignified life, are put on the table outside the debate.

The demand for a biased militancy that answers to one side or another is only a way of arbitrarily reducing the Cuban political spectrum and leaving it at the mercy of the media. There is a whole universe of realities and militancy beyond Díaz Canel, the dogma of Fidel and the PCC or Marcos Rubio, Otaola and the NED. The constant invisibility suffered by the rest of the critical positions shows that the issue does not lie in the improvement of the Island, but in the dispute over the strategic power of who dominates "The key to the Gulf." The critical left in Cuba does not aspire to power, but to remedy a series of ills that plague our land, combat inequalities, fight against authoritarianism and exploitation and try, together with all the people, to achieve a more just Cuba.

I will never be able to support a government that represses its people, that makes them precarious and fattens certain pockets, that violates people's rights, that mistreats them and invents a story of social justice, just as I will never support those who try to make Cuba a neoliberal paradise, a playground for hegemonic and extractive interests under the dictates of capital, where there is a supposed democracy and a false kingdom of opportunities while what belongs to the people is enjoyed by the owner. I will never be able to support a country project where women's rights are not addressed, where the eradication of racism is not among the fundamental objectives, where the fight for the rights of gender dissidents is not among the priorities of the agenda, where the rights of the majority are not the first point on the list.

What kind of Cuba would I like to live in? I'm not entirely sure about that, but I could comment on some things. But one thing I do know is that the Cuba I aspire to is not the one we have now and that the political power imposes, nor is it the one that the other hegemonic side sells as the best.

Much of the global left praises Miguel Díaz-Canel for leading a march for Palestine in the streets. Why are marches for Palestine allowed, but even basic criticism is totally criminalized in Cuba?

Cuban political power is hypocritical, it always has been. That is one of its main tools of domination. It sells the world an image that is not real, where they supposedly defend justice and fight all acts of violence. That is how it deceived a large part of the international left for decades, which only had access to information about Cuba that the government made public. It was not until 2018 that there was free access to the Internet here, and I put “freely” in quotation marks because there are many economic, technological and even government censorship restrictions that do not allow people in Cuba to freely move around the web. Since then, things have changed a bit.

Before, very little information about what was happening reached the rest of the world without being supervised by the political power, so I understand that many around the world were blind to what was happening in our country. Watching the documentaries financed by the government about revolutionary milestones such as the Henry Reeve brigades, Operation Miracle, the massive support for Fidel, the “joy” of the Cuban people, etc., gave a very different image to what they did not show: the impoverishment, the precariousness, the terrible living conditions, the political repression. It was very easy for the anti-imperialist left to fall in love with that, or with Fidel and his speeches at the UN, at the Rio summit, with his “revolutionary aura that fights the greatest empire of modernity.” All ideas really very well disguised. Although there were undeniable successes in the anti-colonial battle, even in breaking with the USSR.

Today, those who allow themselves to be deceived are those who are misinformed, opportunistic or blind. The mask of the totalitarian power that governs Cuba was removed a while ago and was put on the table of international debate, even from the left, thanks to the work of important anti-Stalinist intellectuals and activists. Now there is much to be revealed, there are many alternative media outlets to the government, some of which are not always faithful to reality, others do serious and committed work, beyond political colors. Even the political power has run out of tools to justify its abuses, the usual mantras, such as the discourse of a besieged square or the last anti-imperialist bastion in the world, have become lame and dusty, and have become just another means of self-discredit.

In the case of support for the Palestinian people, it is no less true that the Cuban government has historically positioned itself alongside several just causes, including the Palestinian one. This does not even remotely exempt it from its atrocities and culpability in other cases, especially when many times this support is selective, convenient and remains only in words that cover up its true face before international opinion. In addition to the support that in many cases was given to other peoples or governments with very marked economic or political interests. A clear example is the shameful silence that was made after the violence of the Iranian government against its people, mainly against its women who were asking for their rights. Not one official voice condemned the murders and many other crimes of the Israeli government, on the contrary, we see how Miguel Díaz-Canel and other political representatives of the Island ratify the "magnificent" bilateral relations. Something similar happened after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and more recently with the criminalization by the Russian State of LGBTIQ+ activism. As a Cuban citizen I am indescribably ashamed.

Listing all the inconsistencies of the government and its spokesmen would be exhausting; there are many examples, where, in many cases, behind the good that the Cuban government could or could not do, there was an opportune reward. This, of course, does not apply in all cases; Cuba's solidarity with other peoples is undeniable, although, of course, this is not the merit of its government, nor of Fidel, as the official propaganda constantly sells. Paraphrasing a dear friend: the internal violence that legitimizes the Cuban government does not detract from its successes in foreign policy. This is a truth that one cannot be blind to, but it is always necessary to analyze it with a magnifying glass.

Although I am a committed defender of the Palestinian cause and I condemn daily the genocide committed by the State of Israel and its Western allies against its people, I did not attend the march you mentioned. Activities of this type are organized all the time by the political power in order to clean up its image in the eyes of international opinion. This march, ridiculously symbolic, minimal and hypocritical, was organized by political organizations, which in Cuba are controlled by the State, and was monitored by its repressive organs that ensured that everything that happened fit according to the script that was drawn up. This "march" did not even cover a kilometer, from Calle G to La Piragua, along the Malecón. While in the world, people, spontaneously, and without repressive organization, march for hours and days and confront the power that tries to silence them, in Cuba, the political power organizes a march of a few minutes, meticulously scheduled, with a start and end time. I felt it as a mockery; one more shame.

At the same time that people were marching on the Malecón, whether out of their own conviction or because people were blackmailed at their workplace or school, hundreds of people were behind a cell, unjustly sentenced on the grounds of sedition, public disorder or attack, for demonstrating, demanding their rights, on July 11, 2021, the day that saw the largest escalation of repression in recent decades in Cuba. The critical left, and in this case myself, unconditionally supports the cause of the Palestinian people and condemns Zionism and Western imperialism with all my strength, but I will never side with the hypocrisy of the Cuban government that claims to support other peoples while repressing and violating its own.

Here I would also like to point out that many activists opposed to the government have campaigned against any support from the island for the Palestinian people, arguing that there are enough problems in Cuba to worry about other horizons; here I am obviously referring to the opposition activists who support genocide, because their position is already shameful. I am also against that formula. The eagerness of many Cuban political actors to believe that the national context is comparable to that of other peoples such as Palestine, is not only infamous but criminal. The Cuban opposition needs to get rid of the myth that Cuba is the navel of the world - as much as Fidel Castro has tried to convince us otherwise - solidarity among peoples is an obligation to justice.

What are your demands on the Cuban government?

I do not demand anything from the Cuban government. I fight against the Cuban government, just as I fight against and oppose any repressive, exclusionary and exploitative institution that exists. Let's say that I have many enemies, the Cuban government is just one of them; fortunately, there are more allies and my desire to do good.

La izquierda crítica cubana vs. gobierno autoritario: por una vía neo-marxista, descolonial y democrática en Cuba – Rebelion

rebelion.org

Cuba: Entrevista a Raymar Aguado Hernández

Raymar Aguado Hernández es un joven activista de la izquierda marxista crítica cubana. Compartimos esta reciente entrevista donde comparte sus puntos de vista sobre la situación en la isla. Muchos jóvenes que creen profundamente en el socialismo, el antiimperialismo y la descolonización han sido

lis-isl.org

 

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Theory and praxis of the Cuban Revolution; Critical notes :​

NEW SOCIETY 123; January 1993
*Note: This paper was presented at the Latin American Studies Association-LASA Congress, Los Angeles, 9/1992.

Revolución cubana - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

The Cuban Revolution defined itself as socialist without consultation and without a prior theoretical formulation suitable for Cuba. It ideologically decreed what in reality did not even remotely exist. The socialist government that generated this violence was necessarily autocratic and allowed only the "official theory." In general terms, the Cuban revolutionary process, due to its anti-intellectual and dictatorial character, has truncated the development of the most advanced social thought of men like José Martí, José de la Luz y Caballero, Enrique José Varona.

José Martí - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

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Partido Revolucionario Cubano - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Cuban reality awaits a theoretical reinterpretation with a real outlet for applicability, following that Leninist motto that "there is nothing more practical than a good theory." A historical experience must be drawn: theoretical acephaly and political repression are only mothers of "spontaneity" and the failure of democracy and social welfare. It is time to attack with "the weapon of criticism" to build and create.

0. Intro:
In August 1992 George Bush said that "the world today looks more like America" (i.e. the US)1
How is it possible that in less than a decade and without a world war, the majority of countries that were once enemies of capitalism have actually decided to aspire to "become like America"?
It would be too simple to claim, along with Bush, that this happened thanks to the intelligence of his government.
It would also be too frustrating to conclude that the socialist project of equality and social justice simply does not work and that humanity is definitively condemned to coexist passively with the inequality of nations and social groups.
The progressive forces of the world have the duty to reflect deeply on the causes of the fall of so-called socialism, in order to remake the projects of equality, international solidarity and social justice and make them viable, especially for a Third World now swollen with countries that, incapable of materializing the Marxist ideal, are torn apart by internal struggles and confront an unfavorable and implacable capitalist world market.

We do not intend to examine here the causes of the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe, nor even the causes of the deep crisis that Cuban society is currently going through.
This would be a monumental work that urgently needs to be carried out with the help of the world's intellectuals.
However, we intend to explain what we consider to be one of the great deficiencies of so-called socialism in Cuba, which, inserted in the set of political and economic errors, have led to the curtailment of a plausible, grand and necessary revolutionary project that 33 years ago gave Cuba an honourable place among the countries of the world. It is about the absence of a theoretical orientation, adequate to our conditions, both in the period of insurrectional struggle and in the very process of building "socialism" in Cuba, added to an "anti-intellectual" policy (typical of countries of real socialism), which have impeded the development of critical and constructive social thought capable of generating viable proposals for Cuba.

Criticizing is certainly easier than building. Criticizing “from outside” is even easier, since there is no risk of misinterpretation and subsequent reprisals...
However, those of us who have lived within the Cuban revolution for 33 years have the duty to discuss and present our criticisms, not to destroy everything our country has achieved but, on the contrary, to contribute to saving it.

We believe that if there is one place (outside Cuba) where it is necessary to sincerely discuss these issues, it is in the United States, because its government is the main adversary of the Revolution, because it is the country where the majority of Cuban exiles live and, consequently, because it is perhaps the place where there is the greatest misinformation about Cuba.
Most of the information that the population receives comes through the press, which, in general terms, is extremely biased.2. Either there are articles that idealize the Cuban paradise, recounting the virtues of “lines and blackouts,” focusing only on the indisputable achievements in health and education that the Revolution produced, or there are articles that absolutely ridicule it, idealizing the “Cuban paradise before 1959,” distinguishing it only by the scarcity of material goods and the lack of freedom of expression. The matter becomes complicated and the objectivity of the analysis is clouded by the tangle of feelings towards the small and daring Island that each one possesses and by the politicization of any discussion. If one criticizes Cuba, one immediately runs the risk (especially if it is done in Cuba) of being accused of being anti-communist, anti-Fidelista, reactionary; if one defends oneself, the accusation is of being communist, Castroist and, lately, blind. It seems that the need to place things in antagonistic positions in order to define them without doubt or nuances is inherent to human nature.
We will try here to express our ideas freeing ourselves from the “extremes.” The purpose is to support the reconstruction of the humanistic and democratic ideals that Cuban society demands.


I. «Absence of a project of national socialism in the insurrectional struggle» :
In the insurrectional stage, the construction of socialism was not among the Revolution's immediate or intermediate goals. This was an unthinkable option for it, so there were no strategic and tactical projects to reach this non-existent goal. There was also no socialist theoretical-political model adequate to the historical roots and the concrete conditions of the country. As is known, if this had been the express objective of the Revolution, it would not have triumphed. Theoretical acephaly was one of the essential peculiarities of the Cuban revolutionary process, if we start from its self-definition as socialist.

When analyzing the ideology of the three main forces that contributed to its triumph, we find evidence of the above statement. Of these three forces, the "26th of July Movement" (M-26-7) and the Revolutionary Directorate were, without a doubt, the most important.

Movimiento 26 de Julio - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

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Directorio Revolucionario 13 de marzo - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

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Neither of them proposed socialism among their sociopolitical aspirations and objectives, so it did not appear in their political programs. Both aspired to the restoration of democracy in the terms of the Constitution of 1940, whose Article 1 summarized the most progressive aspirations of the Cuban people, proposing that "Cuba is an independent and sovereign State organized as a unitary and democratic republic, for the enjoyment of political freedom, social justice, individual and collective well-being and human solidarity."4
Both struggled for the achievement of broad social justice and for the eradication of political-administrative corruption which, like a cancer, was infecting the entire body of the State and society in general.
These two forces were the material and moral motors that gave power and speed to the Revolution which, when it unfolded, had a certain tactical support from some of the more traditional political parties, opposed to the dictatorship, but which did not approve of armed struggle as a means of political struggle.

The third force was the Stalinist Popular Socialist Party (PSP), the only one that based its raison d'être on the struggle to establish its version of socialism in Cuba.

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It should be noted that, in the 1950s, the PSP, harassed by McCarthyist anti-communism already perfectly definable in the "authentic" governments, had lost the influence it had enjoyed over civil society in the 1930s and 1940s. It maintained influence in some sectors of the intelligentsia, especially at the University of Havana, as a result of its orientation towards working with the "cultural sectors" to attract them, without trying to impose its vision of the world on them (Stalinists tend to be more democratic than the bourgeoisie when they are fighting for power). Another sphere of influence was the trade union movement, due to the determination shown by trade union leaders who were sympathetic to or members of the party to defend the economic and social rights of workers within the framework of the 1940 Constitution, which they themselves helped to draft. In the 1950s, all this was part of the party's past glory, which was also harassed in the labour movement by the "yellow" Mujalist unions, allied with the dictatorship.

The alliance of the PSP with the other two forces did not occur on the basis of imposing its political vision on them, not only because they were not the managers of the process, but also because they did not have enough political or military strength to impose themselves. They lacked independent troops, except for a small, late guerrilla group in the province of Las Villas.5, which did not carry out any significant military action, in a process that was already shaping the military factor as the determining element of the political weight of the management groups. The PSP joined the insurrectional struggle supporting the guerrilla, on the basis of a minimum program: to overthrow the dictatorship and restore the political democracy so necessary to this party, to restart its legal activity. It was clearly a tactical and not a strategic alliance where socialism, its paths and peculiarities, were not on the negotiating table. The party did not have to renounce it or impose it: that was not discussed. Even this was publicly recognized by the PSP in its first national assembly after the triumph of 1959, when in the speech assessing the work of the party in the face of the Revolution it was stated:
"«Our revolution is not communist, not because it is Cuban, but because it is not applying communist measures or laws now, because it is not building or organizing a communist regime now, because it is and is carrying out the anti-imperialist and anti-landlord objectives; national liberation, agrarian and industrializing objectives that the Cuban situation demands, thereby creating the conditions for its advance toward the new tasks that social progress will impose on it... The Cuban revolution is not a communist revolution, it is anti-imperialist and anti-landlord»"6.

The dogmatism of the Stalinist parties prevented the PSP from generating the political and theoretical project of a socialism consistent with the national democratic and libertarian traditions. It was an insular projection of the policy of the COMINTER first and, after the latter disappeared, of that of the USSR. It considered that the objective conditions for the construction of socialism existed in Cuba; a hindrance of Soviet socialism or of the "popular democracies" of Eastern Europe. Thus, for them, democrats, even revolutionaries, were fellow travelers who, given the objective conditions, were undoubtedly going to be eliminated in favor of "the single party and the new unions" (without strikes or claims). They did not seriously question the fact that talking about socialism in the conditions of underdevelopment and dependence of our country was unthinkable from the perspective of Marx's theory and therefore they did not generate the economic and political proposals that would validate a "Cuban socialism." Their theoretical poverty led them even, in their time of greatest glory, during the anti-Machado revolution of 1933, to oppose the anti-imperialist nationalism of Antonio Guiteras and to proclaim "soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers" in some sugar mills in the style of the Bolshevik revolution. Added to this is the fact that, since there were no other socialist or social-democratic parties in Cuba before which the PSP was forced to validate its vision, there were no other socialist projects with greater and better democratic traditions.
In the Cuban socialist tradition there is an interesting contradiction: during the struggle for power they used all the advantages of the so-called "bourgeois democracy", to the point of accepting participation in non-pro-socialist governments; however, once in power, they fought tirelessly to eliminate all traces of that "democracy" that they had used and defended so much a few years before.7, and they succeeded.

In Marxist terms, the Revolution lacked a theoretical orientation that would allow it to illuminate its praxis and/or question it. Since its definition as socialist, the function of theory (as in all the so-called "countries of real socialism") has had a rather Hegelian meaning, namely: to justify a posteriori the immediate political and economic decisions. Official socio-political thought has not fundamentally been a response to the imperatives of the masses or to the needs of society, but to the interests of the power with respect to which it has an ancillary function and existence.8
The arrival of the revolutionary train to the terminal station of “state socialism” can be considered a contingency of history and not a necessity. It must be understood that we do not deny the need for socialism in Cuba, for a truly democratic socialism, inspired by the libertarian and emancipatory aspirations of the great majority and by the ideas that have tried to systematize them throughout history. We do deny, however, having uncritically and opportunistically copied the worst of the Soviet model, adopted in a critical situation, when the leadership of the triumphant revolution feared for the survival of the process and, in order to move forward, adopted strategic decisions where tactical solutions were really needed. The conflict that the USSR and the USA were waging in the ring of the so-called Cold War (which was actually burning) forced the leadership to define itself for the “red side” in order to count on the support of Soviet nuclear deterrence. We thus ceased to be a Yankee neo-colony, and began the existence of a dependent hostage of the "Soviet power" (a dependence that was assumed uncritically and that has now become evident with the collapse of the USSR).

No one in history decided to build capitalism.
It was an almost natural product of the development of Western societies, beginning in the 15th century, which reached a planetary scale through conquests and colonization. The bourgeois revolutions did not build capitalism “by decree,” nor were they produced for that purpose. When they occurred, capitalist relations already existed at the level of civil society, and the revolutions established political and legal structures in tune with those relations, which, because they were in tune, did not slow down development but rather accelerated it.
In such revolutions, people were not going to die or fight for capitalism, which they already had in their fundamentals, but for greater political freedom, for equal rights, for lower taxes, etc.
Deciding to build socialism is deciding to build that which does not exist, that which does not yet have a predominant existence in civil society. This implies extreme violence against the whole of society. It is a complex project due to its magnitude, with the risk that any path that leads to the unknown entails.
From a realistic perspective, this should be done in gradual steps, without destroying or rendering useless the existing economic mechanism, through a tenacious political and ideological struggle that would accumulate for years and generations:
in Cuba this was decided two years and four months into the revolutionary power, without prior consultation with the masses, and in the context of extreme danger for the achievements already established. Thus, a persistent peculiarity of the revolutionary political leadership and of the process they led comes to light: their subjection to improvisation in politics and economics.
As Carlos Rodríguez, a fundamental ideologist of the PSP integrated into the country's leadership group, explains, "From January 1959 to October 1960, Cuba, from a semi-colonial country, was transformed into a country that was building socialism..."9
It is curious that such "speed" did not call for reflection and doubt: How can history really be changed suddenly? How can someone go to bed convinced that they have defended a democratic revolution, only to get up to defend a communism that they do not even know?

It was a very brief decision for such an uncertain and risky project that would divide Cuban society beyond the inevitable upheaval that any revolution causes.
And the fact is that a socialist project with the characteristics of the Cuban one (absence of reflection and broad discussion of the option to follow, anti-democracy and a one-party system) is, by nature, an eternally exclusive project; it is, essentially, the Stalinist vision of socialism. The proclamation of the option was unconsulted, that is, anti-democratic and... opportune. In an overflow of emotional charge, faced with the imminence of the country being attacked by a foreign and hostile power (April 1961), the willingness to die for the homeland, that is, for the reconquered freedom, national sovereignty, the soil that gives life and sustenance, developed as never before in the masses of the people.

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The homeland is not a concept, it is an experience like love or family. At that thoughtless moment, the enraged, indignant masses were told that they were also going to die for socialism, for a concept, a theory, an abstraction that they had not chosen, but which, in their emotion, the majority did not question. We were thus faced with the emotional declaration of a reality that was merely conceptual.

The Revolution had been very careful to define itself as socialist, and when accused of being so, its leader said it was “neither red nor yellow, but green like palm trees” (April 1959).

The poetic and even ecological definition of its ideological orientation indicates its confused character, its lack of definition and indecision. If its socialist content had existed (as the Cuban leadership has tried to demonstrate - not completely -), we would be in the presence of new methods in the political movements of the century: traditionally, political parties and movements make their objectives explicit, proclaim them a priori, justify them, divulge them and defend them, seeking the conscious adhesion of the citizenry. In our case, the opposite occurred: the ruling elite declared that it “deceived the people for their own good.” We thus faced great political manipulation that led the masses to endure hardship and death for a notion not declared by their leaders and, on the contrary, unknown and feared. The slogan "Socialism or Death" is not a sign of a necrophilia acquired a posteriori by the revolutionary process, but is undoubtedly located in its original sin.


II. «A political decision that seeks its social existence and theoretical validation»:
Since the theory-praxis relationship was not organic at the beginning of the Cuban Revolution, it began a rough race in search of a theoretical validation. The term "theory" was not assumed in its original sense, as critical consciousness and reconstruction of a reality examined in its concrete and peculiar features. It was not considered necessary to think about national reality looking for how to encourage (and not force) the social tendencies that would give socialism an organic existence in Cuba in the future. What was necessary for the leadership was to teach the theory of Marxism from the Soviet textbooks, to make it "take hold" in the masses.
Thus, the most questionable of theoretical methods in the natural and social sciences was put into practice: analogy. Socialism was built by analogy with Soviet reality, absorbing the "theory" - if this worthy name could be given to it - from its dogmatic manuals of political dissemination. The analogy was such that the very Constitution of the Republic approved in 1976 stated that the State and its vanguard party were guided by "the victorious doctrine of Marxism-Leninism" with the support and solidarity of the USSR and other socialist peoples (something unusual for a country's Constitution to explicitly mention the support of another country), forgetting that the ideal that had mobilized the masses in favor of the Revolution had been essentially Martian (it took almost two decades and the collapse of "the socialist brothers" to correct the Constitution, erase references to the USSR, put the Martian ideal before the Marxist-Leninist one, and declare Latin American and Caribbean integration as an essential objective.

Another characteristic of the Cuban revolutionary process also emerged: its enlightenment.
Socialism would become a reality if the consciousness of the masses was filled with its notions and, consequently, if other representations of the world were eradicated, not only in the political sense, but also in the philosophical and religious sense, without thinking that this would turn people into enemies who, by definition, were not class enemies.
At first, the task was entrusted to the PSP militants who adhered to the Revolution, and the centers were the Schools of Revolutionary Instruction (until 1960, the PSP had maintained its "school of cadres" semi-clandestine, since it was not clear what path Fidel would follow, in which the "disseminators of the doctrine" were trained). This is the moment when the PSP militancy began to gain political weight, which increased with its participation in the creation of the single Marxist-Leninist party that would lead the process (1965), which had the ORI (Integrated Revolutionary Organizations) as its precedent.

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The contradiction is evident: the practical choice for socialism precedes the knowledge, evaluation and diffusion of its theoretical and ideological foundations. An inverted and inappropriate scheme for any political movement, but one that is typical of the Cuban process. It was not necessary to convince the adversary or win over him theoretically: a priori, he was eliminated not by the force of reason, but by the unappealable reason of force. It was not considered necessary to really consult with the masses (beyond the "emotional consultations" in the public squares), they only needed to be taught, they had to accept and assimilate the new doctrine as the American Indians had to accept Christianity. The EIR were the churches and the political instructors (who were mostly military, sic.) were the priests, the evangelists. Theologians were not needed, theology was already done in the USSR.10.

There was no real political struggle. Having legally eliminated the political adversary, the latter was left with nothing but the military opposition, the regime's preferred terrain for settling disputes. In reality, the basis of the Revolution's political power was, on the one hand, the popularity acquired by its leaders as a result of a victorious struggle, a courageous performance and a promising discourse of social justice so necessary to a country devastated by corruption and fed up with politicking, and on the other hand, the military factor. Among the revolutionary leaders themselves, discrepancies were resolved by military means, expulsion or prison, and not by political means. Thus, there was no room for dissent among the minority, whatever their political tendency.11.

The ORI were the first political zenith and at the same time the beginning of the decline of the influence of the elements of the PSP within the revolutionary leadership. As good Stalinists, the exclusion that they had to apply outside the leadership nucleus was also used within the revolutionary groups, trying to place themselves above the groups with greater political weight, without understanding that their political role was not won per se, but decided in the style in which an absolute monarch names his ministers. Their political base did not rest on a single bayonet.

The ORI left no theoretical legacy other than the dissemination of textbook Marxism, whose citations became, for the newcomers who had just joined the revolution, the way to match up with those whose record had been earned in the most important skirmishes of guerrilla warfare, adding to them a militia uniform. The work of Blas Roca, undisputed leader of the PSP, "The Foundations of Socialism in Cuba", published in 1943 for propaganda purposes (in the style of Engels' Anti-Duhring, keeping the differences), was republished in a corrected version, and used in study circles as a model of "Marxist" analysis of our reality. This work has undoubted merit given the conditions in which it was written and published, the role it played in the dissemination of the basic ideas of Marxism-Leninism at a level accessible to the masses, the realistic and synthetic portrait of Cuban reality in the 1940s and the effort to analyze it using Marxist-Leninist categories and interpretations of society and its history.
It contains democratic proposals regarding the tactics to be followed by the party to achieve its strategic objectives, in line with the 1940 Constitution, which can be rescued as valuable elements.
However, in the 1960s, it could not offer a political-economic proposal applicable to our reality, as its own author recognizes in the prologue, which would allow the transition to an efficient and non-dogmatic socialism, given that it was written in another context and under very different international conditions, and because it was undermined at its base by the Stalinist background.

Practically in the first decade of the Revolution, the disappearance of civil society and the nationalization of the whole society began and was almost complete. The country became a totalitarian society, with the consequent economic inefficiency and endemic scarcity (the basis of the current economic problems, which we will not discuss here). Of course, strengthening the role of the State in all spheres of social life, especially in the economic field, was a vital factor in achieving a fairer redistribution of wealth. Of course, the State had and should maintain control of the country's main resources, not only as a guarantee of our sovereignty, but also in order to eliminate unemployment, diversify production, and guarantee social security. However, the almost absolute nationalization of both production and services, the centralization of all decisions and the indisputable centralized planning of any action, no matter how small, surreptitiously destroyed the foundations of Cuban socioeconomic life, without the new State having the necessary conditions to replace them, or to resolve the needs that, for example, small private production satisfied. This has led to a discouragement in the sphere of production and services, which today translates into the total inefficiency of the majority of productive and non-productive sectors.

It would be wrong to say that there were no glimpses of an awareness of originality in so-called Cuban socialism.
But when these did occur, they were fundamentally due to external factors. It would be correct to say that the theoretical oscillations regarding what and how socialism has been understood and constructed on our island were shaped more by the level of relations between Cuba and the USSR than by uncensored scientific reflection on national peculiarities.
This is especially evident in recent years when, given the disappearance of the USSR and the loss of the "preferential treatment" that we previously enjoyed among the ex-socialist countries, the Cuban party has raised the need to "return to the roots," to find "authentic, Martian and Guevarian" paths, as long as these are in line with the guidelines pronounced by the supreme leader (with the difficulty that in Cuba there is neither the enthusiasm of the 60s, nor the credibility in the leaders of that era, nor the hope in the strength of a united socialist camp).

