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Recorded in Northridge, CA on April 04, 1990.
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I thought I would speak on everything, I thought I'd speak on, actually, the developments in the world East and West and these developments have led some people to say that Marxism is dead. Marxism is over, it's irrelevant, it's obsolete. It has nothing to say about the world, it's a failure and that's been proven by the collapse of communist governments in Eastern Europe. I'm not too worried about the question of Marxism being dead, because I've been hearing that for 40 years now, that Marxism is irrelevant, that it doesn't work, that history is proving it wrong. Let me say that Marxism is not a theory about existing socialist societies preponderantly. The corpus of Marxist theory is about something else. The amount of Marxist writings about existing social societies is very small, about what socialism would look like; that theory is very underdeveloped in fact and I think, in a way, that practice went way ahead of theory in that respect. In many societies we always hear that theory is all mapped out, but you never get it developed in practice, it's easy to spin a theory, but there's no practice. In fact, more often than not, it's the other way around that there's often quite a bit of things happening and the theory hasn't been developed to explain what's happening. Theory often is catching up to practice. The Marxist theory about existing social societies is a very naive theory, it said that once you get rid of capitalism, once you heal certain contradictions and abuses and exploitations in society and once you can utilize the social production, people are going to act differently and people are going to be really happy etcetera etcetera and that isn't quite what happened.
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Marxism, the other 90% of Marxism, is about capitalism. Marxism is a theory about capitalism and it's a theory which says that capitalism has certain dynamics. Capitalism has a tendency to accumulate capital for the sake of accumulating capital, that's what Marxism says. Marxism says that capitalism is not a system about building jobs, or building communities, or creating work, or creating a better standard of living, that capitalism will create jobs or destroy jobs. Depending on whether or not there's profit, it will create communities Levittown's whatever else, it'll create beautiful houses if there's someone who could pay beautiful prices or it will destroy communities as it destroyed Poletown in Chicago, to build a Cadillac plant. It will create jobs or it will close out jobs, through automation or through exporting those jobs to cheaper labor markets in Hong Kong or South Korea whatever else. That capitalism is a dynamic, that has very little to do with human needs, it's a dynamic that has to do with the maximization of profit. It's central imperative, the central law of capitalist motion and development is the maximization of profit, is capital penetration for the sake of capital accumulation and it will use the environment as a septic tank, not because people are nasty, not because they're stupid or anything else but because that is rational...it's rational to do that and that's the Marxist analysis of capitalism and that's the difference between a liberal complaint and a radical analysis, because the liberal will spend the rest of his life complaining about these things being wrong and saying "aren't we foolish, aren't we irrational that we foul our environment in this way. When are we going to come to our senses?” The implication, always, is that the person who's saying that is somehow morally better and nicer and who would do differently than all the other silly foolish confused people around. The Marxist analysis says: no that isn't true.
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The reason Firestone built that tire company plant on the Mill River in Connecticut and took a river, that Mother Nature had spent a hundred million years developing, that was used for recreation and fishing and drinking water and Firestone dumped that raw industrial effusion into that water wasn't because they were foolish, because they were confused or silly, but they were rational. The commitment wasn't to that River, it wasn't to the environment, it wasn't to the children playing, it wasn't to future generations, and it wasn't to the community; although they'll say that in their PR, the propaganda, as they're doing now with Earth Day. Exxon coming out with ads on Earth Day blows my mind, I say "where am I, 1984 Orwell? What is this?”
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Exxon says “we love the earth too - well we've had a few little rough spots here there but we're with you on Earth Day”, because they had nothing to do with that and that's a Marxist analysis and the Marxist says it's quite rational to dump your raw industrial effusion into that River, because that maximizes your profits and the essence of that system: is the maximization of profit is capital accumulation. Every other human value is secondary and in fact, possibly even antagonistic to that value. It doesn't matter then, those values shall be smashed, sometimes some of them can be accommodated, if they can be accommodated within the parameters of profit, if not, then they have to go.
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If you want to say that analysis is no longer pertinent, because like Valencé has proven himself to be, what I always knew he was, a right-wing capitalist admirer. If you want to say that "I don't get the connection, I don't see that at all". The liberal will say "look how foolish, how wasteful our military budget is. The Air Force builds an F-16 fighter plane and the Navy Air Force builds an F-16 fighter plane which is almost a duplicate, total duplication. Billions of dollars duplicated when we already had that weapon. Isn't that foolish and wasteful?" The Marxist analysis says: no that's not foolish and wasteful, that's only foolish and wasteful from a human point of view, from the taxpayers point of view from the needs of your human community, but who the hell ever said capitalism had anything to do with the human community, if you think it does just listen to George Bush and find out. What has he ever been saying about the needs of the human community two years in office? It's not wasteful, it's wonderful, if you're a defense contractor, then it's wonderful to have a contract with the Navy and one with the Air Force and you'll even go for one with the Marines and with the Seabees and you try to sell the F-16 to the Coast Guard if you could do it, if you could get away with it, it's perfectly rational.
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So you have got to decide: are you going to spend the rest of your life as a half-ass liberal complaining about the irrationalities and the foolishness of all these programs? That's all we ever hear in the media, to the extent we get any criticisms of existing policy. Or are you going to point out the links of class power and class interests that are behind those things that keep doing those things? Do you really think, that because you don't know what they're doing, they don't know what they're doing? That's why when someone says "how can you still be a Marxist?" It's like someone saying to me "how can you still think there's a law of gravity? Don't you see we have an airplane now?”
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How could I pretend that it's just foolish or that I don't know why the US is in El Salvador, or that they're in Central America because they've just got some ego thing, or they're in Central America because they're chasing ghosts and they're all confused in their policy. It's very rational to be in Central America. You're in Central America because you have to keep the world safe for this global process of capital penetration and capital accumulation and the countries you attack and go after are the ones which might take a revolutionary path, or not even so revolutionary. Ãrbenz in Guatemala wasn't a revolutionary, Goulart in Brazil wasn't a revolutionary, Sukarno in Indonesia wasn't a revolutionary, Allende in Chile wasn't a revolutionary, Mosaddegh in Iran wasn't a revolutionary, the Greek premiers under Papandreou weren't revolutionaries when the fascist generals came in, but what they were they were populist nationalist. Noriega and the People's Democratic Revolutionary Party in Panama isn't a revolutionary party, it's a populist party, but it's a left military in Panama...it was. The people's defense force was. The Panamanian Defense Force was a left force and they used to shake down the companies, instead of nationalizing them, they shook 'em down and then they took that money and built social programs. Panama had social welfare programs, it had social security, it had Human Services, they were developing it. By Central American standards, they were pretty good and that has to be destroyed. When it became clear that Noriega wasn't our man, but he was continuing in Torrijos' path, Torrijos who was killed by the CIA, I charged them with that murder when his plane mysteriously blew up in mid-air, then Noriega had to go. Well, we're not in Panama to get Noriega, we got Noriega several months ago, but we're there and we've arrested thousands of trade union leaders and political leaders and intellectuals. Panama City University is being purged of left people. Other people are being rounded up.
