End Cuba’s Divorce of Politics & Science

End Cuba's Divorce of Politics & Science
September 1, 2012
Pedro Campos

HAVANA TIMES — The subject of this article is inspired by Esteban
Morales's piece, "The Challenge Posed by the Intelligentsia," which led
to some considerations that I wish to share with my readers.

Official television and press sources covered some of the discussions
between the delegates to the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party
(PCC), as well as recent meetings of the Central Committee, the councils
of State and Ministers, and the last session of the National Assembly –
gatherings in which the authorities have been defining and implementing
the policies of the "economic updating of the model."

What was clearly revealed in these was the "weakness of the relationship
between politics and science," as pointed out in the article by the
prestigious Cuban academic.

The problem is that the political authorities who are leading and making
decisions (done so in the name of the Party and the Cuban people) are
showing through their speeches their tremendous lack of thought and
scientific analysis concerning current general issues of politics and
economics.

Many of their decisions are adopted not scientifically but
pragmatically, and not according to the demands of the circumstances but
according to the wishes and interests of those who dominate in this area.

Here are some concrete examples:

1 – Most social scientific analysis — be it Marxist or non-Marxist,
Cuban or foreign — agrees that the economic model of socialism attempted
in the twentieth century (based on state ownership, wage labor and
centralization of all important decisions) does not work and that it
failed because it was unable to overcome certain contradictions.

Such incongruities existed between the producers and the means of
production, between production and consumption, between the general
interests of society and the particular ones of individuals, between
their economics and their politics, and between socialized production
and the concentration of control.

Nonetheless, despite the eloquent failure of the Cuban economy or the
warnings by many Cuban social scientists, regardless of the evidence
presented by the party's own press or the popular majority's
unwillingness to continue with the same economic model, and
notwithstanding even the very same criticisms leveled by the leadership
of the Cuban party-government (which at times has called the model into
question), they are not proposing to supplant this model but to "update"
and "rectify" it with a series of cosmetic and stylistic changes. At no
time have they focused on the system's hyper-centralized, monopolistic
and undemocratic essence.

2 – They might mention many of their decisions, but perhaps the
political decision most divorced from a scientific analysis, the most
obvious one, was the executive order and the discussions held at the
highest levels concerning the anti-constitutional "hiring of workers by
other self-employed workers." As has been repeatedly explained, this not
only violates the workers self-managerial spirit and essence of
self-employment, but through this they are also trying to cover up and
mask the development of private capitalism behind the cloak of
"self-employment."

The arguments put forward in approving this injustice lacked any
scientific validity and only demonstrate how correct Esteban Morales was
in his affirmation.

Not only have they shown that something is missing in their scientific
analysis, something that should have taken into account that decision's
possible impact on the immediate future of Cuba, but they have committed
the most flagrant violation of the law and the spirit of the present
constitution.

This can only be explained by the most basic lack of respect for
political science, contempt for the relationship between revolutionary
thought and practical action as they exercise the most vulgar forms of
pragmatism and display a total lack of consistency between means and ends.

The only person who dared to question what was being engendered at the
Sixth Party Congress was a worker, while the others who participated in
the discussion and supported the decision around wage-labor contracting
were bureaucrats dedicated to the party and to government work. Yet none
of those who participated, of those who are known publicly, are versed
in the social sciences. That worker, adopting a clear political and
scientific approach was crushed by the overwhelmingly bureaucratic majority.

Well before the holding of the Sixth Congress, some of us publicly and
privately proposed inviting to the congress (and to the subsequent
conference) certain scientific personalities and socio-political figures
who were not delegates but who could contribute in the analyzes. We know
only of one case of this occurring, where Mariela Castro provided input
on the issue around which she works. None of the known social scientists
who are critical of the statist system were invited.

You are absolutely correct Dr. Morales: There is a divorce between the
politics of the government-party and political science. He doesn't
phrase it like that, but this is what can be perceived. The politics of
revolutionaries is not the "art of the possible" (as Kissinger
pragmatically once said, and as is now repeated by the neophytes of that
philosophy); rather, we see practice as the criterion of truth – beyond
theory.

Today we see how the policies of the government-party are adopted with
their eyes closed to socio-political reality. They appear to be blind to
the widespread discontent generated by their many executive orders and
laws, whose outcomes are inconsistent.

This is due to a lack of coherence in their analysis and application; it
is due to their primary interest being the survival of the state and its
bureaucracy. The fact that what they are doing is at the expense of the
people and their needs doesn't seem to matter. But who are they
governing for?

That explains the new customs regulations, the continuation of absurd
and exploitative immigration regulations, the maintaining of a state
monopoly over the domestic market, everything that has been happening
with the Venezuelan cable and the Internet, as well as other
anti-popular, wasteful and counterproductive measures that are too
numerous to mention.

If politics is to be scientific, it must first be democratic; therefore
only the broadest participation of all stakeholders in discussions and
decisions can respond to scientific reality, which does no other than
correspond to the specific interests of the historical moment.

As Marti said:

"We do not want to deliver ourselves from one tyranny to enter into
another one. We do not want to leave one hypocrisy to run into another
one. We love freedom, because in it we see the truth. We will die for
true freedom, not for the freedom that serves as a pretext for allowing
some people to continuing enjoying in excess while others suffer
unnecessary pain. We will die for the Republic if necessary, as we would
die for independence first."

"At the root, [we must] seek to save Cuba from the dangers of personal
authority and disagreements that — due to a lack of popular involvement
and democratic habits in their organization — resulted in the first
American republics falling."

In these and many other cases, our national hero was very clear: The
essence of scientific politics is based on linking them to the concrete
democratic interests of the majority. When this is violated, there is a
divorce between politics and science, whose most elementary consequence
is failure.

Let's end the divorce between politics and science.
—–

To contact Pedro Campos, write: perucho1949@yahoo.es

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