It was a disagreement between Cuba and the USSR (following the "missile crisis") that promoted the search for and foundation of an originality of principle that would differentiate Cuban socialism from the Soviet one. Not in vain, in the 1960s, even Jean-Paul Sartre considered our Revolution "authentic."
The Cuban leadership understood from the beginning that the hasty declaration of the socialist character of our revolution, in addition to allowing economic survival under the protective mantle of the world socialist system, would allow the country to emerge from political anonymity on an international scale, launching it into "prominence" first of all on a continental scale and even on the world stage.
For this reason, socialist Cuba allowed the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles, since, to the extent that Cuba had a certain determination in the use and movement of these, it would acquire the nuclear David's slingshot, which the American Goliath would have to take into account.


It was a new power factor in the Western Hemisphere (a power that was actually rented, in spite of what the country's leadership believed). The missiles in Cuba brought the world to the brink of war, but only to the brink: the US and the USSR were not going to commit suicide over Cuba and they made up behind their backs.
Certainly the USSR was loyal in the sense that it obtained the American guarantee not to invade Cuba (a guarantee that is now practically non-existent), in exchange for withdrawing its nuclear missiles, thus preserving a socialist revolution in the lobby of the Yankee mansion. The Cuban leadership resented the USSR, among others, because it tried to take the lead role away from it, eliminating it from the negotiations (despite the fact that it was one of the most interested parties). The missiles had given Cuba a force that no other Third World country had ever had before and contributed to inflaming the tone and firmness of Cuban discourse in the face of the rascality of the American empire.
After this, relations with the USSR did not cease, but varied in their degree of intimacy, becoming, for a time, a "marriage with separate capital."

It is astonishing how the above-mentioned differences determined the type of socialism that the Cuban regime fostered and the peculiarities of its construction. The Cuban leadership, in the figure of its leader, resentful of the unconsulted loss of such precious rockets, declared in a dramatically memorable speech that the revolution had great moral rockets of very long range that could never be dismantled. The rockets that were dismantled in Cuba were logically of medium range, from which it follows that the "new rockets" would be capable not only of touching the territory of the USA, but were apparently also destined for that of the USSR (against which they were indeed launched, in the 1960s and more recently, following the almost failed "perestroika").

These rockets contain an ethical charge that did not fit in with the way socialism had been proclaimed in the Eastern countries, and this will be another distinctive feature of the Cuban vision of socialism in the early years.
The need for a new man is proclaimed. This does not exist. The real and only existing man, emerging from the "garbage dump" of the old society, had to be, from then on, immediately forced to "be." Communism could not be expected, it had to be built alongside socialism (which also did not exist).
This was a substantial difference with Soviet socialism, for which communism was a later and consecutive stage of socialism. For the Soviets, the material factor continued to be the determining factor, for the Cuban leadership it was the moral factor.12For the Cuban leadership, the Soviets, unwittingly, were building capitalism (as it is again considered today).

Within Cuban socialism, the totalitarian model of society was not questioned, but on the contrary, was reinforced. All social life acquired a military component, which was noticeable in the slogans and in the organization of the economy. Military language became common: winter sowing was called a “cold campaign”; workers who went to work in the fields were organized into “columns”; the “most efficient” productive forces were organized into “contingents.”
The Soviets did not allow themselves to eliminate the unions, they only took away their independent character, to turn them into transmission belts for party policy.
The Cubans eliminated them, replacing them with "advanced workers' movements," so that the worker who was not "advanced" lacked an organization to support him (this error had to be corrected, although in reality the "cure" was only nominal, in the sense that, in reality, the unions have always been dominated by the party and have been highly politicized organizations, allied to the state administration, in the supposed belief that in socialism there are no contradictions between the administrations, the party and the unions).

Whenever “the Cuban theory of socialism” has claimed to be “original,” it has had to distance itself, on the one hand, from the Soviet model (which it has almost completely copied at other times).
But, in essence, the Cuban model has not been different from the Stalinist one: it has been that of an absolutist State that has swallowed up civil society in its midst, with an inefficient and deficient economy, in which the individual has lacked the autonomy of a subject, in order to acquire, in relation to the State and especially to the party that directs it, the availability of a “thing,” and is also required to generate a “happy conscience” in relation to this. A staunch enemy of the alienation of man, Marx saw in socialism the historical alternative capable of overcoming this negative burden of social development. However, in its name, paradoxically, a form of human existence has arisen that is as alienating or even more so than that which "socialism" seeks to overcome, especially because of the phenomenon of "double standards" that it has generated (even now officially recognized in Cuba, but not eliminated) and because of the "scientifically justified" falsehoods on which it has relied and with which it has valued itself.

If there was anything original about the construction of socialism in Cuba, it was the thesis of the simultaneous nature of the construction of socialism and communism.
But, in reality, this was not the result of the search for a more just form of society (in accordance with the national and Western traditions to which the country belongs, capable of combining social justice, economic well-being and individual freedom); it was not the product of an intense theoretical and practical search, but essentially the manifestation of disagreements over the withdrawal of borrowed rockets.
This conditioned the proposal to "be different from the Soviets" at its base: not only more socialist, but also more communist.
An "indistinct salad" of socialism and moral communism began to be made ("for a communist conscience in the construction of socialism"), which was intended to be heard from the Caribbean to the walls of the Kremlin, to deter the world conscience more than the nuclear rockets themselves.

Another peculiar element of the Cuban revolutionary process, whose theoretical expression constituted a point of disagreement and confrontation with the traditional communist parties of Iberian America, and even with the USSR itself, was the one referring to the tactics and strategy of taking political power, the role of the political vanguards and the infallibility and inevitability of armed methods. The aim was to validate for the whole Third World the sui generis characteristics that the Cuban Revolution showed in these aspects. The theory of the "foco" (labeled as "bourgeois" in some Soviet Marxist manuals) was the expression of this tendency which, given the theoretical poverty of the process, needed a Frenchman with a degree from the Sorbonne to obtain a letter of introduction in the market of revolutionary theories. Regis Debrais shaped the theory, dressed it in the suit with which political theories are dressed, but he did not create it. Therefore, as an adopted daughter, she was able to later renounce it without trauma or pain.

But in reality, “el foco” is not a socialist theory or a theory about building socialism. It is a technique about how a political group can ignite the hopes of the dispossessed to come to power by armed means, and it can be used by groups of different political shades, from the Shining Path to drug trafficking. There is also an extremely dangerous element in it in the long term: it gives prestige to the military path as a means of gaining political weight and power, subordinating the political to the military. The political group that uses it necessarily subverts the relationship between “leadership” and “domination.” A political vanguard should aspire to be the leader of the majority that voluntarily accepts its leadership and with which it has a consensus. It should aspire to be dominant – with all the weight of state power – only with those sectors that confront it outside the established legal framework.
But political power acquired only by the weight of arms knows itself to be dominant and, therefore, to be a leader, and not the other way around.
In political terms, this is called “dictatorship.”

The pretension of a relative theoretical independence from the USSR was maintained in Cuba until the failure of the sugar harvest of 1970, as a reflection of a certain independence in the political line.
It is the period remembered by many with melancholy, as the epic stage of the Revolution.
Before this failure, there was a certain flexibility in theoretical publications (even "Animal Farm" was read, along with Gramsci, Lukacs, Althusser, and others) and an access to the productions of the so-called Western neo-Marxism: the new European and North American left, which were not inclined to the Soviet model.
This was the golden age of the courtship between the revolution and the leftist intellectuals, who were allowed to reflect in order to demonstrate the suitability and originality of the Cuban socialist process always under the motto of "with the revolution everything, against the revolution nothing."13.
One of the most important intellectual groups of this period was the aforementioned editorial and organizing group of the magazine Pensamiento Crítico (1967-1971), of the University of Havana, around which young people gathered who assumed themselves, with a certain naivety, as theorists of a national socialism.
This organ was later closed and many of its animators accused of revisionism and prevented from practicing and publishing in the country. With this and other actions, it was intended to satisfy the Soviet leadership when, after the failure of the "10 million" and the ruin of the country, the Cuban wagon had to be put on the train pulled by the Soviet locomotive.
Thus, the intellectual group was sacrificed and a typical feature of all socialist revolutions was accentuated: the anti-intellectual character, so well defined by Fidel in his speech at the FEU Congress in 1990 when he said "This cannot be a society of intellectuals, but of workers." In general terms, with respect to all cultural productions, the Cuban State has played the role of "patron State," which pays and subsidizes those intellectual productions that do not subvert it, promoting a timid social thought, art and literature that does not criticize.

The USSR extended its fraternal hand at a time when the country was clearly collapsing economically. In exchange, the revolution was criticized as voluntary, the thesis of the simultaneous construction of socialism and communism was abandoned and the preeminence of moral factors was toned down. Here another feature of the Cuban leadership appears: it can criticize itself but it does not accept criticism; it can make serious mistakes, criticize itself and remain in power without anyone daring to question it; Fidel must be forgiven for everything and we must continue to believe in him without a shadow of a doubt.

In order to achieve maximum economic support from the countries of real socialism, Cuba had to align itself with the ideological and economic bloc of the CMEA.
The power of moral rockets attacking the Kremlin walls was quietly dismantled. Soviet neo-Stalinism behaved like a theological power: economic and military support in exchange for a “doctrinal baptism.”
The process of osmosis was not very difficult:
- Since the missile crisis, the USSR guaranteed that Cuba was not attacked by the US and provided strong military assistance.
- Both countries had totalitarian states governed by a political-military caste (already strongly defined in the USSR and in Cuba in an advanced process of formation), accelerating with this alliance the formation of "the new Cuban class"
- Cuba was a good base for ideological expansion in the Third World and a possible deterrent "aircraft carrier" at the throat of the empire.

We might ask ourselves today whether Cuba had any other option than to enter the “CAME track.” It is always easier to examine things after the fact, in the light of historical experience, and that experience tells us that yes, indeed, we could and should have acted differently. Cuba did not have to have uncritically accepted everything that the USSR offered it, and sanctified not only the economic model, but also the discourse and “theory” that the Soviets offered. It even went so far as to punish a student who criticized a Soviet professor because “what came from the USSR” was sacred. There were other socialist countries that did not follow Moscow’s mandates to the letter. But, like good Cubans, we went from one extreme to the other.

We believe that the Cuban leadership has made do: it was easier to uncritically assume the status of "favored brother," accompanied by a model and a scheme of thought, and above all, with the validation of an almost feudal hierarchical structure of power, which guaranteed the immobility of "the new class," than to effectively join the socialist economy but without subordinating itself to it in an absolute way, without forgetting our Iberian American and Caribbean location, without ceasing to seek its own political and economic forms, without dogmatizing social thought to the point of absurdity. It is true that there was a factor against it: the imperialist blockade maintained for 33 years.
However, today, when the blockade is tighter than ever and the aggressiveness of the right-wing elements in Miami is greater than ever, Cuba has been forced to find new forms of production, new markets, it has been forced to rethink its economic integration in the Caribbean, etc. Hopefully it is not too late and the country can emerge from its economic crisis and make the democratic changes that it urgently needs. But today shows us that yesterday could have been different. But when in a country only the top leaders can give their opinion, the intellectuals and all the other workers have no more room than that of apology, there is no room for rational, far-sighted and theoretically argued decisions.

From that time on, the heyday of the Soviet DIAMAT was seen, which "scientifically" justified that socialism was one, universal and scientific, here or in Mongolia. The ruling class did not care to fully understand the internal tendencies that were throbbing in the USSR. It never imagined that in Moscow a process of democratic reforms, human rights and de-statization of the economy would be encouraged, which, by its nature, made a large part of "the new class" lose its monopoly on power; it brought to light, even in Cuba, the inefficient nature of the economy, it showed the unjust order of inequality and dependence within the CMEA itself and, unfortunately, it also led to the explosion of tensions, forcibly contained for years, between different ethnic groups and republics in the Eastern European world.

In the early years of "perestroika," which coincidentally coincided with the proclamation of the rectification process in Cuba, the winds of "glasnost" began to blow across the island, and many intellectuals believed that the time had come to put an end to double standards and to say, carefully, what we thought of society. We breathed a sigh of relief, believing that we had finally finished with the era in which all research work had to be necessarily preceded by quotes from the PCC congresses, and in which, in order to obtain approval "from above," the obvious thesis of each text had to show that this or that law of "dialectics" stated in a manual was "applied" in this or that process (be it a chemical reaction or a historical fact).

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Important events took place, such as the seminar “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” the scientific workshop at the University of Havana “Culture, Ideology and Society: A Balance Sheet of the 1980s,” the Latin American congresses on “Psychoanalysis and Marxism” (which had the audacity, for the first time in Cuba, to seek points of contact between psychoanalysis – considered bourgeois and idealistic by dogmatic Marxist thought – and Marxism). University students began to dare to ask “difficult” questions. The Soviet publication Novedades de Moscow was sold on the “black market” for $1.00, and there were even some bold people who, confidently, went so far as to raise the need for multipartyism and to revive the free peasant market in the discussions of the “Call to the 4th Congress of the PCC” (1991) (later receiving the consequent criticism).
Important political and economic changes could have been made at this time, a destructive crisis could have been foreseen, Soviet-style, and The renewal of the original spirit that was almost achieved between 1986 and 1989 should have been taken advantage of.
But it was not done.
The orientation was then to change the quotes from the Soviet manuals for those of Che Guevara, especially those that do not expose the corruption of "the new class." The new justification has been that Cuba should not allow itself the luxury of being left without history, as happened in the USSR.
The political discourse, far from becoming more flexible, has become more voluntaristic, more dogmatic. The cult of personality has reached unsuspected limits, as was evident in the last congress of the organization of the pioneers in Havana. The repressive mechanisms have become more violent. On the other hand, changes are being made in the economic sphere that make the "socialist relations of production" more flexible, reaching some extremes such as the nonexistence of unions that support Cuban workers who work in joint ventures with foreign capital.

And what about theory now? We don't need theorists, we only need arms for agriculture. The theory is made by Fidel, it was made by Martí, it is sought in Che.14. Theorists who dare to criticize the regime or propose something different from what "the party" decides are expelled from universities, from intellectual centers, and some are even imprisoned.
Well known is the case of the professors of the Instituto Superior Politécnico J.A. Echevarría, who were expelled from their jobs for signing a letter addressed to Fidel, with acts of repudiation included; or that of the writer Jesús Díaz (much applauded in the first months of the "rectification", when he was finally able to publish his book "Las primeras de la Tierra" in Cuba in 1988), expelled from the UNEAC and the ICAIC for his article "Los anillos de la Serpiente", or the ridiculous case of the "spontaneous repudiation" of the film "Alice in Wonderland".
We could fill pages with cases like these, but it hurts us.

We could also fill pages with the numerous virtues of the Cuban revolutionary process. That is the contradiction that makes any analysis difficult. But, for fear of being considered "traitors" or "for not giving weapons to the enemy", they have remained silent or, at best, have said things half-heartedly.

We believe today that the only truly revolutionary attitude towards Cuba is one that, on the one hand, condemns the US blockade, condemns any form of external interference in the decision of the destiny of the Cuban people and, on the other, carries out a constructive theoretical criticism that allows us to rescue our democratic and libertarian traditions :
our Western, Hispanic, Ibero-African and Caribbean culture,


and to continue the revolutionary process that, through free elections, allows us to adopt the options that the majority decides, without manipulation and without minorities being crushed, within a framework of unrestricted respect for human rights and the exercise of national sovereignty based on the principles of popular sovereignty, social justice, political and economic democracy, the elimination of all types of discrimination (racial, sexual, political or religious) and the demilitarization of society.

*Authors:

Marisela Fleites Lear​

Graduated in Philosophy from the University of Havana, where she obtained a degree as a specialist in Dialectical Materialism afters studies in Leipzig, Germany. She worked as a professor of philosophy at the University of Havana.

Enrique Patterson​

He is an essayist and journalist. He was a professor of history and philosophy at the University of Havana. Dedicated to analyzing the racial issue in Cuba, he is co-founder of the Cuban Democratic Socialist Current.

Cuban Democratic Socialist Current - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Arco Progresista - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

He went into exile in the United States in 1992. He is a spokesman for the Citizen Committee for Racial Integration.

 

[Eltitoguay]

Dossier ​

 A marginalized discourse: Voices from the Cuban critical left :​

AAAVV​

06/24/2023

Presentation
(By James Buckwalter-Arias) :

Too many of us who live outside Cuba and identify with the international left have failed in our elementary duty to listen carefully to our counterparts on the island—that is, to those who share with us fundamental leftist precepts without being part of the institutional apparatuses of power. Too many of us have placed passive trust in those who speak from positions of power, we have tended to accept that the official discourse adequately corresponds to a supposed collective will, we have tended to accept that Revolution, government, and people constitute parts of a more or less coherent whole—even when our counterparts in Cuba urge us to question this.

While there are important exceptions—notable criticisms from the left of the power structures in Cuba—too many of us have conceded that dissent in Cuba often arises from the ideological right and that this dissent is sponsored and manipulated from abroad. There is, of course, a media campaign, authorized by the Helms-Burton Act and funded by organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). It is true, of course, that millions of dollars are spent every year on opposition groups in the United States and in Cuba. This is a proven fact that is not at all trivial.

But this does not mean that dissent in Cuba necessarily emanates from the mainland as a result of what the Helms-Burton Act euphemistically calls "democracy building efforts." If we draw this unfounded conclusion, if we turn a blind eye to the indigenous dissent that the official discourse on the Island denigrates and that the sponsoring organizations in the United States turn their backs on, we are thereby denying the fundamental political agency exercised by so many ordinary Cubans.

There are, of course, Cuban political lefts that criticize, that dissent, that are marginalized or suppressed, dissatisfied lefts, activists, lefts that do not have media platforms either on the Island or overseas—not the “independent” Cuban press sponsored by the United States, for example, nor the “progressive” press in English in the United States. It is an excluded left, then, a pluralist left, a constellation of voices without central organs, without organized political institutions. The voices included in this text, then, do not speak for a united or coherent left. They simply offer perspectives from the political left as the authors define this category.

When "progressive" publications in the United States or other industrialized countries do not translate or disseminate those Cuban voices that strive to articulate a rigorous and sustainable leftist discourse—under conditions far more difficult and dangerous than we can imagine from our locus of enunciation—we cede the terrain of criticism to the right. We concede, in effect, that the only alternative to the Cuban model is that of Western liberal democracy, the Pax Americana, unbridled capitalist restoration, and Cuba as a client state of the United States. We passively accept that the only voices authorized to respond to American hostility and intervention are those that speak from institutional power in Cuba. But the primary objective of the Cuban government, as of all governments, including the governments of liberal democracies, is to remain in power. This is not news to anyone. But the fact should prompt us to engage with those who do not occupy positions of power, both inside and outside Cuba.

The progressive press in the United States has tended to counter the discourse of the hardliners and their goal of regime change in Cuba with a mixture of revolutionary apologia and anti-imperialist discourse, but at the same time it has tended to exclude voices that reject the ideological dichotomies that have structured the debates—a rejection necessary for a full understanding of reality, as Alina Bárbara López Hernández demonstrates in her reflection. In general terms, the "progressive" media have given little space to the voices best positioned to criticize both the authoritarian and repressive government in Cuba and the hostile and interventionist government to the north, thus marginalizing Cuban intellectuals who are most acutely aware of the limits that their own government imposes daily on their work, on their professional development, and even on their own security and personal freedom. These intellectuals are the same ones, of course, who are best positioned to analyze the mechanisms of the media campaign financed from the United States, its distortions, for example, or its economic incentives for writers and artists in the archipelago, as Raymar Aguado Hernández suggests in his reflection.

When it comes to Cuba, these writers have an undeniable epistemological advantage over us, but we often read in the pages of the “progressive” press what Anglo-American leftists think about a Cuba that is alien to our reality—including what the stars of the entertainment industry proclaim—instead of reading those who articulate anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal or anti-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQ or democratic socialist discourses from Cuba and outside the centers of power. In this way, the progressive media reproduce a neocolonial dynamic in which leftist American intellectuals arrogate to themselves the authority to speak about Cubans to an English-speaking audience without first trying to understand what our counterparts think. The aim of this collaborative text, then, is to contribute to the visibility of a small number of intellectuals in this rather extensive, deep and diverse field, of intellectuals whose voices have not been heard—or very little—in English, and also to call for the translation and publication of more extensive writings by these and other intellectuals in order to contribute to a more genuinely collaborative, supportive and decolonizing project.

1- Alexander Hall Lujardo :
(Alexander Hall Lujardo is a historian and works as a researcher at the Institute of Anthropology.)

The triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959, marked the beginning of a process that offered unquestionable guarantees for access to rights that were forbidden to specific sectors of the population. A new social pact was thus established that quickly embraced the idea of socialist construction as an alternative to the capitalist order that existed in Cuba after the Republic was established in 1902.

The Cold War scenario and the hostility of the US government against the young revolutionary process, caused the Island to lean towards the Soviet bloc; while guerrilla movements and other rebel groups against the oligarchic capitalism of the peripheral-underdeveloped states in Latin America were encouraged. This action was undertaken in accordance with the Marxist theory of encouraging a world revolution, in search of regional and hemispheric support in the face of the isolation to which the Caribbean nation was subjected, after the victorious rise in 1959.

However, from the first years of the triumph, the methods of political censorship towards creators in the different spheres of culture became evident: cinema, performing arts, plastic arts, poetry and literature. Thus, parameterized repression materialized in numerous artistic manifestations given their critical and/or confrontational postulates. University autonomy was shackled by the authorities and governed by a regulatory policy of its entry into the classrooms, not exempt from reproducing multiple discrimination mechanisms.

At the same time, the state-centric and hyper-institutional unification of the Party-Government was promoted (1965) and the state monopoly was imposed on the means of communication and production (1968). The democratic mechanisms for public demonstration were suppressed; the electoral participation of the bases in the election of their main leaders was buried along with the legitimacy of peaceful dissent and the popular supervision of the civil service through the criminalization of the strike. All this together with other tactics of political-social control and instrumentalization, citing the scenario of indefinite exceptionality generated by the US hostility.

The political structure leaned towards the block of countries that adopted the models of “real or historical socialism.” These regimes were distinguished by the full administrative dominance and control of the State over economic activities. This reality led to a generalized fall in productivity levels and a sustained slowdown in its growth; shortages of consumer goods; systematic deterioration of infrastructure and effective restrictions on individual freedom, supported by an egalitarian ideal of forced and ultra-ideologized collectivism.

At the same time, widespread corruption was prevalent, associated with the diversion of resources to the informal market, given the insufficiency of salaries to satisfy basic needs. Likewise, there was no investment policy aimed at diversifying the industry, focused on breaking the primary mono/export character as a core element of underdevelopment and technological lag.

Despite the undeniable achievements in social matters, brought about by high investments in sports, culture, health and education, the country was characterized by a general absence of freedom, sublimated by the charisma of a caudillo leadership [a distinction embodied in the figure of the General Secretary of the Communist Party]. In accordance with this, the legal-constitutional culture of the citizens deteriorated due to the absence of institutionalized mechanisms that responded in a regulated manner to the interests of the popular classes.

In opposition to workers' rights, labor unions were dissolved. Workers' autonomy was supplanted with the massive dissolution of cooperatives between 1961-1975, which became part of the extensive list of state property. All of this occurred in a context of a marked authoritarian nature in the management of politics by the leadership, given the centralized, partisan and bureaucratic matrix of the prevailing model.

This reality led to the sustained militarization of the economy in the business sector, with the disastrous consequences that its Bonapartist monopolization has generated for the majority.

The predominant Marxism was characterized by the mimicry of philosophical postulates imported from the Soviet Union (1961-1990), combined with the discursive metanarratives of a nationalist narrative that made invisible transcendent areas of anti-hegemonic resistance. The revolutionary character of the theory, focused on changing the realities of systemic oppression, was subverted by the vulgarly dogmatic foundations of a partisan/ruling class [reproducer of political domination, economic exploitation and social impoverishment].

Other particularities of the territory were ignored by the homogenization budgets that encouraged its use as a state ideology, in accordance with the interests of the political class in power.

From "state socialism" to the oligarchic (neo)capitalist transition
The deep crisis that hit the country with its entry into the Special Period (1990-1994) led the Island to the stage of the deepest material difficulties in its history. The advent of such a precarious context, generated by the fall of the so-called "European socialist camp," affected all aspects of the Cuban economy, leading to a third wave of migration to the United States. This exodus, due to its humble and racialized nature, caused strong [xenophobic/racist] contempt among the Cuban bourgeoisie installed in South Florida, giving exclusive glimpses of its "democratic postulates."

The debacle of the 1990s in Cuba confirmed the historical dependence on foreign powers, thus extending the colonial condition from which its communist leadership did not escape, in the establishment of unequal economic relations with its allies in the east. In this sense, the Cuban leadership silenced for more than forty years the criticisms made by the internationalist revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara from a radical Marxist militancy, in favor of the economic autonomy of the Island as the only condition to guarantee its national sovereignty.

The reconfigurations produced in this period, the result of government policies to "deal with the crisis," gave rise to numerous concessions to private capital (foreign and local). These measures generated new dynamics that were immediately projected on the internal scene, given the singularities that defined the process of Cuban insertion into the world economy, under the "rules of the game" established by the Western powers.

The democratization of the political regime was not conceived in the imagination of its leaders, who were unable to understand that despotism brings with it disastrous results in productivity. In turn, these transformations have led to the resurgence of racism, the increase in inequality and the oligarchization of the model by the ruling class, given its exponential concentration of capital-power.

Left-wing libertarian alternatives to the Gordian knot of the crisis in Cuba
The Cuban government has used a supposed revolutionary character to deny the right to the existence of other organizations or groups that identify themselves as left-wing in Cuba. The ruling political class has cancelled the possibilities of autonomous existence of non-confrontational groups with an anti-capitalist, feminist, anti-racist, anarchist and eco-socialist projection (displaced to the opposition). These groups are the bearers of programmatic lines far removed from statist and institutional centralism, which usually suffocates any self-managed initiative through its methods of co-optation and/or repressive action.

In this area there is a large sector of Cuban civil society, which in its perspectives assumes other alternatives [popular, socialist, decolonized and republican-democratic], whose existence contributes to rethinking public participation through the implementation of innovative mechanisms for the redistribution of power, wealth and participatory deliberation in decision-making that concerns the realities of the different social sectors.

Critical leftists in Cuba have come up against the wall of fossilized institutional machinery. The absolute credit of a falsely socialist narrative is often capitalized on in order to sustain the privileges of the ruling class and its totalitarian control mechanisms.

Thus, any alternative projected to broaden the popular bases of democratic radicalization with an emphasis on restorative justice, the decolonization of knowledge/power, the break with the levels of environmental pollution and the exploitation of workers to which the Cuban working class is subjected, is unviable given the existing social relations of production, typical of a "state capitalist" model.

The scenario of social liberation requires the mobilizing action of a conscious citizenry in the face of the panorama of increasing concentration of wealth in those traditionally hegemonic sectors. It is aimed at achieving the establishment of a structure capable of generating wealth in an equitable, ecological, cooperative, dynamic and sustainable manner.

The libertarian ideals of a popular socialist alternative synthesize the emancipatory, decolonized and counter-hegemonic essence of the critical left with an anti/post-capitalist projection, in order to consecrate the values of democratic socialism as an alternative proposal to the monopolistic hegemony of the authoritarian/Stalinist militancy that dictates the arbitrary springs of political power in Cuba.


2- Alina Barbara Lopez Hernandez :
(Alina Bárbara López Hernández is a professor, essayist and editor, and is a Corresponding Member of the Academy of History of Cuba).

The apocryphal left or the fallacy of the false dilemma
In the field of communication there are fallacies, lies disguised as arguments whose purpose is manipulation. One of them is the fallacy of the "either/or", also known as the "false dilemma", widely used in political debate as it tends to be persuasive by forcing the audience to choose between two alternatives.

