End of Cuba or the start of a Cooperative Society? [Archive]

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RadioRaheem84

14th September 2010, 16:33

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6863DZ20100907

"Cooperatives are not something on the horizon, they are something already approved by the Havana Provincial Assembly in hopes of recovering local production and improving morale and competitiveness," said one government insider who, like others, asked that his name not be used.

Seeking to create jobs, he announced last month that more family-based private business would be allowed and, for the first time, private contracting of labor.

There has been no mention, for example, of entrepreneurs being able to reinvest profits to expand their businesses.

The state will still own the cooperatives' premises, as it does most things in Cuba, but the workers will run them, pay operating costs and taxes and keep the profits.

An economist involved in preparing rules for non-agricultural cooperatives said it was still under debate how much the cooperatives would be allowed to function through market mechanisms.

"The state should let them operate through supply and demand, not begin to cap prices and tell them where and what they can and cannot sell. In other words exercise only indirect control, for example through a tax on sales," he said.

I was starting to feel some hope until the last quote. An economist consulting the Cuban government is asking them to operate the co-ops on the law of supply and demand? I was floored and a bit dismayed.

RadioRaheem84

14th September 2010, 16:55

All I keep thinking about is Gorbachev and the Law of Cooperatives in 1988.

L.A.P.

14th September 2010, 16:55

pranabjyoti

14th September 2010, 17:05

Bonobo1917

14th September 2010, 20:45

Cuba will not 'collapse'. What we see is a shift in the economic forms: from predominantly state ownership to more private ownership. Workers will suffer from this shift, it is a nasty step towards neoliberalism. But only the ones who seriously thought that Cuba was somehow socialist can now think of 'collapse'. What did not exist, cannot collapse either. More important: hopefully, workers will resist this attack. Will the left be on their side?

Dimentio

14th September 2010, 20:53

Is there a strong pro-cooperative movement in Cuba?

Dimentio

14th September 2010, 20:54

RadioRaheem84

14th September 2010, 21:06

How much we can trust agencies like Reuters, BBC, CNN and such trashes regarding news about Cuba? We have heard it long since 1989. Even I can remember newspaper reports regarding beginning of prostitution in Cuba at early as 1991. If such things occur in "mainstream" newspapers, that's ok. But, I don't like wasting space and time with such trashes in revleft.

Well regardless of bourgoise propaganda, Cuba is headed toward a cooperative society and focusing less on a planned economy. How much, I do not know? Is this a good thing? I don't know.

The Vegan Marxist

14th September 2010, 22:26

To be honest Cuba is the only socialist republic to really work and stay true to socialism so even though the last quote is discouraging i have hope that Cuba will stay true to itself and sell out to capitalism like China did.

:confused:

You do realize that China has more collective control over the means of production between the State & the workers than Cuba does, right?

I agree that Cuba is a socialist country, but to say such, we must also uphold the fact that China remains a socialist country as well. Now, if one wants to say they're on a revisionist path back to capitalism, then fine, but that's a different story than mere "embraced capitalism", because embracing revisionism doesn't mean capitalism has been restored.

Tablo

14th September 2010, 22:43

:confused:

You do realize that China has more collective control over the means of production between the State & the workers than Cuba does, right?

I agree that Cuba is a socialist country, but to say such, we must also uphold the fact that China remains a socialist country as well. Now, if one wants to say they're on a revisionist path back to capitalism, then fine, but that's a different story than mere "embraced capitalism", because embracing revisionism doesn't mean capitalism has been restored.
What? Did you just call China socialist? I guess we can cal Vietnam, Laos, Angola, and Libya socialist too. Screw it, France, Sweden, Canada, and the UK are all socialist too! Wait we have government in the US. WE MUST BE SOCIALIST TOO!! Yay! Socialism wins!1!!!1 :lol:

The Vegan Marxist

14th September 2010, 22:48

What? Did you just call China socialist? I guess we can cal Vietnam, Laos, Angola, and Libya socialist too. Screw it, France, Sweden, Canada, and the UK are all socialist too! Wait we have government in the US. WE MUST BE SOCIALIST TOO!! Yay! Socialism wins!1!!!1 :lol:

Vietnam & Laos, yes, because the majority of the means of production remain collectively owned between the workers & the State. Angola, Libya, Sweden, Canada, & the UK, the majority of the means of production within these countries is still privately owned. You're disregarding who owns the means of production here, Comrade.

gorillafuck

14th September 2010, 22:50

I agree that Cuba is a socialist country, but to say such, we must also uphold the fact that China remains a socialist country as well.
You're not a Maoist, then.

