Fidel Castro with
Nikita Kruschev
Cuba, Kruschev and the
20th CPSU Congress
This Communist University has constantly upheld the central
idea within Marx’s “Capital” and within Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the
Oppressed”. That idea is the full restoration of the human Subject as an
individual, within human society, making humanity out of a material world.
The dialectic of the individual and the collective was most
succinctly expressed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the following famous
words, which we have quoted more than once before, from the Communist Manifesto
of 1848:
“… the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
The Communist University has also upheld the SACP’s constitutional
stricture to “Educate, Organise and Mobilise”. We do so in the conviction that
our mission is not to Influence, or to Guide. Such words are used when
education is abandoned by those who have no faith in it. “Influence” and
“Guide” are only stalking-horses for “Command” and “Control” when the latter
two tyrants are too ashamed to show their faces.
In its Freirean educational practice, the Communist
University has never sought to preach. It has opened doors to dialogue and
never closed them. The Communist University codifies, but it does not
prescribe.
When education succeeds, and the working class is restored
to its full humanity as a Subject of History, then why would any of these
insecure and furtive options (Influence, Guiding, Command and Control) be
required? None of them will be required.
Hence we say as Communist University: Education is the means
by which organising and mobilising are done. Education is more than a
preparation for politics. Education is the method of politics and the very substance
of politics, which, when considered broadly, excludes all other substances.
Education is the essence of humanism.
This message is simple, and the Freirean method of carrying
it out is clear. For now, the best illustration of the idea of education as the
substance of political practice is Cuba, a country that has become one big
university - a “society of knowledge”. Please see the article (download linked
below) by Cliff DuRand for an exposition of this concept, including the “Universalization of the
University”.
In addition, and to make the same point in a different way,
we give an (attached, or downloadable below) example and a warning of the
manner in which a previous revolutionary upsurge faced the problem of the
revolutionary Historical Subject, and failed to solve it, with disastrous
consequences.
The All-Union Communist Party
(Bolsheviks), Short Course (a.k.a. simply “Short Course”) was an
attempt to create, from the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
up to 1937, a totalised theory, free of error, for the Soviet Union itself and
for the world communist movement as a whole. We came across it while studying Christopher Caudwell through
Helena
Sheehan, and finding material on J D Bernal and J B S Haldane on Sheehan’s web site. This material mentions
the Short Course and the failure of
the latter two otherwise outstandingly independent-minded communist scientists
to oppose it.
The physical torture and elimination of comrades in the
Soviet Union were shrouded in secrecy and obscurity, and even the “show trials”
that took place were to the Western communist observers problematic because of
the confessions of the accused. Yet the CPSU of the day did have to “lay out
its stall” in public, as all political organisations are forced to do. The CPSU
did so in the form of the All-Union
Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Short Course, and this document gave their
game away completely, to anyone with eyes to see. Yet leading Western
communists preferred not to see what was in front of their eyes.
The Marxists Internet Archive put up the All-Union Communist Party
(Bolsheviks), Short Course in full for all to read, in 2008. In
addition it has Khrushchev’s 1956 speech
to the 20th Congress of the
CPSU, denouncing both Stalin and the Short Course. An extract from that speech pertaining to the Short Course is attached or linked
below.
With the Short Course,
the core reversal or perversion of the CPSU in the Stalin period is laid bare.
For a quick grasp of this inversion of communism see the work’s Conclusion. Interrogate
it with the Fundamental Question of Philosophy, with which we began this
10-part course: How stands the relation between Subject and Object? In the Short Course, the Subject of History is
not educated, but is “guided”. Herein lies the whole disaster.
It was a practical certainty that the leadership of our
South African Revolution would again at some point make the error of attempting
to demolish the popular Subject. Under President Mbeki, that is what happened.
It is bound to be the case that another such revolutionary crisis will arrive,
perhaps soon. This Communist University course, and the whole of the Communist
University initiative, is dedicated to the victory of popular agency in that
struggle, and in all such struggles thereafter.
Power to the People!
- The above is to introduce the original reading-texts: Cuba - A Nation Becoming a University, DuRand, MRZine, and Khrushchev, 20th CPSU Congress, 1956, Extracts re ‘Short Course’.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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