Generally, those who propose alternatives are aware that there are other options and hide them, which is why it is also called the fallacy of the "excluded middle." Some call it the fallacy of the "dead end," since those who must choose may feel trapped in an unsolvable contradiction. Let us look at two examples of false dilemmas: "Whoever is not with us is against us," said George W. Bush in September 2001. And this one, a cornerstone of the official discourse on the Island: "In favor of the Cuban government or in favor of the American blockade."

The most recent false dilemma of the official ideological apparatus in Cuba involves two supposed alternatives: a sectarian and Stalinist left opposed to change and stuck in old molds (represented by the Telegram group La Manigua, Revolución Pa′ Rato and certain figures of that movement, such as Rodrigo Huamachi) or an inclusive left, favorable to dialogue, that seeks to empathize with other options considered revolutionary (embodied in the group La Comuna and also in other projects and media that include everything from Pañuelos Rojos or the site Cubadebate to the program Con Filo and people linked to such spaces).

The “excluded third” in this case is enormous, as it contains practically all the types of dissent existing on the Island, which they have grouped into the “counterrevolutionary” camp with absolute shamelessness, despite the fact that a sector of that camp is avowedly critical left-wing. The manipulation is so evident that it is surprising that many believe that we are facing a pitched battle between opposing points of view. Obviously, the objective of such a trick is to achieve a positioning of public opinion in favor of the, apparently, least bad of the options.

Uncovering the false dilemma
When a group of delegates to the National Assembly in France (by pure chance) placed themselves on the left of the platform during a vote on 11 September 1789, they were taking a stand in favour of restricting the king's absolute power and choosing a monarchy limited by popular power. There were no organised political parties there, but rather tendencies.

Being left-wing is not about wearing a pullover with a little sign, a picture of Che Guevara or a quote from Marx. Nor is it about wearing red scarves, using inclusive language and going out in public spaces in a performative attitude. Militancy on the left is not granted by a self-proclamation or a communication campaign. Being left-wing is about positioning oneself against the established powers that ignore social justice and prevent the majority who have been deprived of their rights from exercising their rights.

Long before the word left designated a political position, and up to this day, rights have been conquered from below: plebeians vs. patricians, peasant struggles for land, rebellions of enslaved people in pursuit of their freedom, universal suffrage, separation of powers, workers' struggles, against child labor, for the eight-hour day, women's vote, against racism and homophobia... Without exception, all have been conquests against established powers.

If you are unconditional in favor of a power that overwhelms citizens, discriminates and prevents the exercise of economic, political and social rights, then you are not left-wing, no matter how much you boast about it. It makes no difference whether the powers are absolute for a monarch, a conservative government, a military dictatorship or an authoritarian single party (capitalist, socialist or communist).

It is not necessary to be a Marxist to be a leftist. Nor is proclaiming oneself a safe-conduct to the left. In the experiments of real socialism, the bureaucratic class was designated as such and was in fact a privileged group that supplanted the popular will. When a group in power—established as a new class—strips Marxism of its scientific method, reduces it to its ideological dimension and turns it into a state ideology, it ceases to be a revolutionary current and becomes a mechanism of domination. We have reached that point in Cuba. It is a counterrevolutionary position and must be denounced.

The implosion of socialism, in Europe as in Cuba, proves that the impossibility of gaining conquests from below hampered economic and social evolution and made these experiments return to the path of authoritarian capitalism. Bureaucratic, one-party socialism makes the emergence of a true left impossible, since socialist critical thought is supplanted by an apocryphal left that supports the new class, empowered over society.

So the false dilemma with which they want to trick us is not acceptable. Neither of the two options that, according to you, make up the revolutionary bloc is really left-wing. Michel Torres Corona made this very clear in the television program Con Filo, Boca de Sauron of the ideological apparatus, when he reproduced the fragment of a speech by Raúl Castro where the limits of the supposed diversity are clearly defined: the single Party. That is the only thing that is not up for discussion in order to be accepted by the Power. Only if they accept that precept will they be recognized as left-wing by the ruling group.

The two supposedly competing options admit this single, uncaused cause, uncritically assume the Cuban political system and accept the will of the Party as the foundation of their existence. For this reason, they are false leftists who have done much harm to the cause. They have succeeded in making people in Cuba who wish to claim social justice and popular rights not recognize themselves as leftists for the reason that they believe that you are... and they flee from it like the devil from the cross.

If we let them continue with their false flag strategy, pretending to be “unity within diversity,” they could go very far. As a friend told me: in a short time they could come up with two parties to pretend to be plural, just as the Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo did in 1942.
And please, do not disrespect collective intelligence. You are very naive if you think that others are. We are saturated with false leftists and false dilemmas, but there is a way out of this “dead end.”


3- Lisbeth Moya Gonzalez :
(Lisbeth Moya González is a Cuban journalist, contributor to the magazines Tremenda Nota and La Joven Cuba, and member of the collective Socialistas en Lucha. She is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Sociology at FLACSO Ecuador).

From the point of view of the international left, Cuba is a territory of conflict. The influence of the Cuban revolution on the rise of progressivism in Latin America is undeniable. The solidarity of the global left for the survival of the Cuban revolution to this day is also undeniable. One of the greatest dichotomies for those of us on the left who dissent within Cuba is how to do so from a political system historically attacked by imperialism?

However, most of us who dissent from the left in Cuba have understood that the Cuban revolution does not respond to the slogan of continuity that the current government promotes so much politically. What the Cuban revolution proposed at its beginning has been degraded, to the point that Cuba is now a country mired in poverty, with few democratic freedoms and a government that has shown that it will go to the last consequences to stay in power.

Dialoguing with the international left is always a challenge for those of us who want to do politics and change things in Cuba. It is a challenge because on many occasions, from a paternalistic perspective, the foreign left tries to protect the myth and associates all kinds of dissent regarding Cuba with the historical intentions of the right and imperialism, or with echoes of the Cold War and the media campaign that looms over "the Revolution." I say Revolution in capital letters and in quotation marks, because that abstract entity, half charismatic leaders and martyrs; half social and political feat; is the ghost venerated by a good part of the international left.

I consider it a serious tactical error to understand Cuba from the particularity of its political system and not as a nation inserted in the world system. The experience of applying similar models has shown that socialism in a single country will be suffocated by its opponents or overthrown from within by its "leaders" and bureaucrats. Cuba is alone in many aspects and the international left, consolidated in power or not, has been its main ally. But imagining Cuba as the bastion of democracy and social justice, turning it into a souvenir and idealization of utopia, does it as much favor as those who demonize it and paint it as a barracks.

In recent times, many of these left-wing groups have awakened and I dare say that a good part of the world's Trotskyist sectors, with their particularities and the spirit of dissent that characterizes them, have been pioneers in understanding the reality of the Cuban left and have tried to approach it with conciliatory impetus. I have always expected a realistic pronouncement regarding Cuba from great left-wing intellectuals in critical situations and although, in moments like 11J, some have been concerned and supported from the shadows, many others have remained silent or simply adopted a position of defense of the Cuban government in the face of acts that are indefensible from any ideology, such as the case of repression and the long sentences for political prisoners. Given this, I wonder how many years any of these activists or intellectuals, who in their countries can demonstrate and can be free to write on their social networks, for example, would have been imprisoned in Cuba.

Starting a dialogue between the left, inside and outside Cuba, is fundamental. The left will not survive in isolation, because it has too many enemies. In the case of Cuba, those of us who dissent from the left have the guns of the government, the right and the international utopian lefts at our heads. This dialogue is clearly the basis for organizing strategies of greater scope. Cuba can really be that "island of utopia." Stopping idealizing it and really working to make it so is the first step.

The dialogue between the international left and Cuban civil society began a long time ago and has been possible, even with the expectant gaze and threats of the Cuban government. The event on Trotsky and Trotskyisms held in Havana in 2019 opened the doors to many parties, intellectuals and political tendencies, especially Trotskyists, who have maintained contact and constant support for the Cuban critical left. Some of them are affiliated with sectors of the more governmental left, as is the case of the International Marxist Current; others, such as Marx 21 and Erick Toussaint, among others - to give an example - are much closer to the critical left, which is systematically repressed by the government.

For Cuban civil society, in all its ideological scope, the arrival of the Internet in Cuba was crucial. Having a virtual, independent and accessible space for expression favoured the emergence of visible political platforms of all kinds. Currently there is a network of digital magazines, pages or media outlets of critical Cuban left that years ago was unthinkable. Among them: Comunistas blog, La Tizza, Tremenda Nota, La Cosa, Cuidadanías, Yo sí te Creo, Ágora, Socialistas en Lucha, Reclamo Universitario...among many other spaces, which contribute to plurality and political debate from the left.

The debate with the American left is crucial because it is in that country where the greatest hostility against what could have been the Cuban project from the beginning is brewing. The American sanctions are a brake on the development of Cuba as a nation, based on whatever economic and social model it may have. This debate and support between the Cuban and American left is vital for both parties, because the day that the United States has a normal political relationship with Cuba, a substantial step towards true democracy and justice will have been taken.

Cuba is already part of the United States, because Cuba is not only the archipelago, it is also the diaspora and a lot of Cuba lives in the United States. The problem of this island is also to reconcile its civil society, to calm the hatred of a good part of this diaspora that abhors all forms of the left, because in the beginning it was expropriated of its wealth, or because later it suffered the consequences of authoritarianism. We must ask ourselves for certain if this authoritarianism, if this deformed system, was not born from the political and economic pressure of the United States. I dare to say that the foreign policy of the United States is the mother of this dictatorship. The case of Cuba is a snake that bites its tail.


4- Lynn Cruz :
(Lynn Cruz is an award-winning actress and writer. Due to her political stance, she has not been able to work as an actress in Cuba since 2018).

Part of the dissidents in Cuba have felt slighted by the international left, let's say, because obviously the Cuban government defines itself as left-wing. In Cuba, the people, or rather the majority of the people, were not communists as such, but Fidelistas, where the Revolution was the Goddess and the priest of the church called Cuba was called Fidel Castro. That is why Fidel did not give speeches to his followers, but sermons. The new Cuban left, or the critical left, in my opinion, must take this aspect into account, which is decisive in the process that has been going on for more than sixty years. Ignoring how someone from the outside sees you seems naive to me. Ignoring that the Cuban Revolution had an international impact also lacks objectivity. It is clear that politics forces you to take sides, you are either on my side or you are on the other side. Simply put. And in that matter of sides, precious time has been lost because the external opposition apparently wants all the power and power in Cuba also wants absolutely everything. They end up looking alike and the conflict generated by the belief or hatred towards Fidel Castro begins to seem eternal. On the other hand, we live in a world where the market dictates the last word. The left ends up manifesting itself in the struggles of minorities and the right especially through the Protestant churches and their pro-life campaigns. All this is very reductive. Recently in Europe, for example, there have been movements of young ecologists who advocate recycling, which are calling attention to the danger of being close to a world where there will not be enough food for everyone. So, one must put Cuba in perspective with what is happening in the rest of the world. Recycling for us is a natural state. The fact of wearing clothes that are given to you, even if they are used, should not be seen as something negative. Cubans, living with so many shortages, sometimes deny things that if you look at them from another perspective, you see that they are something positive. And I am not making a cult of misery, but rather calling attention to the need to rescue these aspects that, once inside consumer societies, are seen as something from the “communist” past that they do not want to remember. Hence the importance of the unsweetened view from outside. At this moment, the people are faced with the corpse that is the Revolution in the Fidelista form. As in Russia and the former socialist countries, I think it would be naive to think of a fall that would turn the Cuban Revolution into a phenomenon of the past. We have seen these experiences in the form of ghosts. It would be better to look for the causes.
Yes, there have been lights, but also a long shadow in these 63 years. A public apology is owed to the people harmed by this experience so that the country can heal.

In the midst of all this, it would be important to understand that Cuban reality is subject to a factor that conditions everything and that is the improvisation that is given by a structural crisis that does not allow its development. In recent years there has been an accumulated debt that keeps the rulers in check and causes them to act out of fear. Any decision made that is based on fear lacks objectivity. For example, the construction of very luxurious hotels in the most important centers of power such as Old Havana, Miramar and Vedado. Inhuman masses in a city that has a water deficit. A valuable opportunity has been lost, such as the fact of developing ecological tourism. On the other hand, there is the abandonment of the sugar mills and the sugar industry. The obstacles that farmers face in accessing fertilizers and means of work, as well as the low wages for workers. The worst thing that is happening in Cuba is the combination of a Stalinist system for those below and a neoliberal capitalist system for those above. Sometimes it seems that decisions are only aimed at macroeconomic growth, and leave aside the social aspect with a noticeably aging population. Quite the opposite of what the official discourse says: We are not thinking as a country.

The war that broke out with Putin at the head and NATO on the other side, as well as what we experienced during the pandemic, has made it clear that it is no longer about the Russian, or American, or European or Chinese economy, it is about a single economy. The laws that govern the world market affect us all. So, how can we disengage from a world that is becoming less and less separate? Today more than ever, we need to understand the social experiment that was the October Socialist Revolution and the echoes it had in Cuba. There is no other economic system than the capitalist one, but we can have capitalism with social justice, as is the case in the Nordic countries, which, although they are not perfect, are models that seem more humane to me.


5- Raymar Aguado Hernández :
(Raymar Aguado Hernández is a university student, cultural critic and analyst of social issues. He has collaborated with several Cuban and foreign magazines and has published around fifty texts ranging from essays, criticism and political opinion articles to poetry).

i)
The current Cuban political situation is so tainted by labels and subtitles that we find ourselves in a fire of extremes that are neither recognized nor identified. These extremes, commonly loaded with masks and narrative voids, are situated antagonistically to any discursive treaty that manages to point out weak areas in its proposals. Such schematisms call for segregation and dogma, where it is a sport to prejudge certain positions of thought and action under fallacies unconnected to the reality through which they transit.

Cuban political power, from its Party/State/Government triad, pigeonholes every actor who disagrees with its structure with delegitimizing and offensive adjectives.

These names, always accompanied by the tag of an alleged mercenarism in the service of imperialism, are ready to solidify the authoritarianism of the country's ruling class, while depriving the right to a plurality of political positions. Meanwhile, repression, whether physical or psychological, ideological abuses and citizen despair increase.

After 9/11, this repressive and hermetic order increased greatly. The thousands of imprisonments and the normalized violence following the protests, the approval of a new penal code that criminalizes dissent, and the forced exile of many political activists are evidence of this. Although these procedures existed in previous years, they did not have the visibility offered to them by the establishment of the Internet and the emergence of countless independent media in Cuba.

On the other hand, at the other extreme, there is a sector trapped in a bubble of elite and exclusivity, which encases its politics in pro-capitalist and liberal narratives, with an agenda focused on discrediting any leftist position that questions, dissents and confronts the histrionic and dehumanizing imperialist arrogance.

In this camp we find people who do not believe in subalternity, sexual dissidence and vulnerable sectors, and who manipulate their activism with a view to media positioning. In this way, they make clear their ultraconservative, exclusionary policies and conceptions, which deny and violate these communities while trying to belittle their struggle.

They also manage to reproduce standards of domination similar to those of political power, pigeonholing as pro-government or in any other way delegitimizing people who direct their political work along Marxist, decolonial, transfeminist, etc. lines. Any position in favor of unity, sustainable progress, equity, integration and social justice as a whole is the focus of their attacks, which in most cases are confrontational and violent, lacking any theoretical support, where their ethics are based on capital and privileged groups.

It is no secret that these sectors receive millions in funding from American far-right organizations, including the U.S. government itself. Therefore, they have the same media and manipulative power as the power elite in Cuba, even more so, so much so that they reproduce their policies of hatred and exclusion with caustic formulas, having Miami as their main niche.

ii)
The conception of what a leftist position can be in the Cuban context is largely hijacked by the polarized divisionism that I mentioned earlier.

For more than sixty years, the political power of the Island has proclaimed itself to be left-wing, even making the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara icons of this international movement.

Today, with the social achievements of the revolution and the people largely buried, and political power having become a centralized, totalitarian and dictatorial party/state, the concept of the left is promoted from such instances as something inherent to the government process taking place in Cuba, mainly from the voices of intellectuals, artists and political researchers at the service of the regime, who also have political-economic privileges, legal impunity and support from the official media.

At the same time, pro-government groups and movements, born from the protests following the 27N sit-in and others after the popular uprising of 11J, carry out apologetic work towards government bodies, while trying to offer a false picture of integration and commitment of youth with the official verticality.

While these people enjoy their freedom of action, with public interventions, open letters, meetings with the president and high-ranking government officials, institutional recognition, privileged jobs, publication spaces in official media, etc., many other people suffer harassment, censorship, expulsions from work and educational centers, discrediting campaigns, illegal summons by State Security bodies, repression and exile for maintaining a critical stance, even if it comes from a Marxist, leftist perspective committed to social justice, supposed premises and guidelines of the Cuban state.

The attempt to discredit claims from the critical left is also a recurring practice at the other extreme, where from various platforms, spokesmen for the right-wing opposition try to delegitimize the work of left-wing groups reacting to political power with fallacious stereotyped criteria regarding Marxism, decolonialism, etc.

iii)
One of the main problems that exists when analyzing the phenomenon of the Cuban left and the conceptualization that is made of it, is the way in which different international groups and individuals validate the rhetoric of the Cuban regime. Many political parties, associations, intellectuals and scholars of the left position the Cuban process as socialist or leftist, when many economic and political studies have already demonstrated the existence of a totalitarian state, which is economically governed by a state capitalist system, which is based on an inhuman legality.

It is well known that the Cuban Revolution, more than thirty years ago, went from being a social revolution, of/by/for the humble, to being a fiefdom, property of a few who run the country as they please. An example of this is the existence of the economic/business conglomerate GAESA, which, subordinated to the FAR, moves and centralizes a significant amount of capital backed by military power and the ruling class, while the Cuban population suffers high levels of impoverishment.

Data published by ONEI in September 2021 shed light on this issue. According to the figures from said institution, only 0.5% of public funds had been allocated to the education sector and 1.0% to health and social assistance, figures that contrast sharply with the 42.3% allocated to real estate and hotel construction.

It is evident how public assets are being damaged after analyzing these data, so much so that by simply walking through Havana, we will find how, alongside luxurious five-star hotels, houses, state centers and all kinds of urban buildings are collapsing.

The Cuban official propaganda and that of its supporters outside its borders, promotes a false vision of the national panorama, which spreads and solidifies erroneous points of view that cause much harm to people within the Island and to the left-wing opposition, at the same time feeding the narratives of the right-wing opposition and legitimizing, while promoting the management of Cuban political power as fair, the myth of socialism in Cuba.

This opinion of people who are unaware of the internal reality on the Island and support the management of its current government, is unfair and criminal with respect to the hundreds of political prisoners, censored, exiled, abused, with respect to the millions of people in Cuba who live in precarious conditions, in extreme poverty, with respect to the thousands of people who are hungry on the Island, who are homeless, who do not enjoy adequate working conditions or salaries, with respect to those killed at the hands of the police - let us always remember the murders of Zidane Batista and Diubis Laurencio - with respect to the millions of Cubans who live trampled by the boot of a totalitarian and oppressive system that under its laws, leaves us without the right to demand our rights.

AAAVV :
Edited by James Buckwalter-Arias with contributions from Alexander Hall Lujardo, Lisbeth Moya Gonzalez, Alina Barbara Lopez Hernandez, Lynn Cruz, and Raymar Aguado Hernández.
Fountain:
New Politics, Summer 2023
Theme:
Political commitment
Cuba
Alternative left

Un discurso marginado: voces desde la izquierda crítica cubana. Dossier

PresentaciónJames Buckwalter-AriasDemasiados de los que vivimos fuera de Cuba y nos identificamos con la izquierda internacional hemos incumplido el deber elemental de escuchar detenidamente a nuestros homólogos en la Isla—es decir, a los que comparten con nosotros fundamentales preceptos de...

www.sinpermiso.info

 

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...And another brief (more or less related with Cuba) musical interlude...
Salud, pa' l@s Aceres/Aseres , dentro y fuera de El Caimán Verde :

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MAY 2020

The American Left after Sanders :​

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The consequences of Bernie Sanders' strong performance in the primaries will not be easily dispelled. To a large extent, he won the "battle of ideas" within the Democratic Party and managed to shift it to the left. A strong debate is now looming over the strategies that the left should adopt and how to intervene in the always complex scenario of the Democratic Party.
Figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez embody the generational change.
Patrick Iber ; May 2020.

Since 2015, Bernie Sanders has been the standard-bearer of the left in the United States.

Bernie Sanders - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

When he announced his candidacy for the presidency, only a few believed that it would be anything more than a protest campaign. Sanders described himself as a “democratic socialist” and called for a “political revolution,” positioning himself far outside the boundaries of traditional American politics. He was not even a formal member of the Democratic Party, although he was running for the presidential nomination for that party. Five years later, in early 2020, he was, for a time, the favorite in the race for the Democratic nomination.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders at a rally at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on Feb. 18, 2020.

In the 2020 Democratic primaries, the incumbent senator from Vermont performed well in the first three of the four early voting states . All told, he tied in the Iowa caucuses , won the New Hampshire primary, and won again in the Nevada caucuses, where he received strong support from working-class Latino voters. By then, projections had him as the Democratic front-runner. Then, in late February, Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s vice president who is considered a politically moderate Democrat, won South Carolina, the first early state with a significant African-American population. In an instant, many of the remaining candidates dropped out of the race, and on March 3, which is known as “Super Tuesday” because of the number of states holding simultaneous primaries, Biden dominated the scene. Sanders’ path to the nomination faded away.

While he remained in the race, Sanders demonstrated that the electorate for a social democratic agenda in the United States was much larger than most expected, but at the same time not large enough to stage what would have essentially been a takeover of the Democratic Party. Although his age will not allow him to run again, the consequences of his strong showing will not be easily dissipated. Sanders has largely won the “battle of ideas” within the Democratic Party, shifting it substantially to the left. But how American left organizations will seek to move forward in a post-Sanders era remains a matter of heated debate.

The strategy moving forward depends in part on whether you believe Sanders actually had a chance of being elected or, rather, that his chances of winning were illusory. Some Sanders supporters remain bitter that the party establishment favored Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary, feeling that it tilted the playing field in their favor. In 2020, they again saw the Democratic establishment unify around Biden, who had struggled to generate enthusiasm, rally volunteers and secure donations. “What the establishment wanted was to make sure that people would unite around Biden so they could beat me,” Sanders said . Candidate Pete Buttigieg, for example, who had tied with Sanders in Iowa, dropped out after a phone call with Barack Obama . Amy Klobuchar did the same, and the support of Klobuchar and Buttigieg was essential in boosting Biden against Sanders on Super Tuesday.
Many on the left, skeptical that the Democratic Party is truly a vehicle for progressive change, feel their candidate was simply unacceptable to the party.

From a party perspective, there is little mystery in this. Sanders was not a formal member of the Democratic Party, but chose to remain independent throughout his political career as a senator.
This may have been an advantage in the general election to appeal to voters alienated from the party, but it was certainly not an advantage in the primaries, where most voters, almost by definition, identify as Democrats. In addition to programmatic divergences and hostility from party elites, who feared the implementation of Sanders’s program, there were also ordinary voters who feared that choosing him as the Democratic candidate would prove too risky in a year when the bottom line is defeating Donald Trump. (Polls suggested that both Sanders and Biden could beat Trump with roughly equal odds in the November election, but this did not allay fears that running a “socialist” might not be a smart political move.) Even those who supported much of Sanders’s agenda did not see him as capable of successfully implementing it. Among his most ardent supporters, little attention was sometimes paid to the problems he would have faced if elected, from “investment strikes” to various forms of political obstructionism. In the end, both the Democratic Party establishment and the majority of voters rejected Sanders. He mustered the support of just over 30% of voters, which would have only served to win in a divided arena. Once the competition was reduced to just two candidates, his chances all but disappeared.

There was, perhaps, some chance in February, when another outcome was still possible. Sanders was and remains very popular and seen as genuine, but in taking the lead he had to prove that he could be the candidate not just of the left but of the entire party. Had enthusiasm continued to grow, perhaps the party would have had to accept him. But Sanders continued to rival the Democratic Party itself, making it difficult to imagine that he could unite it after victory. He received little support from African Americans, the group most loyal to the party and some of those who had the most to lose. Culturally, his campaign remained wedded to the left in a way that did not allow it to forge the necessary coalitions.

In my case, for example, I returned to my home state of Iowa to canvass door-to-door for Sanders before the caucus . As part of that campaign work, I attended a rally of more than 3,000 people in Cedar Rapids—a city well known for the smell of oatmeal, due to a factory located just outside. In addition to a speech by Sanders himself, the rally featured a performance by the band Vampire Weekend and prominent figures such as filmmaker Michael Moore and Marxist philosopher, theologian, and African-American human rights activist Cornel West. The crowd was enthusiastic, but I left worried: there were probably more volunteers from other states than people from Iowa. I also noticed the absence of a plan to expand the movement beyond the left (represented by figures like Moore and West, who are highly respected but don’t mean much outside that space) and young people (represented by the many popular bands, like Vampire Weekend, who played for free at the Sanders campaign). The next day, speaking to voters door-to-door, I met many who had supported Sanders in 2016 but now thought Elizabeth Warren or Buttigieg were a better choice.

Sanders needed to broaden his appeal beyond those who identified with “socialism.”
But it wasn’t simply a matter of convincing people of the candidate’s merits: it was a matter of persuading skeptics that they had a place in his campaign and that his strategy of change would pay off. Sanders claimed that he was the only one who could bring young people and disillusioned abstentionists to the polls. But those groups did not mobilize in early voting states in a way that would fundamentally change the race. At the same time, relations soured between different groups of voters. Warren, the second-most progressive candidate in the primaries, gathered around her a loyal group of supporters represented by highly educated progressive professionals. Warren’s campaign gained considerable momentum in late 2019, when Sanders was still recovering from a heart attack. As she topped the polls for the first time, many pro-Sanders outlets, such as Jacobin magazine , launched attacks on Warren, eroding relations among her supporters. The kind of online behavior of some Sanders supporters was seen as rude , which may have deterred some from joining the campaign. Fundamentally, the identity of the left has been built around the shortcomings of “liberalism”—in its American sense, where it is more or less synonymous with progressivism—making it difficult to imagine how to forge the necessary coalition with the more moderate wings of the Democratic Party.
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Sanders at a campaign rally in Michigan.

There were voices within Sanders’s campaign urging him to find ways to expand beyond his traditional base, but the candidate was finding it difficult to change the message that had taken him this far and that he had been advocating with great consistency since the 1960s. I saw some of this firsthand. During the primaries, I served as a campaign consultant, part of the foreign policy advisory team. (In my day-to-day life, I teach U.S. and Latin American history at the University of Wisconsin.) I had no direct contact with Sanders, no access to behind-the-scenes discussion or debate. But I was available to help craft messages and proposals in an area where Sanders had to tread carefully. He comes from the anti-imperialist tradition of the American left, and his critics have been eager to link him to Venezuelan “socialism.” Overall, I think he handled the campaign well, making clear that he had no interest in defending authoritarian governments, while emphasizing the need to establish a relationship with Latin American countries based on equality and nonintervention and criticizing the way the Trump administration's bluster helped entrench hard-line figures in the region.

But when Sanders began to lead in the polls, he inevitably faced increased scrutiny. One interviewer released a tape of Sanders from the 1980s in which he explained that Cubans had not rebelled against Fidel Castro during the U.S.-sponsored operation to overthrow him at the Bahía Cochinos (Bay of Pigs), saying that “he educated the children, he gave them health care, he completely transformed society.”