The Vegan Marxist

14th September 2010, 22:54

You're not a Maoist, then.

I continue to uphold Mao's policies, so yes, in that sense, I am. But when a country is deadlocked by global capitalist powers, changes are needing to happen. Essentially, to stay in par with what is going on within today's proletarian struggle, I officially remain under Marxist-Leninism.

Tablo

14th September 2010, 22:54

Vietnam & Laos, yes, because the majority of the means of production remain collectively owned between the workers & the State. Angola, Libya, Sweden, Canada, & the UK, the majority of the means of production within these countries is still privately owned. You're disregarding who owns the means of production here, Comrade.
The means of production is owned by the state and operated for the benefit of the ruling elite. That is not socialism. Are you some kinda revisionist?

Cuba isn't looking good. I'm hoping they are able to pull through with minimal privatization, but realistically I think Cubans can expect a somewhat significant decline in their standard of living.

gorillafuck

14th September 2010, 22:55

I continue to uphold Mao's policies, so yes, in that sense, I am. But when a country is deadlocked by global capitalist powers, changes are needing to happen. Essentially, to stay in par with what is going on within today's proletarian struggle, I officially remain under Marxist-Leninism.
Adapting to reality doesn't mean every single thing is acceptable. China is a neo-liberal capitalist state. Maoists accept that, so you're not a Maoist.

The Vegan Marxist

14th September 2010, 22:57

The means of production is owned by the state and operated for the benefit of the ruling elite. That is not socialism. Are you some kinda revisionist?

Cuba isn't looking good. I'm hoping they are able to pull through with minimal privatization, but realistically I think Cubans can expect a somewhat significant decline in their standard of living.

The workers are still in management over the means of production though. I would say that both Laos & China are on a revisionist path & are allowing too much private industries to form, but again, revisionism doesn't mean capitalism has been restored yet. I do fear of what is to come to both Laos & China, which is why I'm hoping the working class in both take advantage of this crisis & wage more strikes in demands of more collective control.

Adapting to reality doesn't mean every single thing is acceptable. China is a neo-liberal capitalist state. Maoists accept that, so you're not a Maoist.

I'm going to have to disagree with you completely that China is a neo-liberal capitalist state. Under a Marxist analysis, this is untrue. Both the PSL & FRSO-FB! realize this, & uphold it still today.

gorillafuck

14th September 2010, 23:15

I'm going to have to disagree with you completely that China is a neo-liberal capitalist state. Under a Marxist analysis, this is untrue. Both the PSL & FRSO-FB! realize this, & uphold it still today.
The economy is predominantly privately owned and operated for private profit. The state intervention doesn't indicate socialism, is indicates state capitalism. A Marxist analysis would indicate that Chinas economy is characterized primarily by private ownership and profit (I don't care what either of those groups think), and therefore is capitalist.

The Vegan Marxist

14th September 2010, 23:24

The economy is predominantly privately owned and operated for private profit. The state intervention doesn't indicate socialism, is indicates state capitalism. A Marxist analysis would indicate that Chinas economy is characterized primarily by private ownership and profit (I don't care what either of those groups think), and therefore is capitalist.

This claim is false. You clearly have no idea on how the economy is within China. Private industries are largely present within the SEZ's, not the majority of Chinese land. The CPC have remained showing a predominant collective control over the economy within the interests of the Chinese workers.

Os Cangaceiros

14th September 2010, 23:44

The CPC have remained showing a predominant collective control over the economy within the interests of the Chinese workers.

Wow you're fucking delusional. :rolleyes:

Kibbutznik

14th September 2010, 23:50

Regardless, he is right that the vast majority of the Chinese economy is still owned by the state and developed according to a planned economy. While it is not socialism, it is not "neo-liberal capitalism" either.

Os Cangaceiros

14th September 2010, 23:55

China is a capitalist state. Period. End of story.

The only people who dispute that are the Mao nostalgists (not real Maoists, who for the most part reject Dengist policies) who's view of a properly applied socialism is (apparently) Chinese cops beating striking workers or villagers being forcibly ejected from their property in favor of private developement.

