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‘Nobel Laureate
also a journalist

The 1982 Nobel Prize for
Literature was awarded Col-
ombian writer Gabriel Garcia
Marquez whose career spans
both fictional and news writ-
ing. This look at Marquez, who
now lives in Mexico, is by
Jorge Timossi in the Cuban
newspaper, Gramma:

* * *

The Nobel Prize for litera-
ture awarded to Gabriel Garcia
Marquez is also for journalism,
because this writer is also a
journalist in every sense of
the word.

When news of the Nobel GABRIEL MARQUEZ
Prize decision became known sometime in the early hours of
October 21, there were many who recalled that the talent of the
Colombian now likened to Faulkener and Balzac developed
through teletypes, telex machines, feature stories and all those
things which led him to say, *‘I simply tell it like it is.’

Proving our point is the news that he will use the money from
the prize to set up a newspaper in Colombia to be staffed by
journalists under 30 years of age. It was in Colombia that he
served as a Prensa Latina correspondent when the agency was
young and where he worked as the editor of Alternativa
magazine.

When I was finally able to reach him at his house on Fuego
Street in the Pedregal district, there was only one question I
wanted to ask the Nobel laureate and winner of the Aztec Eagle
and Felix Varela awards. I knew that such recognition has been a
longstanding desire of his.

He jokingly welcomed me saying: ‘‘From now on you must call
me Mr. Garcia Marquez. We can’t have any more of this exces-
sive familiarity.’’ He was in his usual good mood and I didn’t wait
to ask my question: :

What aspect of the journalist is pleased by this prize given to
the writer?

“The reporter, beyond doubt.”

Why?

“Because the reporter works with information, and because
information and only information can be the basis of literature.”’

No other aspect of the journalist?

**No, because what I call commentators are no longer journal-
ists.”

And why information?

“Because it is information based on reality which is the basis of
both literature and journalism.”

This is a Garcia Marquez true to himself and true to the man
who has said in scores of interviews, ‘‘Never, under any circum-
stances, have I forgotten that at heart I am not, nor will I ever be,
anything more than one of the 16 children of the Aracatace
telegraph operator.”

In keeping with the example of his father, Garcia Marquez has
always been amidst dispatches, involved in communications and
the news, reflecting the situation as it is in his many feature stories
that provide an in-depth look at the lives and aspirations of the
peoples of Angola, Cuba, Vietnam and Nicaragua magnificent
articles in which literature and journalism each draw on the other,
encompassing the real and the magical, the vital and the drama-
tic. To those who say that the Nobel Prize he has received is ‘‘a
price to imagination,” he will always say from the depth of his
Latin American heart, ‘‘I simply tell it like it is.””

That is what he does in his weekly column in the Mexican
magazine Proceso, in extraordinary pieces apparently written
with the greatest of ease and which he described as a lesson in
good journalism: “This note which I turn out every week is an
indication ofa strict sense of professional honor. I only missed once
and it wasn’t my fault since there was a last minute breakdown in
the transmission system. I write it, every Friday from 9:00 a.m. to
3:00 p.m. withthe same determination, enthusiasm and inspiration
that I would need for a literary masterpiece.”’

An announcer on Mexican TV Channel 11 summed up this
aspect of the Nobel prize-winner:

“In addition to his laudable literary work, this is also a prize for
the daily work of thousands of Latin American journalists who
participate in the violent struggle of their peoples with the equally
violent and decisive weapon of the typewriter.”’

This. also means that all Latin American journalists should be
pleased and honored by the prize given to Garcia Marquez. It is
this feeling which leads him and all of us to ask, when will there be
a Nobel prize for journalism?

“I will insist on that,’’ said Garcia Marquez.
Why not a Nobel prize for painting, sculpture and journalism?
Why only literature?

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—FEBRUARY 25, 1983— Page 10

No ‘third way’ between
capitalism and socialism

Futurology Fiasco by Georgi Shakhnazarov,
Progress Publishers, Moscow, 230 pp. $5 cloth.

Since 1917 there has been a constant stream of
propaganda attacks on the Soviet Union.
Bourgeois ideologues, seeking to discredit the
world’s first socialist state, have accused it of a
wide variety of sins, the theme being that socialism

_ was a pipe dream and the attempt to achieve it

would be tyrannous. Most of these criticisms,
some of which were very crude, have been aban-
doned. It has been found necessary to be more
Subtle, taking into account the many successes of
the Soviet experiment.

Georgi Shakhnazarov, a Soviet political scien-
tist says that the theme of contemporary
academic attacks on the USSR is that while
socialism has been successful, it has tended to
‘converge’ with capitalism, as the two systems
borrow from each other. This view, currently in
vogue, holds that the Soviet Union is a little
‘capitalistic’, while the west is a little
‘socialistic’. Most convergence theorists believe
that technology determines society. In the
‘post-industrial’ world, talk of classes and
exploitation is irrelevant. Managers rule: the goal
of both societies is efficiency.

