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‘March for the Alternative’ - 26th March - London

Proper Tidy said:
I didn't. You may have missed it when I said it was a present. I've never been to Cuba, although I would like to. If I ever do, I'm sure I'll buy some Che tat.

My view of Che is a bit more nuanced than twat/not-twat to be honest. I'd have hoped to have got that across already.

I would defo buy a genuine Nazi ashtray though. It is, after all, an ashtray, not a declaration of support and solidarity.
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Yet you just go onto admit you would still buy stuff with his face on it. Odd. Also I would never buy a swastika ashtray, but then maybe Im abit odd myself.
 
Proper Tidy said:
The organised working class had no role in the Cuban revolution. Consequently, power never passed into the hands of the working class but to a new ruling bureaucracy. It was Stalinist in practise - nationalisations and a planned economy but without accountability to the working class, and repression of critics from the left who, whilst defending the gains made, called for a further revolution to put power into the hands of the Cuban working class. That isn't to dismiss the gains made for the working class in Cuba but neither does it make the Cuban bureaucracy a working class government and it certainly wasn't/isn't socialism. Guevara acknowledged himself that the 26th July Movement and the bureaucracy it created contained many bourgeois elements, yet condemned those calling for a genuine workers' government and/or a w/c revolution. He was a guerrilla, an elitist, who believed cadre could transform society in place of the working class, not that the role of cadre is to provide direction to the working class, engaged in class struggle or carrying through a revolution (which incidentally is where the usual and horrifically simple anarchist critique of vanguardism falls down, by assuming vangaurdism equals the former).

I don't know why some of the critics of Che focus on the killing and slaying and blood in an abstract sense - he killed people therefore must have been a monster. Which is liberal bollocks. Overthrowing a ruling class is inevitably going to involve a wee bit of blood-letting. It wasn't that he killed, or ordered others to kill. It was that he regarded many working class militants as no different to the defenders of Batista and capitalism, as the enemies of the Cuban revolution. His long-held position of placing his revolutionary elite in the role of the working class in practise. It was who he repressed and why he repressed them, not that repression took place.

The repressive, bureaucratic and unaccountable nature of the Cuban government - or regime, or new ruling class - was not a later degeneration, it was the inevitable result of the approach and analysis of the 26th July Movement.

I'm v hungover so this is a bit clumsily expressed but you get my points hopefully.

And I do own a very nice Che ashtray somebody got me from Cuba. It's ace.
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Brilliant post,and spot-on.Che and Fidel were two of the poshest revolutionaries there've ever been
 
i got a pack of che cigerettes, but i put them through the wash and i dunno if they will smoke funny now :(

dont think i'll bother. but in a moment of desperation i did unwrap them, but then i managed to regain some self control...
 
Who wouldn't want this for their birthday?

2009_04_20_hitler_cake.jpg
 
Streathamite said:
Brilliant post,and spot-on.Che and Fidel were two of the poshest revolutionaries there've ever been
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I was going to add a bit about how the attitudes of Stalinists and parliamentary road socialists (and Fabians, left liberals, Greens etc) to the working class have more in common than either would ever admit, but I thought it might get mired in controversy. So I decided I'd just post a pic of a nazi cake instead.
 
Proper Tidy said:
I was going to add a bit about how the attitudes of Stalinists and parliamentary road socialists (and Fabians, left liberals, Greens etc) to the working class have more in common than either would ever admit, but I thought it might get mired in controversy. So I decided I'd just post a pic of a nazi cake instead.
Click to expand...

Do tell what you were going to say please? Sound interesting. I think you are going to say something along the lines of 'they think the working class can't do things themselves'. If so I agree.
 
allybaba said:
Do tell what you were going to say please? Sound interesting. I think you are going to say something along the lines of 'they think the working class can't do things themselves'. If so I agree.
Click to expand...

Pretty much, yeah. A paternalistic and romantic view of the w/c that conceals their contempt for them.
 
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