Cuba’s “Battle for Ideas” Affects Us All, or Could, and Should
June 21, 2016
Cuba’s “Battle for Ideas” Affects Us All, or Could, and Should
by Susan Babbitt
Some suggest more abstract “theoretical” questions are a luxury. There is no time, given global crises, for such ivory tower work. Yet no less a revolutionary than Fidel Castro said that people suffer because of concepts. He made the point in Caracus after Hugo Chávez was first elected in 1998. The example he offered was not obviously political.
Castro said people suffer because of “nicely sweetened but rotten ideas … that man is an animal moved only by a carrot or when beaten by a whip” That is, we suffer because of ideas about what it means to be human. Marx, after all, thought human beings are distinct from other animals because we care about such an issue: We don’t just try to realize our nature. We need to know what it means to do so.
In capitalist societies, he argued, we suffer “unnatural separation” from our own humanity. We are alienated, not just from others but from ourselves, and from our “species essence”. To live well, Marx wrote, we must fulfill our “natural vocation” for “conscious life activity” and judge it to be a human one: “Human beings will only be complete when the real individual . . . has become a species being”.[ii]
Species essence is known through intimate felt connection between one individual and members of the species as a whole. Of course, now, in the North at least, we don’t believe in species being. Some political theorists, discussing “development”, refer to “shared humanity”[iii]. But it is rhetoric. Properly understood, the idea is hard. It counters the ideology that living well is a matter of believing in oneself.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/21/cubas-battle-for-ideas-affects-us-all-or-could-and-should/