The Vegan Marxist

15th September 2010, 00:04

Wow you're fucking delusional. :rolleyes:

http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2010/07/10/how-the-communist-party-of-china-safeguards-workers-interests-during-crisis/

China is a capitalist state. Period. End of story.

The only people who dispute that are the Mao nostalgists (not real Maoists, who for the most part reject Dengist policies) who's view of a properly applied socialism is (apparently) Chinese cops beating striking workers or villagers being forcibly ejected from their property in favor of private developement.

Please point out where Chinese cops, under the command of the CPC, came in & beat workers & villagers down in order to continue privately run industries within the SEZs.

Os Cangaceiros

15th September 2010, 00:11

http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2010/07/10/how-the-communist-party-of-china-safeguards-workers-interests-during-crisis/

Whoa! A source from the Marxist-Leninist blog about how a communist party is safeguarding worker's rights!

What's next, an article from The Economist about how globalization helps protect wage equality and freedom?

Please point out where Chinese cops, under the command of the CPC, came in & beat workers & villagers down in order to continue privately run industries within the SEZs.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1814269&postcount=130

the last donut of the night

15th September 2010, 00:22

I know these are all news from CNN and such, but still, this is worrying.

The Vegan Marxist

15th September 2010, 00:23

Whoa! A source from the Marxist-Leninist blog about how a communist party is safeguarding worker's rights!

What's next, an article from The Economist about how globalization helps protect wage equality and freedom?

It's nice seeing you attacking the blog without showing any relevant response to such. Though, given your hostile view of the Marxist-Leninist, I don't expect much when you can't prove a post by them as being wrong.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1814269&postcount=130

I should've stated my question a bit better. Yes there are police clashes between the working class/peasants & local authority within those provinces, though can we correctly connect them to the CPC as ordering such assaults? And even if so, we're not hiding the fact that there's a sign of bureaucracy within the CPC. Look at Venezuela! Although Chavez & his party are working as hard as they can under the interests of the working class & peasants, the bureaucrats within the Venezuelan government still allow the oppressing clashes between police over workers - workers who I might add are in support of Chavez.

Show me where these workers that are fighting against the private industries are in opposition with Hu Jintao & the Left wing of the CPC. Hu Jintao & his people within the Left wing have been fighting for the interests of the working class, as you can see through the Marxist-Leninist post that I pointed out, in which you inevitably disregarded through an unnecessary attack.

UPDATE: It's also best to point out that Socialism is not defined whether police are clashing with workers, or if the workers are still in class struggle. As both Comrade Mao & Comrade Stalin have pointed out, class struggle remains even while under Socialism. Socialism is defined through the ownership of the means of production, which I've correctly pointed out is being collectively owned between the workers & the State of the majority of the economy. The fact that signs of class struggle are present does nothing in showing whether China is socialist or not.

gorillafuck

15th September 2010, 00:52

Chinese sweatshop workers made my clothes. Or should I say, SOCIALIST sweatshop workers made my clothes!

And you're right, it's not neoliberal capitalism. That was wrong of me to say. It's state capitalism, in the sense that it's a capitalist economy which operates for private profit under state guidance. Also, how do state owned enterprises in China operate, do you know?

Os Cangaceiros

15th September 2010, 00:54

UPDATE: It's also best to point out that Socialism is not defined whether police are clashing with workers, or if the workers are still in class struggle. As both Comrade Mao & Comrade Stalin have pointed out, class struggle remains even while under Socialism. Socialism is defined through the ownership of the means of production, which I've correctly pointed out is being collectively owned between the workers & the State of the majority of the economy. The fact that signs of class struggle are present does nothing in showing whether China is socialist or not.

Just had to add that little informative tidbit, eh?

You'd let someone put you in chains as long as they claimed to uphold Marxist-Leninism.

The Vegan Marxist

15th September 2010, 00:57

Chinese sweatshop workers made my clothes. Or should I say, SOCIALIST sweatshop workers made my clothes!

No, these took place within the SEZs from as far as I know. The Chinese government is largely dominated by Right-Wing politics, which is where revisionism is present, ranging from continued support of "market-socialism" to allowing so much private industries to thrive within the SEZs.

