Radio Havana Cuba

Notes on the Revolution / Column 11

September 27, 2019

The Unreasonable Logic of the Blockade

By Charles McKelvey

The long-standing U.S. economic, commercial, and financial blockade of Cuba has its logic. Cuba is a threat to the economic interests of the global powers, because its persistence in exercising its sovereignty is a bad example for the neocolonized nations and peoples of the world, who might come to believe that they too could exercise in practice their right to sovereignty, proclaimed by the United Nations as a right of all independent nations.

The modern world-system is constructed on a colonial foundation. From 1492 to 1914, seven European nation-states conquered the Americas, and most of South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The purpose of the conquest was economic gain, and to this end, the economies of the conquered empires, kingdoms, nations, and peoples were transformed, such that they became the suppliers of raw materials, both agricultural and mineral, on a base of forced labor, in one form or another. And with their traditional manufacturing capacities undermined, they also provided markets for the surplus manufactured goods of the colonizing nations.

In spite of cultural differences among the colonized peoples, they possessed a common determination to resist. At first, it took the form of military resistance to the conquest; later, it was expressed in the form of revolutionary social movements that sought to capture political power in the institutions imposed by the colonizers, with the intention of transforming them in defense of their fundamental rights and needs.

The colonizing powers were compelled by the resistance of the colonized to concede political independence. But the colonizers maneuvered to ensure that the economic structures established during the colonial process were preserved, such that the colonized of the world would attain political independence, but they would not have sovereignty.

For newly independent nations seeking sovereignty, the obstacles were enormous. On the one hand, they confronted serious problems associated with underdevelopment and poverty, a legacy of the previous stage of colonialism. On the other hand, they confronted the continuous aggressive maneuvers of the global powers, which took economic, military, and ideological forms.

Out of this dynamic, a neocolonial world-system emerged, which attained maturity in the period 1945 to 1968, with the United States as the dominant power. In the neocolonial world-system, the right of all independent nations to sovereignty is formally recognized; but any nation that practices its right to sovereignty will be castigated, whether it be China, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, or Nicaragua. Their intransigence cannot be allowed to stand. This is the logic of the blockade imposed against Cuba.

Although logical from a colonial and imperialist point of view, the blockade against Cuba is unreasonable, in that it falsely assumes that the capitalist world-economy is eternal. But in fact, there are signs that the capitalist world-economy has entered a sustained structural crisis, from which three tendencies are emerging, all of which imply the end of the neocolonial world-system and the emergence of something else.

The fundamental problem that the capitalist world-economy confronts is that, since its origins in the sixteenth century, it has expanded economically by obtaining more land, raw materials, and labor through the conquest of new territories and peoples; but around the middle of the twentieth century, the world-system reached the geographical limits earth. This meant, in the first place, that capitalist producers could no longer find new zones of cheap labor and new markets; and secondly, that the ecological costs of production increased. As a result, economic growth declined, and profits stagnated.

In response to this situation, the elites of the colonizing nations reversed tendencies that had been unfolding from the 1920s through the 1970s toward greater concessions to the sovereignty of the neocolonized nations. The consequences were multifaceted. First, there was a deepening of underdevelopment and poverty, which stimulated an uncontrolled migration to the colonizing nations, a tendency strengthened by new aggressive wars by the global powers. Secondly, a new form of terrorism emerged, in which non-state actors indiscriminately attack civilians. Thirdly, although initially disoriented in the 1980s, many governments and popular movements of the neocolonized zones eventually would reclaim in the late 1990s the original proclamations of the newly independent nations of the Third World for a New International Economic Order, and would cooperate with one another in the development, in theory and in practice, of a more just, democratic, and sustainable world-system.

Meanwhile, there were significant developments in the colonizing nations themselves. The post-1980 structural adjustments included the abandonment of many protections of the social and economic rights of the people, which gave rise to a popular loss of faith in the state and to ethnic separatist movements and religious fundamentalism. The abandonment of the people, in conjunction with the continually increasing problems of uncontrolled international migration and a new form of terrorism, in combination with the absence of a comprehensive explanation and proposal coming from the Left, have led to the rise of parties and movements of the extreme Right.

In the context of such unfolding global dynamics, it is unlikely that the capitalist world-economy will be able to reestablish equilibrium as a world-system that grants independence but not sovereignty to the majority of nations, superexploiting their peoples and distributing the benefits to the working and middle classes of the colonizing nations and to a small privileged class in the neocolonies. The crises and conflicts of our time are demonstrating the unsustainability of that neocolonial world-system.

Here is where the logic of the blockade becomes unreasonable. The blockade seeks to reestablish U.S. neocolonial control, not seeing that a world-system based on indirect political control and economic penetration of supposedly independent nations has little possibility of sustaining itself.

What is likely to emerge following the end of the world-system as we know it? There are three possibilities. The growth of organized criminal networks is pointing to one possibility, namely, the disintegration of the world-system into chaos, with fragmented de facto local power in the hands of those who control the instruments of violence. On the other hand, the increasing militarization of the U.S. economy and the emergence of political movements of the extreme Right point to the possibility of a global military dictatorship under U.S. direction. Yet another possibility is an alternative world-system, based on respect for the sovereignty of nations and on mutually beneficial trade, which presently is being constructed by socialist and progressive governments and movements in the neocolonized zones. These not three abstract possibilities, but real possibilities emerging from concrete and observable dynamics, even though many in the North have not seen the unfolding efforts to construct an alternative, more just and democratic world-system by the peoples and nations of the Third World.

Through its desperate actions in defense of its particular interests during the last four decades, the global elite has lost its moral authority to govern. All of us committed to social justice must enter the space created by that moral vacuum to explain to our peoples the three emerging possibilities for the future, with the awareness that such explanation makes self-evident the necessary direction of political action.

This is Charles McKelvey, reflecting on the unfolding global popular socialist revolution forged by our peoples in defense of humanity.