Invasión de bahía de Cochinos - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

All of that is fairly accurate. When presented with the clip, Sanders responded, “We are totally opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba, but it would be unfair to say that it’s all wrong.” Again, nothing false: but it seemed to many people (and headline editors) that Sanders was praising Fidel Castro. This raised questions about both his views and his chances of being elected. What kind of socialist is he? Liberal journalist Chris Matthews practically had a nervous breakdown on live television, pontificating: “I think if Castro and the communists had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of those executed. And there would have been people celebrating.” Matthews, who certainly had no such doubts , said he was not sure whether Sanders’ vision of “socialism” resembled that of Cuba or Denmark. At the very least, this controversy was perceived as a major liability in Florida, an important state in the general election. In a state with many anti-Castro Cuban opinion-mongers (not to mention Venezuelan and Nicaraguan migrants, etc.), these statements constituted proof that Sanders either did not recognize the essentially repressive nature of Castro’s government, or that he was caught up in revolutionary nostalgia.

I spent a few feverish days trying to provide Sanders with a set of ideas on how to approach the issue. In my view, he should avoid talking about Castro, use questions about these remarks as an opportunity to make his ideas about socialism clearer while explaining that people did not have to identify as “socialists” to support his campaign. He could highlight his long and well-documented defense of civil liberties in the United States. He could emphasize the setback that Trump’s policies represented regarding the Obama administration’s diplomatic opening toward Cuba and how this served to reinforce the most repressive wing of the Cuban government.

As a candidate, Obama also faced accusations—many of them racially charged—of being out of touch with mainstream American politics. In 2008, a video of his church pastor, Jeremiah Wright, saying “God damn America” surfaced, and Obama responded with a moving, nuanced speech about the complexities of race in the country that distanced him from his pastor and displayed great political skill. This calmed fears about Obama’s “unelectability” and showed that he knew how to navigate the obstacles put in his way. I thought the Cuba issue would give Sanders a similar opportunity that we could take advantage of. But in a debate a couple of days later, he basically reiterated his previous position, circling around criticizing American interventionism in Latin America. Again, everything he said was true, and even morally correct, but it fed into a broader perception, I think, that he didn’t have the skill he would need in the months ahead. Among other things, this made him an “unacceptable” candidate in the general election, leading voters and the party to their verdict on Super Tuesday.

In 2016, Sanders stayed in the primary race even when it was clear he had no chance of winning, seeking to maintain his influence on the party platform. This year, he made a different choice. The spread of the coronavirus and the various forms of lockdowns and social distancing put in place to combat it made voting dangerous. (Still, in Wisconsin, where I currently live, the Republican legislature and judges rejected the Democratic governor’s attempts to delay the election until it could be held safely.) Because of the staggered primary voting schedule, many states still had elections pending. Rather than put people at risk, Sanders dropped out of the race and decided to throw his support behind Biden.

Although Sanders and Biden have been personal friends for some time, Biden does not have much credibility on the left. He has a reputation as a mainstream Democrat. But he has come to realize that the support and enthusiasm Sanders generated has become a significant part of the party, and he must adapt to this new context. Against the backdrop of multiple crises, including the federal government’s catastrophic response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the potentially destructive effects of climate change, many young voters fear that Biden does not share their sense of urgency. But unlike Clinton in 2016, Biden has invited members of Sanders’ campaign staff to join his team . Biden has also tried to incorporate some of Sanders’ and Warren’s policy proposals, hoping to generate some enthusiasm among Sanders’ youthful base . In May, Biden and Sanders jointly announced the formation of unified task forces to develop the party’s policy platform , with three out of eight members chosen by Sanders.

During the pre-campaign, Biden struggled to attract large, enthusiastic crowds. But with the coronavirus making large campaign events impossible, mass gatherings are likely to be less relevant to the November results. In my hometown of Madison, I have yet to see a lawn sign supporting Biden, but I did see a few in support of “Any Able-Bodied Adult 2020.” Current polls suggest that lying low and not being Trump should already be a winning strategy, though the 2016 result warns against overconfidence.

Organizations on the left, meanwhile, are divided.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has refused to endorse Biden. Critics say this decision will doom DSA to irrelevance in the years to come (although it is unclear whether Biden would have wanted or benefited from DSA’s endorsement).

Democratic Socialists of America - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Some socialists see Sanders’s defeat as a sign of the limits of such electoral strategies within the Democratic Party and have pinned their hopes on a third party. However, beyond a few prominent commentators, the vast majority of Sanders’ supporters will vote for Biden in November. The mixed response on the left in some ways shows that the “cult of Bernie” imagined by some critics was no such thing: his supporters are thinking for themselves and not even necessarily following the lead of Sanders, who has been clear on the importance of electing Biden. But whatever they do, members and organizations on the left will have to look to the future.

Sanders has brought many leading lights of the American left into positions in the political world that were unthinkable a few years ago.
Among them, perhaps, is his likely successor as the symbolic leader of the American left: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Unlike Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez is not ambiguous about her place in the Democratic Party, although she said in January that “in any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America we are.”
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It is a statement that sums up the challenge that the American left will always face: without constitutional reforms or changes to the electoral system, it will have to participate in a party that is not a left-wing party. Still, there are those who are hopeful. In May, it was announced that Ocasio-Cortez will serve on the special advisory body on climate change. And, looking to the future, she possesses formidable political talent. “The way she expresses herself seeks to create a majority on terms that Bernie is not interested in,” said Max Berger, a progressive member of Warren’s team. “If Bernie is Moses, then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is Joshua.”
In this case, perhaps someone less burdened by the legacy of the past will be able to carry the flag of the future.
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La izquierda estadounidense después de Sanders | Nueva Sociedad

Las consecuencias del gran desempeño de Bernie Sanders en las primarias no se disiparán fácilmente. En gran medida, ganó la «batalla de las ideas» dentro del Partido Demócrata y logró desplazarlo hacia la izquierda. Ahora se avecina un fuerte debate sobre las estrategias que deberá adoptar la...

nuso.org

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The pragmatism of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:​

The congresswoman has moderated her rhetoric in the five and a half years since she was elected and has evolved from the margins to the center of the Democratic Party.​

Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaking at the U.S. House of Representatives.

JAVIER DE LA SOTILLA; WASHINGTON; 09/16/2024

A week after winning her election to Congress for her New York district , Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez staged a sit-in with 200 other climate activists in 2018 at the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The youth revolt, which demanded that the Democratic establishment make the climate emergency a priority, was a statement of intent: a new progressive generation had arrived at the Capitol to challenge the party establishment .

Alongside Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, the American left had managed to increase its share of representation in Congress, under the spiritual leadership of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and had united in a hopeful group of young politicians who called themselves The Squad. That generation, which prided itself on being independent of the powerful lobbies of the fossil industry, carried the Green New Deal energy transition as its banner and, making trouble from the margins of the party, sought far-reaching transformations in an aging Congress.

Two years later, at the 2020 Democratic convention, Ocasio-Cortez had just 90 seconds to endorse Sanders in the Democratic primaries.
The party, fearful that a left-wing candidate would alienate moderates and facilitate Donald Trump’s re-election, threw its support behind Joe Biden, who went on to win the nomination and the election in November. After his victory, the Democrats signed a truce, and Biden and Sanders created joint working groups to define the policies of the new administration. Ocasio-Cortez participated in those decisive meetings.

Four years later, at last month’s Chicago convention, the progressive gave a prime-time speech lasting more than half an hour , preceding former candidate Hillary Clinton and winning over thousands of attendees, who chanted her name as she defended Biden’s mandate, Kamala Harris’ presidential ambitions and warned of a return of Trump, who “would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his pockets and greasing those of his friends on Wall Street.”

That speech, more focused on the dangers of the Republican than on the defense of progressive policies, was the signature of the pragmatism of a politician who aspires, in her own words, to “change the party from within” and progressively gain power shares in the Democratic apparatus. This does not imply a change in her ideology, but an adaptation of her speech: if before she addressed the young university students of New York, now she addresses an entire country and praises a candidate who defends the extraction of oil through fracking, rejects universal public health care and promises to limit the right to asylum and to deploy more national guards on the border.

The Democratic Socialists of America, the party's leftmost group, withdrew its support for his stance on Israel.​

Ocasio-Cortez was one of the first congresswomen to speak out against what she called a “genocide” in Gaza and called for an end to the military aid to Israel that the Biden administration is defending. But those differences have not prevented her from giving her unconditional support to Harris, which has earned her criticism from the pro-Palestinian sector. While she assured inside the United Center stadium in Chicago that Harris is “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bring the hostages home,” thousands of protesters outside the venue chanted at her and other members of the Squad as one of the facilitators of the massacre of more than 40,000 Palestinians.

In response to these stances, the Democratic Socialists of America, the leftmost group in the Democratic Party, withdrew their support for her re-election to Congress on November 5, when, in addition to the White House, the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate will be up for renewal. In a long statement, the socialists accused her of “deep betrayal” after participating in an event with leaders of the Jewish community against “anti-Semitism” in the protests that have proliferated this year on university campuses across the country. At a recent event in the Bronx with Senator Sanders, dozens of protesters interrupted her speech to accuse her of being a “fraud.”

Democratic Socialists of America - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Ocasio-Cortez's pragmatism is explained by the exceptional political moment the country is experiencing and by the party's urgency to show itself united in the face of an ulterior evil: Trump's victory in the elections. The congresswoman has evolved from activism to institutional politics in the five and a half years she has been serving in Congress, during which she has held leadership positions on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, as well as on the Natural Resources Committee, from which she has worked hand in hand with the Biden Administration in the development of legislation.

Over the past six years, the left has expanded its representation, with the election of members such as Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Greg Casar and Summer Lee, but it has become more institutionalised and its discourse has moderated. The truce within the Democratic Party, which tries to hide its deep divisions on social, environmental and geopolitical issues, will continue until the November elections, which will decide the future of the country and the party itself. If the centrist turn that Harris has also taken in her speeches proves ineffective in the elections, in the event of a Trump victory, it is expected that the Squad will revive the combative spirit that characterised its origins and push the party, once again, to the left.

Read also

Kamala Harris defends her pivot to the center in her first interview as a candidate on CNN​

JAVIER DE LA SOTILLA

The Democratic Unity Convention Against the Cult of the Republican Leader​

JAVIER DE LA SOTILLA

Harris leads in polls after debate, but holds back hope: “We start at a disadvantage”​

JAVIER DE LA SOTILLA

Trump vows “mass deportations” of Haitian migrants after claiming they eat pets​

EUROPA PRESS

El pragmatismo de Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Una semana después de ganar las elecciones al Congreso como representante de su distrito de Nueva York, la demócrata Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez organizó en el 2018 una

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Evaluating Yolanda Díaz's management​

By Luis Molina Temboury | March 14, 2022

Yolanda Díaz - Wikipedia

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Communist Party of Spain - Wikipedia

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Sumar (electoral platform) - Wikipedia

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In his book A People Betrayed , historian Paul Preston explains, with a wealth of episodes, that during the last century and a half the Spanish elites have been an obstacle to progress due to their corruption and ineptitude. And that this unfortunate attitude has caused serious social problems that the same elites have tried to resolve through repression, sometimes using extreme violence.

The bloody Franco dictatorship (Preston provides extensive documentation on this in other books) was a period of intense exercise of both baseness, although the arrival of the Opus Dei technocrats significantly reduced the level of ineptitude. Ineptitude diminished rapidly after the new democratic consensus, but with niches of dramatic growth, as during the long gestation of the financial-real estate bubble, whose responsible watchdogs did not want or did not know how to see in the data that they sang for soleares. The consequence was that, once again, many at the bottom paid the price for the ineptitude or corruption of a few at the top, in addition to suffering in their ears the tiresome sermon of collective responsibility. The real culprits got off scot-free this time, always so flamenco, and they got away with it, advising painful measures that they would not suffer. A classic.

Corruption, which during Franco's regime remained at stratospheric levels thanks to an extensive collaborative network between economic and political power, struggled to remain rooted after the Transition. Like incompetence, both vices know how to protect and succeed each other well through a network of complicit silence, if not mafia-like practices, which delays the true knowledge of History. It took us many years to learn of the foundational and endemic corrupt nature of the PP, we are still in it, of the adventures of Pujol, the protégé on the left and right to obtain political gain, or of some in the PSOE, whose practices were metastasizing throughout Andalusia. The process of knowing the truth is even slower at the top of the State, the latest episode with a King Emeritus who was once exemplary and now silent, enjoying his dark fortune as if nothing had happened... in the happy company of kings and princes like him.

Looking at the glass half full, it can be said that, although with exasperating delay, the corruption and ineptitude of the elites has diminished considerably due to the denunciation of the press and the action of justice, although the Spanish people continue to watch brand new chapters, waiting for explanations and apologies that take a long time to arrive and putting up with the denial of the obvious, the complicit silence or the you more of the politicians.

Social dialogue
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In civilized countries, and following the recommendations of international organizations, the ideal is that labor issues are resolved by consensus through social dialogue between the two parties in a potential conflict: representatives of employers and workers. It is evident that this system favors social peace and progress, so the role of politicians should be to encourage and bless with the norm the possible consensus.

Spain is a country where social dialogue has been improving and is currently working reasonably well. One only has to see the patience and responsibility of union representatives in moderating their demands in crisis situations or the concessions of employers to achieve a consensus favourable to workers when the economy improves, as has happened with the latest labour reform.

The problem arises when politicians in the style described by Preston and the usual elites, turning on their media loudspeakers, instead of celebrating agreements, position themselves against one of the parties, mainly the workers, in order to dynamite the dialogue. Take for example what happened with the increases in the minimum wage to which I referred in this article , an issue in which the mercenary ideologues of the big companies disguised as technical economists, the neoliberals accustomed to lying as an argument, on this occasion accompanied by other technicians from intermediary companies whose activity consists precisely in squeezing workers who receive the minimum wage, or the Governor of the Bank of Spain and his experts, systematically positioned against the workers, do not cease to proclaim misfortunes for the increases in the minimum wage, even though they contradict the evidence of the data.

For those who think that the consensus on minimum wage increases is broken by the employers' association, which has done nothing but give in to the powerful media avalanche and then join in, it should be remembered that, in July 2018, within the framework of the IV Agreement for Employment and Collective Bargaining, the employers' association and the unions reached an agreement to increase the minimum wage to 1,000 euros in 14 instalments in 2020. That is exactly the scandalous and dangerous figure now set by the Government in 2022, with the approval of the unions, but now without the employers' association, at the end of a pandemic that has mainly affected workers with the lowest salaries and with a record number of employed workers, to the discredit of those who deny the beneficial effects of the increases.

It is no coincidence that the CEOE president is now demanding that electricity prices not be affected by the rise in gas prices, nor that his opinion coincides with the offensive of the electricity lobby, perhaps even more powerful than the banking lobby, which has brought its “prestigious technical economists” out of their austerity -seeking hiding place to urgently defend the same nonsense in the media. The businessmen who suffer from the brutal rise in electricity prices, whose utility consists in fattening the obscene profits of the large electricity companies at the cost of the collapse of many energy-consuming companies, must have been amazed by the opinion of their president, but it seems that where there is a captain, the sailor does not command.

The processing of labor reform
View attachment 19060993
The passage of the latest labour reform through Congress was an episode that should be included as an appendix in a possible reissue of Preston's book, as it clearly confirms his arguments. It is rare to witness an open-chested battle between the corrupt and inept against the hard-working Spanish people, although the recent crisis of the PP could suggest that we are facing a new cycle in which both defects, to the greater astonishment of the audience, shamelessly air their differences in public.

For the processing of the latest reform, an unprecedented pact in which workers gain rights, this time the best allies were available. The document had been agreed upon, in an exercise of tenacity and patience by the Minister of Labour (you can see where the title is going), between a modern employers' association determined to leave behind the years of entrenchment and some corrupt prisoners and majority unions aware that it is better to consolidate something less than to go back much further later due to a probable revengeful change of the norm.

The three parties had previously been the protagonists of a greater feat, when they agreed to avoid layoffs in the face of the massive cessation of work activity due to COVID-19. The cruel nightmare that we would have had to endure if they had not agreed to support millions of families by resorting to ERTES can be imagined from the data in graph G.1 below. For now, hats off!

After having saved jobs in the face of the greatest labour crisis since the post-war period and then having held out at the negotiating table to design a better future for the people, one could begin to think of a well-deserved monument to the protagonists and collaborators who had made the new reform possible, but... not so fast, the approval of Congress was still missing. Some optimists, blinded by the success of the negotiation and fleetingly forgetting that stepmother Spain prone to bringing out its two demons, glimpsed a broad consensus, but the story would be different, more realistic and traditional.

In a Dalinian-Berlangian exercise, inept and/or corrupt deputies burst in to make Spanish history again. Needless to say, the Francoist extreme right was in favor of boycotting the law: the worse, the better. The right of the PP yearned for its previous law excluding unions, so its deputies would not give in either, even if the new law was signed by the businessmen. Nor would the patriotic separatists on one side or the other, who, confident that others would get involved for them, once again made use of their nationalist blinkers so as not to see the working people on either side and to demonstrate once again their power to annoy. The deputies of the dying Ciudadanos party offered to lend a hand, thank goodness, but it was still not enough to guarantee approval. A couple more votes had to be added, which were desperately sought from the two UPN deputies, the coalition with Ciudadanos and the PP of the Navarrese regionalists, who, by exchanging a few cards, finally joined the task, again, thank goodness, just barely. But there was still another but. Just at the time of the vote, both deputies suffered a fit of ineptitude, corruption or perhaps a combination, and surprisingly voted the opposite of what they had promised. The Spanish people were once again stunned to witness a reissue of the “tamayazo”, which condemned the people of Madrid to decades of unbridled corruption, this time on a national scale and in the Congress of Deputies.

Had it not been for the hand of God, like that of Maradona for the Argentines in that football World Cup, materialized this time in the finger of a PP deputy who insisted on repeatedly clicking on the option he did not want, the Spanish people would have seen once again that history repeats itself, the social agents who architected the reform would have been left with nothing after so many months of effort, and it is likely that the minister would have thrown in the towel in the face of such nonsense, causing an unnecessary political crisis in the midst of the economic crisis caused by the pandemic and on the verge of another that would come from Putin's war.

Employment management by the 2nd Vice President and Minister of Labour
View attachment 19060988
Let us now turn to the history of data. Some insist that past data with “adjusted simulations” provide better conclusions than the known data of the present. This magical method, capable of fulfilling wishes, was widely used by the representatives of the men in black after the bubble crisis, who defended the disastrous results of their wage devaluation policies with the argument that, according to their complex models, if these measures had not been applied, the data would have been worse.

Although I love science fiction, when it comes to evaluating political action I prefer to avoid time travel, which is even more mind-blowing if it is backwards, and to rely on published statistical data. This is what I did in this article , which verified the disproportionate temporary nature of employment in Spain compared to the EU with data published by EUROSTAT, or in this other one mentioned above , in which I explained that according to official Spanish statistics on the labour market, increases in the minimum wage have not destroyed employment in Spain, but have created it in all areas where there are rumours or simulations of something else.

To answer the question in the title, we have statistical series that stand out for their immediacy, such as those on Social Security affiliation or summaries of registered unemployment and contracts, which can be known just a couple of days after the end of the month and which have the advantage of being mandatory administrative records. Either you are or you are not, without sampling or mathematical complexities.

The first verification chart, which condenses more than fifteen years of employment history, represents the evolution of employment according to Social Security affiliation data between January 2007 and February 2022.

In G.1, it can be seen that the peak of employment during the financial-real estate bubble occurred in July 2007, when 19,493,050 members were registered according to the monthly average of the daily data. During the PSOE Government, the bubble burst, causing an abrupt fall in employment in construction that dragged down employment in industry and, to a lesser extent, in services. The fall in employment continued to a minimum of 16,150,747 members in February 2013.

Only since 2014 did employment begin to rise steadily, until 2019, shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic, when it recovered the maximum level of the bubble, no less than twelve years later, but having generated a bigger problem. The excessive and chronic temporary nature of employment worsened with the labour reform of 2012, and the growth of inequality due to wage devaluation added a new distinctive scourge to Spain in the European tail end: an alarming level of job insecurity and poverty.

Redirecting labour regulations that had driven a significant percentage of well-educated young people from Spain, that had condemned 30% of the population to precarious employment, that had been driving unsustainable pockets of child poverty even in households with workers in employment, that, in short, had been increasing an inequality that not only hampered the progress of the people, but also the economy itself, which had become a jammed machine that sucked wealth upwards and distributed poverty downwards, was a major challenge for whoever was going to pilot labour policy in the apparently fragile coalition government.

Minister Yolanda Díaz arrived at the Ministry of Labour in January 2020, but her first task was not to develop the regulatory reform to alleviate temporary and precarious employment because the pandemic broke out. As has been said, the mandatory confinement left millions of workers without activity, which threatened a tremendous wave of layoffs that was saved by using the ERTES, an old resource that appeared in a 1995 regulation that was modified several times, the last in the PP's labour reform in February 2012. Nobody had foreseen that the ERTES would serve to save a crisis of these proportions, so many economists celebrate the firm and rapid decision of the Sánchez Government and the willingness of the social partners to use this resource and save people before the bills, a 180-degree turn with respect to the previous sad and failed labour policy.

The new policy proved to be a resounding success, saving thousands of companies and millions of working-class families from ruin. In February 2022, 19,694,272 average Social Security affiliates were registered, the ninth consecutive monthly historical record, unexpectedly recorded two years after the greatest labour crisis since the post-war period. In those two years, the labour market has absorbed and recovered 4.7 million jobs, 3.5 million that were inactive in a situation of ERTE and an additional 1.2 million that were lost in the crisis. These data already seem sufficient to highlight Yolanda Díaz's aptitude at the head of the Ministry of Labour and to establish her provisional position in the best history of Spain yet to be written, but let's continue.

To better visualise what has happened, G.2 represents the variations in the monthly affiliation data compared to the same period of the previous year, which cushion the sawtooth of the employment curve in G.1, significant of this exceptional rate of Spanish temporary employment that disproportionately creates and destroys employment depending on the month of the year.

In G.2 it is clearly seen that the recovery of employment after the explosion of the real estate bubble took no less than six years, until 2014, when after its initial sharp decline, employment was recovering under the Zapatero government, but the "inevitable" austerity policy imposed by Brussels even before the arrival of the PP in December 2011 brought it down again, causing a second enormous accumulated pocket of destruction that was reflected in an unemployment rate that reached almost 27% in the first quarter of 2013. An unusual figure.
It is also clear that since 2014, when the sadistic measures applied to people to save the numbers of finances whose loss of control had caused the crisis culminated, employment has picked up speed, one would say not because of the measures but in spite of them, when the torture hit rock bottom. After the new sharp collapse of employment due to the pandemic, managed in a spectacularly effective manner with the use of ERTES, employment has taken off again with a force never seen before and also on an increasing trend.
But, as has been said, the minister's objective upon her arrival at the ministry had not been to solve the unforeseeable employment crisis caused by COVID-19, but rather the problem of temporary and precarious employment, for which the labour reform was designed. Once it has come into force, it is time to verify with data whether it is being effective.

The Minister's management of excessive temporary and precarious employment
View attachment 19060994
In order to assess the reduction in the temporary employment rate that the labour reform aims for, the EPA for the next few quarters will have to be consulted. A semester would begin to give good clues and a year should be enough to draw conclusions. Regarding the reduction in precariousness, we will have to wait a long time. The Survey of Living Conditions, the Annual Survey of Salary Structure, the Decile of Salaries in Main Employment or the statistics of the Tax Agency will still take a year and a half or more to give a definitive answer. In the meantime, we will have to draw on other statistics with less lag that can give good clues, such as the SEPE statistics on employment contracts, whose series are handled below.

In G.3, the employment and contract series have been represented in the form of indices, taking as a starting point the period before the first crisis (January 2007) and using twelve-term moving averages. Moving averages are a simple statistical tool that consists of representing the data of a period as the average of that period and other previous ones, in this case the previous 11 months plus the current one, to cushion the fluctuations, which, being extreme in the case of contracts, make it difficult to visualise trends. In these smoothed curves it is clearly observed that after the bubble crisis, labour contracts decreased sharply, that they began to recover with the Zapatero Government, but that with the aforementioned turn of the screw due to austerity during the PP mandate they fell again. From 2013, hiring was encouraged, with a spectacular rise that for a bad analyst would be very good news, but it is not for someone who knows the abnormal behaviour of Spain with respect to the EU (again the article on temporality ).
It is not good news for employment that the number of contracts increases sharply if there are many of them of short or very short duration that are frequently terminated, which had been happening for almost 40 years before the last reform. It is not worth celebrating that many chickens enter the coop (contracts, in this case) without checking that they are not leaving through another channel. So the explosion in hiring after the 2012 labour reform was not good news. It was, of course, that employment increased, but it left as a consequence this new increase in temporary employment, chronically very high, and that precariousness soared, due to excessive labour rotation which, added to the policy of wage devaluation, mortgaged the life plans of a large portion of Spanish workers.

The comparison in the months of February represented in G.4 (the monthly fluctuation is very high, so it is advisable to compare the same months) shows that at the beginning of the recovery in 2014 the contracts had decreased compared to the times of the bubble (1.1 million in total vs. 1.4 million then) and in a greater proportion the permanent ones. In February 2007 the permanent contracts were 12.5% of the contracts and in February 2014 9%, a symptom of worsening, not so much because there were fewer contracts, as has been commented, but because the temporary nature of the contracts, which was chronically high, increased.
February 2007, in the midst of the bubble, was not a month in which temporary employment was low. The chronic defect of the Spanish labour market that had been dragging on since 1986, a very high rate of temporary employment, remained between 1992 and 2006 at around 34%, more than 20 pp. above the average rate in the EU. In February 2020, the rate differential had fallen, standing at 13 pp. above, but still double the European rate. If the rate was then lower than in the times of the bubble, it was not because of a policy that sought to achieve it, since it had been growing after the PP's labour reform, but because of the very dynamics of the excess of temporary employment in Spain, with a disproportionate destruction of temporary employment in crises, and a greater creation of temporary employment in recovery cycles. The PP's labour reform did not correct this defect, but rather enhanced it, sharpening labour turnover.
The effects of the PP's labour reform would be noticeable in that temporary contracts rose sharply. In February 2020, just before the pandemic, there were 420,000 more monthly temporary contracts than at the beginning of the recovery, in February 2014. The number of permanent contracts was similar to that of the bubble times, 180,000, but their weight in the total number of contracts was lower, due to the greater number of contracts (11.1% in February 2020 vs. 12.5% in February 2007). The hiring situation was therefore very bad before the pandemic, when the first coalition government came into being.
After two years of Yolanda Díaz's management (between February 2020 and February 2022), with employment at record levels after overcoming its biggest drop, temporary contracts have fallen significantly (by around 300,000) and permanent contracts have risen (140,000), which is good news in both senses, which can be summed up by the fact that the proportion of permanent contracts out of the total number of contracts in February 2022 was 21.9%, a figure never seen before in the entire historical series.

The SEPE data also allow us to check the evolution of temporary contracts according to their duration, which is represented in G.5. The first thing that draws attention in this graph is the large portion of temporary contracts of indefinite duration, which should decrease considerably after the latest labour reform, which has repealed contracts for work or service, in which the time was not previously fixed.
But the most striking thing by far in G.5 is the increase in the percentage of contracts lasting one week or less, which went from representing 13.6% of all contracts in February 2007 to 27.2%, exactly double, thirteen years later; from 191,805 contracts, a figure that was already very high at the time, to 433,874, an incredible magnitude. Before the last labour reform in Spain, a huge volume of temporary contracts were signed each month, 1.42 million in February 2020, and of these, 30.6% were very short-term. Another serious partial problem to be solved when the portfolio in the Ministry of Labour changed.
Since Yolanda Díaz arrived at the Ministry until two years later, with the pandemic in decline, temporary contracts as a whole fell by 20.4%, and those of seven days or less duration by 37.8%. With record levels of employment. Compared to the time when employment began to recover, in 2014, temporary contracts have deflated much of the excess generated by the PP's 2012 labor reform, but with a very significant difference: in February 2014 the average number of Social Security affiliates was 16,212,304, while in February 2022 there were 19,694,272, three and a half million more employed people.

