People's Power

Cuba's Experience With Representative Government

Peter Roman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367298050
• eBook ISBN: 9781000315264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

The study on which this book is based began in 1986 with the fifth legislative session of the Cuban municipal assemblies. The research on which the book is based was supported in part by grants from the City University of New York PSC/CUNY Research Foundation.

1
Early Theories of Socialist Representative Government

As Stephen White, John Gardner, and George Schopflin have pointed out, communist states "have a democratic theory of their own which, in line with Marxist and indeed with some earlier theories of democracy, places more emphasis upon the content of democracy than upon its form, and upon the socio-economic rights of citizens rather than upon their formal independence of state power."¹

Just as the study of Locke, Hobbes, and Montesquieu is indispensable for an understanding of the formation and logic of the capitalist system of representative government, the works of Rousseau, Marx, and Lenin, among others, are essential to the understanding of the origins and logic of the structures and practices of socialist representative government, including that of Cuba. The theory relating democratic government to economic equality, the merging of civil and political societies, political participation, and the mandat impératif can be traced directly to Rousseau. Marx and Len in built on this foundation.

Also of significance with regard to the development of the theory of representative government under socialism and to the formation of socialist governmental structures and practices are certain historical events and models, the most important of which are the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian soviets of 1905 and 1917, the Russian Revolution itself, and the period immediately following (especially those of the first constitutions) and the evolution of the Soviet Union (especially after the death of Stalin). Just as most formal state systems are derived from existing ones, the Cuban organs of People's Power were patterned after existing socialist representative systems, with the Soviet system of the 1970s serving as the basic model.

However, socialist representative government has been neither necessarily fixed nor stagnant and, within its historical context, has been subject like any other system to evolution, development, and change. Innovations introduced during and after the Cuban institutionalization process of the early 1970s departed from the existing Soviet model by including competitive elections for municipal delegates, with candidates proposed and nominated by the constituents rather than by the Communist Party, and with the requirement that local delegates reside in their electoral districts and be directly accountable to their constituents at all times.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the theories of Rousseau, Marx, and Engels and the experience of the 1871 Paris Commune most influenced the path socialist representative government was to take.

Rousseau

The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, while not a socialist, represented an important break with liberal political theorists, including Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu,² and in this sense, he was an important predecessor to the Marxian critique of bourgeois society. The Italian Marxist philosopher Lucio Colletti wrote, "In an age in which all the most advanced thinkers were interpreters of the rights and reasons of rising bourgeois society, its prosperity and industry (and in France struggled to give this new society adequate political forms), the critique of 'civil society' in the Discourse irretrievably isolated Rousseau from his contemporaries, and made his thought appear absurd and paradoxical to them."³

Rousseau's writings had a powerful though unacknowledged influence on Marx's theory. Colletti went so far as to say that with regard to specifically "political" theory, "Marx and Lenin have added nothing to Rousseau, except for the analysis (which is of course important) of the 'economic bases' for the withering away of the state."⁴ He added that Fidel Castro is reported to have told a French reporter that he considered Rousseau to be his teacher and that he had carried the Social Contract with him during the struggle against Fulgencio Batista. Colletti concluded, "I do not think that Castro disowned this last statement when he added, 'that since then, he has preferred reading Marx's Capital.'"⁵

Rousseau argued, as did Marx and Engels later, that private property was the source of inequality in society. The British historian Eric Hobsbawm considers Rousseau's concept of equality the precursor of the modern communist movement:

First, the view that social equality must rest on common ownership of wealth and central regulation of all productive labour is a natural extension of Rousseau's argument. Second, and more important, the political influence of Rousseau's egalitarianism on the Jacobean left, out of which the first modern communist movements emerged, is undeniable. . .. The communism whose acquaintance Marx and Engels first made had equality as its central slogan; and Rousseau was its most influential theorist. Inasmuch as socialism and communism in the early 1840s were French—as they largely were—a Rousseauist egalitarianism was one of the original components.⁶

Rousseau's theory of equality was a precursor of the socialist concept of political equality in that its essence is the absence of profound economic and social divisions and differences among the electorate. Rousseau rejected the liberal concept of equality under the law, a notion that overlooks the economic and social inequalities that abounds in civil society. This paradox of legal equality but economic inequality foreshadowed the early Marx's contention that the separation of civil society and the state in capitalist society made truly representative government a fiction.⁷ Rousseau rejected inequality based on class and status but recognized the social importance of individuals' merits:

I conceive that there are two kinds of inequality among the human species; one which I call natural or physical, because it is established by nature, and consists in a difference of age, health, bodily strength, and the qualities of the mind or of the soul; and another, which may be called moral or political inequality, because it depends on a kind of convention, and is established, or at least authorized, by the consent of men. This latter consists of the different privileges which some men enjoy to the prejudice of others; such as that of being more rich, more honoured, more powerful or even in a position to exact obedience.⁸

In his "Letters Written from the Mountains," he deplored the existence of

people who abound in wealth on the one hand, and the most abject and low on the other. Is it in these extremes, where the one doth his utmost to buy, and the other to sell himself, that we are to expect the love of justice and the laws? They are the causes of the state's degeneracy. The rich have the law in their pockets, and the poor choose bread rather than liberty.⁹

Galvano della Volpe called Rousseau's concept of equality "egalitarian freedom" or "anti-leveling egalitarian society."¹⁰ For him, Rousseauian equality acquired its concrete meaning, resolution, and historical continuity and development in Marx, Engels, and Lenin:

The double aspect, the two souls, of modern liberty and democracy are civil (political) liberty initiated by parliamentary, or political, democracy and expounded theoretically by Locke, Montesquieu, Kant, Humboldt, and Constant; and egalitarian (social) liberty, instituted by socialist democracy, and expounded theoretically in the first instance by Rousseau and then, more or less explicitly, by Marx, Engels and Lenin. . . . It means the right of every human being to social recognition of his personal capacities and potentialities. . . . This contrasting of the two souls of modern democracy, of the two modern demands for liberty, means in political terms, in the last resort, the comparison of liberalism, or the political system of liberty without equality or (social) justice, with socialism, or the political system of social justice, or justice for all (egalitarian liberty in its full development).¹¹

Della Volpe argued that this conception of egalitarianism theorems resolves itself in Marx's concepts of class struggle, abolition of classes, and proletarian emancipation and egalitarianism as presented in the "Critique of the Gotha Programme," Engels's "Anti-Dühring," and Lenin's "State and Revolution."¹² Colletti, however, pointed out that whereas Rousseau argued that society should recognize natural differences, Marx's position was that society should suppress the disadvantages and privileges that result from individual attributes.¹³

Rousseau attributed civil inequality to societal factors. In "A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality," he wrote:

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying "This is mine," and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."¹⁴

He believ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Acronyms
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Early Theories of Socialist Representative Government
• 2 Lenin and the Socialist State
• 3 The Organs of People's Power: An Overview
• 4 Nominations and Elections
• 5 Accountability
• 6 The People's Councils
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index