• Submitted by: manso
• Editorial Articles
• 10 / 29 / 2010

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Behind the New Economic Measures in Cuba: Advancing the Revolution in the Concrete World Situation of Today. By Ike Nahem.

On September 13, 2010 the Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC) - the mass trade-union organization that is a central component and pillar of the Cuban workers state and the revolutionary government headed by Raul Castro - issued an announcement which codified and specified new measures and significant changes in economic, financial, and commercial policies that will be implemented in Cuba over the coming months and years. These new economic policies have been long-debated and broadly discussed inside Cuba from local grass-roots mass organizations and work places to the highest levels of government and state. They come as a surprise to no one in Cuba.

We can expect these measures to be implemented prudently, deliberately,transparently and over time without the slightest sense of panic, extremism, or adventurism. Their purpose is to develop, modernize technologically, and industrialize Cuba's economy and bolster its finances in order to preserve and strengthen Cuba's workers state and socialist revolution in the concrete objective domestic and international situation it faces. They signal that correcting Cuba's economic weaknesses, imbalances, inefficiencies, and low labor productivity can be put off no longer. At the center of the measures is a radical reduction in the number of Cubans employed in state and government bureaucracies, some 500,000 in the coming months and year.

Propaganda Campaign Against Socialism

The Cuban announcement sparked a one-note campaign in the US and internationally presenting these measures as "capitalist" and "free market" and more confirmation of the "failure" of "socialism" in general and "Cuban socialism" in particular. (It should be added that this bourgeois propaganda campaign has been pathetically complemented by a layer of ultra-left sectarians, most of whom were already hostile to the Cuban Revolution and its historic leadership, who assert these measures are a "sellout" or "capitulation" to "capitalism.")

It would certainly be a boon for capitalist propaganda if the revolutionary government of Cuba were indeed throwing in the towel, particularly at a time when the world capitalist system is at the opening stages of its greatest structural crisis since the so-called "Great Depression" of the 1930s. But the opposite is the truth.

The measures announced in Cuba were presented in the international big-business press as analogous to the harsh austerity measures that are being carried out -at varying paces and degrees and with mounting working-class resistance - in the advanced capitalist countries by conservative, liberal, and social-democratic governments. Under the guise of resolving government "deficits" these include large-scale layoffs in the "public sector" complementing mass unemployment in the "private sector;" cuts in social services and benefits in health care,education, child and family support; and attacks on pensions and unemployment
benefits.

None of this has anything in common with the new policies unfolding in Cuba. There will be in Cuba no growth of mass unemployment - or as Marx put it a "reserve army of labor" that suppresses the cost of labor power for capitalist employers - and the subsequent growth of poverty and destitution as is now becoming the norm in all of the advanced capitalist economies not to speak of dependent "Third World" capitalist economies. Individuals let go from redundant, unproductive state and government positions will be able to return to university or technical schools for specialized training, with wage support, for new jobs in addition to those choosing to be self-employed, or join newly established co-operatives.

Savings from the reductions in state expenses and budgets will go to preserve social services, modernize and improve free medical care and education, and so on. Cuba's advances in implementing these measures and confronting its serious economic weaknesses is deeply in the interests of the world working class and is in reality a great aid in the developing struggles against capitalist austerity worldwide.

Washington's 50-year-old economic and political war to subvert and overturn the Cuban Revolution continues under the Barack Obama Administration. Cuba needs time and space to continue to hold out until new revolutionary triumphs of workers and peasants, new socialist revolutions occur out of the mounting long-term world capitalist depression that first burst into the open in 2008. To do so and not be swamped and drowned under the weight of economic stagnation and obstacles, Cuba must raise its level of labor productivity which also means it must increase the size of the agricultural and industrial proletariat. Cuba needs more industrial workers and farmers and less government officials and bureaucrats. The Cuban workers state needs to reduce the size of its government bureaucracy. Entrenched privileged state and government bureaucracy is also the main source and mass base of any potential capitalist restoration in a workers state, not particularly the small layers of "proprietors" that are likely to emerge in Cuba in the coming years.

What the revolutionary government in Cuba is attempting to consciously and deliberately implement is a process that will lead to the numerical growth,social expansion, growing political weight of industrial workers, agricultural workers, and working farmers - private-family and cooperative . This will be greater than the inevitable rise in petty-bourgeois layers involved in retail services, brokerage, and speculation. These class demographic changes will emerge out of the accompanying decline (a good thing!) in the numbers of bureaucrats in state institutions and enterprises whose official jobs breed demoralization insofar as they register nonproductive activity which, in the framework of scarcity and economic pressure, which can foster corruption and thievery.