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Now you could say "I don't understand why we're in Panama. I don't understand why we're in Central America. I don't understand why we did that in Indonesia. I don't understand why we back the wrong side all the time". It's not the wrong side, it's the wrong side from a human point of view, it's the wrong side from a point of view of social justice, but it's a correct side, that's correct policy if your constituency is the fortune 500. Then it’s correct policy to go into those countries and keep them open for capital penetration and capital accumulation on your terms, where those resources are yours, where those markets are yours, where that workforce is a cheap labor force, where you can pay them not seven dollars an hour and not eleven dollars an hour, like you got to do in Ohio or California, but you can pay them seventy cents an hour and that's very rational. I mean we're talking about billions of dollars in difference. Billions of dollars that would otherwise go to the people who work for wages and salaries, or have pensions. Billions of dollars taken from the pockets of the people who live off interests and dividends and Commission royalties, like when they own land that has oil on it or something and rents. That class is the class that is served by George Bush, if you think not, then you tell me: what is his tax policy? He has only one tax policy which is to cut capital gains, in fact the only domestic bill that George Bush has pushed for in two years, that he's been in office, is a cut in the capital gains tax, I mean really push well you know calling up senators lining up votes and all that sort of thing, it's a cut in the capital gains tax. Cutting it for that point five, one half of one percent, of the population that would benefit from that tax cut.
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In every other area he's doing nothing. In the environment he's doing nothing. He gets up before an international environmental group two months ago and he says "considerations about the environment must always take into account", he has that dynamic way of talking just sets you on fire and I said "go for it Georgie! Go!" He said "considerations of environments always take into account the free market and economic development". Translated: profits before environment. He was saying what I just said. You see the argument that Marxists make is that George Bush is Marxist; he doesn't know he's a Marxist, but he is performing. He says what we say he says, he said "screw your environment buddy, its profits first". Senator Stephen Simms of Idaho made a very good point, he said it much better, it was on a radio interview not long ago, I heard him. He said "if it's a question of choosing between ecology and capitalism; then I'm picking capitalism". I thought that was fascinating. I said "wait a minute?! What do you mean you're picking capitalism over ecology?" It's like someone saying "if it's a question of choosing between smoking or my lungs: I'm picking smoking", but you need your lungs; even for smoking. So when they say that Marxism is no longer relevant, I don't know what they're talking about, because that's what a Marxist analysis is, it's analysis about the laws of capital motion and development and about class power and interest.
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It's also an analysis about another capitalist force, the most potent and powerful in shaping the map of the world, the most potent and powerful over the last 500 years which you never studied in school…I'll bet most of you, maybe one or two, which you never studied in school; because capitalism is not only an economic order, it's a whole social order. It's not just an economic system, it's a whole social system and in capitalist schools and in the West you don't study it, but Marxism is a study of that other most potent force in the history of mankind over the last five centuries. It's called imperialism and it has carved up the world. It has murdered literally millions upon millions of people; either by direct violence or through starvation and deprivation and other ways and it's not taught. I can tell you, you can get a PhD in political science from Yale University and never once study imperialism, you're looking at it. You're looking at someone who did that very thing. When I wrote my book The Sword in the Dollar, it kept occurring to me, "why did I have to wait till now to read or discover some of the things that I'm writing about?" So that's what Marxism is about, it's a study of capitalism and it's a study of imperialism.
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It makes some other statements it says that "the process of capital accumulation and concentration is an indigenous characteristic, an inherent tendency", by the way a tendency doesn't mean it's inevitable and must always be manifested, but it's an inherent tendency is the tendency toward increasing concentrations of capital. Is that no longer relevant? Can someone come up and say that's no longer relevant? When, over the last eight years, the ten largest mergers in the 400 year history of capitalism took place…in the last eight years. Giant multinational conglomerates not gobbling up smaller companies, but gobbling up other giant multinational conglomerates. When a giant multinational conglomerate, like NBC incorporated; which owns media and TV and radio stations and publishing houses and recreation parks and things in three different continents, when NBC is gobbled up by a still larger giant multinational conglomerate called General Electric. Sometimes the smaller one buys out the bigger one but it doesn't matter. The amazing concentration of capital is going on. That's what Marx wrote about. If that's not correct, then Marxism is irrelevant, if it is correct, then you might want to give a better look at what's happening.
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Another thing that the Marxists say is that there is, along with this growing concentration of capital, growing immiseration, growing impoverishment of masses of people. "Well that's not relevant everybody's middle-class, we all got VCRs now" and all sort of thing. Well you got to look at the whole globe and you will find that, in fact, the trend over the last 40 years has been for increasing impoverishment, increasing poverty, increasing malnutrition; because of that capital concentration and that capital penetration and capital accumulation.
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The Brazilian miracle of the 1960's, which showed a growth in the in the gross national income and the gross national product of the nation, also created the black bean shortage. That land that used to be used for beans and rice and corn was taken away and used by agribusiness to grow tobacco and coffee and sugar and cotton and beef for cash export markets elsewhere and of course it's going to mean an increase in your gross national product, of course you're making more money off that land when you're growing coffee for commercial markets, than when some peasants own it and they're growing beans and corn, but the people are starving. What that gross national product increase doesn't show you is that the maldistribution is increasing and so all throughout the world you see that tendency, not just the poor, but even what's called the middle class in the third world and the middle class is a very rather privileged stratum, they too are suffering and being dragged down and are complaining about the terrible problems they're having. So the Marxist prediction that the tendency in capitalism is for an increasing impoverishment of the masses is true.
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Even in our own country, the country that those Eastern Europeans love and dream of and talk about with stars in their eyes, when you talk to them and they say "oh, but in America it's different in America, you don't know, I know because I have seen it on your television. In America it's different". Even in our own country, in the last 10 years, the number of people living below the poverty level have gone from 24 million to 35.5 million, now down to 34.5 million. What that means in the last decade the poor are the fastest-growing social group in America. Well that's what Marx was talking about. Even putting aside the poor, that middle class is finding all sorts of people who have to hold down two jobs, people who today are working much harder just to stay in the same place. Real wages have gone down in the last 15 or 20 years since 1977 or earlier.