This notion does not impress Shakhnazarov,
who points out that similarities in all modern
societies — two examples being monogamy and
urbanization — prove that they are both modern
and industrial, but not that their politics are the
same. The fact that both systems borrow the
other’s techniques does not mean that they use them
for the same economic or social purposes.

Shakhnazarov devotes a chapter to social

' democracy, the most direct political expression of

this view. Social democrats, he says, believe they
are socially responsible, like the communists, but
democratic, like the bourgeois world. They thus
combine the best of both and avoid the worst.

Shakhnazarov is not impressed. He points out
that there is no third way between capitalism and
socialism: social democrats can only tinker with
the abuses of capitalism. When crises hit, or when
capitalism feels threatened, the social democrats
are swept aside.

Marxists are supposed to feel flattered that their

_ analysis has, to some extent, been accepted, but

Shakhnazarov resists the temptation to similarly
praise his opponents. This is not only because he
does not agree with them. It is because they have a
habit of postulating what he calls ‘trumped-up
dilemmas’, by which, if we choose one system’s
advantages, we are saddled with its problems. By
appropriating ‘“‘democracy’’ for themselves, the
futurologists suggest that, for its ills, capitalism,
unlike socialism, is capable of some future resolu-
tion of the contradictions.

The book is sub-titled ‘‘A Critical Study of
Non-Marxist Concepts of How Society Develops’.
All the anti-Marxists seem to believe in a future
that is neither wholly capitalist nor entirely
socialist — one, that is, of reformed capitalism.

A favorite conundrum is that of freedom and
equality, which are seen to be incompatible. This is
because freedom, seen through bourgeois eyes, is
expressed in the private ownership of property,

which creates class divisions. It was not always so. -

The French Revolution proclaimed ‘“‘liberty,

' equality and brotherhood’.

Shakhnazarov believes that, because equality
was soon found to be incompatible with bourgeois
freedom, it was found necessary to discredit equal-
ity. It is now common for people to think of equal-
ity as meaning ‘‘sameness’. From this belief is de-
rived the view that in the Soviet Union “‘everyone
is the same’’, living in a drab, conformist world.
Shakhnazarov’s conclusion is different.

SOS as Seen eS

In 1983, the centenary of Marx’s death bourge’
ideologists are still attempting to refute his ide?

(G? Books

‘The answer, which the future is sure to Of
out, is equality and freedom’’. This cat
achieved only with socialism, because this al?
creates the conditions of an equality of opportu®

ae

ss

_ which is at once political and economic.

Similar confusion is discussed in Pluralism
Democratic Centralism? Shakhnazarov does !
think a centralized government is in itself good

_ bad, democratic or dictatorial. It depends on W

is exercising power for whom. This contradicts!

_popular bourgeois view that, in the Soviet Un'¢

too much power resides in Moscow. He discuss
Lenin’s view that democracy is best achieved
combining the participation of all citizens with!
finite leadership, responsibility and order. +
much centralism can lead to dictatorship; too litt
to anarchy. Shakhnazarov feels this problem
unresolved in bourgeois society because —
isolating political institutions from society’s e
nomic basis ... interesting theoretical consti
tions are inescapably reduced to well-intentio?
and impracticable, utopian prospects’’. The exP
ience of capitalist societies with powerful cent
authorities is consistently bad, stretching ft
Napoleon to Hitler — and beyond.

Shakhnazarov draws three conclusions. F
pluralism cannot exist in an exploitative socie
pluralistic freedoms that do exist are !
“‘capitalism’s gift to the people, but a concess!
won in persevering struggle by the working cle
and other progressive forces’’; and only in social
societies, ‘‘in the absence of class antagonism
can conciliatory decision-making procedures |
ally succeed. 3

Shakhnazarov’s final conundrum is that of un
or diversity. He rejects popular western views tl
the USSR lacks diversity, his thesis being that fo!
and essence, the general and the particular, ml
be blended. To illustrate this point he discuss
two rival notions. Sweden, which he regards ast
world’s most advanced social democracy,
grafted socialist forms to a capitalist essence.
China, during the cultural revolutio
‘“non-socialist form ... was artificially grafted
to the socialist system’’. Sweden and China to
opposite paths, but both have failed to achieve r
socialism.

Obviously well acquainted with the we
Shakhnazarov adds a conclusion about Brave N
World and 1984, two very significant bourge!
critiques of the future. Both Huxley and Orwell,
beliéves, missed the point, as have a series of s
ence fiction writers whose work is quoted withc
comment. It is, says the author, too obviou:
decadent to require analysis.

Jeremy Ag