Sunday, March 19, 2023

Cuban Communism and LGBT Rights

 From Return to Order:

According to the well-known classification by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, communism is the third stage of the Revolution, that is, a process of decadence which, since the fall of the Middle Ages, has been pushing the world away from Christian civilization. Two notions express the spirit of this Revolution: absolute equality and complete freedom. Both seem and indeed are somewhat contradictory from some points of view. However, they are reconciled in the communist utopia of an anarchist paradise, the final result of the revolutionary process. According to Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira’s classification, this transformation into anarchy would be a Fourth Revolution aimed at “liberating” not the proletarians but the instincts of man for all restraints.

At points during the communist phase, the Revolution often had to sacrifice freedom to impose equality. This is what happened, for example, to the Soviet Union and its massive repressive state. Communist theorists hold that the Revolutionary process goes from “liberation” to “liberation” as part of the historical dialectical process as it advances inexorably toward the final utopia that will be totally free and absolutely equal.

This dialectic process was reflected in the preamble of the Soviet Constitution, which stated: “The supreme goal of the Soviet state is the construction of a classless communist society in which communist social self-management will develop.”2 FV Konstantinov of the Soviet Academy of Sciences explains that this process with bring about “the withering away of the state,” i.e., the disappearance of the repressive apparatus that characterized the Soviet period and the beginning of a new era of total freedom and total equality, precisely the communist utopia.3

Throughout the twentieth century, the transition from state socialism to a communist, libertarian utopia was a major topic of discussion among communist and socialist intellectuals. None of them defended the continuation of the Soviet status quo. Theirs is an evolutionary vision that conceives history as a continuous becoming. During the Soviet period, several attempts were made to implement transitions to the next phase: Gramscism, Frankfurt School, Freudian Marxism, Marxist Humanism, the Cultural Revolution, Self-managing Socialism and so on.

This tension within the Revolution to transition to new liberations has survived to this day. And so we return to Mariela Castro Espín.

Everything in Cuba is completely controlled. Any activity not sanctioned by the government can lead to prison or, worse, the paredón—the wall of execution. It is inconceivable that Castro Espín, a high-ranking member of the Cuban nomenklatura, could do anything that is not explicitly permitted, indeed, promoted by the Communist Party. (Read more.)
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