An early indicator of the effects of the labour reform on the temporary employment rate, which will be provided by the official quarterly EPA, can be observed by observing the monthly evolution of the percentage of permanent contracts out of the total, which is represented in G.6.
A clear indication that the reform is having immediate effects is that this proportion (blue line) jumped in January 2022 to 15%, to continue its progression in February 2022 to a historic 22%.
Given that the fluctuations are very marked throughout the series, and even more so after the entry into force of the latest reform, another interesting series to observe in the coming months will be the 12-term moving average. In this smoothed curve, represented in red in the graph, it is clearly observed that after the worst of the pandemic, the proportion of permanent contracts has a very upward trend, which will foreseeably be reflected in an improvement in the temporary nature of employment in the next EPA data.

And to finish with the verifications on the data, graph G.7 represents the long series, from before the bubble, of the evolution of monthly temporary contracts according to their duration, leading monthly indicators that can also give good clues about the foreseeable results in the medium and long term of the labour reform.
The data on contracts broken down by duration are not published two days after the end of the month, like the monthly summaries. They take a few more days, but in any case they allow early monitoring of the possible effects of the labour reform. The data for February 2022 were published on 11 March.
The graph shows the explosion of very short-term contracts (seven days or less) following the PP's labour reform, and the evolution of permanent contracts, the other largest volume of monthly contracts (see G.5), which corresponds mainly to work and service contracts, which should fall considerably from April with the new reform.
For the moment, in view of G.7, it can be anticipated that even before the reform, presumably due to a reinforcement of the fraud inspection work in this type of contract, positive results were perceived in the case of open-ended contracts, which registered a monthly downward trend with a record level of employment. And positive results were also recorded in very short-term contracts, 7 days or less, which, although with an upward trend after the pandemic, still maintained a level much lower than two years earlier with a higher level of employment. In February 2022, the series of moving averages of very short-term contracts shows a stabilization, which is also a very good sign, which will have to be followed in the coming months.

Summary
View attachment 19060995
Yolanda Díaz's management at the head of the Ministry of Labour and Social Economy has been of monumental excellence.

From her ministry, the collapse of employment during the COVID-19 crisis was avoided, which rose in a surprisingly short time to historic levels; avant-garde regulations have been approved, even at an international level, such as the rider law , or urgent, such as the teleworking law; the reduction of inequality among the most vulnerable workers has been pushed by defending and applying increases in the minimum wage; social dialogue and collective bargaining have been successfully promoted and precariousness in hiring has been reduced even before the regulatory change of the labour reform. Since it came into force, the data, just a couple of months later, indicate that the reform will mark a before and after in the fight against job insecurity and excessive temporary employment.
The minister's merit is all the more remarkable for having had to face a powerful gang of politicians who, for their own personal interests, have positioned themselves against a historic social pact between the representatives of workers and employers. She has demonstrated that she has baraka (this cannot be verified with data, but rather indicatively by facts) by miraculously overcoming a corrupt political intrigue expressly designed to overthrow the reform and remove her from office. And she has also overcome stubborn resistance within her own ranks, obtaining the unanimity of that part of the left that does not conceive the regulatory framework of the labour market as a constructive place for dialogue and consensus, but as a disorderly field of normative revenge.

Corollary
View attachment 19060991
Although in Spanish politics it is not well-regarded that someone at the top makes an effort and makes things better for people (see the atmosphere in the Congress of Deputies against the Sánchez Government before, during and after the pandemic), the case of the management of Minister Yolanda Díaz at the head of the Ministry of Labor is worthy of highlighting, thanking and celebrating.

Here's a toast to her from someone who is not a member of any party.

Let us hope that the minister will have the opportunity to continue to manage the foreseeable negative effects on the labour market of the terrible war that is ravaging Europe so well. The protection of workers and employers against the fluctuations in prices and supplies or the labour integration of refugees will give her the opportunity to once again demonstrate what she is capable of.
View attachment 19060985
Published in eldiario.es , Work / Employment , Work and employment

About Luis Molina Temboury​

Economist specializing in statistical analysis of inequality. Convinced that to reverse the escalation of extreme inequality we will have to agree on a limit to wealth. The sooner the better. Member of Economists Against the Crisis.

Evaluando la gestión de Yolanda Díaz | Economistas Frente a la Crisis

En su libro Un pueblo traicionado, el historiador Paul Preston explica, con profusión de episodios, que durante el último siglo y medio las élites españolas han sido un obstáculo para el progreso por su corrupción e ineptitud. Y que esa desgraciada actitud ha provocado graves problemas sociales...

economistasfrentealacrisis.com

Inheritance, housing, parenting: Yolanda Díaz's proposals for the 2025 budget :​

September 16, 2024

Sumar leader and second vice president and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, speaks at the event in which Sumar presented its proposals for the 2025 General State Budget. EFE/ JJ Guillén

Yolanda Díaz - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Communist Party of Spain - Wikipedia

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Sumar (electoral platform) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Madrid (EFE).- Sumar will propose to the PSOE to include in the future budgets for 2025 an increase in taxes for large estates and large inheritances, as well as a ban on buying homes in stressed areas if they are not for habitual residence or affordable rent.

Spanish Socialist Workers' Party - Wikipedia

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Second Vice President and leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz, presented this Monday a “core document” of proposals that will form the basis of the budget negotiation with the PSOE, with which she intends to tackle inequality and modernise the country without forgetting the “plurinational structure”.

Díaz has defended as one of the main pillars of her proposal the need for a tax reform that involves extending the solidarity tax on large fortunes to assets of more than one million euros (instead of three, as currently).

Yolanda Díaz: Workers' mental health gains rights and increases productivity

And the creation of a solidarity tax for large inheritances (those exceeding one million euros, excluding the habitual residence).

They also propose maintaining taxes on banking and energy companies without incorporating bonuses for sustainable investments and eliminating "privileges" for SICAVs - establishing a capital concentration limit - and REITs - reducing their tax bonus.

In terms of personal income tax, Sumar advocates introducing an additional bracket for work income of more than 150,000 euros and progressively increasing the taxation of capital income.

Yolanda Díaz, at the event where Sumar presented its proposals for the 2025 Budget.

In addition, the party advocates lowering VAT on hairdressers, veterinary centres, nappies, gluten-free products and electricity, but raising it on private education and private health insurance.

To make progress in the ecological transition, the proposals include increasing taxes on non-habitual housing, a solidarity tax on private planes, yachts and luxury cars, and a special tax on kerosene, as well as maintaining the bonus for public transport and a 'social leasing' for electric vehicles.

Ban the purchase of housing in tense areas​

The right to housing “is a fundamental right that is not being fulfilled,” lamented Díaz, who has proposed temporarily banning the purchase of housing in stressed areas if it is not intended for primary residence or affordable rental.

It also proposes raising VAT on tourist apartments to 21%, extending long-term rental rights to seasonal and room-based rentals, and limiting deductions for rentals in personal income tax in certain cases.

In order to force the autonomous communities to apply the housing law, Sumar advocates making housing aid conditional on the application of instruments to control rental prices and complementing this measure with a sanctioning regime.

Family benefit for raising children of 200 euros​

The group's social proposals include paying four weeks of parental leave per child, extending birth leave to 20 weeks, increasing investment in dependency, and moving towards universal education from zero to three years.

They also advocate a family benefit for raising children of 200 euros per month until the age of 18, improving the minimum vital income, raising the public indicator of income for multiple purposes (IPREM) or extending the advantages of large families to single-parent families.

In terms of health, their proposals include the expansion of oral health benefits, aid for the purchase of glasses and contact lenses, an increase in funding for primary care, and an increase in tobacco taxes.

Autonomous Communities' (Regional) financing​

As regards regional funding, Sumar requires AIReF to calculate, within a maximum period of six months, the funding deficits of the regions in order to activate the corresponding compensation mechanisms based on this data.

"There are autonomous communities that are underfunded," such as the Valencian Community, Aragon or Andalusia, Díaz argued, and that "is not debatable."

The document also proposes a specific taxation for cultural work, increasing resources for the fight against gender-based violence and raising the salaries of public employees.



This document will now be delivered to the PSOE and, once “a good agreement” is reached, both parties will “get to work to push the Budgets through” with the “conviction that we will be able to do it,” Díaz said.

Las propuestas de Yolanda Díaz para los presupuestos de 2025

La líder de Sumar, Yolanda Díaz propondrá al PSOE incluir en los presupuestos de 2025 propuestas sobre vivienda o grandes herencias.

efe.com

 

[right]

View attachment 19068042

Inheritance, housing, parenting: Yolanda Díaz's proposals for the 2025 budget :​

September 16, 2024

Sumar leader and second vice president and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, speaks at the event in which Sumar presented its proposals for the 2025 General State Budget. EFE/ JJ Guillén

Yolanda Díaz - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Communist Party of Spain - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Sumar (electoral platform) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Madrid (EFE).- Sumar will propose to the PSOE to include in the future budgets for 2025 an increase in taxes for large estates and large inheritances, as well as a ban on buying homes in stressed areas if they are not for habitual residence or affordable rent.

Spanish Socialist Workers' Party - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Second Vice President and leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz, presented this Monday a “core document” of proposals that will form the basis of the budget negotiation with the PSOE, with which she intends to tackle inequality and modernise the country without forgetting the “plurinational structure”.

Díaz has defended as one of the main pillars of her proposal the need for a tax reform that involves extending the solidarity tax on large fortunes to assets of more than one million euros (instead of three, as currently).

And the creation of a solidarity tax for large inheritances (those exceeding one million euros, excluding the habitual residence).

They also propose maintaining taxes on banking and energy companies without incorporating bonuses for sustainable investments and eliminating "privileges" for SICAVs - establishing a capital concentration limit - and REITs - reducing their tax bonus.

In terms of personal income tax, Sumar advocates introducing an additional bracket for work income of more than 150,000 euros and progressively increasing the taxation of capital income.

Yolanda Díaz, at the event where Sumar presented its proposals for the 2025 Budget.

In addition, the party advocates lowering VAT on hairdressers, veterinary centres, nappies, gluten-free products and electricity, but raising it on private education and private health insurance.

To make progress in the ecological transition, the proposals include increasing taxes on non-habitual housing, a solidarity tax on private planes, yachts and luxury cars, and a special tax on kerosene, as well as maintaining the bonus for public transport and a 'social leasing' for electric vehicles.

Ban the purchase of housing in tense areas​

The right to housing “is a fundamental right that is not being fulfilled,” lamented Díaz, who has proposed temporarily banning the purchase of housing in stressed areas if it is not intended for primary residence or affordable rental.

It also proposes raising VAT on tourist apartments to 21%, extending long-term rental rights to seasonal and room-based rentals, and limiting deductions for rentals in personal income tax in certain cases.

In order to force the autonomous communities to apply the housing law, Sumar advocates making housing aid conditional on the application of instruments to control rental prices and complementing this measure with a sanctioning regime.

Family benefit for raising children of 200 euros​

The group's social proposals include paying four weeks of parental leave per child, extending birth leave to 20 weeks, increasing investment in dependency, and moving towards universal education from zero to three years.

They also advocate a family benefit for raising children of 200 euros per month until the age of 18, improving the minimum vital income, raising the public indicator of income for multiple purposes (IPREM) or extending the advantages of large families to single-parent families.

In terms of health, their proposals include the expansion of oral health benefits, aid for the purchase of glasses and contact lenses, an increase in funding for primary care, and an increase in tobacco taxes.

Autonomous Communities' (Regional) financing​

As regards regional funding, Sumar requires AIReF to calculate, within a maximum period of six months, the funding deficits of the regions in order to activate the corresponding compensation mechanisms based on this data.

"There are autonomous communities that are underfunded," such as the Valencian Community, Aragon or Andalusia, Díaz argued, and that "is not debatable."

The document also proposes a specific taxation for cultural work, increasing resources for the fight against gender-based violence and raising the salaries of public employees.



This document will now be delivered to the PSOE and, once “a good agreement” is reached, both parties will “get to work to push the Budgets through” with the “conviction that we will be able to do it,” Díaz said.

Las propuestas de Yolanda Díaz para los presupuestos de 2025

La líder de Sumar, Yolanda Díaz propondrá al PSOE incluir en los presupuestos de 2025 propuestas sobre vivienda o grandes herencias.

efe.com

This is a mouthful.
You ought to shorten this down, and put it in a pamphlet.
In all seriousness I would love to read Marx or Trotsky.

 

[Eltitoguay]

Frente Polisario - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

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جبهة البوليساريو - ويكيبيديا

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Polisario Front - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Eltitoguay]

لجيش الصحراوي يستهدف قواعد دعم وتدخل لجيش الإحتلال بقطاعي المحبس وأمكالا​

El ejército saharaui ataca bases de apoyo e intervención enemigas en los sectores de Mahbes y Amgala​

The Sahrawi army attacks enemy support and intervention bases in the Mahbes and Amgala sectors​

ثلاثاء 17/09/2024 - 16:11

بئر لحلو (الأراضي المحررة) ، 17 سبتمبر 2024 (واص) - استهدفت مفارز متقدمة من مقاتلي جيش التحرير الشعبي الصحراوي قواعد للعدو ومراكز تدخل وتدريب بقطاعي المحبس وأمكالا ، مخلفة خسائر فادحة في الأرواح والمعدات .
وأوضح البلاغ العسكري الصادر عن المديرية المركزية للمحافظة السياسية لجيش التحرير الشعبي الصحراوي أن مفارز متقدمة نفذت أمس الإثنين و صباح اليوم الثلاثاء 17 سبتمبر 2024 أقصافا مستمرة و مركزة استهدفت قواعد العدو الامامية و الخلفية بقطاع المحبس ، حيث تم استهداف تخندقات الجيش الملكي بمناطق امحيبس التدريب و اعكد أركان بقطاع المحبس ، بالإضافة لقاعدة معادية بذات القطاع ما خلف خسائر معتبرة بين صفوف جيش الاحتلال .

واستهدف مقاتلونا الابطال بتاريخ الأربعاء 11 سبتمبر 2024 ما يسمى " وحدات التدخل والاسناد " التابعة لأحدى ألوية الجيش الملكي الجبان بمنطقة أمكلي الدشرة بقطاع أمكالا ، حيث استمر هذا القصف من 18:53 إلى حدود الساعة 19:10 وبشكل متواصل.
وكان حماة المجد قد نفذوا في وقت سابق بتاريخ الاثنين 02 سبتمبر 2024 ضربات مباشرة و " بسلاح مناسب " ، حيث تم استهداف تخندقات العدو و أبراج المراقبة و التجسس الخاصة بإحدى القواعد الأمامية التابعة للجيش الملكي بقطاع حوزة.
وأمام قوة و صلابة مقاتلينا الاشاوس و تشبثهم بعدالة القضية وقوة إيمانهم بحتمية النصر ، فإن جيش التحرير الشعبي الصحراوي مستمر و بكل إمكانياته في توجيه ضربات موجعة ومفاجئة تستهدف كل الأهداف المعادية المشروعة التابعة للجيش الملكي الجبان المحتل لبلادنا .(واص)​

Bir Lehlu (República Saharaui), 17 de septiembre de 2024 (SPS) –
Destacamentos de avanzada de del Ejército de Liberación Popular Saharaui (ELPS) han atacado este martes varias bases de apoyo e intervención ubicadas en los sectores de Mahbes y Amgala, respectivamente, dejando considerables pérdidas humanas y materiales.

Según el Parte de Guerra hecho público por el Departamento de Organización Política del Ejército de Liberación Popular Saharaui, destacamentos de avanzada de nuestro ejército han llevado a cabo ayer, lunes, y la mañana de este martes, 17 de septiembre de 2024, una serie de bombardeos continuos y concentrados contra varias bases de vanguardia y retaguardia ubicadas en el sector de Mahbes, específicamente en las regiones de Amheibis At-tadrib y Aagad Aragán, además de otra base enemiga instalada en el miso sector, causando enormes pérdidas en las filas de del ejército de ocupación.

En este sentido, cabe destacar que nuestros heroicos combatientes habían ejecutado una operación el pasado miércoles 11 de septiembre de 2024 que se prologó desde las 18:53 hasta las 19:10, y se dirigió contra la base de un batallón del ejército real de ocupación marroquí ubicada en la región de Amagli Adachra en el sector de Amgala.

Asimismo, las unidades del ELPS habían lanzado el pasado lunes, 2 de septiembre de 2024 una serie de ataques coordinados, utilizando el “armamento adecuado”, contra varios atrincheramientos y puestos de observación instalados en una base de vanguardia enemiga ubicada en el sector de Hauza.

De esta forma, nuestros heroicos combatientes, inspirados en la legitimidad de su lucha y con una fe inquebrantable en la victoria, continúan asestando duros golpes al enemigo y atacando blancos legítimos de las fuerzas de ocupación marroquíes a lo largo y ancho de nuestro terrarios ocupados. (SPS)

الجيش الصحراوي يستهدف قواعد دعم وتدخل لجيش الإحتلال بقطاعي المحبس وأمكالا | وكالة الأنباء الصحراوية (واص)

بئر لحلو (الأراضي المحررة) ، 17 سبتمبر 2024 (واص) - استهدفت مفارز متقدمة من مقاتلي جيش التحرير الشعبي الصحراوي قواعد للعدو ومراكز تدخل وتدريب بقطاعي المحبس وأمكالا ، مخلفة خسائر فادحة في الأرواح والمعدات .

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[Eltitoguay]

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Feminism and freedom: the struggle of Sahrawi women​

August 7, 2020, by DAUDEN Laura , SEINI BRAHIM CHABA

For more than forty years, women have been organizing and leading the resistance in the last hotbed of colonialism in Africa: Western Sahara. If during the years of war and struggle for survival, women were responsible for laying the foundations of the republic that was proclaimed in exile in one of the most inhospitable regions on the planet, today they have managed to establish one of the most progressive Arab societies from the point of view of gender equality. Their fight for rights from a postcolonial feminist perspective is not dissociated from the tireless search for freedom and self-determination for their people.

A homeland in exile​

Nothing is obvious about the situation in Western Sahara. For outside observers, accustomed to Eurocentric logic and theories, nothing in this context seems to respond to what is expected from their imaginations: an African colonizer, a republic founded in exile, a people that has survived for 41 years in the most inhospitable region of the desert, a UN mission with its hands tied in the face of the most serious violations of human rights, an international community complicit in the theft of a nation.

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Sahrawi women raise the Sahrawi flag during a speech by President Mohamed Abdelaziz. Tindouf, Algeria, 2009.

It is no different when one analyses, in particular, the role of Sahrawi women in the struggle for self-determination and the consolidation of their rights. Contrary to what Western and Islamophobic references may suggest, fuelled by a unique – and generally victimising – narrative about Arab women, they are the protagonists of what is seen as one of the most unique experiences of resistance in the world today.
In their construction, challenging previous experiences that point to an alleged incompatibility of the feminist agenda with the ideals of national liberation, the Sahrawi women show that independence and feminism, in their context, are inseparable and interdependent objectives. They also challenge the discourses that assign them an instrumentalized place in the political structure of the Polisario Front, the Sahrawi liberation movement.

The aim of this article is to review in a general way the main stages and areas of the struggle of Sahrawi women since the birth of the independence movement and the challenges that stand in the way of consolidating the rights that they have so hard won over the last forty years, always from a postcolonial or peripheral perspective.

Brief historical review of the conflict​

Intersectionality is key to understanding the Sahrawi women's movement: among the many lenses through which they can be seen, they are Arab, African, Muslim, refugees. Another marked characteristic, as Rocío Medina Martín (2014) points out, is the transgenerational and collective nature of their struggle, which is configured within the national liberation movement. Therefore, it is essential to briefly compile the key moments of this process that culminated in exile, on the one hand, and occupation, on the other.

The territory of Western Sahara was occupied by Spain at the end of the 19th century and incorporated into the metropolis with the status of province (number 53) in 1961. In that same decade of the 1960s, it entered the list of territories pending decolonization of the UN, at the same time it aroused the greed of the dictator Francisco Franco due to the discovery of important reserves of phosphate under its sands.

The mineral was withdrawn in 1972, as annexation claims by Morocco and Mauritania grew. In 1974, they appealed to the Hague Court for an advisory opinion to support their alleged right to the land. The favourable opinion was never forthcoming, as the Court believed that there was no sovereignty link between the fate of Western Sahara and those two countries.

The lack of legal support did not prevent the start of an occupation movement in the Sahara, backed by major powers such as France and the United States, immediately after the verdict and Franco's death. In an episode known as the Green March, more than 300,000 Moroccans marched in the capital of El Aaiun, marking the beginning of a conflict that would last more than 15 years.

The Sahrawis, organised in two large national liberation movements since the 1960s, first against Spanish power and then against Morocco and Mauritania, were expelled from their cities and fled across the desert towards neighbouring Algeria. On the way, they were bombed with napalm and white phosphorus and, once in the refuge, on 27 February 1976, they proclaimed their Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.

However, despite all the financial and military support behind the Moroccan offensive, the Polisario Front managed to secure positions and keep a large part of the territory under its control. This division of the country was crystallized in the 1980s with the construction by Morocco of a 2.2 thousand kilometer sand wall – a structure that to this day divides families and prevents the Sahrawis living in Algeria or in the territories controlled by the Polisario Front (the so-called liberated zones) from returning to their places of origin and longing.

In 1988, under the mediation of the UN, a ceasefire was signed and a referendum was proposed through which the Sahrawis could freely express their right to self-determination, choosing between the incorporation of the territory into Morocco or independence. Three years later, the UN established MINURSO, the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara. Its mandate has been renewed annually since then, without ever having managed to achieve the initial agreement.

While uncertainty and waiting persist in the diplomatic arena, the Sahrawis continue to work to increase international recognition of their struggle, either through the establishment of bilateral relations or by denouncing human rights violations in the occupied territories and the persistent plundering of their natural resources by Morocco. From exile, they are trying to lay the foundations for the society that will take shape when they finally achieve independence.

Sahrawi women on the front line of resistance​

The prominence of Sahrawi women, despite having been strengthened by the anti-colonial struggle, has roots in the Sahrawi tribal tradition itself. Although they are scarce, studies in this area reveal that Sahrawi society, compared with other contemporary Arab societies, has always reserved relatively wide spaces of freedom and action for women (Juliano, 1998) – a characteristic that can be explained, in part, by the nomadic and cattle-raising culture that imposed the prolonged absence of men.

According to Dolores Juliano (ibid.), “within this general horizon, we must also differentiate between the characteristics of traditional society, those acquired during the years under Spanish colonization and those developed in the 22 years of life in refugee camps.” According to the author, “at each moment the sexual division of labor has changed, as well as the possibilities, obligations and rights of each of the genders within the social structure.”

In this regard, it is necessary to highlight the important influence of the left-wing nationalist movements of that time in the formation of the Sahrawi resistance, historically linked, for example, to the pan-Arab ideals of Gamal Abder Nasser in Egypt and the Baath party in Syria.


As Arantza Chacón and María López Belloso (2011) explain, most nationalist parties had women’s sections, but in many cases, after independence, the women’s rights agenda was relegated to the background: “In general, they followed two paths: some states appropriated women’s associations that did nothing but reproduce the State’s discourses; in other cases, parties with a leftist ideology (communist and socialist) maintained women’s sections, since they understood that the demand for an improvement in the situation of women had to be one of the main plans of leftist parties (Belarbi, 2005)”. In these cases, the authors explain, there was an understanding that the patriarchal structure permeated not only societies, but those parties themselves.

One sign of how the Polisario Front structurally incorporated this issue in its early years is the fight against all types of tribalism, which it considered “a crime against the nation.” As Bengochea and Martínez Monfort (2012) recall, “in a tribal society based on inequality and organized by blood ties, the nationalist assumption of equality between all members of the community will be decisive in opening up a whole series of opportunities for excluded groups such as young people, women and slaves.”

The Front, in opposition to Spanish colonialism and its subaltern vision of Sahrawi women, "claims the status of 'free woman' as consubstantial to the Sahrawi national identity, so what should be done is to reestablish it" (idem).

In this context of ideological differentiation of the Polisario Front, the National Union of Sahrawi Women was born in 1974, a mass organization with national and international action.

Unión Nacional de Mujeres Saharauis - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

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National Union of Sahrawi Women - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Later, we will see how this Sahrawi women's movement, now organized and institutionalized, positions itself on the front line of resistance.

Construction of camps and fighting in the occupied zones​

Sahrawi women were key in the consolidation of the two nationalist movements that preceded the occupation of the territory by Morocco. In general, they were responsible for the subsequent affiliation of their husbands, sons and brothers, as well as being the coordinators of the recruitment of members and the organizers of the rallies.

Following the Moroccan invasion and the displacement of almost all men to fight (although there are also records of female combatants), the period began that researcher Embarka Hamoudi Hamdi (in Bogochea Tirado, 2013) organized into three stages: settlement in refugee camps (1976-1979), the effective empowerment of women (1979-1990), and the return of men (from 1991 onwards).

It should be noted that this classification ignores the role of women activists and human rights defenders who fight against the Moroccan government from the occupied cities. Internationally recognised figures such as Aminetu Haidar or Djimi El Ghalia, who paid for their resistance with imprisonment, forced disappearance and torture, have helped to build structures for the defence of human rights and denunciation of violations that continue to inspire new generations of Sahrawi women in the cities under Moroccan control.

Aminatou Haidar - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

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Aminatou Haidar - Wikipedia

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According to information provided by Medina Martín (2012), nearly 30% of the missing persons in the occupied territories of Western Sahara are women. They also represent 24.8% of the political prisoners released with the ceasefire in 1991.

In the four camps located in southwestern Algeria, women organized the reception, especially of other women, children and the elderly, and were trained to operate radios, drive and provide medical assistance, as well as to fight with light weapons (Bachir, 2008). In general, they were responsible for the reconstruction, in an extremely unfavourable context, of the Sahrawi social structures devastated by the war.

Schools, hospitals, cultural centres, local political institutions – since then, these areas have been occupied in a majority and prominent way by women. This successful effort was even recognised by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees as a model for other similar situations (UNHCR, 2001).

According to Chacón and López Belloso (2011), the urgent and comprehensive dedication of Sahrawi women to the conditions of the camps in the early years was a source of learning and recognition of their own capabilities, "however, day-to-day life and the need to respond to the immediate needs of the population meant that equally important issues, more related to their identity as women, their immediate and strategic interests as a group, as well as the political recognition of their activities, were relegated to the background."

The feminist movement's own agenda once again stands out with the creation of structures such as the 27 de Febrero school, conceived especially for the integral development of Sahrawi women, and with the celebration in 1985 of the first congress of the National Union of Sahrawi Women.

female participation in power structures​

The visible success of Sahrawi women in organizing the camps led to an increasing weight of the National Union of Sahrawi Women in the structure of the Polisario Front.

Created in 1974, one year before the Moroccan invasion, the UNMS set itself the challenge of “raising awareness among all women about their position in society and their role in national independence” and of “guiding women on the role to play in the independent Sahrawi nation and preserving the achievements made in the national liberation process” [ 1 ] , in a clear affirmation of its postcolonial purpose.

