Self-Determination and Cuba

January 08, 2015

Obama’s Kiss of Death

Self-Determination and Cuba

by NORMAN POLLACK


Capitalism is a system founded on repression. The enclosure movement in 17th-century England, even the mercantilist pre-capitalist foundations paving the way, both transitional to capitalism in its modern form, necessitated force, the State as accomplice in achieving wealth accumulation and further class-differentiation, a new epoch therefore in defining relationships of power that assumed and facilitated the exploitation of what would become, in one case, colonial dependencies, and in the other, a working class dependent on those in possession of property. That much is or should be familiar to all: hierarchy, surplus value, the institutional (and ideological) preservation of order. Subordination, whether directed to other nations or industrial laborers in domestic society, becomes integral to capitalist development, a non-negotiable condition for achieving maximum capital accumulation and the uncontested structure of authority. To this extent the political-moral equation of capitalism=democracy=freedom is baloney pure and simple.

The point is relevant to the wider historical performance and status of capitalism in relation to socialism. And therefore, relevant to the discussion of Cuba as a nation and political economy. Unlike capitalism, socialism has never had the historical opportunity to experience autonomous development freed from intervention, outside pressures to capitulate, support of indigenous forces of subversion. With socialism historically came capitalist counterrevolution, as in the case of the Siberian Intervention following World War I, establishing a pattern in which capitalism, chiefly the US, has been unrelenting in anticipating then destroying not only alternative patterns of modernization and political economy, but also their hint of germination and/or success, even as social-democratic versions of capitalism itself. Our way or the highway, buttressed now by international organizations such as the IMF and World Bank, is the reigning formula, the proviso of force always present in reserve.

Capitalism posits no compromise, no spirit of structural-ideological reconciliation, no comity of political economies (to paraphrase the idea of a comity of nations: courtesy, friendship, mutual recognition), and instead, a systemic SOLIPSISM, one grounded ultimately in fear of social change, of democratization, of the very concept of alternative formations per se. Market fundamentalism, the Washington Consensus, deregulation, monopoly, cartels, international financial controls, all (and more) define a US-sponsored and –implemented context of operations which greets any departures as a grievous affront to national honor and possible grounds for war. Cuba has been in the American cross-hairs for 56 years, 7 days, 15 hours (at time of writing), a bipartisan obsession which confirms the psychopathology of insecurity and ideological rigidity of capitalism in America as the frivolous combination of militarism and consumerism, as prone to collapse in case intervention, humongous military appropriations, neocolonialism in trade-and-investment activities and penetration, and more subtly, the false consciousness of working people, racial minorities, the poor in general, should abate, no longer operate, in confirming American power and the pursuit of global hegemony.

If, as I suggest, the secret of capitalism is its FEAR, of others, internal collapse, overcompensation for producing alienation, class antipathies, emptiness in the labor process, a fear therefore of being found out as inhumane, it follows that Cuba becomes a special case of its (again specifically here, American) posture of world Reaction, the tenacious holding on, with the West as a whole, to a hereinbefore status quo of global domination. Now America, in spite of capitalistic fragments/trends in Russia, China, and even Cuba, believes itself besieged and seeks undisputed leadership of international capitalism, the role of custodian of the system, which works to strengthen an already ingrained ethnocentrism (the Other as stranger, adversary, socialist) placing fear-of-difference foremost on the historical agenda. What, Cuba? We eat countries like that for breakfast, and crush them if they resist.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/08/self-determination-and-cuba/