Dialectic Traps / Reinaldo Escobar

Underlying the idea “to change everything that has to be changed,” is a contradiction between the subject and the object of change. When Cuban communists turn this maxim into their new motto, that are thinking “everything that needs to change” in order for socialism to survive, and what they don’t realize is that for the survival of the nation what has to change is socialism.

When I say “socialism” I’m talking about the political, social and economic model with a limited dose of flexibility whose golden rule has four inviolable parts:

  1. The purpose of producing to satisfy the ever-growing needs of the population.
  2. That each contributes according to his capacity and receive according to what he contributes.
  3. That the fundamental means of production are socially owned.
  4. Implementing the dictatorship of the proletariat to eradicate the bourgeois class and to prevent new generations born under the system from resuscitating the appetite for property, the insatiable desire to prosper more than others.

To reject any one of these rules constitutes, according to Lenin, an unpardonable revisionism with disastrous consequences. What the Cuban Communists have not detailed in their Sixth Congress, and probably won’t detail in their upcoming Conference, is whether among what they propose to change is the ideological basis of Marxist-Leninism. If so, they are deciding once and for all to change the name of their organization and baptize it the Cuban Fidelist Party, or whatever occurs to them. This is where you go to find a guaranteed failure if what you are trying to change is human nature, far from the fanciful laws of history imagined in the nineteenth century.

24 April 2011