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So that doesn't sound like it's too far off the mark, that sounds like a very real description, not only a description of what's happening because you can make a prediction for totally wrong reasons. Conservatives are sometimes right...I mean even a broken clock is right twice a day as they say. Not only that prediction, but giving you an analysis and an explanation as to why that dynamic can be happening, why you can have 35 million poor amid so much wealth. Marxists also say that there are growing levels of exploitation and capital accumulation and that's true, the degree of profits are terrific. In the midst of all that profits, there's a growing tendency to have a falling rate of profit, so that no matter how rich and big and how much you're making, your profits are never really stable; there's always a problem of them going down, there's always a problem of even the richest corporations going out of business, which again is true. Chrysler almost crashed and went out, it didn't go because Chrysler got the M1 tank.
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The Marxist description of capitalism is that it's a force which goes everywhere in the globe, turning every corner of the world into its own image. That process is still going on today and maybe you read about a month ago, in the LA Times, a special report on the rainforests of Borneo in the South Pacific: here you have people who've lived very beautiful lives by the descriptions they had their own orchards and groves in the jungles, they raised food, they hunted and it's all being wiped out as capitalism comes in for the hardwood and turns these people; quite systematically, quite deliberately into wage earners. The way you turn people like that into wage earners is you deprive them of their source of sustenance. Once you deprive them of their source of sustenance, they then have to go after the wage as being the thing which will sustain them, that is a Marxist analysis.
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You can read Marxism every day in your daily newspapers, the dynamics that have been discussed by Marx. Che Guevara said: "we can't help it that in Latin America, reality is Marxist. That there are very rich people and they live off the backs of the poor and that the impoverishment is increasing and that they use the power of the state to defend their holdings and to prevent competing or alternative social orders from coming in to develop and use the land the labor the capital the markets in a different way". I think what's happening in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, because I think the same process is going on there, I think there too you can see capitalism at work.
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One of the factors never talked about and it's not talked about by Russians by Soviet writers either, who right now are in an imbecilic orgy of self-flagellation and criticism, to the point where the more negative they can be about their society, the better they seem to feel. A few years ago you could never say anything negative about the Soviet Union if you were there, they never say and you say "what's the problem?"
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"We don't have any problems"
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"You must have some problems?"
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"No, no, no. Everything's nice". Now they can't say anything positive, those same people are now in an orgy of self-criticism, but the one thing they never talk about, because they're too busy flagellating themselves, is that the failure of these communist societies is not just a failure of socialism of that particular form of state socialism will seed socialism, it's a victory of capitalism. It is an example of capitalism at work, because for 70 years in the Soviet Union, for 40 years in Eastern Europe and for 10 years in Nicaragua, for 30 years in regard to Cuba, you have had capitalist encirclement and one of the major factors in the failure of these societies is the power of capitalist encirclement. That capitalist encirclement has meant: invasions, civil wars, sabotage, mercenary armies, destruction of the productive facilities of the society, more invasion, more sabotage, economic boycott, economic embargo, monetary embargo, technological embargo; which have distorting effects upon a society.
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In May of 1921, Lenin got up before the Bolshevik party convention and he said "we've had enough with the workers opposition, let's get rid of them". Now the workers opposition were loyal Bolsheviks, they were communists, they were in the Bolshevik Party, they were in the Communist Party. When the Kronstadt rebellion came, the workers opposition did not side with the Kronstadt Sailors, they sided with the party. In the civil war they were with the party, throughout all the struggles the workers opposition were with the party, but they had formed a self-conscious caucus that had decided that it would represent the particular interests of the industrial proletariat against the party itself at times and after all this invasion, all this destruction, all this terrible death and struggle when Lenin once said "Soviet Russia is like a man with a death fever, just hanging on by an inch of his life". After all that Lenin turned and said "we've had enough opposition". The feeling very much was that that opposition was a wedge and opening, it invited our enemies our mortal enemies to come in and attack us and divide us and the party convention uproariously supported him and said “no more workers opposition no more factions within the party”. So right there that emphasis on a monolithic party and that same month, or the month before in April, Lenin called for a strengthening of the trade unions and for more worker representation on the Central Committee of the Communist Party. So it wasn't that he was moving anti-worker, it was that he was moving against opposition. So right there you see the seeds of a system that could not develop naturally with an opposition, with checks, with internal debate and argument. A system that began to strain for uniformity, for siege, for lockstep cooperation; the emphasis being on organizing, getting the thing done, stop asking too many questions; because everything was a life-and-death issue.
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When the Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua ten years ago, filled with ideals and hopes for their nation and their people, they discovered a very awful thing and it wasn't about themselves even though they had to do it to themselves, it was about that capitalist encirclement. They discovered that they needed a secret police, they discovered that they needed a security police, because all around them coming in from two borders and within their own society were acts of sabotage, espionage attack, mercenary invasion and the like. They understood that if the revolution was going to survive it would have to build up instruments of state power, instruments of coercion even and these instruments by the way can make mistakes and these instruments can not only make mistakes they can commit some serious crimes, although in Nicaragua the impressive record is how few crimes there were given the utterly dire conditions they were under.
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So that kind of capitalist encirclement which goes on unrelenting, attacking any existing socialist society, if some of you don't want to call those societies socialist, don't call them socialist call them window shades, whatever you want to call them, as long as you know what I mean, that I mean: the public ownership of the means of production, using capital in a different way not for capital accumulation per se as an end in itself, a strong social wage, free education, free medical care and subsidized housing, subsidized food subsidized bread, all those things that the Hungarians and Poles are now complaining about losing. That's what I mean by socialist. If you don't want to call that socialist, that's not what real socialism is, real socialism is something that's going to exist someday when the world and people are better and different and it's going to come down and be in a much better form than those things were that's fine. In this world, see I believe socialism is not that real beautiful goal in that society: participation, harmony this and that, I believe that socialism is a process of struggle to achieve that thing. So just go along with my vocabulary, even if you have trouble with it.
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Those socialist or communist societies suffered terrible distorting effects. If there had been no invasion, if there had been no espionage, if there had been no attack, if there had been no white guard armies burning villages; there wouldn't have been a red army of that size, there wouldn't have been a Stalin, there wouldn't have been a KGB. If there hadn't been a CIA, there wouldn't have been a KGB. If there hadn't been a NATO encirclement, there wouldn't have been a Warsaw Pact. To lose sight of that fact is to lose sight of an essential force of what was going on over those seventy years...or ten years. If you want to know what the Soviet Union went through in its early years, just look at what Nicaragua went through in these ten years and then multiply that by ten. Every single one of those countries was targeted, they were targeted by missiles, they were targeted by acts of espionage, they were targeted by economic embargo and all sorts of other forms of aggression, they were targeted by incredible propaganda barrages and the like. Unrelenting, unremitting.