These objectives were facilitated by the permeable political structure that organizes the camps. As Sonia Rossetti (2008) points out, the intricate division between wilayas (provinces or camps) and dayras (each of the “municipalities” in a wilaya) creates multiple opportunities for women’s participation in the democratic process and allows even the most isolated camps to maintain a common political identity, based on the direct links of the dayras and wilayas with the Polisario Front.

Today, in addition to the congress held every five years, the UNMS has a national secretariat with 66 democratically elected women, which meets annually, and an executive bureau composed of a general secretary and 11 thematic departments, with monthly meetings.

“It is interesting to note in the case of Sahrawi women, not only the existence of invisible demands throughout their entire career, but also the presence of a well-organized women's movement, tending to represent gender demands in the legislature – and in general before the power structures of the SADR,” says Juliano (1998). “This step from the implicit to the explicit means a qualitative change in self-affirming strategies and increases the effectiveness of gender approaches, but their very existence and their possibility of development are only viable when the group of women have managed to develop, through their daily practices, areas of self-realization and self-esteem.” (ibid.)

A small proof of the efficiency of this structure is the creation, in 2003 and at the request of the UNMS, of a State Secretariat for Social Affairs and Women's Emancipation that became a ministry (Medina Martín, 2015). Another important change was the adoption, in 2007, of a quota system for the election of women in the wilayas, with immediate effect on their representation in the Legislature.

In the current parliamentary term, 10 of the 53 seats are occupied by women (19%). There are six women in the secretariat of the Polisario Front, in addition to two ministers and two governors.

The relationship between rights and self-determination: two inseparable struggles​

Sahrawi women, as a collective, are defined by their nationalist anti-colonial struggle, their armed resistance against the occupation of their physical and symbolic territories and their prolonged refuge. As Medina Martín reinforces, “it is not possible to think of the agency of Sahrawi women as overcoming their vulnerabilities, but rather as strategies of resistance that contain the latter and emerge from them” (2014).

From this situation of constant and ongoing violation of rights, Sahrawi women have shaped themselves politically and are working to ensure that the achievements of the last forty years are consolidated and reinforced in the independent nation.

In the words of Juliano (1998), what seems to be intended is that, in the Sahrawi case, and contrary to other Islamic nationalist movements, revolution and the struggle for women's rights are inseparable. In this possible future, gender claims would form one of the axes of the society to be built as a "differentiating feature with respect to the enemy against which one fights."

The same opinion is shared by Bengochea Tirado (2013), for whom “the status of women became a defining element of the Sahrawi nation, not only as a symbolic element but as active participation in the process of creating the nation.”

Within the Sahrawi women's movement there is no optimism or possible rest until this double struggle – for specific rights and for independence – is realized. As Senia Bachir (2008) says, women around the world worked for centuries to achieve equal opportunities with men, while Sahrawi women undertook another type of struggle, for the independence and liberation of their country.

“The occupation of Western Sahara may have been the most important driving factor for women to rise in society, compared to other women in the Arab world,” says Bachir. “So one of the biggest questions is: would Sahrawi women occupy the position they occupy today if the country was not occupied?”

Maima Mahamud Nayem2 points in the same direction: “As a Sahrawi woman, I am wary of our future because this long-awaited peace may also be the reason why we see so many of the achievements made during the revolution crumble. History has shown that in times of struggle, women have always occupied a place alongside men, but when the end comes, men occupy the most important positions in all areas.” And she concludes with a definitive call to her comrades: “Do not let your guard down. The real struggle has only just begun.”

Feminismo y libertad: la lucha de las mujeres saharauis – ritimo

Desde hace más de cuarenta años, las mujeres organizan y protagonizan la resistencia en el último foco de colonialismo en África: el Sáhara Occidental. Si en los años de guerra y lucha por…

www.ritimo.org

The song "Julud," dedicated to Aziza's mother, combining intimate and stark desert poetry with an unyielding faith in the Saharawi political struggle:
"You are like the night and the stars/ Your voice goes beyond the top of the clouds/ You are the smiling breeze of today/ You are an example of humanity and of fight. Resist, immortal, resist."

THE SAHRAWI WOMAN IN THE FIRST YEARS OF EXILE IN TINDOUF​

MARCH 8, 2024 LLUISRODRICAP

On the occasion of March 8, International Women's Day, today we vindicate all Sahrawi women, who, both from the refugee camps of Tindouf and from the occupied territories of Western Sahara, have had to fight so hard for their rights and those of their people.

On this occasion, we want to remember their role during the first years of the Sahrawi exile after the invasion of the Sahara that was the Green March at the end of 1975.

Invasión marroquí del Sahara español - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

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To do so, we use a text taken from the book A life with the Polisario (Universo de Letras, 2022), with which we approach the life of the Sahrawi woman in those early days of the Sahrawi refugee camps in the inhospitable Algerian hamada of Tindouf.

As its cover image, “A Life with Polisario” features the fantastic photograph that Christine Spengler took of a Sahrawi woman, Nueina Djil, and her daughter in 1976.



[…] The revolutionary transformations that Polisario was trying to implement in Sahrawi society compared to its previous traditional stage amazed Benda because of the audacity with which they were intended to be carried out despite the adversities of the moment. But if there was something that particularly caught the young communist’s attention in those first months in the hamada of Tindouf, it was that, as the difficulties of the organization in that exile increased, the massive participation of women in the political and economic administration of the camps also increased. The traditional gender division of labor, which stipulated, for men, specialization in nomadic herding and, for women, semi-sedentary family care, was modified, transforming men into soldiers, who normally lived outside the settlements of Tindouf, and women into organizers and administrators of the entire life of the camps.

This sexual division of labour was precisely one of the keys to the success of organising a State in exile in the refugee camps of Tindouf and, at the same time, maintaining the war of resistance against Morocco and Mauritania. A division of labour that, on the other hand, was effectively carried out by both sides. The former nomadic shepherds were also good warriors and many of the basic elements for battle, such as knowledge of the terrain, courage or resistance to adversity, were incorporated by the Sahrawis from their period before exile and even from Spanish colonisation. In this sense, Sahrawi men make this specialisation at the moment in which they are forced into a war of resistance after the occupation of their territory.

Women, for their part, had always been good and responsible managers of the family environment. While traditional nomadic Sahrawi life meant that men were absent from the tent for long periods of time, it left decision-making and all the economic and organisational management of family groups to women, a skill that they would apply effectively in the wilayas of the new administrative units of the camps. This assumption of important responsibilities by women in exile would be accompanied by a certain political weight and public recognition in Sahrawi society.

Benda liked to go out in the evenings at the end of her work day and visit friendly tents before going to sleep. She often started with tea and stayed for dinner in the tent she visited despite making a vague attempt to decline the invitation, although she always agreed to stay because she was aware of the great sense of hospitality of the Sahrawis and their reluctance to accept no for an answer in these situations.

Sometimes it was a matter of visiting some of the patients he had been treating to see the state and evolution of their ailments. Other times, they were courtesy visits to friendly families. But what Benda liked most was to sit down with Polisario leaders and engage in long political conversations where the teas would drag on. As the hours passed, he exchanged opinions between his political position and that of his interlocutors, on the evolution of the war or the excesses of international politics, especially those that affected the national liberation processes that were then taking place in other latitudes.

Benda in 1976 caring for sick children in the first Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf / Photo provided by Benda herself.

But another of Benda's favourites for her evening chats was her friend Maimuna. Whenever she had the chance, she would visit her, even if it was just for a moment. It wasn't very frequent, as her tent was far from where Benda lived, but the effort to get there was always worth it for the Catalan woman. With Maimuna, they talked about everything: politics, organisational ideas for the development of the camps, traditions and customs of the Sahrawi people, etc. They also talked about more intimate matters, such as feelings, personal projects or simple gossip, banalities that are so necessary for anyone to express, even if they are in a refugee camp in the middle of the desert.

But of all the topics she discussed with Maimuna, there was one that interested Benda in particular. It was about the new roles that Sahrawi women were adopting in the refugee camps in relation to the role they had always played in traditional nomadic society.
Maimuna, on the other hand, was able to learn about the new reality of Sahrawi women in those first moments of exile, from a certain gender activism, and to expand on her explanations about the progress that was taking place in this regard in the new social organisation that had emerged in the camps.
Without knowing it, the two girls were consolidating a symbiotic relationship between them, where the young Sahrawi woman delighted in proudly explaining the achievements made by her people in the fight for gender equality, while Benda tried to discover, in Maimuna, the strength of the modern Sahrawi woman.

Maimuna could talk for hours about the emancipation of Sahrawi women in the revolution that the Polisario was carrying out.
She knew very well the role that women were called upon to play in the new Sahrawi State and, in the tasks that she carried out in the organisation and administration of the camps, she exercised these functions as a member of the National Union of Sahrawi Women (UNMS), an organisation created in 1974, still at the time of Spanish colonisation.

Unión Nacional de Mujeres Saharauis - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

National Union of Sahrawi Women - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

After the founding of the Polisario Front, the women of Western Sahara believed it appropriate to create, within the very heart of the liberation movement, this organisation so that it could participate in national liberation but, at the same time, also mobilise all the women of the nation to fight for equal rights between men and women.

The particularity of the Sahrawi conflict allowed for the heightening of gender awareness among Sahrawi women from the very beginning of the conflict.
The Polisario Front is a progressive movement and, as such, has a modern recognition of human rights, including gender equality.
This dualism between the struggle for national liberation and women's demands is common in other revolutionary processes, especially in leftist revolutionary movements such as the Sandinista Revolution and others developed in Latin America, but, in most cases, it has historically been resolved through the prioritization of general political objectives over those specifically related to women's problems, although there are honorable exceptions such as the Zapatista Revolution of the EZLN 1.

In conservative nationalist processes or those developed in the rest of the Islamic world, gender claims are not taken into account as much. This double aspect often takes on an antagonistic character, where the nationalist discourse is restrictive towards women's rights in favour of the social and religious tradition of each country.

With the experience of the independence processes of the Arab countries, we see how the most fundamentalist sectors of society and the majority of conservative parties have always pressured women not only to collaborate against the oppressors, but also to put aside their gender demands, considered as Westernizing, especially by the fundamentalists, in order not to break the unity of the struggle.
The closest case for the Sahrawis was in Algeria itself, where the significant participation of women in their revolution was followed by pressure from the most reactionary sectors of the country to return to more traditional ways of life.

However, there are revolutionary processes in the Arab world in which gender demands are part of both the social tradition that is to be preserved and the new society that is to be built.
This could be the case of the Sahrawi people and their struggle for the liberation of Western Sahara, where gender demands can be understood as part of the specificity of the Sahrawi people, who risk losing elements of their ethnic identity if Western Sahara ends up being assimilated into Moroccan culture, as Morocco intends, an eventuality that would devalue its women on the social scale.

The gender claim thus becomes one of the bases of the liberation movement of Western Sahara, where the possibilities of women, as members of the Sahrawi people, are related to the triumph of the war of resistance promoted by the Polisario.

— ...But the recognition of women's rights is prior to the political choice of Polisario — Maimuna explains to Benda during one of their meetings over tea —. I mean that the weight and importance that we have always had in Sahrawi society is already determined by the tradition of our people.

As she speaks, Maimuna pours a little hot water from the teapot into one of the small glass cups that she will later use to serve the tea. She does this by raising the teapot to a certain height and then pouring the excess water into another container. She then pours the tea from one glass into the other to return the contents of the second glass to the first, repeating the process several times until she manages to raise a layer of foam in the two small containers, both the one containing the tea and the one that is empty. Meanwhile, she has refilled the teapot with water and places it again on the fire of the mechmar , the small iron brazier with a cylindrical base so typical of the Sahrawis.

— In the nomadic era — Maimuna continues, while stoking the mechmar fire with a small piece of cardboard — the men came and went with the cattle and, sometimes, they could stay away from the camps for quite a long time, even months, in search of pastures for the herds while the women had to stay alone in the frig leading the family. They had no choice but to learn to trust that we would be able to carry on the life of the tent! — exclaims the young Sahrawi woman with an ironic smile — We did not need guardians or custodians and, in Sahrawi society, this capacity of women has always been recognized.

Maimuna adjusts her melhfa with one hand, while continuing to stir the embers of the mechmar with the other, and continues:

— We now intend to consolidate the leading role that women have always had in traditional Sahrawi society where, as you know, women have always been fairly well regarded and respected compared to what happens in other countries bordering us. But this does not mean that we do not have our problems and limitations. On the contrary, there is still much to do here. But it can be said that the traditions of our people are more favourable to women than those of other neighbouring peoples.

—And how are men taking it now? — asks Benda. — I mean, if we consider that social changes always require a time of adaptation, how are men perceiving this new prominence of women at the moment?

— The men of Polisario support our demands — Maimuna replies —, which are now also part of their own demands in the revolutionary process led by the Front. But our protagonism that you speak of is also part of their own cultural heritage, because, as I explained to you before, the centrality of women in current Sahrawi society largely corresponds to how they have always lived, how their mothers lived and how they have seen their grandmothers live. It is therefore not new to them.

Once the tea seems ready to be served, Maimuna arranges several small glasses on a round, three-legged silver tray. She pours the tea into one of the glasses and then passes it from glass to glass, raising her hand just enough so that the trickle that falls into each one forms the same layer of foam on all of them as before. But suddenly she pauses briefly to look Benda in the eyes and say:

—This dual objective between the nationalist claim and the claim of women is not considered conflictive in itself, but rather, in some way, complementary —she states.

The young Sahrawi girl then silently resumes the action of pouring the foamed tea from one glass to another. Benda watches the ritual, listening to the trickle falling again and again into the small glass containers.

Once again, several hours have passed without Benda being aware of the time that has passed inside Maimuna's tent. In the end, there have been three rounds of tea, as required by Sahrawi tradition, in which, as always, the first tea has been bitter as life; the second, sweet as love; and the third, soft as death. Several women from Maimuna's family have accompanied them with tea throughout the evening without saying anything. And the little they said was between themselves. Some of them even dozed for a while, stretched out on the colorful rugs, covering their faces with part of their melhfa so as not to be disturbed by the poor light that illuminates the interior of the tent.

It's night outside. It's very late and Benda is invited to stay overnight in the tent, but the young Catalan woman prefers to go to her tent and rest there. She has to get up early tomorrow. She has many patients to attend to at the hospital.[…]

La mujer saharaui en los primeros años del exilio en Tinduf

Con motivo del 8 de marzo, día internacional de la mujer, hoy reivindicamos a todas las mujeres saharauis, que, tanto desde los campamentos de refugiados de Tinduf como desde los territorios ocupad…

www.elsaharaoccidental.com

 

[Eltitoguay]

September 17, 2024

«Sahrawi women are a very difficult subject for Morocco to silence»​

October 19, 2023 by Leandro Albani

La tinta spoke with Jadiya Ali Mohamed Sleima, representative of the National Union of Sahrawi Women, about the struggle of her people, the challenges in a territory at war and the solidarity between women that is essential for liberation.​

—Were you born in the camps?

-Yeah.

—How old are you?

—I'm thirty years old.

—And what is it like to grow up and live in the camps?

—It's a hard life, and now even more so with global warming. For me, since it's the only thing I've ever known, it didn't seem so hard. Once you open your eyes a little, you educate yourself, you get to know other types of realities, then you do see the hardness of living in a refugee camp.

The speaker is Jadiya Ali Mohamed Sleima, a member of the National Union of Sahrawi Women (UNMS). The camps she is referring to are located in southern Algeria, where some two hundred thousand Sahrawi men and women have lived for more than three decades.
They arrived at this place, built from scratch in the desert, after Morocco expelled them with blood and fire from its historic territory in 1975, in a military operation and the transfer of settlers known as the Green March.

Jadiya is now in Argentina, on a trip that has already taken her to Buenos Aires, Rosario, Córdoba and Bariloche, where she participated in the 36th Plurinational Meeting of Women, Lesbians, Transvestites, Trans, Bisexuals, Intersexuals and Non-Binaries.


The story she tells is that of her people, who demand something as basic as sovereignty over their territory. A claim that Morocco denies. To this end, the monarchy of King Mohammed VI does not spare in applying strong repression against the Sahrawi population that remains in the lands illegally administered by Rabat.

But the long history of the Sahrawi people is not only made up of pain and exile. Through the Polisario Front, the legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people before the international community, this resistance built in landscapes impossible to encompass with the naked eye flows vigorously across the African continent.

For more than two years, the thirty-year impasse of the liberation war against Moroccan forces has shaken the Sahrawi nation once again. Although almost no one talks about the current war between the Polisario Front and Morocco, the days pass between cross-bombings, military casualties and a demand that the United Nations (UN) itself must enforce: the holding of a referendum in the occupied Sahrawi territories so that its original inhabitants can decide on the independence of Western Sahara. These last three decades confirm that Rabat has no interest in such a vote taking place; these thirty long years also seem to confirm that the world powers have little interest in the fate of the Sahrawi men and women.

“As children, the only thing we know about the Sahara is what our parents tell us,” says Jadiya in a chat with La tinta . “One of my dreams is to set foot on occupied lands, because I have already set foot on the liberated lands of the Sahara. I have never seen a large part of my maternal family, my grandparents, my uncles, except through video calls.”

Between 1975 and 1991, the open war between the Polisario Front and Morocco took place in the lands of Western Sahara, bathed by the Atlantic Ocean and, in turn, settled on the desert that stretches to the horizon. When the agreement to stop the fighting was signed and the UN decided to hold a self-determination referendum, the Sahrawi military forces had managed to recover part of their border territories with Algeria and Mauritania.
The liberated region was separated from the occupied zone by a wall of more than two thousand kilometers built by the Moroccan monarchy, infected by anti-personnel mines.

Jadiya pauses for a long time, thinks about her words, adjusts the yellow melfha that women in her country wear and says: “Living in the camps was about surviving. Everything was limited, there were so many needs and you lived with what you had. I tell you this because I come from a large family and I always wore the clothes of one of my sisters, who is ten years older. Both sisters and brothers would pass clothes around because everything was scarce. I’m not even going to tell you about having toys, which a girl could barely count on, that’s not at all. It was a childhood of survival more than anything. We didn’t live like girls should live.”

Over time, with the organization of the Polisario Front and the government of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), and with international aid from countries and UN agencies, the refugee camps in Tindouf began to take on a life of their own.
Today, there are schools, hospitals, a university, craft workshops, small-scale work projects, as well as a popular army that, despite its numerical and technological inferiority, has been dealing heavy blows to the Moroccan troops entrenched behind the so-called Wall of Shame for two years.

Empowered Sahrawi women

The National Union of Sahrawi Women was created in 1974, in the midst of the liberation struggle of the Polisario Front. Today, the UNMS is present in the refugee camps of Tindouf, in the territories occupied by Morocco and in the Sahrawi diaspora, settled mainly in Europe.



Jadiya says that women's main work is in the camps, as militancy in the occupied territories is much more difficult and limited due to Moroccan repression.

According to its representative, the UNMS addresses several lines of work and activism, such as “the empowerment and emancipation of women in Sahrawi society, education, training in other fields in which we have less representation and also the creation of workshops for the self-sufficiency and economic independence of women who do not have a university education and cannot access positions in institutions. In this way, they can create their own workshops or small shops, and have a livelihood. It is a form of emancipation and economic independence.”

—How are Sahrawi women organizing themselves in the face of the war between the Polisario Front and Morocco?

—We have taken up arms again, but for the vast majority of Sahrawi women, especially the elderly, this is not a new situation. They already experienced it in the first war, but it is a new situation for us, the new generations. But we have them at the front, guiding us in this regard. The new reality for us is that the majority of our male colleagues had to go to the front, which created a void in many administrative and other positions. These positions had to be filled by women so that certain services and supplies would not be lacking, and so that the camps and institutions would continue to function as they had all this time. In addition, there were a large number of female volunteers who enlisted in the military school to receive training in line with current needs. If at a given time there is a need for women to join the fight, there is that will on the part of women.

—Is it something new in Sahrawi society that many women are joining military training?

—It is nothing new. In the previous war, there was a large group of women who were part of military battalions that were fighting and others who were nurses, who were in charge of healthcare units. For Sahrawi society, it is nothing new that women are part of the army and go to fight.

Jadiya also talks about the importance of solidarity between women's movements at an international level. For the Sahrawi women, these links are essential to make their voices heard and explain their cause. "Sometimes you come across women's organisations that understand what you are talking about," she explains, "because they come from a context and origin similar to ours, as is the case of Iberian American and African organisations, which are the closest in this sense, because they understand that we have gone through colonisation and illegal occupation."

“Sometimes it is twice as difficult with Western organisations. With them, you have to invest more effort and more time to make them understand that this is an illegal occupation that has lasted for many years,” Jadiya points out. “It is also more difficult when you get to contexts where the Moroccan lobby is very strong and the story they have absorbed is the one told by Morocco. There, not only do you have to invest more time and personnel from the UNMS itself, but we also have to become friends with that movement itself so that it can raise awareness and educate that organisation and other nearby organisations on the Sahrawi issue.”

Sexual harassment and violence as a Moroccan policy

The Moroccan plan was to occupy the Sahrawi territories before achieving full independence of Spain, which was the colonising country of the region and is currently the “administering power”.
The monarchy of Rabat bombed Western Sahara while moving thousands of people to settle on land that does not belong to them.

Although the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic has the recognition of more than eighty countries and countless international resolutions confirming its legitimacy over its historical territory, the power of Morocco is felt to hinder any possibility of Sahrawi independence.

—For quite some time now, there have been reports of growing discontent with the King of Morocco. Could this help the Sahrawis achieve full independence?

—I am in favour of an approach to the Moroccan population, because I think that, in some way, we could understand each other due to the multiple oppressions and violations to which the Sahrawi population under occupation is subjected. I would say that there are two groups in Morocco. One is the one that is completely unaware of the Sahrawi issue and another group is the one that is well-watered with Moroccan propaganda and that really believes that the Sahrawis are separatists, that the Sahara has always belonged to Morocco and all that history of the Sahara at no time being a territory and a country independent of Morocco, although it is not linked by any kind of social, cultural or any other kind of bond. I think that the Sahrawi population should, in some way, try to get closer to the Moroccan population, although I must say that it is a society that is subjected to such a point of oppression and, at the same time, of complete loyalty to the monarchy that it is very afraid of going against the king or carrying out any kind of act that goes against the monarchical and occupation agenda. I tell you this because even when you go to other countries, you try to address the issue with the Moroccan diaspora and there are many who confess to you and tell you that they cannot take a direct position, make statements and even publish something about the Sahara on their personal social media profiles, because they risk having their families in Morocco attacked or being targeted by the security forces, or being oppressed. It is true that these are rather volatile lands and that knowing how to approach the Moroccan population requires a lot of study, a lot of research and doing it in a way that does not harm the security of that population in order to be able to work together.

—What is the current situation of the Sahrawi people within the occupied territories?

—It remains the same and even worsens depending on the events that are taking place. The violation of human rights is the daily bread and the only tactic that Morocco uses to silence the voices of the Sahrawi people and, in particular, of Sahrawi women. It is known that the activism of Sahrawi women is one of the most powerful within the occupied territories, so Sahrawi women are very difficult to silence. Morocco's most common tactics, knowing our culture and our religion, are harassment and sexual violence, which is a way of silencing them because of the stigma attached to being a victim of rape or harassment. But they always encounter resistance from Sahrawi women and this is, in some way, what leads them to resort to other methods, such as forced disappearances, torture and prison. When they come across a very persistent activist, they normally resort to displacing her and removing her from her family, and that is a form of torture. Human rights violations occur every day.

To this terrifying panorama, Jadiya adds a recent example :
Last September, the UN special envoy for Western Sahara, Stefan de Mistura, visited El Aaiún, the historic Sahrawi capital occupied by Morocco.
Due to this arrival, the Moroccan monarchy “deployed a police, gendarmerie and army cordon throughout the city to ensure that no protests would take place,” recalls the UNMS representative. “This was to convey a message to the special envoy that everything is harmonious there, everything is happy, that there is no problem. Most of those deployed in the streets were plainclothes police, but the Sahrawis know them. And we know that going out into the streets means that they will beat us, take us away, make us disappear and then we will not know where we are. But on the outskirts of El Aaiún, there were protests and they could not stop them.”




“Our cause is just”

Jadiya completed her primary and secondary education in refugee camps.
She then moved to Spain, where she graduated as a translator and interpreter at the university. With her degree under her arm, she returned to the land of the sons and daughters of the clouds.

“I have the philosophy, like many Sahrawis, that the cause needs me more in the camps than in Spain,” she says. “Where I live, there are only a few translators, so I am more useful there. I am not saying that everyone has one, but this philosophy is shared by many young people, to train ourselves, to equip ourselves well with the tools necessary not only to help, but also to train others so that they can help in all areas. The Sahrawi is one of the most multifunctional societies. I cannot limit myself to anything other than being a translator and interpreter, because if they ask me to be a journalist, I do it; if I have to be a driver, I do it. The Sahrawi population is very small, we do not reach a million. According to the last census in the camps, we are just over two hundred thousand. Therefore, we have to be involved in multiple things and know everything in order, mainly, to make the cause visible at different levels. And in the end, you have to learn everything.”

—You, your colleagues and family, how do you manage to resist in all areas and in your daily life?

—The truth is that it is not easy, because apart from the conviction, which we all have, that our cause is just and that if we do not fight, no one will, one has an internal battle. I am convinced that I have to be in the camps, my cause needs me, but we also have our personal needs. Neither I nor any Sahrawi wants to be in a refugee camp. With my training, like many others with their training, I could be anywhere in the world, but if you do that, you feel like you are letting down your cause.

Jadiya is honest when she says that “getting up every day is a challenge, because there are needs that may not be so basic, but if we were in our country, they would be guaranteed. Being in a refugee camp, you have to look the other way and say that some things are not so necessary. Something simple, like having air conditioning in a place that reaches 53 or 54 Celsius degrees in summer, or having a stable electricity network, because sometimes it fails, or, if not, having a generator.
As a woman, I don’t need to be with a fan in the middle of the desert to survive. We are not talking about two months of summer, we are talking about four or even five months. Last year, the heat lasted until November and started at the end of May. Apart from the heat, there are the sandstorms, in addition to having to survive.”

“We are a state that does not have direct access to its natural resources , nor do we have an economy that we can manage ourselves, with an income that can support an entire population,” explains the young woman from UNMS. “There are many people who have private businesses, but the vast majority in the camps do not have work, especially a large part of the youth. We are a state that survives on aid from friendly states and the population from aid agencies of the United Nations and international NGOs. But that is enough for the basics. If one day you want to eat a banana, you have to buy it, because it is not in the basic food basket. A large part of the young population is unemployed and, in the end, resorts to migration, and this is totally understandable. We, in general, are large families, so a young person tells you that he cannot allow his family to survive, because he does not live, but rather survives on the basic food basket distributed by the food programme. Perhaps the older people have other food needs and, to achieve this, they have to look for a job and there is none in the camps. But there is no such thing, not because there is no desire, but because there are no means to do so. You have a large part of the young, educated population emigrating to third countries, mostly Western. You lose human capital that is educated, capable, and at a very young age, and that is a loss. There are several challenges: climatic, social, economic.

—In light of this situation, does Polisario's legitimacy remain strong?

—Yes, it is unquestionable and the support is total, because it is our only legitimate representative, it is our liberation movement. As long as there is Moroccan occupation and we do not have independence, it will continue to be our liberation movement until we reach the end, which is the total independence of the Sahrawi territory. Once this independence is achieved, there will be a window open to political parties. But currently, and I think I could speak for the Sahrawis, there is a firm conviction that the Polisario Front is the only representative. Although Morocco continually tries to sell the image that it does not represent all the Sahrawis. I could say that it is the only movement that represents us and that looks after the interests of all the Sahrawis.

*By Leandro Albani for La tinta

 

[Eltitoguay]

The business of illegal occupation of Western Sahara​

January 5, 2022 by Redacción La tinta

The documentary Occupation Inc. reveals the complicity between Morocco and Spain to illegally exploit the natural resources of Western Sahara.​

By La tinta Editorial Team.

