7-09-08, 8:59 am

The passage from a society driven by individual greed and rivalry to another one based on mutual solidarity and assistance comes up against many more material obstacles and psychological barriers than Karl Marx and all of his forerunners and followers could have ever imagined as they searched for a socialist utopia.

I don't think it's a matter of inconsistencies in Marx's revolutionary concepts or assumptions about political freedom and his struggle against exploitation, plundering, misery, savagery and alienation, or his materialistic conceptions of history and economic doctrine. Engels echoed and enhanced these with his magnificent contributions to philosophy, natural science, sociology and the complex struggle for social and economic development.

Neither Marx nor Engels was a wise man estranged from reality. Far from it, as their prime goal was always to provide the labor movement with the scientifically-founded ideological instruments it needed to transform the world.

Despite the long-standing struggle of the revolutionaries –both in society as a whole, within political and administrative circles and at any level of leadership– against all kinds of negative trends such as corruption, nepotism, dogmatism, sectarianism, verticality and extremism, these evils are prone to reproduce and therefore are likely to remain on the revolution's engagement agenda for a long time to come, if not forever.

It's like machismo and many other misgivings with a bearing on gender, ethnic and race relations, always with their share of advocates and opponents even after the state has clearly and officially declared itself in favor of an accurately legislated policy of equality.

In any country, those who end up on the short end of the stick when the time comes to distribute wealth are the ones who are supposed to be in favor of the struggle for solidarity as an alternative to competitiveness. Similarly, the nations of the world ranking lowest in global society's current structure –a world divided into rich dominant countries and dependent underdeveloped countries– are set to become the spearhead of the same struggle.

Even if revolutions at the national and international level draw from much more than the realities imposed by either well-being or poverty, existing conditions will be conditional in any revolutionary process. Poverty encourages rebellion, but more so injustice, inequality and exclusion, and this is a valid argument at the individual, social and global levels.

However, the world is a whole complex of networks and circumstances where unforeseen events outnumber the rules and thus there's no room for simplistic solutions.

Ever more conscious, the Third World's aspiration to change the world's unfair economic, political and social order has stumbled upon subjective obstacles that the industrial powers put up and exploit to undermine the unity and will of a great many public sectors in the South.

Globalization's trends on a worldwide scale are manipulated by the developed nations for their own profit and to the detriment of the underprivileged. At the same time, the mass media have grown to become a means for the powerful to promote ways of life that best suit modern-day neoliberal capitalism. Meanwhile they disregard and even challenge those models of solidarity, unity and cooperation that come into being in countries which successfully escape underdevelopment.

A world divided into nations competing against one another for their own gain at the expense of others is no doubt at odds with a world of equals united for the common good. A greater consistency with the principles of cross-border development that globalization entails would not only pay attention to trade, investment and all other forms of international economic exchange, but also to migration, the free use of advanced technologies and other issues exclusively justified as measures to protect the advantages enjoyed nowadays by the citizens of the most developed countries.

Once in power, revolutions have to deal with plenty of internal contradictions resulting from evils and seen as deviations to be overcome by the people. But they also sprout and spread among the political and administrative leaders as a result of natural inclination, outside influence, prejudice, tradition and other causes. And the effort gets all the more demanding and puts even more strain on you when made amidst the hardships imposed by a situation of resistance to foreign aggression. Like it or not, the clash seems unavoidable, judging from the fact that the purpose of our [euphemistically called] 'developing countries' involves, in the final analysis, a restructuring of international relations. These threaten the very essence of capitalism, which is unthinkable without exploitation, trade imbalances and economic dependency.

--A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann. June 2008.