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The most targeted socialist country in the world, as of a couple years ago and actually still to today, is not Nicaragua was not Nicaragua, not even Cuba, it was the Soviet Union. All those missiles were pointing to the USSR, they still are and they're still building those missiles and they're refusing to negotiate those missiles, the sea-based missiles, which is where the US has 75% of its first strike force. They have announced that they will not negotiate that 75% of the first strike force, only their 25% which is land-based. The Soviets of course 75% of their force is land-based and only 25% is sea based and none of it working very well, because they've got just a few choke points and they don't have that much access to sea and they don't have all the fueling stations and harbors and whatever else that the US has around the world. So that kind of encirclement is still there and that kind of thing is still going on.
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If you want to understand something about it, that's why Gorbachev is trying to normalize international relations, even at the risk of giving away the whole store. It's because he's hoping that would give him, he also doesn't want to see the world blown up of course and he wants to end the Cold War, but he also wants to see that as a means of normalizing social relations in his own country. When you have a burden, which is twice as heavy as we have in this country, a military burden of that sort, you've got to do something about it before you lose your whole economy. These countries also suffered from a lot of other things. They suffered from centuries of under development and poverty.
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There's a lot of talk in the media right now for instance that Poland is being left in such bad shape. The Communists have left Poland in such bad shape, I think there's a certain poetic justice about that, you should have seen Poland when the Communists took it over, when the capitalists left it. It was totally decimated. Hundreds of villages destroyed, whole cities, all of Warsaw destroyed, reduced to rubble. Poverty, malnutrition, starvation, that's what the Communists took over. They built up a Poland that was worse, or as bad, as any third-world country in some cases worse in terms of what had happened to its industrial base and its infrastructure and everything else and built it up. So there's this incredible economic backlog of the countries that are taken over: of Cuba, Nicaragua and then what happens to them when they're in there. As I said, let me repeat, not just these countries are targeted by capitalist encirclement, but even any kind of mildly populist nationalist country: a Libya, a Panama, a Guatemala under Arbenz, a Chile under Allende. Allende was a Marxist, but his government was a popular unity government made up of six different parties, with all sorts of different tendencies and he emphasized again and again that it wasn't a Marxist society.
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Another thing these countries have had, especially in Eastern Europe, very relevant to Eastern Europe, is ideological backwardness, not only economic but ideologically backwardness. Incredible ideological retrograde elements dominant in these countries. Listening to the media today, you would get the impression that Eastern Europe is now going back to its democracy, it is regaining its democracy. When Lech Wałęsa says "let Poland be what it was in 1940, before the war" I said "What? Wait a minute!" Poland in 1940 was a right-wing fascist dictatorship, powerful Church that controlled all the education, no freedom of dissent, anti-Semitic, poor, privileged barons owning estates, workers working at subsistence wages, starvation wages. That's what you want to go back to Lech Wałęsa? Well, you're doing a very good job of it I must say.
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All of these countries were fascist countries before World War two, except Czechoslovakia which was a Western parliamentary democracy, but Hungary was a fascist country it was allied to the Nazis in World War two. Bulgaria was a fascist country it was allied with the Nazis and fought with the Nazis in World War two. Romania was a fascist country, it was allied with the Nazis. Lithuania was a fascist country it was allied with the Nazis. Do you forget it? Well some of us haven't forgot it. These were anti-Semitic, fascist countries that supported the powers that be, in the most retrograde narrow way, supported by petty bourgeois mentalities that themselves were superstitious and religious-ridden and individualistic, anti-Semitic, Nazi collaborators, priest-ridden; those elements are not taking too much time in surfacing again in Lithuania and in Hungary.
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Talking on the part of Hungary, talking about the Christian justice party, Hungary just invited Pinochet to come to Hungary to tell them how they should handle their economy. How do you do that harsh surgery that you did so well in Chile after you kicked out Allende? That invitation was rescinded, because it didn't look too good. "Look, you can be a fascist, but don't invite overt fascists in". Hungary invited the South African Foreign Minister to come in.
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Listen to Havel, president of Czechoslovakia, the guy who said, with that false humility, I knew this guy was going to run the day I read his statement, they said "will you be President?"
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He said "I am not a politician, I am a playwright, I am just a writer".
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I said "this guy's going for it".
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When they talk humble like that, “oh man he's going for it”. Once he became president he couldn't stop, the first thing he's going to Bonn, he goes to Moscow, he goes here, he’s going there. Issuing proclamations all over. He's talking about the Christian family and the Christian nation and he's talking about how since world war two it was the forces of light, that was the West, against the forces of darkness and that was communism. The forces of light, in the West? Were those the forces of light that killed all those people in Zaire? That created South Africa? That have destroyed so many people in Latin America and Central America? Those are the forces of light? That's the free world? Havel is buying in and talking that reader's digest George Bush line right down the way. So there is this incredible ideological conservatism and background.
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Having said all that, I do not want to deny that there were very real problems within those systems themselves: a bureaucratic mode of operation, a structured hierarchical organization that did not allow for proper feedback and corrective measures, an organizational ethic as in every organization where your destiny and your advance in the organization depends on what? Not on serving your constituency, but on pleasing the person above you. A media that was really retarded in terms of its propaganda, or its ability to present things about the world. I was raised hearing about communist propaganda, what struck me is how the kind of propaganda that came out of communist countries, or even in them, was so fifty years behind what the US had. I mean they don't have a media culture, they don't have an advertising culture, they don't know how to do image, as witnessed by the fact that now they're having elections, they call Westerners in. "Please come and tell us how to manipulate the public in elections".
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“But you guys have been doing that for years. Aren't you wicked diabolic communist? You should know how to do it”.
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They say "No, we don't know. How do I sell myself like a soap product?"
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Well, we also learned that people cannot live by the social wage alone, that once our needs are satisfied, then our wants become our needs and our wants tend to escalate. I was talking to an East German friend of mine, who is complaining about conditions in East Germany. The complaints are interesting, because the image we have of these communist countries is of this totalitarian pressing down and crushing. The complaints they have, when you talk to them, is that the Goddamn things a whole goof off. It's a goof off. Nobody's minding the store, or there should be more labor discipline. We build a nice housing project, people moved in and they're not bothering to pay the rents. Klaus' wife Marion was furious about that. They're living in these beautiful nice housing projects and they're not even paying the rent and nobody's getting around to collect the rents. Well you can't run a country quite that well if that happens. He was complaining about those things and by the way, a lot of the complaints are legitimate complaints.
