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

The expansion of "self-employment"

Expansion of retail operations, small merchants and peddlers, and self-employed services are not the same thing as capitalist commodity production. Any expansion of small-scale private retail consumer goods sales and services will not be supplied directly by capitalist manufacturing but by enterprises owned or controlled by the Cuban workers state. Any such private "businesses" will not be able to transition their monetary wealth into private ownership and financing of means of production. The Cuban State Bank is, as part of the new economic policies, studying and discussing, with the purpose of formulating rules policies for loans to the small businesses that are going to be established.

The main question and problem for the still-underdeveloped, still far from adequately industrialized Cuban workers state - literally an island of the proletariat in an ocean of the reign of the imperialist bourgeoisie - is not the individual, family, or co-operative that repairs your shoe, cuts your hair, fixes your leaking roof, or paints your house. On the contrary it is producing in factories with financing, raw materials, modern machinery, and a skilled, trained industrial working class that can actually make the shoes, utensils, roofing materials, and paint in the first place.

Attractive restaurants with good food are fine (and I've been to quite a few very nice ones, both family-run and "public" in Havana) and nothing in Marxist theory or revolutionary practice mandates the "nationalization" of small businesses, private professional services or retail operation in principle.

It should also be pointed out that, under conditions of monopoly capitalism in the United States and other advanced capitalist societies, more and more of these small "family service businesses" subsumed by large-scale corporate chains. "Mom and Pop" retail operations may start to flourish in "communist" Cuba even as giant chains and national brands make them, under monopoly capitalism, a dying breed in the United States.

From the point of view of the political power of the working class, these petty bourgeois, normally capitalist-aspiring layer can be won as potential allies to a regime where industrial and agricultural producers dominate. Like the overwhelming majority of Cubans, many incorporating these layers that will expand are imbued with a patriotic and anti-imperialist consciousness and the understanding that it was Cuba's socialist revolution that conquered and has defended genuine national independence and social dignity for the Cuban people. But this is a political question and - again -for a Marxist must be viewed concretely.

The real question here is whether the Cuban workers state is better off with bloated government payrolls stacked with people doing no productive labor and very little of use or value to anyone, or by releasing those layers into production and service where they can learn skills, even if working in a joint venture or private business that can raise the productivity of labor in Cuba. Is it better for the workers state to have workers engaged in productive labor - that is, engineering, constructing, manufacturing, and transporting means of production, infrastructure, items for consumption, or retail services to meet the pent-up needs and demands of the Cuban working people, or to retain government officials whose "jobs" are increasingly parasitic (and thereby demoralizing to the people involved) even if this means working in a joint venture with foreign capital or even a private enterprise?

Is it better to have more employed, productive workers and less government officials and bureaucrats even if it means having a larger layer of "proprietors" and other petty-bourgeois elements? Who is more useful, who contributes more, to the Cuban workers state and Cuban society: a new family farmer, self-employed plumber, or member of a barber's cooperative on the one hand, or the Assistant to the Assistant in Charge of Blah-Blah-Blah in the Ministry of God-Knows-What on the other? Cuban working-class public opinion is fed up with a reality where work needs to be done and, despite scarcity of resources, can be done, but is bottled up by bureaucracy, waste, and the theft of state resources.

In any case, and again contrary to the spin in capitalist media outlets, public or state property in industry will not be weakened but strengthened, and the controls of the Cuban workers state and Cuba's highly progressive labor laws, will be fully applicable to any "joint" enterprises established in negotiations with private capital. What is most useful and progressive socially for Cuba is to create more machinists, millwrights, lathe operators, steelworkers, railroad workers, carpenters, and so on.

The absorption of the projected 500,000-person reduction in state bureaucracy will not be - as implied by all the nonsense being written -primarily via the category of self-employment that is, in retail sales and exchange of goods and services. Certainly there will be space opened up - and there is nothing "wrong" with this from the standpoint of state power firmly in the hands of the working class and peasantry - of small business owners, primarily in retail sales and services. But it should be emphasized that many of these operations and services will have forms other than family businesses, mainly co-operatives.

The key mode here for the foreseeable future will be the management by the Cuban government, unions, and farmers organizations of a process that will necessarily involve both centralization on the so-called macro scale, and decentralization on a so-called micro scale.( Part II)

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