The concomitant growth of petty bourgeois layers will undoubtedly foster relative social inequality. But of course this has been happening and reproducing anyway in the form of the so-called "black market" and illegal economic activity unregulated by the workers state. And if labor productivity and the social surplus product increases, within the framework of the workers state, the material basis (and also the political basis) for advancing social equality will also advance. Increases in labor productivity and a radical expansion in agricultural output will allow for large savings in foreign exchange currency that can then be used for industrialization and the "light industry" production of consumers products and quality services.

Cuba is a Workers State

Cuba's political economy will continue to be guided by rational, economic planning to which commodity and exchange "markets" will be strictly subordinate and which will mediated and creatively guided by increasingly democratic mass participation, most importantly by the expanding Cuban working class organized in the CTC, and less by rigid bureaucratic "models." It is no accident that it was the CTC that made the initial announcement about the scale and scope of the slashing of government functionaries and the restructuring goals and policies.

Cuba's banks will continue to be the property of the workers state. Cuba's international trade will continue to be solely mediated by organs and institutions of the workers state. There will thus be a state monopoly of foreign trade, one of the fundamental characteristics and criteria in the origins and character of a workers state. (Others include the destruction of the previous capitalist state's police, military, and juridical institutions; the nationalization of the major industrial means of production and finance; the establishment of new social and economic relations that obviates the existence and reproduction of a modern bourgeoisie or capitalist class; and the primacy of conscious planning and cooperation for human needs within the new state over the profit-seeking dynamics and mechanism of the capitalist market and competition.)

The foreign trade monopoly is of decisive importance, or as stated by V.I.Lenin, the central leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, "in the present epoch of imperialism the only system of protection worthy of consideration is the monopoly of foreign trade." (Lenin's Final Fight, Pathfinder Press, p. 207)

While private foreign capitalists will be able to invest capital and make a profit in partnership with Cuban state firms, they will be subject to Cuban social relations that have been forged by fifty years of socialist revolution and which are dominated by the interests and political weight of workers and farmers. The problem at hand, however, is not the solidarity of Cuba's marvelous social relations compared to the atomized, every-man-for-himself fostering of privilege and submission in capitalist societies but increasing labor productivity, industrialization, and modernization. Clearly bureaucratism, waste, corruption, and theft of social property are in Cuba today the greatest threat to the social relations forged out of the Cuban Revolution.

Lenin put it like this in the last year of his active political life as he struggled to reorient and rebuild the economy and finances of the young Soviet republic after the devastation and ruin of the 1918-1921 civil war and imperialist interventions. This included strong efforts to attract foreign capital and business deals with capitalist firms and states. "The capitalists are operating alongside us," Lenin spoke. "They are operating like robbers; they make profit; but they know how to do things. But you - you are trying to do it in a new way; you make no profit, your principles are communist; your ideals are splendid; they are written out so beautifully that you seem to be saints, that you should go to heaven while you are still alive. But can you get things done?" (Lenin's Final Fight, Pathfinder Press, p. 58)

The challenge for Cuban "businesspeople" - the agents of the workers state -will be to negotiate the deals and contracts that are mutually beneficial to the Cuban economy and the representatives of foreign capital. This requires cadre with particular revolutionary qualities, including a steel disposition,political consciousness, and diplomatic personality skills to carry out such tasks and remain uncorrupted.

As Fidel Castro put it in the November 2005 speech, "Some of our businessmen make million dollar deals, and the fine art of corruption as it is practiced in capitalist circles is as subtle as a serpent and worse than a rat. They will anesthetize you while you are being 'bitten' and it can rip off a hunk of flesh in the middle of the night. This was the way the Revolution was being put to sleep so that a piece of flesh could then be ripped away. In a few cases, corruption was out in the open. Many knew about its existence, or they suspected it, when they observed the life-style changes the new car, the house being redecorated, adding little decorative touches here and there because of pure vanity. We have heard such stories time and time again, and measures must be taken even though it will not be resolved easily."

In no way will the proposed restructuring foster the formation of a Cuban national capitalist bourgeoisie, although it is certain and inevitable that there will be an expansion of petty-bourgeois layers in Cuban society which may coagulate into a political opposition to the socialist Cuban government with a real social base inside the country, as opposed to the pathetic current gang of so-called "dissidents" that are appendages of the US government. But this is by no means certain or inevitable. It depends on many national, and especially international, political factors, first and foremost the coming big developments in world politics - depression, war, and revolution. In any case, this is a risk that must be accepted and struggled against consciously and intelligently. (Part 1)

By Ike Nahem

Source: Yahoo Groups