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The fate of the whistle-blower in communist/socialist countries is the same as the fate of the whistle-blower in our country. You complain, you don't get rewarded for your integrity, you get into trouble. He was complaining about the junky cars and you can't get any oranges and we don't get any bananas. He said at Christmas time there's a shipment of oranges and everybody in the factory leaves in the middle of the workday and rushes down to get on line to buy the oranges. I said "in the US you'd be machine-gunned if you did that". He'd be fired if you did that. In fact, East Germans would go to West Germany and discover when they want to rush off the job to go shopping, they get fired and they didn't know that. He's talking about not being able to get this…and that doesn't quite work as well as I want. I said to him "well Klaus, what about your free education, your health care, free health care? I mean some of us don't have health insurance". At the time I was talking to him, I didn't have health insurance, what happens to health here is terrible. "What about you got your subsidized this and subsided that and all that" and his answer was very good it really summed it all up.
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He said "oh. Nobody ever talks about that".
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I said "that's interesting" and you can see what's happening now. Nobody ever talks about that, but they assumed that was what they were going to have. They took for granted those things they had and they are looking now for the goodies.
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The East Germans were stunned last year, before the border opened, when something like 800 of their doctors applied to emigrate. Their doctors do have the goodies: they have a little apartment, a nice apartment, they have a car, they have phones, they have all these other things, they have a very good income and all that. These doctors were applying to emigrate and the government was really stunned and say "Why you?" and the answer is: they want to see Paris, they want to travel and they don't have any hard currency. There wasn't such a restriction on travel, Klaus says, people could travel. Getting out of the country wasn't hard, it's just that you didn't even have any hard currency. It goes to the exchange, because of the monetary embargo against the East German currency. So you'd have to go to West Germany, stay with a relative, you'd have only ten dollars in your pocket and you could stay only a limited time. They want to go elsewhere, they want to do all the things that are being done elsewhere. So, the dynamic is that as people get treated better, they also want more, they're not necessarily grateful for what they have, they want more. In fact, they take for granted what they have.
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Laurence Weschler, in his article in The New Yorker, was interviewing some Polish workers and he said "would you be in favor of this factory being turned over to private hands and then it would work more efficiently under private ownership, because they would fire a lot of the featherbedding and surplus workers?"
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The workers said "yes, that would be good, be more productive then per worker"
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He said "well, what if you two lost your jobs?"
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The workers said "Well that's okay, we'd still do it"
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"You'd still do it?"
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"Yes, because the government would find us other jobs".
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Weschler said "they don't get it, they don't get it". They don't understand that that social wage, those securities, those built-in safety nets and all that are going to go, because you're getting this other system. That system, that dynamic system of capital penetration and capital accumulation, where you become an instrumental value for this other end. You are no longer the end. We no longer worry about getting everybody a job here. We worry about, who are the people we could pick? The younger workers.
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Weschler talks about the older tired worker, if he's too slow. The owner, a former solidarity leader, comes along and fires him on the spot to leave and then the other workers don't even look up with their heads, he's fired. The Poles now, are taking abuses from their new capitalist solidarity government that they would have never tolerated under the communist government and they say "it's okay because it's going to lead us to the Promised Land...soon". What they're suffering now is a six hundred percent inflation, a hundred thousand unemployed every month, hunger, bread lines in Poland. An incredible story which isn't being reported very much, I don't see it on evening news. Have I missed it? Shots of the bread lines and the complaints and all that…nothing much. It's a sensational eye-opening story. The system that didn't work is out and the system that does work has come in and it's brought massive unemployment and inflation. That's the system that works. That's the success story. That's the problem, because the Poles, when they're thinking of capitalism, are not thinking of Zaire and capitalist Indonesia and capitalist Brazil and capitalist Mexico and capitalist Turkey. They're thinking of West Germany, Sweden, Canada and the US. That's what they think they're gonna become, but they're not gonna become that. Right before our very eyes, this year, they're becoming another Brazil or Mexico or Turkey. Well, this is what we face. I could go on with other points I want to make about what was wrong with existing socialism, but I think I'll stop there.
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A leadership that didn't suffer so much from despotism as from arrogance, a leadership that talked only to each other. The Hungarian ambassador in Washington, I live in Washington D.C, the Hungarian ambassador had a little press conference and he was saying "we're changing our system"
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We say "Why?"
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"Because it's failed, it doesn't work"
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We say "Why doesn't it work?"
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He said "I don't know" and I wanted to grab this guy by his lapels and shake him and say
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"You don't know!? Wait a minute, you've been in the party elite for 30 years and you don't know why your system doesn't work? Who have you been talking to? What has been happening? How out of touch can a leadership get?" Very out of touch is the answer, very out of touch because they begin to talk only to themselves.
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It's a system that was suffered a great deal of cultural penetration from the West. You cannot talk to these people and convince them that there's poverty and discontent in the West. They don't believe you. They know. They have imagined the future and it is the US. If you say "you know there are people sleeping on gratings, homeless people in New York and all that"
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They said "that's not true. Nikya just came back from New York, he said he didn't see any homeless people".
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A friend of mine was in Cuba we're talking to people there and he had a young man say to him "you Americans live well. Don't tell me, I see it on your television, your Miami television. I watch Dynasty in Dallas and I see how you live". We all go home and tell this to our Butler's and our maids on our estates, as they do in Dynasty. That cultural penetration, not just Eastern Europe and socialist countries, all through the third world, this myth that America is the place of limitless bounty. That anybody in America could live well, if he just wishes so and is willing to work and then you will live well. That view is the religion of Eastern Europe, of existing socialist countries, of the Soviet Union and of most of the third world, even though they hate the Yankees and want them out of their own countries, there are other many people who would tomorrow come here.
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We talk about the refugees from communism, the refugees from capitalism, if you open your doors to Latin America and said "come my troubled people, come we'll let you in". Let me tell you something about the refugees from capitalism, for those who think that capitalism is triumphant throughout the world. In Italy there's a movement called the Democratic Movement of the Unemployed, in Naples. Now Italy, as capitalist countries go, isn't that bad. There's some social-democracy, there's a Socialist Party, there's a communist party. They've won some benefits, so by many standards, Italy isn't so bad this is one of the better capitalist countries. They went to the Cuban embassy in Rome. The request was addressed to Cuban President Fidel Castro, it said quote "we have found it impossible to live an honest, decent life in our own country. Permit us therefore, to ask for political asylum, because we are fully convinced that we will find in Cuba, not only social justice, but also a little peace and quiet". The movement also presented an appeal to all the parties in the Italian chamber of deputies, which is the lower house, asking them to put pressure on the government, which continues to remain deaf to the appeals of the group about the grave problems facing unemployed young people in Naples. So right in the middle of all this, here's an interesting unusual story, don't you think the media would have had something on this? Well in the midst of everybody East wanting to come West, there are some people West who want to go East. Let's look at this for a minute, what does that mean? I could do the show, but I guess Tom Brokaw that little twerp can't do it.