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music that you love, upload original content and share it all with friends, family and the world on YouTube.

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In just 40 minutes, the documentary Occupation SA (2020) reveals how the illegal occupation of the Kingdom of Morocco is carried out on the territory of Western Sahara. But not only that, it also names the owners of large Spanish companies – with links to other foreign capitals – that are dedicated to plundering the natural resources of the Sahrawi people, through the Moroccan regime.

Directed by Laura Dauden and Sebastián Ruiz-Cabrera, the documentary provides a clear and precise account of the Sahrawi people and their struggle to defend their territory. It also reveals Spain's responsibility (and complicity) in the illegal occupation of Western Sahara.



With the blessing of successive Spanish governments, Morocco has built a business conglomerate on land that does not belong to it, with the participation of a group of companies, mostly from Spain, to plunder the valuable natural resources of the Sahrawis, such as phosphate, sand and fishing.

Although various international rulings have made it clear that the Moroccan Kingdom has no power over these resources, the regime of Mohammed VI – supported by a strong repressive apparatus – continues to plunder the riches of Western Sahara before the eyes of a world that seems not to react.

El negocio de la ocupación ilegal del Sahara Occidental | La tinta

El documental Ocupación S.A. revela la complicidad entre Marruecos y España para explotar de forma ilegal los recursos naturales del Sahara Occidental.

latinta.com.ar

 

[Eltitoguay]

The most confusing country I've ever visited | the Western Sahara zone under Moroccan occupation : who does it belong to? :
In this video (17 minutes) we delve into the physical location of Western Sahara (the zone under Moroccan occupation) to try to understand what daily life is like in a territory that has been in a complicated dispute for more than 4 decades. Parts in the video:
0:00 Intro 1:19 Explanation of the situation 3:10 What benefit does the European Union see? 4:14 El Aaiún: the largest city in the region 4:25 Map comparison 4:52 Moroccan flags everywhere 5:20 Testimonies from locals 5:54 What was the “Green March”? 6:42 Economy in the region 7:35 There is a sense of peace in the streets 8:16 Where is the population of Western Sahara? 8:34 What is their language and religion? 9:18 Dakhla: The most disputed city 10:30 Camping in the middle of the desert 10:59 We found a nomad camp 11:58 How do they survive in the desert? 12:32 Medicinal plants 13:06 Desert car workshop 14:06 We found an oasis 14:28 Water tap method 14:28 Water tap method 14:56 How do nomads identify themselves? 15:16 What do they do with their trash? 15:26 Tea foaming technique 16:02 Conclusion

Saharawi refugee camps | Life in the Sahara | TRAVEL clippings II :​

Video summary (15 minutes) of the days I spent in the Sahrawi refugee camps, with my camera everywhere, from the inside and experienced in first person. I hope you like it and that it transports you to that magical place that should never have existed.

To "travel" to places like this I don't need encouragement, I'm already motivated. I have edited the recorded material with the same affection and love that I received from "all the Sahrawi people" and above all that I received from my wonderful host family. We have a lot to learn and above all there is a long way to go to make the Sahrawi cause visible and try to get the governments involved to find a solution for these people who have been "abandoned" in the desert for more than 40 years.

If you have had or intend to host a Sahrawi child through the "vacations in peace" program (only for Spain) or you are simply interested in receiving information about it, to help, collaborate or find out more about this people, go to the Sahrawi delegation in your community. Below is the link to the State Coordinator of Associations in Solidarity with the Sahara where you will have all the information you need.

Finally, I only have to say THANK YOU. Why? Do you ask yourself? Well, because by the simple fact that you see this video or any other one on the Internet, read these words or any article with more meaning than this one, you are, without realizing it, making visible an endemic crisis that as I have already said should never have happened and that must be solved! It is not fair that these people continue in these conditions! Or at least it is not fair that those who do not want to live like this are forced to because "they do not exist", they have no identification, no passport, they have nothing but the help that others give them! I won't go on any longer. I HOPE YOU LIKE IT! And if not, you know, I'm totally open to criticism, the channel belongs to everyone, you can give your opinion and, if possible, I'll fix it. Until next time!
LONG LIVE THE FREE SAHARA!!

(State Coordinator of Associations in Solidarity with the Sahara) :
https://ceas-sahara.es/#

 

[Eltitoguay]

Dakhla refugee camp - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

General | Dajla, Campamento de Refugiados Saharauis

www.dajla.org

Dakhla (Dajla), Sahrawi Refugee Camp​

Look for
MAIN MENUSKIP TO CONTENT
SAHARA FESTIVAL , GENERAL

LA SEXTA TV IN THE SAHARA, WITH "EL FOLLONERO" ("THE TROUBLEMAKER") :​

MAY 7, 2010 NGO DAKHLA
This Sunday, May 9, on the TV channel La Sexta within the program “Salvados”, and starting at 9:30 p.m., we will be able to see the report of the “troublemaker” that was recorded during this year's FiSahara.

Festival Internacional de cine del Sahara - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Sahara International Film Festival - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

On the occasion of the Film Festival, this week, Jordi Évole, “el Follonero”, travels to the Sahara desert to learn first-hand about the problems of the Sahrawi people, who have been forced into exile since the Moroccans expelled them from their land 35 years ago.

Jordi Évole - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

چوردى اڤول ريكوينا - ويكيبيديا

arz.wikipedia.org

Accompanied by actors such as Victoria Abril, Álex Angulo and Antonio de la Torre, el Follonero (and famouse war journalist Gervasio Sánchez) will try to give this event more glamour, introducing a very peculiar photocall and some changes to a camel race, so that the harsh reality of the Sahrawis has a greater impact at the international level :

Gervasio Sánchez - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

 

[Eltitoguay]

Socialist Workers' Party (Argentina) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

HISTORY OF THE INTERNATIONALS​

The First International: The origins (I) :​

Primera Internacional - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

International Workingmen's Association - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The workers' movement throughout its history has organized itself internationally to confront the capitalists and fight for a society free of exploitation and oppression by establishing four Internationals.
José Montes; June 13, 2013

“Workers of the world unite!”
These were the words of the inaugural manifesto of the International Workers’ Association (IWA) written by Karl Marx. Since its foundation on 28 September 1864, the international unity of workers has been the banner of the IWA, also known as the First International.


Workers organize across borders:

In those years, capitalism was in crisis. The attempts of the bourgeoisie (businessmen and financiers) to unload it on the workers provoked a revival of the struggle and the organisation of the workers' movement in the main capitalist powers of that time, England and France, as well as in other countries of Europe. In the heat of the first strikes at the end of the 1850s, trade unions (workers' unions) emerged in Great Britain, which began to take into their own hands both the trade union and political demands of the workers.

Faced with workers' resistance, the bourgeoisie sought to use national differences to force workers to compete with each other, seeking in this way to achieve lower wages and worse working conditions. The need to confront this situation gave rise to one of the first impulses that would give birth to the First International. In 1863, the trade unions of England would call on their class brothers in other nations to organize against this competition between workers that the bourgeoisie wanted to impose on them.

At the same time, enormous political phenomena were shaking the working class. The United States was immersed in a civil war, where the capitalists of the South of the country were fighting against the North to maintain slavery. The cause of the liberation of slaves aroused the international solidarity of the workers of Europe. As did the struggle of the people of Poland who had taken up arms to free themselves from Russian domination.

In this context, the call of the English workers had a significant impact on the workers' movement of the European continent, first of all in the workshops and factories of France. In 1864, the French workers responded and the call was concretized at the first meeting that would mark the foundation of the International. This call was attended by German, Belgian, Polish, Italian, Swiss, and other workers.

The idea of international organisation naturally spread among the workers, because the bourgeoisie did not yet have an apparatus of bureaucrats at its service in the organisations of the workers' movement capable of crushing this type of initiative.
But, despite these advances, this young working class did not have its own revolutionary parties in the different countries, nor a clear programme and strategy to defeat the capitalists. From the struggle of the political tendencies that made up the First International and from the test that would be the conquest of the first workers' government in history with the Paris Commune of 1871, many of the future political and programmatic definitions would emerge. These lessons and ideological debates would become the basis for the organisation of the workers' movement from then on. Many of them remain valid to this day, despite the bourgeoisie's insistence on erasing the history of the workers so that they would always have to start from scratch.


From utopian socialism to scientific socialism:

In September 1864, the first meeting was held in London, which laid the foundations for the new International.
Karl Marx was in charge of preparing the Inaugural Manifesto of the IWA and its statutes, which were approved with a few modifications.

Karl Marx - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Marx was not the founder of the First International, but he quickly became its main leader and organizer. This was no coincidence. On the one hand, by then he was already a veteran revolutionary and in exile he had cultivated a close relationship with the workers' circles of London. On the other hand, his theses expressed the most advanced conclusions of the workers' movement of the time.
Marx, together with Friedrich Engels, had developed a fundamental political struggle, which was expressed in the Communist Manifesto, against the currents that conceived socialism as a utopia, as the construction of an ideal society outside the existing one.

Friedrich Engels - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Robert Owen in England, Charles Fourier and Étienne Cabet in France were some of the great inspirations of these tendencies that conceived ideal, democratic communities, founded on relations of equality. They constituted an initial moment, of great inspiration for the nascent workers' movement that was not yet clearly distinguished from the artisan movement.

Marx and Engels were also inspired by many of the themes of these utopian socialists, but contrasted utopian socialism with scientific socialism. For them, socialism was not an ideal to which reality had to adapt, but rather an objective that arose from the struggle of the working class against capitalist exploitation and from its place in production.

Both revolutionary founders of Marxism devoted themselves to a scientific study of the contradictions of capitalism. They not only discovered that the capitalist profit arose from the “theft” of part of the work carried out by the workers (see box “Marx and the discovery of surplus value”), but also that the very development of the productive forces (machinery, work organization, workers’ skills, etc.) under capitalism was the material basis that allowed one to aspire to conquer a society of freely associated producers.

To achieve this, it was necessary to put the advances of science and modern technology at the service of social needs and not capitalist profit. In this way, it would be possible to gradually reduce the time that each individual devotes to work until it represents an insignificant portion and people could devote their energies to creative leisure in science, art, and culture, and thus develop all human capacities.

It was not about building closed communities that respected ideal socialist principles, but about the working class taking power by defeating the bourgeoisie in order to advance towards a society free of exploitation and oppression. The only way to achieve this was to develop the class struggle and make the revolution.


The workers' movement and the political tendencies of the IWA:

Two years after its foundation, and after several attempts, the First International finally held its first Congress in Geneva (Switzerland) in September 1866. With the resurgence of the workers' movement, many of the main tendencies that had been influential among workers during the previous decades regained strength.

“Utopian socialism” as such had been superseded by the development of the class struggle itself. During the revolutions of 1848 (see box “The Spring of the Peoples”) the working class had already demonstrated that the struggle for a new society was being played out in the streets and that it was capable of shaking the foundations of the domination of the capitalists.

However, these conclusions were the heritage of the most advanced sector of the workers, while many of those who went into struggle at the time of the founding of the First International did so with expectations that a more just society could be achieved without an open confrontation with the State and the bourgeoisie.
It is within this framework that the IWA advanced in the elaboration of a programme and a strategy for the working class based on intervention in the class struggle and on political and ideological debate between the different tendencies that comprised it. Among the main ones, one would be represented by Marx, Engels and their group; another by the anarchists who were based on the theories of Proudhon;

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

another would be made up of the leaders of the English trade unions; and finally the anarchist current led by Mikhail Bakunin who would join the IWA in 1868.

Mikhail Bakunin - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The First International and its place in history :​

Since the beginning of capitalism, the struggle of workers has often taken on an international character. This is not surprising because the capitalist system was the first to spread throughout the world.
Eduardo Castilla and Paula Schaller; February 28, 2013

The First International or International Workers' Association (IWA) was founded on September 28, 1864, at a meeting held in London with delegations of workers from England, France, Germany and Italy. The IWA was founded after a long period of setbacks, the result of the defeat of the revolutions of 1848-49, also known as the "Spring of Nations"1. This had led to a dark period for workers, where workers' organizations were persecuted and their leaders ended up in prison or in exile.

From the end of the 1850s, the situation began to change due to a combination of factors. On the one hand, the economic crises of 1857-58 and 1863 hit the whole European continent hard. These two crises led to the beginning of protests, mobilisations and the emergence of a new, more combative trade unionism in England. In addition, international solidarity actions took place, where English unions organised aid to those suffering from hunger in France.
Along with the crisis, the Civil War in the USA would shake the whole continent. The sympathy of the working class was on the side of the North against the slave-owning South. At the beginning of 1863, the Polish people rose up against the oppression exercised by Russia, where Tsar Alexander II reigned. This rebellion also aroused the sympathy of the peoples and workers of Europe. In one of the acts of support for this insurrection, the initiative to organise the working class internationally emerged.


The two currents that come together in the First International:

Within this framework, the First International was founded, which expressed the unity of two currents. On the one hand, there were the English trade union organisations, the most developed on the whole continent, which is not surprising because England was the country with the greatest capitalist development. Alongside the trade union organisation, there was a strong tradition of fighting for the political rights of the working class. The Chartist movement had developed there, which in 1837 would publish the People's Charter, which included a series of basic political demands2. It was not the kindness of the capitalists but the struggles of these workers that allowed them to win many political rights that still exist today.
The attacks of the capitalists pushed this sector to advance in the international organisation. In a document from 1863, the English leaders said: “Every time we try to improve our situation by reducing the working day or increasing wages, the capitalists threaten us with hiring French, Belgian and German workers, who would do our work for a lower wage. Unfortunately, this threat is often fulfilled”3. Solidarity and international organisation were necessary to fight for better living conditions in the face of the divisions imposed by the capitalists. Even today, as 150 years ago, employers divide the working class to increase their profits, employing immigrant workers for a lower salary.

The other current was made up of delegations of workers from France and workers of German origin, who were exiled in England after the revolution of 1848. These sectors, although they were more advanced in their ideas because they proposed to fight to end the capitalist system, were weaker in their organization. In their countries, the workers' movement was less developed and the revolution of 1848 had been defeated, something that did not happen in England. Marx was close to the exiled German workers and, thanks to this, he participated in the founding Conference of the IWA and became part of the Commission in charge of drafting the Statutes and the inaugural Message of the International.


The fundamental role of Marx:

Marx succeeded in ensuring that the most important ideas formulated in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 were retained both in the inaugural address and in the statutes: the need for an independent organisation of the working class, the fight for complete economic liberation which can only be achieved through political struggle, the need for unity of workers from different economic sectors and from different countries in order to confront capitalism. Marx was able to do this in a way that was acceptable to the workers' movement of that time, which was more widespread and developed in all countries, but was less conscious of revolutionary ideas after years of retreat. For Marx this was the starting point for the subsequent advance of workers' consciousness.
Precisely this allowed the IWA to express the real workers' movement that was developing. Against all attempts to impose ideas that were not the result of the process of workers' struggles, Marx and Engels fought to ensure that the IWA would encompass all the real organisations of the workers' movement.

Overall, the IWA fulfilled two fundamental functions: first, it brought together all the real workers' organizations that existed at that time. At the same time, it helped them to advance in a clear awareness of their objectives.
The latter was achieved through important struggles within the International.

The differences between Marxism and Anarchism :​

(VI Lenin, The State and the Revolution)

1 The former, while proposing the total abolition of the State, recognise that this goal can only be achieved after classes have been abolished by a socialist revolution, as a result of the establishment of socialism, which leads to the withering away of the State. The latter want to abolish the State completely overnight, without understanding the conditions under which it can be abolished.

2 The former admit that the proletariat, after having conquered political power, must completely destroy the old state machine and replace it by a new one, consisting of an organization of armed workers, similar to that of the Commune. The latter, while insisting on the destruction of the state, have only a vague idea as to what the proletariat will replace it with and how it will use its revolutionary power. The anarchists even deny that the revolutionary proletariat must make use of power, and reject its revolutionary dictatorship.

3 The former demand that the proletariat prepare for revolution using the modern state. Anarchists reject this.”
VI Lenin, The State and the Revolution

Ideological struggle and first battles :​

PTS; June 27 2013

The First International developed in a context marked by the emergence of a new workers' movement, a surge in its struggles and its organisation, and the members of the International were to be active protagonists. At the same time, an important process of ideological and political clarification took place in the working class, expressed in the International Workers' Association (IWA) itself in the debates between the different currents that comprised it.

Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels
Marx and Engels, in defence of the principle of class struggle, argued that it is impossible to advance towards the emancipation of workers by leaving existing capitalist society in peace, because it is this society that does not and will never leave workers in peace to freely associate as producers. The class struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie cannot be avoided because the exploitation of the worker is the source of profit for the capitalists and the foundation of the system.

Mikhail Bakunin
May 30, 1814 - July 1, 1876
From 1868 he joined the International, the tendency that he led that had been gaining strength during those years. Bakunin was an anarchist, but unlike the Proudhonists, he believed that in order to win the liberation of the oppressed it was necessary to make a revolution that would destroy the bourgeois state. In this he agreed with Marx and Engels, however, Bakunin was opposed to all political action by the working class because, in his opinion, it only strengthened the state.

Pierre Joseph Proudhon
15 January 1809 - 19 January 1865
He was a worker, a self-taught intellectual, a scathing critic of bourgeois property, which he defined as theft. However, he maintained that the improvement of the situation of workers was through becoming small property owners through workers' mutual aid associations, a kind of credit and consumer cooperatives.

The First International was to intervene boldly in the widespread strike process that had swept through Europe since 1868. It would put all its efforts into ensuring that each of these conflicts would succeed, and many of its members were to be at the forefront. The international campaigns
carried out by the IWA, for example to create strike funds, were so extensive that the bourgeoisie could not understand how so much money came from workers' solidarity and the newspapers invented the most ridiculous stories about the "hidden" financing of the International. Around this participation in the main experiments carried out by the workers' movement, during the last years of the 1860s, the IWA achieved a very large growth in its influence among the workers.

The First International: ideological struggle and first battles (II) :​

Throughout its history, the workers' movement has organized itself internationally to confront the capitalists and fight for a society free of exploitation and oppression, creating four Internationals. In this section of LVO we present a series of articles on this history, with its debates, struggles, and lessons. This second installment deals with the ideological struggles and early battles of the First International.
José Montes; June 27, 2013

As we saw in the previous article (in LVO n° 526), the First International developed in a context marked by the emergence of a new workers' movement, an upsurge in its struggles and its organisation, and the members of the International were to be active protagonists. At the same time, an important process of ideological and political clarification took place in the working class, expressed in the International Workers' Association (IWA) itself in the debates between the different currents that comprised it. Among the main ones were: the current represented by Marx, Engels and their group; that of the anarchists who were based on the theories of Proudhon; that which was made up of the leaders of the English trade unions; and the anarchist current led by Mikhail Bakunin who joined the IWA in 1868.


The emancipation of workers and class struggle:

IWA, one of the most influential was the anarchist tendency based on the ideas of Pierre Joseph Proudhon, who had died in 1865. Proudhon was a worker, a self-taught intellectual, a scathing critic of bourgeois property, which he defined as theft. However, he maintained that the improvement of the situation of workers was through becoming small owners through workers' mutual aid associations, a kind of credit and consumer cooperatives.
This position, supported by his followers in the ranks of the First International, distanced workers from the need for class struggle against the bourgeoisie and its State and was in line with the hopes of a significant sector of the new French workers' movement to achieve emancipation by peaceful means.
Marx and Engels confronted this current by arguing that it is not possible to advance towards the emancipation of the workers by leaving the existing capitalist society in peace, because it is the latter that does not and will never leave the workers in peace to freely associate as producers. The class struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie cannot be avoided because the exploitation of the worker is the source of the capitalists' profit and the foundation of the system.
In turn, this struggle necessarily takes on a political character because the State is an instrument for the oppression of the workers and comes to the crossroads wherever the workers' movement fights decisively for its rights.

The tendency of the Proudhonists to keep the working class outside the class struggle led them to even reject the very existence of unions and to be against strikes as a method of struggle because they consider them harmful to the workers as they disorganize production.

As a result of these intense debates, a bloc was formed between Marx and the English leaders of the trade unions that defeated the Proudhonists, causing the IWA to declare itself in favour of strikes and the organisation of unions. Also against the opinion of the Proudhonists, the International adopted as part of its programme the limitation of the working day to 8 hours. Along with these definitions, the International adopted very important points such as the struggle for collective ownership of the means of transport and communication, against permanent armies and for arms for the people, among others.
Thanks to these definitions adopted by its first two Congresses in 1866 and 1867, the IWA was prepared to join and intervene boldly in the widespread process of strikes that would sweep through Europe from 1868 onwards. The First International would put all its efforts into ensuring that each of these conflicts would succeed, and many of its members would be at the forefront. The international campaigns carried out by the IWA, for example to create strike funds, were so extensive that the bourgeoisie could not understand how so much money came from workers' solidarity and the newspapers invented the most ridiculous stories about the "hidden" financing of the International.
Around this participation in the main experiments carried out by the workers' movement, during the last years of the 1860s, the IWA achieved a very large growth in its influence among workers, especially in France where the movement was more widespread.


Political struggle “under pressure” or revolutionary political struggle:

The first Congress of the International (1866) was also marked by the enormous struggle that the English workers were carrying out, led by the trade unions, for the right to vote for workers (at that time the struggle was still limited to men’s suffrage; suffrage for women workers would only be won for the first time with the Russian Revolution of 1917). In June 1866 the movement reached its highest point with a huge concentration of more than 60 thousand people in one of the largest parks in the centre of London, Hyde Park, which almost became an insurrection. It was the largest demonstration in the history of the English working class up to that time, in which it made clear the political weight it had acquired.
Around this struggle another important debate took place in the IWA, this time between Marx and the leaders of the trade unions. Marx criticised them for having confidence in the sectors of the bourgeoisie that called themselves democratic. The working class could not rely on the good will of the capitalists, but only on its own strength. The workers had to defend their political independence from the exploiters and their state tooth and nail.
Marx was right. The “democratic” bourgeoisie promised to abandon the movement as soon as they had obtained the vote for them. However, in order to stop the mobilizations, the government also had to grant the right to vote to a section of the working class. The maneuver consisted of leaving out of the electoral reform the workers who did not have a place of their own to live in, as well as the rural workers.
In certain circumstances, the bourgeoisie may find it convenient to grant certain partial concessions to the workers in order to defuse large movements such as the one led by the English working class in 1866. But against the illusions harbored by the representatives of the trade unions, Marx warned that the emancipation of the working class cannot come about through a progressive accumulation of partial conquests that the bourgeoisie would always try to reverse as soon as the balance of forces was favorable to it.
Unlike the English representatives of the trade unions, for Marx the political struggle was not a struggle to put pressure on parliament as a complement to the trade union struggle, but a struggle for workers' power which implied the preparation of the working class in each partial combat for an inevitable revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie and its State. The capitalists had already demonstrated in the revolutions of 1848 that they were capable of anything to maintain their domination and, as we shall see later, they would demonstrate this again a few years later in the face of the Paris workers' uprising in 1871.


Defeat the bourgeois state… and then what?:

From 1868 onwards, the tendency of Mikail Bakunin, which had been gaining strength during those years, joined the International. Bakunin was an anarchist, but unlike the Proudhonists, he believed that in order to achieve the liberation of the oppressed it was necessary to make a revolution that would destroy the bourgeois state. In this he agreed with Marx and Engels, however, Bakunin was opposed to any political action by the working class.
Bakunin believed that workers should not organize their own political parties. He rejected any political struggle in existing society, such as the struggle for the democratic right to vote that the English workers had led, because according to him it only strengthened the state. Marx harshly criticized this abstentionism because it left, in fact, political action in the hands of bourgeois parties.
These differences were also expressed when thinking about the conquest of power by the workers. According to Bakunin, the bourgeoisie have economic power only because the State exists; if the State ceases to exist, capitalist society simply collapses, opening the way to the emancipation of the oppressed. For Marx, the domination of the bourgeoisie is not limited to the State, but their power stems from the fact that they have private ownership of the means of production (they are the owners of the factories, transport, raw materials, etc.). Therefore, the resistance of the capitalists continues and even deepens once the revolution succeeds in breaking the apparatus of the capitalist State.
For all this, Marx argued that the working class should oppose the bourgeois State with its own state power in order to impose its domination over the bourgeoisie and to concentrate the social means of production in its hands, and put them in function of an economic plan, where production would be for the needs of the majority and not for the profit of the capitalists.
However, for Marx it was not about any state power. While every State exists for the domination of one class by another, in this case, the State that the working class must build for the first time in history will not seek to dominate the majority but on the contrary, to have the great majority truly participate in daily government, and for the mechanisms of domination to fall on the small minority of former oppressors and their agents.
As participation in this new workers' state expands and progress is made in meeting social needs, it loses its raison d'être. As Marx said, "it is a transitional state that seeks to wither away along with the forms of exploitation and oppression." Marx called this transitional state governed by workers, based on the broadest democracy for the majority and where domination falls on the minority of capitalists, the "dictatorship of the proletariat."
These discussions soon went beyond the realm of speeches. The working class was to face this problem in practice in 1871, putting to the test the different programs and strategies that the movement had until then. In that year, for the first time in history, the proletariat was to establish its own government: the Paris Commune.

Paris Commune - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The First International and the Revolution (III) :​

As we pointed out in the previous issue of LVO, in 1871 the International Workers' Association (IWA) and each of its currents faced a great test: the French working class won the first workers' government in history, the Paris Commune. The time had come to measure programs and strategies in the heat of the confrontation between revolution and counterrevolution.
José Montes; July 4, 2013

War brings revolution:

By 1870, workers' unrest was growing in France. The response of the government headed by Napoleon III, who had already been in power for 20 years, was police persecution and the outlawing of workers' organizations.

By July, Napoleon III declared war on Prussia (the main province of what would later become Germany) as a way of maintaining France's position in Europe, while at the same time containing internal opposition from the working class. But his calculations went very wrong. By early September, the French army was defeated, Prussia went on the offensive and invaded France, and Napoleon III himself was captured.

France was left without a government and revolution broke out. On September 4, the working class and the people of Paris marched to the Chamber of Deputies shouting “The fatherland is in danger,” but despite the strength of the movement, the workers did not take power. The bourgeoisie took advantage of the situation and formed a government headed by Thiers, a reactionary politician.

All the forces of the French section of the First International actively participated in the mobilizations. Meanwhile, the General Council of the IWA called for international solidarity between workers and their French class brothers. Marx was in charge of writing a series of Manifestos through which the International repudiated both the war and the maneuver of the bourgeoisie to have expropriated the revolution.


The bourgeoisie unites across borders against the working class:

Despite being at war, from the beginning of the revolution the French and Prussian bourgeoisie will conspire with the common goal of defeating the working class, giving a great demonstration of counterrevolutionary “solidarity”.

The defence of France against invasion was left exclusively to the armed workers, who together with the lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie had formed by mid-February 1871 the Federation of Battalions of the National Guard, an irregular militia numbering around 200,000 people.
As Marx noted in one of the documents of the International: “Armed Paris was the only serious obstacle standing in the way of counter-revolutionary conspiracy.”

In March 1871, the French bourgeoisie finally capitulated to Prussia and attempted to disarm the National Guard, which was in fact a declaration of war against the Paris proletariat.

The working class's response was not long in coming, and on March 18th the insurrection broke out that would bring the proletariat to power for the first time in history. The bourgeoisie's worst nightmare became reality, as the bourgeois government fled to take refuge in Versailles (the former seat of government of the kings of France) and armed workers formed their own government.
Thus the Paris Commune was born.


