Third-generation socialism

Toward the Party Conference (Final Part)

Third-generation socialism

By Jorge Gómez Barata

Although other origins are attributed to it, socialism was born as an essential part of the liberal humanism of Christian roots. Romantic and literary, the thinking that is called “utopian” is the fruit of Europe’s most advanced minds that, horrified by savage capitalism, conceived ideal constructions that expressed perplexity and hope vis-à-vis the dehumanization of the bourgeoisie, an extraordinarily cruel and selfish social class, and called for a social order based on the best of the human condition.

That thought was transcended by Marx, who seized it has raw material and inspiration to create a concept that, because it was the fruit of theoretic reflection and submitted its conclusions to the scrutiny of reason, was justly called scientific. With various ideas, the Communist League and the First Internationale were born and inspired the creation of the workers’ parties. Social-democracy flourished and the lay Christians were integrated into active politics through social-Christian organizations.

The argument about the attitude to be assumed by the socialist parties and militants regarding World War I, the war itself, and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, conferred upon the socialist ideas and projects (some immature, others barely sketched) a practical relevance and a state connotation. With Lenin, communism came to power and later, in an anomalous manner, a group of nations from eastern Europe joined the movement. Socialism stopped being merely ideology and planning. Another era began: real socialism.

Whereas in the mid-19th Century, when the issue was only ideas, the Communist Manifesto scared the European bourgeoisie, the Bolshevik Revolution, which separated from capitalism one-sixth of the planet, terrified it. The instinct for preservation in the world’s reaction unleashed on the country of soviets a storm of violence and fire that led to a civil war and foreign intervention, a confrontation that left the first socialist state exhausted and ruined and took the life of its leader prematurely.

The battles fought by the Soviets were so many and so colossal, the disaster caused by two world wars, a revolution and a civil war was so immense, that in 30 years 50 million people died. There was such hostility and there were so many diverse and imaginative strategies for survival (added to mistaken interpretations, deformations and falsifications of the revolutionary theory and historical truth) that it is impossible to know what Lenin and his comrades thought and what they would have done if they had had the chance to carry them out without the pressure of circumstances that left them without alternatives.

The socialist camp, led and brought together by the Soviet Union, was formed by the European countries liberated by the USSR from the Nazi yoke, plus Mongolia and Yugoslavia. That entity, almost 30 years after its creation, was joined by Cuba, which, in 1973 when it joined the Comecon, gave an organic form to its militancy. The island never joined the Warsaw Pact, the military arm of real socialism.

That political group, put to the test during the post-war and reconstruction years, denazification, Stalinism and the Cold War; a survivor of negative political events like those in Hungary and Poland in 1956, the Soviet Union’s conflicts with China, Yugoslavia and Albania, the intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979, finally corroded by its internal problems, imploded between the late 1980s and early ’90s and disappeared from the political scene, ending second-generation socialism.

Without intending to, when joining the socialist camp, the Cuban Revolution, fruit of an autochthonous and autonomous process not linked to any international force, not dependent on any temporary situation, and led by Fidel Castro, introduced important shadings to the so-called world system of socialism. Although it became a revolutionary paradigm for other regions, the Cuban Revolution did not manage to influence real socialism, with which, despite some copying and identification, it did not merge. The difference in origin and evolution and the efficacy of the revolutionary leadership allowed Cuban socialism to survive.

When everything seemed to be over and socialism appeared to be a thing of the past (its end was even announced), the left recovered . Guided by new leaders and great mass movements that instead of weapons for rebellion use election levers, socialism reinvented itself and — linked to a legitimate and renewed nationalism, to popular demands, among them the rescue of national riches and agrarian reform — advanced and consolidated itself.

In Latin America, despite the resistance from the oligarchy and the bourgeoisie, and the lack of understanding from the political forces and the population, socialism continues to flourish, while in Cuba, where those factors do not exist, socialism seems to get a renovating breath of air that probably will lead to structural changes necessary to shed its failed experiences and update certain facets of the political system and the operation of institutions that are susceptible to improvement.

The Cuban Revolution will hardly resign itself to being identified with previous historic options or to become a link between one generation and another. The successful resistance of the Cuban people, the nation’s stability, the experience attained by the Party and its leading cadres, the leadership of Raúl and Fidel’s recuperation are creating expectations that the announced Party Conference will surely meet. The renewal of socialism, like its previous crisis and the path to new methods of expression, does not seem to be a local phenomenon.

Jorge Gómez Barata is a Cuban journalist. He lives in Cuba.