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Well what I'd say by that example is, let's discard the myth that capitalism is triumphant, that capitalism has solved the problems of its people, that it's giving its people a good life, that it's giving the globe a good chance of survival, because none of those things are true. If none of those things are true about capitalism, then a lot of the things that Marxists say are true and that means that we've got to keep fighting and keep struggling and keep doing the things we're doing to try to change this awful inhuman system today. To bring humanity to it, to bring justice to it and to bring democracy, real democracy to it.
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Thank you
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Question and Answer (questions inaudible throughout)
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Well, I think what we practically do in this society is try to move toward a more trammeled and restricted capitalism, building and expanding the public sector. Moving toward national ownership of some of basic industries and maybe a mixed economy. That's the goal we should fight for at this stage of historical development, but what we've been moving toward in the last 10 years, is really toward a untrammeled capitalism; one which is breaking the labor unions and is really enjoying immense class victories and doing it without the fascism. I mean some elements of fascism: coercion, the breaking of the left in the late 60s early 70s, using force and violence, the FBI killing and the murder of the Black Panthers and the like, so there are strains of fascism. Generally, what Reagan accomplished is what Mussolini and Hitler accomplished, except they did it by busting the political system, because the left was strong enough in that system and the crises were so immense, that they broke that system.
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Whenever people discuss fascism, they never discuss what the fascists did after they came to power. There's literature on it: who supported Hitler, who didn't support Hitler, who was behind who, but the question is not who supported Nazism? But what did Nazism support when it came into power? They did just what Ronald Reagan did, but Reagan did it within the forms of a democratic, so-called "democratic framework", because the working class is excluded from politics in this country and the model they're trying to develop in Eastern Europe, is to exclude the working class.
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The other myth you're getting in the media is that: they're moving toward pluralism in Eastern Europe. The pluralism lasted two months, it's over ladies and gentlemen. It's over. The media is now being privatized. Well, when you privatize your media, it goes into the hands of those who can get financing from advertisers or rich buyers. In Hungary, Rupert Murdoch has gone in there and a few other right-wing press moguls and they're buying up media. In East Germany, the news agency, that used to report things about the U.S. suppression in the third world, has killed those stories. I know the GDR press corps in Washington DC and they don't report that anymore and their jobs are finished and they're told that the government has no more money for them and they may have to be privatized. They said "if we're privatized we have no money though, how could we operate?" So that's it, you don't have a pluralistic media, you got a capitalist media. So what we gotta fight for here is real pluralism, real ideological difference, a real opening.
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Audience inaudible
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We work toward, at this stage of historical development, an open pluralistic Democratic Society which would which would mean a greater democratization of economic and political power, even if it doesn't mean a vanguard one-party totally nationalized economy. If that alternative doesn't work, because it's not democratic, there's not enough feedback, there's not enough accountability, there's not enough checks and balances and all that and it had all the other problems to it; we struggle for a mixed-economy social-democracy at this stage of development and anti-imperialist.
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People are all struggling, if you want to know what we should work for, you could see it all around you. We struggle with solidarity, work against imperialism in Central America for protection of the environment, but we have to start calling it correctly and understand when you want protection of the environment, you're saying something very essential about the nature of capitalism. Your question is a hard one that is "If capitalism is so bad and socialism doesn't work, what's the Third way?" Nobody has a third way, I mean history hasn't given us a third way, so the best we could hope for is some kind of mixed economy where we can do away with the worst effects of capitalism and introduce a stronger public sector. What you're getting in socialist countries you hear "yes, we must take what's good from both", that isn't what they're getting. What they're getting is the worst of capitalism period. They're getting the worst of one system, they ain't getting much from whatever was good from the other.
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Audience inaudible
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Well those are two things of a very long list, the survival of trade unions. Aside from trade union democracy, how about democracy for trade unions? Trade union democracy means: within the union there's got to be more democracy, more participation, but also democracy for the unions. In this country, the union organizing, this is one of the hardest countries to organize unions. I mean the Taft-Hartley law is so rigged as to make it very difficult to get unions and then they get unions to get the collective bargaining reassured and then to get the company to abide by the book in the contract and so forth. Union organizing has more legal restrictions in the United States with the right-to-work laws and everything else than it does in South Africa. Think about that one a minute.
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Audience inaudible
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The anarcho-syndicalist model is posed, I'm repeating the question, as a third model as opposed to the communism/socialism or capitalism. Anarcho-syndicalism sounds ok, worker owned factories become our capitalist factories. There's a market, they make lots of money, the workers begin to hire other workers. That's what happens with co-ops. Decentralization is not necessarily more democratic, it's not even more equal, just as something may be centralized doesn't mean it's undemocratic. In our own country, we have decentralized the land and water policies out in the West. You have water commissions and water boards all around the West. Those are federal water boards and they've been decentralized under the cloak of local participation, it sounds so beautiful "participation". Well you know what happens? The big landowners take over the boards and in the West he who controls the water, controls the land, controls the herds, controls the crops and everything else. It becomes highly undemocratic, because they can make decisions for their own economic interests, but use state power to do it. So you've actually parceled out, and in Democracy for the Few I have a whole section called "The public-private Authority", there are all sorts of things in our economy that have been parcelled out, into private hands, but with public sanction behind them and that's not democratic, it's very decentralized, but it's not democratic.
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Then we have things that are very centralized that are democratic. Social Security, if they weren't raiding the fund. Social Security has, for years, worked in a very democratic way in the sense that it benefited the mass of working people. It was egalitarian and it was in the benefit of ordinary people. The women's infant nutrition program, the women's infant children's program WIC, is one of the best dollars spent, it's a centralized program. Whether something is centralized or decentralized may not be the necessary characteristic.
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The problem with workers syndicalism is that you've decentralized things to the point where it's hard to imagine how a modern economy would work and that's the problem. People who were in Poland and they talked about working syndicalism for a while and the questions were things like "well what if the workers in the steel mill want to produce a different kind of steel and the Gdansk shipyard can't use that steel, but they want to produce that different steel, because they want to sell it somewhere else?"
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“Well the government will worry about it.” So already you're making reference to a central authority. You could say "we can make it so that the workers in that steel mill must make the steel that will serve the shipyard".
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Then you're talking about coordination, you're talking about an authority above that workers syndicalism that could say to those workers, "No. You can't do this any way you want". The problem is you'll get the anarchy of production, you'll get a lot of, I think, many qualms.
