A rout can become a route

A date and a reflection

By Luis Sexto

With its early sunsets, November reminds us of the Russian Revolution, also known as the October Revolution because of the Julian calendar, which is 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar. According to the Western almanac, the October Revolution is the November Revolution.

But, on a more important issue, what niche in the history of the 20th Century is occupied by that social explosion that, in this writer’s opinion, put an end to the visions, norms and concepts of the 19th Century? Should we evaluate it only as a date? And if it has fallen into the vague concept of a simple yearly remembrance, would we be fair and accurate to classify it among the almanac’s oddities?

We wouldn’t be fair if we reproached it for its premature sunset. That would mean sidestepping the opportunity to articulate a rational explanation for the implosion that in 1990 pulverized the world the October Revolution had created and apparently consolidated.

To begin with, the almost incredible episode of its collapse demonstrates that, although it was very capable of overthrowing the Czar and his castles of medieval oppression and managed to defend itself triumphantly from Hitler’s invasion, the Revolution was unable to keep its advances from losing their way on the return trip. What seemed unbeatable, fell; what we called eternal, died.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Country of the Soviets, the first socialist country on earth, as we used to call the vast conglomerate of republics that emerged after 1917, has left numerous experiences for the revolutions that aspire in the 21st Century to be the genesis of irreversible changes.

Of course, the topic is too great for a journalistic analysis. But, as I write only as a journalist, I have the right to broach what, in my opinion, I still haven’t found – a balanced and definitive judgment.

Maybe 100 years must go by before we can find the right way to make our evaluation. For now, it seems to me that one truth, among many, rises like the peak of a volcano seen from afar. The political will to make revolution needs the political will to make it endure. Who doesn’t have that intention? I do not deny that the will to exist forever fuels the true revolutions.

However, it happens that the political will to endure demands that we live in dialectics, that we act by using a Yes and a No, that we engage in a reflexive and creative debate that prevents ossification, the rigidity of the economic and social structures in the name of a preconceived and therefore immoveable model.

As I see it, in the Soviet Union there was a predominance of that inflexible adherence to the so-called principles. Nobody in 1917, before or after, has known for certain how socialism rises over the ruins of capitalism or how states survived in the Middle Ages. Fidel Castro has acknowledged that. The Bolsheviks thought they had found a way. Later, Lenin apparently realized that inflexibility didn’t lead to any safe place and began to feel his way around.

To this writer, the New Economic Policy was just that: an exploration that was frustrated by the death of the October leader and the return to the original positions that Stalin imposed: state property as a function of socialized property. This doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be a socialist state that regulates and safeguards socialism. It means there shouldn’t be an “absolutely proprietary” state that drifts toward a kind of incompetent post-capitalism.

Lenin was right. A society, like a house, is not built from the roof down. You need to set the foundations and that is not a short-range project with few and basic achievements. With the model based on the control of state bureaucracy, a country like the Soviet Union, so blessed with natural riches, barely enjoyed seven decades of existence. Not a comfortable existence, either. It enjoyed development in some sectors, suffered underdevelopment in others.

I remember when, in 1988, I visited the Siberian region of Sukpay, where Cuban lumberjacks processed the wood that the Soviet government gave to Cuba. I learned that the medics in the Cuban team (particularly the dentists) had to help school children whose rotten teeth testified to the lack of dental care 70 years after the October Revolution.

It is politically and socially wrong to rigidly adopt principles that the founders of Marxism described only as “guidelines for action.” Principles cannot be separated from goals. While on a personal level the sacrifice of an individual to his standards can be admirable, in social processes immolation as fate, not as a partial accident, achieves the value of failure.

We’d have to ask ourselves: Why are we building socialism? To heed principles or to use principles to achieve development, freedom and human well-being within the rules of equity, equality and justice? We need to accept the fact that the best principles are those that best accomplish the goal of transforming our lives. A socialism that imposes equality of poverty and restrictions cannot call itself socialism.

By accepting this fact, we accept that, beyond philosophies, we revolutionaries must bear in mind the tendencies of human nature. Sometimes, we legislate and theorize against those tendencies. That’s a futile task, because the needs of our species do not tolerate barriers. Once a quantitative goal has been reached, we demolish it or leap beyond its limits.

Is a man’s well-being – his job, home, comfort, consumption – enough for him to solve his problems and live happily? And what about death? Will that basic problem of man ever be solved? In the end, that’s the supreme injustice, which social justice never will vindicate.

The failure of the humanisms that have tried to redeem man, to turn him into a guest of an earthly paradise built with human works within human structures, results from the fact that those humanisms have not taken into account the objective and subjective dimensions of man and the regularity of his inclination toward passion and imperfection.

It is true that society forms, educates, imposes relationships. But can a united society automatically prevent envy, ambition or intrigue?

Our experience in a society that tried to give equally to everyone, and in the end gave away less than it tried to, confirms that shortages and material poverty (not spiritual poverty) encourages base tendencies, because the “state of necessity” conditions behaviors that may leap over the boundaries of the most collectivist ethics.

Material poverty has a principal and defining feature: it takes over conscience, so carelessness and indifference appear everywhere. Trash piles up on corners, even though the city services pick it up. Disposable objects pile up in homes, objects that are useful for little more than just housing cockroaches. The culture of the blockade in the chronicling of Cuba also provides a sensation of provisionality and hopelessness.

But after acknowledging that revolutions sometimes are good at gaining power and sometimes are incapable of defending power creatively, one wonders if Marxism and the remembrance of the October Revolution and the experience we gained from its birth and death still have a future in this planet, globalized by a market that has become a perverse god that spurs the interests of domination, of the least humane aspects of selfishness.

British historian Eric Hobsbaum still allows Marx ample space to influence human societies. However, the author of “History of the 20th Century” cautions that this will not be in the form we expect, that is, as a centrally planned economy that practically eliminated the market – and in the opinion of this commentator turned society into a village – “but in the shape of a system deliberately orientated toward increasing human freedom and the development of Man’s abilities.”

While justice remains a necessary aspiration, a primordial deed that was never completed or was only partially achieved, the October Revolution and its frustrated ideal of fostering freedom and human abilities will remain viable.

On Nov. 7, 1917, the 19th Century and its imperfect legacy ended. Today, we hope that the 21st Century will inaugurate the new epoch with a light that will replace the hesitating glow of the 20th Century, without a dogma that will make it commit the same errors as old dates whose evocation, despite errors and missteps, leads us to optimism in the formation of a new society.

Luis Sexto, a Cuban journalist, won the 2009 José Martí Award. He is a regular contributor to Progreso Semanal/Weekly.