Again, like every other poster who's went against what I've shown, you've completely disregarded the fact that the means of production is, of the majority, collectively owned between the workers & the State - which I might add is thankfully being led by Hu Jintao & the Left wing of the CPC. They've largely been fighting for the interests of the workers, which is something as well that's being completely disregarded by each poster on this subject.

gorillafuck

15th September 2010, 00:59

No, these took place within the SEZs from as far as I know. The Chinese government is largely dominated by Right-Wing politics, which is where revisionism is present, ranging from continued support of "market-socialism" to allowing so much private industries to thrive within the SEZs.
The Chinese SEZ's are in China. So yes, my clothes were made in sweatshops in China.

Again, like every other poster who's went against what I've shown, you've completely disregarded the fact that the means of production is, of the majority, collectively owned between the workers & the State - which I might add is thankfully being led by Hu Jintao & the Left wing of the CPC. They've largely been fighting for the interests of the workers, which is something as well that's being completely disregarded by each poster on this subject.What are some statistics about the portion of the economy that is not privately owned, and as I said, how does it operate? Universities in the USA are technically public (except private ones) but they operate as capitalist institutions. I am fairly sure that public ownership in China is largely operated in a private-profit motivated way with some state guidance.

The Vegan Marxist

15th September 2010, 01:03

And you're right, it's not neoliberal capitalism. That was wrong of me to say. It's state capitalism, in the sense that it's a capitalist economy which operates for private profit under state guidance. Also, how do state owned enterprises in China operate, do you know?

http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/statisticaldata/yearlydata/

This is the Chinese statistical yearbook. Though, to warn you, if you're using anything other than Internet Explorer, you won't be able to access this site for some weird reason. So before you click this, make sure it's through Internet Explorer. What this shows is where the Chinese people work, which I've already stated is the public sector by the vast majority. As you can clearly see, the biggest single category is the township and village enterprises, which are definitely socialist enterprises.

There's also these:

http://english.cpc.people.com.cn/66102/6290205.html

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-03/16/c_13212790.htm

This shows in great length the continued role in planning the Chinese economy.

The Vegan Marxist

15th September 2010, 01:04

The Chinese SEZ's are in China. So yes, my clothes were made in sweatshops in China.

Yes, they are in China, but the SEZ's are in operation of the minority of the economy.

What are some statistics about the portion of the economy that is not privately owned, and as I said, how does it operate? Universities in the USA are technically public (except private ones) but they operate as capitalist institutions. I am fairly sure that public ownership in China is largely operated in a private-profit motivated way with some state guidance.

I've just provided that in my post above this one.

UPDATE: About the comment of US economy, even so, while accounting both public & private institutions, the means of production is still, of the majority, privately owned.

Os Cangaceiros

15th September 2010, 01:09

The Vegan Marxist

15th September 2010, 01:16

You haven't proven that the working class is in control of the means of production at all, and I don't expect you to. As has been re-iterated since time in memoriam: the state =/= the working class, although I guess some cursory lip-service to Marx and Lenin is evidence enough for you that the proletariat's dutiful servants in the form of Jintao and the rest of the oligarchs in the PRC are taking good care of them. :rolleyes: I guess if state ownership of industry is a indicator of socialism, then Bismarck's Germany was a great socialist state.

Actually yes I have shown, which if you follow the links, you'll clearly see. Also, you state that (stating I believe) "state =/= working class" which is not at all what I've said. You're clearly distorting my words.

Then you go on by stating that, according to how I've pointed out that the means of production is collectively owned between the workers & the State, that Bismarck's Germany would be a great socialist state.

First of all, I never stated that China is a great socialist state. A socialist state, yes. A great one, well, it's progressed quite nicely over the years, but this doesn't make it great. Second of all, Bismarck never spoke about the means of production & how the State would act in accordance to the working class &/or peasants. So to state that Bismarck is in a comparable relation to what I've stated is a bit misleading.

When it comes to the State & its role in Socialism in accordance to the working class, these articles suffice so far in explaining such:

http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/socialism-and-the-dictatorship-of-the-proletariat/

http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/the-chinese-economy-in-1978/

Os Cangaceiros

15th September 2010, 01:20

Actually yes I have shown, which if you follow the links, you'll clearly see.