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I think it wouldn't be a bad thing to have more workers co-ops in this society, I think that would be a positive step forward. If you want to see a very positive anarchists community, you could look at Mondragon in Spain, where they have actually done production and have a lot of worker ownership and things are done by participation by committees and there's no profit, I mean there's obviously profit, in any society you wanna have some surplus value that you could use for retooling, for expansion, for redeveloping and all that. When they have problems in one sector and it's get got laid off they try to retrain the workers elsewhere. The one thing Mondragon doesn't have is state power though, it operates in one region in Spain, but it's a very good example of maybe what you could do, but I don't think it's ultimately the answer in as far as organizing the whole society.
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Audience inaudible
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The question is "I'd like to hear about the about the criticisms of Stalin and the rehabilitation of those people". I think criticisms of Stalin are okay. They most definitely were in order and needed, because Stalin not only made mistakes, but he committed some very serious crimes against the people of the Soviet Union and against his own party, so I don't think that's too terrible a thing.
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What I detect in the Soviet Union among writers and academics and such is a totally worshipful conservatism. A worshipful attitude toward the West. They are now translating right-wing books, they're translating Robert Conquest his books on the Stalinist terror. Well Conquest, I mean even mainstream Sovietologists in this country criticize Conquest, as his work is really very unreliable and it cites very highly dubious and fabricated sources and the like, but that's who they're printing. In other words, the more negative it is, the more attractive it has become. That's what I was saying earlier before and that's what's going on.
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Three years ago Progress Publishers wrote to me and said "we'd like to translate Democracy for the Few into Russian, but could you update it?"
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I said "no I don't update for foreign editions", I'd spend the rest of my life just redoing that one book and it's not worth it. I said "but a new edition is coming out a year and a half from now"
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They said "oh okay, let us know". So when the new edition, the fifth edition, came out I sent it to them they said "let us know as soon as possible we want to publish this book". I got the letter from Progress Publishers and they got the book and then I got a very strange letter
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It said "thank you very much, if we go ahead with production we'll let you know" and they never published it.
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What they are publishing now, about American politics, are the standard mainstream things: how we have a democratic system, how pluralistic it is, how wonderful it works and all sort of things and those are the books they're now publishing in the Soviet Union. That's what the (inaudible) brought forth, a total reaction to Marxism.
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Let me point out to you the Literary Gazette. The Literary Gazette is a Soviet publication, which is now published in English and let me quote to you from Literary Gazette what they have to say, the editor-in-chief, he's talking about the fact that they have, I think the guy is an artist of some kind, he's become Minister of Culture and they're saying "Well, people here are critical that he's an artist and he's Minister of Culture when we should have a more official kind of person".
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He said "that's the difference between us and the Americans. The way Americans and Soviets see things. Probably no one in the US was surprised when ex-actor Ronald Reagan was elected president. I am aware that after his artistic career", that's artistic not autistic, I thought he said autistic. "I am aware that after his artistic career he picked up quite a bit of experience as a statesman". You people know that don't you? "before running for president of the United States", but I remember that Soviet news analyst somehow overlooked his political experience, at least during his first months in office and ridiculed the movie star and the guise of a politician as something typical of American life. Then he goes on and he says "there is now a reduced threat of nuclear war and there's progress in disarmament. The first positive results were achieved under Reagan and now President Bush is continuing in his footsteps", not a mention of Gorbachev or any of that stuff.
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Then they talk about the Minister of Culture, there's a picture of him, they interview him a very long interview and they say to him as follows: "last summer there were heated debates at the Supreme Soviet whether we need a Minister of Culture at all", get ready for this, "there is no such ministry in the United States and yet it seems that there is nothing wrong with American culture". So that's the mentality. They're nuts. They're crazy and there are people in the Communist Party here, including the leadership, who don't even recognize those incredible changes that have been going on there. They are now anti-Marxist, they think Marxism is old hat. Imperialism is something never heard of, although it's still going on all over the world. There isn't there isn't a critical word in Literary Gazette or Moscow News about the US, only adulatory positive things about capitalism and such.
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The Soviet geneticists are looking at socio-biology, they're absolutely gung-ho about it. It reminds me of the Chinese students I met in in Washington, Chinese from China, who were demonstrating at the Tiananmen Square you know the ones who were there. I said to one of them "what do you want? What exactly you want, that you're demonstrating there?"
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He said "I want to own the factory". So now we have factory managers, that's just a name your manager, but you should own the factory yourself...own it. I remember his eyes glistening up, this exciting new idea in history called private property. I never heard of this thing before. You own it, you see, they're excited about it.
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Imperialism? Never heard of imperialism. I mean for Chinese, if you can think of a nation that has suffered from imperialist outrages...China is one of the 80 most violated countries. I say 80, whenever I say who's the most violated, there are 80 that are number one; they all have horrible; horrible histories about them and China is right up there. I turned to the next student I said "what are you doing?"
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He says "I came to study engineering, but I'm taking business courses" he said "I want to be entrepreneur" he said, really exciting.
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As one of their leaders said as quoted in The Guardian some time ago he said "all they think of is money, money, money" he said "that's good because that means they've turned their backs on socialism. However, people do need some values too, don't they?" Even one of these dissident leaders was saying the emphasis on money is okay, but we do need some values. I think it's not that those particular Chinese kids are unduly corrupt or whatever else, this is the historical reaction. They've had this society and system and it somehow hasn't brought the future, the future hasn't arrived and they now realize the way to get the future is to go for it the way they go for it in the West and this has become the new and exciting idea for them and they're going to have to learn the hard way.
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Audience inaudible
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First, giving up their power, they're doing that right now, before your very eyes. There's pressure, it had to come with a good push, they had to give up power. As far as your other point, that the external threats are often used then to keep hold of power and keep yourself free of internal criticisms, absolutely. I thought I made that same point, that the problem is the systems developed bureaucratic modes of operation, there's no feedback, there often is not enough accountability. Now you see the thing that was supposed to operate as the as the conscience and the impetus and the check on those abuses was the party. The party was supposed to be the eyes, the ears and the conscience and the party did operate that way to some degree. The party often did root out corruption, it often did push the forced marches that were needed for industrialization to fight off the Nazis. The party performed magnificently under siege-socialism, when it was fighting for its life and fighting for the life of a nation, but there also seems to be and there's evidence in the Soviet Union and elsewhere that that same corruption existed in the party itself. The same career-ism, time servers all that other stuff, so you get back to the ancient question of: who guards the Guardians? The age of the Vanguard one-party system doesn't hold anymore.
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I don't really understand your last question, "has there ever been an example of a communist leader, who, when they've reached that final fourth stage of communism have willingly given up power?" Well, since no one has ever reached that final fourth stage, how could there be an example of anyone haven't given up power? In existing communist societies, they've given up power. One wishes that could be done in El Salvador, where twenty or thirty people are being killed every day, where seventy thousand people have been killed and they're talking about trade unionists and peasants, peasant leaders and cooperative leaders and student leaders and workers and priests and clergymen have been killed trying to fight an autocratic regime.
