{"id":3842,"date":"2021-08-06T11:54:37","date_gmt":"2021-08-06T15:54:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=3842"},"modified":"2021-08-12T09:09:16","modified_gmt":"2021-08-12T13:09:16","slug":"readers-response-to-the-call-for-the-release-of-detainees-in-cuba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2021\/08\/readers-response-to-the-call-for-the-release-of-detainees-in-cuba\/","title":{"rendered":"Reader’s response to the Call for the release of detainees in Cuba<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>n the heyday of third-worldism back in 1972, the American Fidelista and Maoist Paul Sweezy, editor of Monthly Review, wrote that socialist revolution in the third world countries depends on,<\/p>\n

the existence or nonexistence in the population of a sizable element capable of playing the role assigned to the proletariat in classical Marxian theory\u2014an element with essentially proletarian attitudes and values even though it may not be the product of a specifically proletarian experience. The history of the last few decades suggests that the most likely way for such a \u201csubstitute proletariat\u201d to arise is through prolonged revolutionary warfare involving masses of people. Here men and women of various classes and strata are brought together under conditions contrasting sharply with their normal ways of life. They learn the value, indeed the necessity for survival, of discipline, organization, solidarity, cooperation, struggle. Culturally, politically, and even technologically they are raised to a new and higher level. They are, in a word, molded into a revolutionary force which has enormous significance not only for the overthrow of the old system but also for the building of the new.<\/p>\n

Paul Sweezy and Charles Bettelheim, On The Transition to Socialism<\/em> (Monthly Review Press, 1971), 52-53<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Sweezy\u2019s day, this thesis was usually advanced in conjunction with the idea that the industrial working class, especially in the advanced countries, had been \u201cbought off\u2019\u2019 and displaced as a revolutionary force in the contemporary world. See Paul Sweezy, \u201cThe Proletariat in Today\u2019s World,\u201d Tricontinental, no. 9 (November-December 1968); and Malcolm Caldwell, \u201cThe Revolutionary Role of the Peasants,\u201d International Socialism, no. 41 (December 1969\/January 1970).<\/p>\n

Half a century on, what the history of the last few decades actually shows is how tragically wrong Paul Sweezy was, and how right Marx was in insisting in the Communist Manifesto (1848) and The Civil War in France (1871) that there is no substitute for working class self-emancipation. From China to Cuba, Vietnam to Nicaragua, every single revolution led by such \u201csubstitute proletariats\u201d installed new class societies\u2014run by \u201csavior-dictators\u201d of self-appointed would-be do-gooders.<\/p>\n