The Commune: the workers' government:

In the Paris Commune, the army and the police were replaced by the general armament of the working class and the people of Paris organized in the militias of the National Guard. Faced with the counter-revolutionary unity of the French and Prussian bourgeoisie, the internationalism of the Commune was reflected in the very composition of the militias, which had several revolutionaries from other countries among their most experienced military leaders.

The Commune was established as a legislative and executive body at the same time, with all deputies earning the same wages as workers. It thus swept away the political caste of “representatives” who in bourgeois governments used their positions to guarantee their business. At the same time, all deputies were immediately revocable by their electors, so that they could not turn their backs on those who elected them. It also put an end to the caste of lifelong officials in the judiciary, with all judges being elected by popular vote. It sanctioned the separation of Church and State. In this way the Commune gave the republic a basis for truly democratic institutions.

As Marx points out: “The Commune was essentially a government of the working class, the fruit of the struggle of the producing class against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered which would allow the economic emancipation of labour to be achieved.” Thus, among its first measures, the Commune adopted the placing under workers' control of all the factories that the bourgeoisie had abandoned after the revolution; the elimination of fines with which the employers punished the workers; the prohibition of night work, among other measures that reflected its class character.


Revolution and counterrevolution:

The Commune showed that workers could form their own government. It was a great example for all workers in the world that frightened the French and Prussian bourgeoisie alike. Bismarck, chancellor of the newly created German Empire, frees prisoners of war from the French army so that Thiers can assemble a counter-revolutionary army of about 170,000 members to confront the workers of Paris.

The French bourgeoisie, with the support of its German counterpart, launched a war of extermination against the Commune. The workers fought for eight days, each barricade was defended to the end. The counter-revolutionary army shot them en masse at every opportunity, including children. During that week, 30,000 Communards were killed.

These bloody days were not the result of an excess of the bourgeoisie, which after the victory proudly paraded among the dead in the streets of Paris. As Thiers, satisfied with the work of his troops, said: “The ground is covered with their corpses: this horrible spectacle will serve as a lesson.”

However, contrary to what Thiers and the entire bourgeoisie expected, the struggle of the Communards and their courage in taking power, despite the few weeks that the Commune lasted, would serve as an inspiration and a source of enormous political lessons for the new generations of revolutionaries and their banners would be taken up by the Russian workers in the October Revolution of 1917.


The First International and the lessons of the Commune:

The experience of the Paris Commune practically resolved many of the main debates that had permeated the First International.

In its political struggle to establish truly democratic institutions, and even to repel the Prussian invasion, the working class had to resort to revolutionary methods. Thus the very development of the Commune clashed with the pacifist illusions of a section of the leaders of the English trade unions that were part of the International. This was the case of Odger, one of the founders of the IWA, who refused to support the Commune and broke with the International.

As Marx points out, far from those illusions, if there was one mistake on the part of the Communards, it was not having marched on Versailles to definitively defeat and capture the Thiers government, giving it time to recover and organize the counteroffensive. In the same sense, Marx argues that the Communards had been too respectful of private property by not appropriating the gold that was in the Bank of France to use those funds for the revolution.

As the outcome of the Commune demonstrated, the bourgeoisie had no consideration for the workers, whom it attacked mercilessly as soon as it had the opportunity.

On the other hand, it was clear, contrary to the theses upheld by Bakunin, that the power of the bourgeoisie did not disappear once control of the State was lost, but that it continued to fight ruthlessly to recover it, and that therefore, as Marx pointed out, it was necessary for the working class to establish its own State power to guarantee the domination of the former oppressors. The working class demonstrated in practice that it had the capacity to do so.

The weakness of the Commune in this respect was precisely that it failed to build a state power on a French-wide scale. The uprisings that took place in provincial towns such as Lyon and Marseille, or the clashes in Toulouse, Carbone, Saint Etienne and Creusot, were isolated and defeated. Contrary to what Bakunin maintained, it was not just a matter of establishing new Communes, but of conquering a central and democratic workers' and peasants' power that would encompass the whole country. The absence of such a power allowed the defeat of Paris, since it did not have the support and joint action of the workers and peasants at a national level to prevail against the bourgeoisie.

The First International being very weak for the scale of events, the working class arrived at the revolution in 1871 without a revolutionary leadership capable of leading the enormous energy and heroism displayed by the French working class to victory.

Far from the distrust of the Proudhonists, or the repudiation of Bakunin, of the political action and organization of the working class, this proved to be a matter of life or death for the workers.

The tendencies that formed the First International would become well-differentiated currents in the following period: syndicalism, anarchism, and Marxism.
On the basis of the lessons learned by Marx and his current in the IWA, the Second International would emerge years later under the leadership of Friedrich Engels.


Contempt and panic of the Argentine oligarchy towards the Paris Commune (Excerpts from the newspaper La Nación of 1871*) :

*Quoted in 'Marx in Argentina" by Horacio Tarcus
"For La Nación, the workers who had taken over the government in Paris were “a mob of ferocious ignoramuses. Ignorant because they have not the slightest idea not only of republican institutions, but of common law; ferocious because they claim to establish the principles of equality and justice by means of the guillotine and stoning.

Frightened, the columnist calls upon the ruling classes to reflect: “Do these classes perhaps expect to shake off their lethargy when […] the hungry and greedy hand knocks on their door to begin this endless operation of levelling fortune?”
Exaggerating the role of the First International, La Nación maintains that “The International is a formidable association: it has done what is happening today in Paris."

Despite the massacre of 30,000 communards, La Nación shows that the Argentine oligarchy is still dominated by the panic of the spread of the revolution that it identifies with the First International. It says on June 29, 1871: “Its program, published today everywhere, even in Paris, where the conspiracy that posts the posters in the streets cannot be discovered, is reduced to these four principles: abolition of all religion; extermination of all rulers; abolition of capital; arrival of the workers in the government of human society. Its first battle was the burning of Paris. Its second battle will perhaps be the ruin of all Europe.”
*Quoted in 'Marx in Argentina" by Horacio Tarcus

PTS : Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas

PTS : Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas

www.pts.org.ar

 

[Eltitoguay]

HISTORY OF THE INTERNATIONALS​

The Second International (I): The spread of the socialist movement among the masses :​

Segunda Internacional - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Second International - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The workers' movement throughout its history has organized itself internationally to confront the capitalists and fight for a society free of exploitation and oppression by establishing four Internationals.
Jazmín Jiménez; July 11, 2013

The construction of Socialist Parties in different countries:

As we saw in the previous issue of La Verdad Obrera, after the defeat of the Paris Commune, it took 17 years for the working class to have the necessary strength to establish a new International.

The years following the dissolution of the First International were characterized by the reorganization of the European workers' movement and, in this sense, the construction of socialist parties in the different countries of the old continent was very important. The most important of these was the German one. After the failure of the bourgeois revolution of 1848, Marshal Otto von Bismark tried to modernize Germany, in a bourgeois way and from above, preventing the active intervention of the popular sectors in the resolution of national problems. Bismark intended to keep the workers on his side to contain the junkers (landowners). The Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany emerged in 1875 when the General Association of German Workers of Ferdinand Lassalle
and the Social Democratic Workers' Party, led by the Marxists August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, were united. The unification would take place at a Congress held in the city of Gotha. (see box)

Ferdinand Lassalle - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Karl Liebknecht - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

After the merger, the Social Democratic Party increased its vote share considerably.
In 1878, in an attempt to halt the advance of Social Democracy among the most advanced German workers, the Bismarck government passed the “anti-socialist laws” which banned all Social Democratic Party organisations and mass workers’ organisations, suspended the publication of workers’ presses and established reprisals against socialist activists, subjecting Social Democratic Party leaders to police persecution.
But instead of crushing the Marxist party, they tempered it and increased its popularity among the workers. Although the party was illegal, its members could stand as candidates in elections and this allowed Social Democracy to have representatives in parliament. In this sense, the electoral advance was accompanied by the underground struggle which generated admiration abroad for the success achieved in combining legal and illegal work, that is, in the tasks posed in the face of persecution. At this stage, the party was taken as an example in various countries. This was not without a major problem: the political leadership of the party was in exile and there was a risk that the leadership would fall into the hands of its parliamentary representatives, the only ones who could publicly speak on its behalf.

At the beginning of the 1890s, with the end of the “anti-socialist laws”, repealed by pressure from the workers’ movement on 1 October 1890, this party, which had been underground for ten years, became the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party and adopted a new programme known as the Erfurt Programme, drawn up by Karl Kautsky, which, unlike the Gotha Programme, had a strictly Marxist basis.

Social Democratic Party of Germany - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Karl Kautsky - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

It became a gigantic movement that came to have a million members and dozens of its own newspapers that were published throughout Germany. It developed an enormous cultural, social and political life around it, including choirs that were part of the Party. But this enormous political, social and cultural activity was not yet aimed at breaking the capitalist regime or leading revolutionary processes.

The second most important Socialist Party in the International was the French one, which faced a difficult period after the repression of the Paris Commune. The leaders who were not killed had to go into exile. It was not until 1879, with the amnesty issued by the government, that they were able to begin to reorganize and form the Federation of Socialist Workers.

In turn, during the decade of 1880 the foundations were laid and workers' and socialist parties were built in Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland and Italy. Marxist groups also emerged in Finland and Russia.
In the United States the Socialist Labor Party was organized.

Socialist Labor Party of America - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

And in England the New Syndicalism emerged, an organization of large masses of unskilled workers, which was to the left of the old unions.

By the end of 1880 there was a significant number of national parties in which Marxist influence was predominant. The working class had increased in number due to the economic growth that had occurred towards the end of the 19th century. This meant that the workers' movement had become an important international force both in terms of its political and numerical development and that it needed an international organisation.

After the dissolution of the First International, Marx and Engels continued to perform the functions of the General Council.
Immediately after Marx's death, the international workers' movement developed strongly and in 1886 the question of forming a new International arose.
Engels took part in its founding three years later and, as a writer and adviser, took the most active part in the workers' movement in almost all European countries. Since there was no Central Committee until 1900, the old General Council, with several members from different countries, was now personified in him. In his later years, in addition to continuing the theoretical work of scientific socialism, he advised each new Marxist party that emerged.

 

[Eltitoguay]

HISTORY OF THE INTERNATIONALS​

The Second International (II): Social democracy in the face of the new era and the revolution :​

Jazmín Jiménez and Santiago Duval; 2013

A new era of crisis, wars, and revolutions:

As we saw in the previous note, between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, there were years of important advances in the organization of the workers' movement, both trade union and political, where the Second International played a leading role.

Second International - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

This development coincided with the transition of capitalism into a new historical phase: its imperialist stage. But what were its characteristics?

First, monopolies appear to replace free competition, because production and capital are increasingly concentrated and centralized. Although competition does not disappear completely, it continues, generating very sharp contradictions and conflicts. A second characteristic, linked to the previous one, is the appearance of financial capital, which is the banking capital of a few large monopolistic banks merged with the capital of the monopolistic industrial associations. The third fundamental characteristic of imperialism is that the dominant countries no longer only export goods and use the colonies and semi-colonies as sources of raw materials, but the export of capital is also of great importance, that is, they begin to produce directly in these countries. In this way, a fourth aspect arises, which is the formation of international monopolistic capitalist associations that divide up the world. Therefore, the world is divided into a handful of imperialist countries that exploited the majority of the colonial and semi-colonial countries. Finally, the fifth characteristic of this stage is that the great powers had finished dividing up the territories of the whole world and the new powers that had emerged later wanted a redistribution of control of the colonial world. This competition was what increased tensions and the tendency towards war between them.

Lenin pointed out that all these elements suggested a deepening of the contradictions of capitalism.

Vladimir Lenin - Wikipedia

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However, not all members of the Second International agreed with this forecast; there were those who interpreted this new stage as a mitigation of the contradictions and as a prevention of recurring economic crises. The first to theorize about this was Rudolf Hilferding, leader of the German Social Democratic Party, who considered imperialism to be a necessary stage in the development of capitalism and an overcoming of free trade.

Unlike Hilferding, who saw that it would lead to peace, for Lenin what was opening up with the rise of imperialism was a new era of wars, crises and revolutions.


The Russian Revolution of 1905:

Russian Revolution of 1905 - Wikipedia

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More than 30 years had passed since the French workers had fought heroically in defence of the Commune. The working class was no longer the same; its social power and organisational capacity had increased enormously. However, the memory of the revolution had become diffuse and expectations of an evolutionary advance towards socialism were growing. But it was not a century of “peaceful evolution” that was beginning, but on the contrary, one of great upheavals.
The prelude occurred in Russia in 1905.

Russia was still governed by an absolutist monarchy: Tsarism.
The majority of the population was peasant and continued to live and produce as in the Middle Ages.
However, as a result of the export of financial capital from the European imperialist countries, important Russian cities were industrialized in a short period of time, giving birth to a young and concentrated working class that made its debut in successive strikes that destabilized Tsarism.
The government wanted to stop them in an attempt to degenerate a climate of national unity, seeking a small military victory. Therefore, on February 9, 1904, Russia declared war on Japan. In a few months this monarchy would demonstrate its uselessness, in the only area where it still retained some prestige, losing the war.
Thus 1905 arrived. In the first days of January, a strike broke out in St. Petersburg and on the 9th more than 200,000 workers mobilised to demand from Tsar Nicholas Romanov public liberties, separation of Church and State, an eight-hour work day, normal wages, progressive transfer of land to the people and a Constituent Assembly elected by universal suffrage. The Tsar's response was to shoot at the demonstrators indiscriminately: hundreds were killed and thousands were wounded; that day went down in history as "Bloody Sunday".

Bloody Sunday (1905) - Wikipedia

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However, it did not end there; the following months were very convulsive and in October a new round of strikes began that would spread rapidly. The strike was taking on an increasingly political character, stirring public opinion throughout Europe and also that of the European socialists who despised the methods of the general strike.

In the heat of this general strike, the working class needed an organisation that would unite the masses and bring together all the currents of the proletariat. Thus, on 13 October, the first Soviet (council) of Workers' Deputies was born. No one had proposed a more democratic form of organisation until then. One delegate was elected for every five hundred workers and his mandate was revocable. The Soviet began to assume government functions, such as implementing freedom of the press and organising patrols to protect the population. It took control of the post office, telegraphs, railways and attempted to establish an eight-hour workday. It was not only a suitable tool for the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie and Tsarism, but it also demonstrated great potential as a basis for a new type of state, that is, for a workers' state.

In December, members of the St. Petersburg Soviet were arrested, including Leon Trotsky, who had recently assumed the presidency.

Leon Trotsky - Wikipedia

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The Moscow Soviet called for a general strike, attempting to transform it into an armed insurrection. A heroic battle took place in the streets of the city, but the workers were defeated after having held the local garrison at bay for ten days. Lenin said that in order for an insurrection to succeed, it must be based on the most advanced class, be supported by the rise of the revolutionary people, and that at the same time, the greatest activity of the people's vanguard must coincide with the greatest vacillation of enemies and half-friends. Given these conditions, it is essential that the working class has a revolutionary party with sufficient organization, experience and influence to achieve victory through a strategy for taking power.

In 1905, the movement was unable to achieve the coincidence of all these conditions. However, the Russian Revolution of '05 was becoming the great dress rehearsal of the revolutionary proletariat that would inspire the left wing of the Second International.


The emergence of the Revolution and the Second International:

The revolutionary uprising of the Russian masses, the development of the general strike, the formation of workers' councils (soviets) and the uprising led by the Bolsheviks in Moscow, presented a new framework.

1905 was a breath of fresh air for the whole of Europe after 35 years since the Paris Commune, and it set in motion revolutionary currents in the various countries, both in the imperialist countries and in the colonies. This happened in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Romania, India, China. The imperialist bourgeoisie had to make some democratic concessions. At the same time, various socialist parties called for actions of international solidarity for the triumph of the Russian revolution. The different political tendencies that existed in the International were also affected. Old conceptions had been called into question. The imperialist era came to show that it was not necessary to wait for the revolution to begin in an advanced country. The left wing of the Second International, made up of Rosa Luxemburg, Mehring, Liebknecht, Lenin and Trotsky, among others, was strengthened by its convergence at that time with important leaders of the centre wing such as Kautsky and Bebel.

Rosa Luxemburg - Wikipedia

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August Bebel - Wikipedia

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The return of the revolution, led by the young Russian working class, exposed the routine into which the largest parties of the Second International had fallen and which, like the German Social Democratic Party, had a working class with a great tradition.

As Rosa Luxemburg pointed out, “Those trade union and parliamentary leaders who consider the German proletariat to be 'too weak' and that conditions in Germany are 'not ripe enough' for mass revolutionary struggle, evidently have not the slightest idea that the measure of the level of maturity of class relations in Germany and of the strength of the proletariat lies not in the statistics of German trade unionism or in electoral figures, but in the events of the Russian Revolution.”

The Russian Revolution of 1905 would put the debate on strategy in the International on a new level. In 1906, Rosa Luxemburg wrote “Mass Strike, Party and Trade Unions”, after 34 years without revolutions, in which, driven by successive electoral advances, parliamentarism had already become “the old tried and tested tactic” for social democracy, opposed to the idea of the general strike and, increasingly, to the development of extra-parliamentary action in general by the workers’ movement.

As we will see in the next issue of LVO, this will be a fundamental debate that will in turn intersect with discussions on how to confront the world war for which the bourgeoisie was preparing itself more and more decisively.


Rosa Luxemburg 1871-1919:

One of the leading revolutionaries of the 20th century. A leading theorist of German communism and author of important books. Born in Poland, she founded the Polish Social Democratic Party in 1893.
In 1897 she became involved in the German socialist movement. Together with Mehring and Plekhanov, she began the fight against revisionism (Eduard Bernstein)  in the Second International.

Revisionismo (marxismo) - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

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Eduard Bernstein - Wikipedia

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At the 1907 Congress of the Russian Party she supported the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks on all the key issues of the Russian Revolution.

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party - Wikipedia

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Bolsheviks - Wikipedia

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Mensheviks - Wikipedia

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Together with Lenin, she proposed the revolutionary resolution against war. Imprisoned since 1915, she collaborated in the work of the Spartacus League.

Spartacus League - Wikipedia

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She was released in 1918, after the revolution, and participated in the creation of the Communist Party of Germany.

She was arrested and murdered along with Liebknecht in January 1919.

Trotsky wrote on hearing of her murder:
“Ferdinand Lasalle had already written about the physical effort of thought and the supernatural tension that the human spirit is capable of in order to overcome and surmount material obstacles. This was the energy that Rosa Luxemburg communicated when she spoke from the rostrum, surrounded by enemies. And she had many. Despite being small in stature and fragile in appearance, Rosa Luxemburg knew how to command and hold the attention of large audiences, even when they were hostile to her ideas. She was able to silence her most determined enemies by the rigor of her logic, especially when her words were addressed to the working masses.”

 

[Eltitoguay]

HISTORY OF THE INTERNATIONALS​

The Second International (III): Social Democracy in the face of war :​

In this installment we will see how the expansion of imperialist capitalism led to the division of the world among the great monopolies and capitalist powers and resulted in a new relationship between oppressor and oppressed nations.
Among the latter are the colonies, countries that have no political or economic independence, or the semi-colonies, States that are formally independent, but are politically and militarily subordinated to the powers and suffer economic domination due to their dependence on foreign financial capital.
Jazmín Jiménez; July 25, 2013

The imperialist bourgeoisie and its agents divide the working class:

After the defeat of the 1905 Russian Revolution, a period of political ebb and flow began, not only in Russia but throughout Europe.
In England, the Labour Party again began to work closely with the Liberal Party, a bourgeois party;

Labour Party (UK) - Wikipedia

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in France, the trade unionists adopted reformist positions; in Germany, the centre wing of social democracy turned to the right and the right wing raised its head.

In the imperialist countries, positions were being gained, giving an idea of the continuous development of capitalism. Salaries improved, labour protection laws were passed and poverty decreased, although it did not disappear. At the same time, socialist parties increased their votes in each election and won seats in parliament. However, far from a peaceful development, contradictions increased instead of diminishing: it was the threshold of an era of imperialist wars, civil wars and social revolutions.

As we saw in the previous note, capitalism at this stage is characterized by its parasitic character. Lenin explains that the export of capital gives huge profits, which allows the bourgeoisies of the imperialist countries to corrupt the workers' leaders and the upper stratum of the "labor aristocracy" in direct and indirect ways, dividing the proletariat. This was a layer of bourgeois workers, by their way of life and their mentality, who began to be the main support of the International; true agents of the bourgeoisie within the workers' movement, bearers of reformism and nationalism. An important sector of leaders of the workers' parties and unions of the imperialist countries began to represent only the interests of this privileged layer, becoming a bureaucracy within these organizations. These are the material roots that explain why revisionism gained so much weight in theory and reformism in practice, producing a break with the legacy of Marxism in a large part of the members of the International. These leaders, who lived a quiet and peaceful life, conciliated with the bourgeoisies of their countries, became junior partners of the imperialism of their nations, and were increasingly indifferent to what happened to the workers of the colonies. For example, the trade unionists, who were the right-wing tendency of the International, such as those led by Eduard David in Germany, remained passive in the face of slavery in the colonies, or at most argued that, “since colonies were inevitable in capitalism,” one should only fight to improve the living conditions of the people in those countries.


Parliamentary intervention and direct action in the revolutionary strategy:

These were the material pressures that the parties of the International were under. The centrist tendency – the current that oscillated between revolutionary and reformist positions – was now leaning towards the right: Kautsky and Bebel, its main leaders, who had accompanied the left wing in the conclusions of 1905 and in the idea that this was the future of the European revolution, ended up strengthening a reformist strategy, which consisted of pressuring the capitalist governments to obtain concessions, and the struggle to destroy the existing order was only a matter of speeches. Meanwhile, the left wing, headed by Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Lenin and Trotsky, faced these tendencies from a revolutionary strategy.

In this context, the discussion about the general strike became a struggle of strategies in the largest party of the International. In 1910, a movement for universal suffrage developed in Germany; there were assemblies of tens of thousands of workers. The demonstrations were massive, as in Berlin, when up to 200,000 people were mobilized. But the Social Democrats were uncomfortable, since their primary “objective” was the 1912 elections. That is why the official orientation of the party was to calm the movement. What seemed to be a discussion of a new tactic, was transformed into a general debate on the strategy of the new era that was beginning, between an evolutionary and electoral perspective, and a revolutionary strategy based on class struggle.

Rosa Luxemburg proposed adopting the general strike in order to achieve the democratisation of the electoral system. Kautsky, her main opponent, countered her with the need for the proletariat to wager on wearing down the bourgeoisie in order to obtain its demands, and not to run the risk that a mass strike entailed. Kautsky’s strategy of “wearing down” was explained by the successive electoral campaigns that, according to him, should give the party a majority in parliament. Rosa confronted him forcefully: “Since Comrade Kautsky opposes the mass strike conceived in this way [with an artificial contrast] to our old and tried-and-tested tactics of parliamentarism, in reality all he does is recommend for the present and for the present situation nothing but parliamentarism […] In fact, Comrade Kautsky – this is the fundamental pillar of the strategy of wear down – insistently refers us to the next elections for the Reichstag (Parliament).”

For Rosa, Russia, which had developed the general strike and the Soviets as the most democratic organisation in 1905, showed the way. Given the character of the militant mass strike in that country and the role of the proletariat, it was then impossible to separate the economic element from the political one, contrary to the theoretical schemes that differentiated them.

The revolution had shown that the political general strike united the masses in action and overcame the corporate limits of the unions. The general strike, although it did not resolve the problem of who had power, for which an insurrection was necessary, was a powerful tool of struggle for the proletariat.
The discussion on the general strike and the role of direct action in the strategy of the proletariat would not be limited to Germany but would be one of the fundamental discussions that would run through the entire International, when defining the means that the proletariat would be called upon to use to stop the inter-imperialist war that the bourgeoisies were preparing.


The World War and the debacle of the Second International:

As Lenin had put it, capitalism in its imperialist stage was in its phase of decline. The world was divided among a few imperialist powers that were competing in an increasingly violent manner, increasing the tendency towards a great inter-imperialist war.
In July 1914, the First World War began.

World War I - Wikipedia

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The debate on war and what the attitude of revolutionaries should be towards it had permeated the various Congresses since the founding of the Second International. Luxemburg had argued that socialists should fight against militarism and colonialism, opposed military budgets and organised mobilisations against the war. The Amsterdam Congress in 1904 was marked by debate with the revisionists, who saw the possibility of a peaceful path towards socialism through reforms.
The Russian Revolution of 1905, triggered by the Russo-Japanese War, had raised the question of the relationship between war and revolution in the new era. At the Stuttgart Congress of 1907, the discussion of war and colonialism was central, due to the growing tensions between the imperialist countries. The left wing of the International, headed by Lenin, Luxemburg and others, prevailed. The resolution stated that if war threatened to break out, it was the duty of the working class of these countries and their representatives in parliament, with the help of the International leadership, to make every effort to prevent it. And if war did break out, they had the right to intervene to stop it by using the economic and political crisis created by the war, mobilizing broad popular sectors and thus precipitating the fall of capitalist domination. But it was not clear what methods of struggle would be to precipitate this fall. This discussion, which would be central to the Copenhagen Congress in 1910, would revolve around the effectiveness or not of the general strike, although here again no definition was reached because no agreement was reached between the different wings of the International. In 1912 the leadership of the International organized acts against the war and called an extraordinary congress in Basel, with the aim of making a demonstration of strength and international solidarity, where for the first time the imperialist character of the war was denounced.

In July 1914, war broke out.
In response, the German Social Democrats issued a manifesto demanding that the government not enter the war and organised meetings attended by millions of workers. But the decline of capitalism and the tensions between the great powers were becoming so acute that the only way to stop it was to call for a general strike, which they did not do. The second mandate of the Stuttgart resolution was not carried out: “to use with all their might the economic and political crisis caused by the war to stir up the masses and thus precipitate the fall of capitalist domination.” This was the ultimate test and here the International broke up, destroying all the proclamations of the previous years.

While most leaders guaranteed that the class struggle would not develop within their countries, in other words, they were doing the bourgeoisie a favour so that it could go to war without worrying about internal affairs, Lenin, on the other hand, proposed that the imperialist war should be transformed into a civil war. This policy was called “revolutionary defeatism” and consisted in the fact that the working class should not stop the revolutionary struggle against the government of their country, in the face of the possibility of its defeat in the war. For him, the revolution in times of war was a civil war.

The 4th of August 1914 marked the collapse of the Second International.
The 111 members of parliament of the German Social Democratic Party approved the loans that the government was asking for to go to war.
The French socialists did the same on the other side of the border, leading the workers to the slaughterhouse.
They renounced the class struggle in the name of “defending the attacked fatherland”. In this way they broke the international solidarity of the proletariat, surrendered to their bourgeoisies and betrayed the cause of socialism.
In this way the Second International was bankrupt.

But Lenin, Trotsky, Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and the left wing of the International opposed the war, and later organised the Zimmerwald and Kienthal Conferences, which laid the foundation for a new International, as we will see in the next installment.


Karl Liebknecht 1871-1919:

Leader of the German Social Democratic Party, he was the only deputy to oppose the war, imprisoned from 1916 to 1918 for his anti-war activity. Founder with Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartacus League.
Both were assassinated, by order of the social democratic government, for leading the insurrection of January 1919.
This is how Trotsky remembered it: "The name of Karl Liebknecht became known throughout the world in the first days of the great European war. From the first weeks of this war, when German militarism celebrated its first victories, its first bloody orgies, (…) when German social democracy knelt before German militarism and imperialism that seemed able to subdue the entire world (…) in the midst of these dark and tragic days a single voice was raised in Germany to protest and curse: that of Karl Liebknecht. In reality, Liebknecht was not alone: Rosa Luxemburg, a woman of great courage, fought at his side.”