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Here you got a country in Poland or in Czechoslovakia: a hundred thousand people walk across the bridge into the square and the government surrenders says "okay, I guess you don't want this system anymore" and these are the totalitarian power-hungry, crazed, ruthless communists, who would never give up power, who are only there for power, who did not want the power to end hunger, they only hungered for power. That's what we heard. That's we heard. There's all the hunger for power. I would love to see that happen in Central America, I would love to see that happen.
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Audience inaudible
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I don't know.
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As someone told you
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Audience inaudible
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Excuse me sir, I really don't appreciate the spirit in which you're, that you're injecting into this meeting we're all friends here. Wait a minute nothing, wait a minute could you let me answer? I want to make a criticism of the way you've injected that kind of spirit here and I don't think you should. Boy we got some people. Don't waste your time it's the case.
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Audience inaudible
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The question is "how do you get people in power in a modern industrial society? How do you run things with "the people" in power?"
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The people themselves should be in power making the decisions, that's beautiful. Who the hell's against that? Raise your hand if you're against "the people" themselves? That's beautiful. How do "the people" themselves joining in participating in a consensus in the give-and-take, how do you fight off eighty Nazi divisions doing that? How do you go east of the Urals and build a whole new industrial base, because you know you're gonna be attacked from the West within ten years? I mean how do you do that? How do you run a modern airline with "the people" in power? Untrammeled-participatory-anarcho-spontaneous way of doing it, "the people" directly ruling, it's beautiful. Who the hell could be against it, I love it. I wish that could be done. How do you do that? I don't know.
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I don't know if I'd get on an airline that was run by "the people". I would get on an airline that was owned by the workers, who own that airline and were caring for it, but even those workers, I'd like to have an outside audit, because what we have discovered ladies and gentlemen is that even workers can get corrupt. They get caught stealing out of the till, they can start goofing off and all that sort of thing. It's very utopian, it's like the free-market view.
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There's a whole bunch of talk going on now about the free market and I say to students the same thing "I'd like to see you get on an airline that was run purely on free-market principles". First of all, you wouldn't have an airport, your airports are socialist, you know that? Your free-market private airplanes go to socialist airports that have been paid for by the people of America, through our taxes, with air controllers that are paid for by us, with a union that was busted by our President. Those airports are regulated by the state, by the federal government. Why? Because airliners don't give a hoot about that part of it, they don't make any money out of building the airport and regulating all that. They make money by getting the passengers through.
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So the public sector always has to come up, sweeping up, cleaning up behind the private sector and then the private sector can turn around and say "you see how much debt and problems they have and how terrific we work?" I'd like to see you get on an airplane that was run purely on free-market principles. Purely by an executive that says "I'm gonna maximize profits with no regulations of any kind". You know what you'd have? You'd have that New Yorker cartoon, you see it? A ticket counter, an airport ticket counter and they had two signs they said "maintenance", "no maintenance". What would you pick?
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Audience inaudible
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They had a choice, they could have killed a good 10,000. Terrorized them, roll the tanks over them, they're overwhelming. What's more overwhelming than El Salvador? I mean the mass of people are against the government of Guatemala which has killed 70,000 people since 1954. Overwhelming mass demonstrations in the face of machine guns, but the machine guns in Guatemala opened fire. Then they go up into the villages and destroy the villages and all that. In the face of overwhelming pressure, one reason those people felt they could be so overwhelming and outspoken is because they didn't have the fear that they were gonna open fire on them. They were facing a more benign enemy, the one reason solidarity struck and ten million workers went out back in 1982 was that 83, when it first happened, what they didn't tell you is that all those workers kept collecting their pay. The only places in the world where workers can go out on strike and continue to get paid were socialist countries. So you go out on strike in Poland and you continue to get paid and you got a government that was saying "come on, come on. Let's talk. Don't do that, you know we're a worker state". You go out on strike in El Salvador and the death squads come and put a bullet in your head, in all the leaders’ heads and they machine-gun the people in the square when they're marching. So, I think there very much was a difference in how power was operating.
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Audience inaudible
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I've seen them. I've seen them in New York City. When we had a million people in 1982 for nuclear freeze and the government said "go. Get the hell out" and the media didn't even cover it...a million people and you got a little clip at night, a little quick clip. It never made the major media. We get a hundred thousand out for the homeless, we get so many out for abortion. They don't even look at it, they don't even respond on a policy. Forget the nature of the state. Forget that. Forget a revolutionary claim on ordinary, minimal policies.
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We had to fight for 10 years to get a change in the Vietnam policy and I'm talking about millions of people that went out and the only reason they finally changed was because they decided they were losing the war at home, that the thing was so de-legitimating rule at home, that it was costing too much politically, finally they had to stop and that only happened because we kept up pressure so much and because of the courage and persistence of the Vietnamese people that prolonged that war. If it was a quick easy war they would have done it, but yes, there have been those kind of marches in El Salvador and people have been killed and there have been those kind of marches in Mexico, the Tlatelolco massacre. Echeverría, I remember the guy’s name, minister of defense opened fire machine-gun fire on the on the Mexican students. There were tens of thousands of them marching and they just opened fire and shot them. Now can you imagine if that happened in a socialist country? You'd be hearing about it for the next ten years.
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Audience inaudible
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I'm being antagonistic?
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No, they are a wonderful crowd, it's one or two people who are taking things too personally, I think.
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Audience inaudible
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Well, I'm not sure about Cuba, I think that Cuba might have a keener awareness of imperialism, because it's right there and imperialism is happening all around. But I do believe that, probably, the younger generation in Cuba has some of those same symptoms I've been talking about. They take the social wage for granted. They have no understanding of imperialism. They may know about it, at least they read about it, but they don't really have an experience of it.
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You go to a peasant, a campesino, in Cuba who is say 55 or 60 years old. He remembers in his gut el tiempo muerto, the dead time after the sugar harvest, where his children cried from hunger. You go to somebody now, you go to his grandchildren now or in school 16-17 years old, they may have read about it, it's like we've read about slavery. The difference between reading about slavery and being a slave and palpably experiencing the utter horror of slavery is a world of difference and you have to do a real concerted effort of the mind and imagination even to catch a glimpse a feeling of what that must have been all about.
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So they don't have it and they thinking about the thinking about Michael Jackson and about all the goodies there are. I'm not trying to say there aren’t other Cuban youths that are working in the volunteer micro brigades and there are people doing a lot of that stuff too, but I'm not sure that the future of socialism is secure in Cuba, given the kind of cultural and capitalist penetration that exists.
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Listen I want to stop, because my voice is running out.
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Thank you very much |