Redefining Socialism? Cuba, India and the Socialist Debate

It seems that someone is always tying to "redefine" socialism, which is perhaps not so bad for an ideology declared dead, absent or irrelevant by our opposition for well more than 100 years.

How many times have we heard that capitalism is triumphant only to see it falter at the expense of people the world over? One crucial difference between socialism and capitalism is that socialism existed first in theory (which understood real human activity for what it is) and then in practice, while capitalists seized power in bloody coups and revolutions or through costly dispossession and only later wrote the texts justifying what they had done and raising this to realms of theory and law. Each path to power has its special difficulties and its certain appeals if viewed dispassionately from historical perspectives.

The US news media was quick to report today on an alleged coup by Raul Castro in Cuba. The US version of events has Raul Castro removing key supporters of Fidel from positions of power in Cuba and redefining Cuban power relations and socialism. An account of these changes can be found here. A statement by Fidel issued late in the day corrects the US record and you can read that statement here.

Taking up the theoretical challenges in the current world economic and political crises, Prabhat Patnaik of India has an interesting article in People's Democracy which attempts to demonstrate the innate superiority of a socialist economy. You can read that article here.

I have my doubts about the arguments made in this article. We should be reaching for a more fluid definition of socialism and not so bound to project the lessons of the past so far into the future. We don't have to freight our thinking with an analysis of capitalism stuck in another time, and we should appreciate the depth of reforms made in capitalist societies, many of them pushed and won by the left. The essential nature of capitalism has not changed, as the article points out, but our approach must take into consideration all that has changed and what is now possible. We can project into the future a more liberating form of socialism with the understanding that real people can make this socialism out of their needs and within the context of their experiences.

Still and all, people tending to agree with me on these points have not done the necessary theoretical work redefining our terms in light of current economic and political conditions. We do not have the world view or texts at hand that Prabhat Patnaik and others who agree with him do. Where is the real redefinition of liberating socialism taking place today?

Brian Jones at the Socialist Worker evidently feels the pressure of this question as well. He attempts to answer it in a way that I find helpful, although I wish that he would incorporate into his rap some of the points and approach taken by Patnaik. Read the Jones article here.