No, you've actually done nothing of the sort. You give me one story from a M-L blog or a PRC press release and I'll give you five about Chinese sweatshops and party officials collaborating with cops and developers to keep people in economic bondage.

Also, you state that (stating I believe) "state =/= working class" which is not at all what I've said. You're clearly distorting my words.

Coulda fooled me. You seemed to place a good deal of emphasis on the role that the Chinese state plays in the overall economy.

Second of all, Bismarck never spoke about the means of production & how the State would act in accordance to the working class &/or peasants.

...which goes back to my original point that the only thing that matters to you is lip service.

The Vegan Marxist

15th September 2010, 01:27

No, you've actually done nothing of the sort. You give me one story from a M-L blog or a PRC press release and I'll give you five about Chinese sweatshops and party officials collaborating with cops and developers to keep people in economic bondage.

If you've followed what all I've said to Zeekloid, you'd find that your statement is irrelevant on determining whether China is socialist or not, & what role exactly these sweatshops play in within China, which I'm telling you for the last time is not of the public sector.

Coulda fooled me. You seemed to place a good deal of emphasis on the role that the Chinese state plays in the overall economy.

Given your black & white analysis of China & its economy, you're getting fooled by many other things as well.

...which goes back to my original point that the only thing that matters to you is lip service.

I really don't care what you have to say to me, because you've proven nothing except the fact that class struggle continues under Socialism. Congrats! Though, you're a bit 50 years behind this analysis, given that both Mao & Stalin have already stated this. :thumbup1:

Os Cangaceiros

15th September 2010, 01:39

If you've followed what all I've said to Zeekloid, you'd find that your statement is irrelevant on determining whether China is socialist or not, & what role exactly these sweatshops play in within China, which I'm telling you for the last time is not of the public sector.

Right. So, apparently in the world of The Vegan Marxist, economic exploitation within the territory of a so-called "socialist state" is just fine and dandy as long as it occurs within the private sector. Gotcha.

Also, cops attacking workers, people being evicted due to a booming urban real estate market in China and the discovery of a defacto slavery network within the kiln trade is not anything to take note of, other than the fact that the class struggle is still alive and well! Man, that takes a load off my mind.

I really don't care what you have to say to me, because you've proven nothing except the fact that class struggle continues under Socialism.

Yup, and since you haven't proven that China is a socialist state, I've essentially proven that class struggle continues in the state capitalist PRC regime.

Weezer

15th September 2010, 01:42

How can there be class struggle if the bourgeoisie have been driven out of society's hierarchy?

Is there some new class I need to know about?

The Vegan Marxist

15th September 2010, 01:50

Right. So, apparently in the world of The Vegan Marxist, economic exploitation within the territory of a so-called "socialist state" is just fine and dandy as long as it occurs within the private sector. Gotcha.

Stop putting words in my mouth. I never stated a thing that the exploitation in the private sector is alright. I'm completely against it. In fact, I even stated where I stood on this issue a few posts back:

I would say that both Laos & China are on a revisionist path & are allowing too much private industries to form, but again, revisionism doesn't mean capitalism has been restored yet. I do fear of what is to come to both Laos & China, which is why I'm hoping the working class in both take advantage of this crisis & wage more strikes in demands of more collective control.

So you apparently are just disregarding everything I'm posting & continue to spit your same baseless rhetoric.

Also, cops attacking workers, people being evicted due to a booming urban real estate market in China and the discovery of a defacto slavery network within the kiln trade is not anything to take note of, other than the fact that the class struggle is still alive and well! Man, that takes a load off my mind.

When did I ever state that it shouldn't be analyzed & be handled of? If you even read where I linked you to an article explaining how the CPC are operating in the interests of the workers, you'd clearly see that the exploitation in the private sector is being discussed by the CPC.

Yup, and since you haven't proven that China is a socialist state, I've essentially proven that class struggle continues in the state capitalist PRC regime.

Actually I have proven it throughout everything I've stated, along with each link posted. Through just the links alone would take about a day to get done reading & analyzed. So the fact that you're posting within merely minutes & disregarding everything I've posted, you're clearly not going to take any effort in reading what I provide, because you've chosen to remain one-sided on the issue.

The Vegan Marxist

15th September 2010, 01:54

How can there be class struggle if the bourgeoisie have been driven out of society's hierarchy?

Is there some new class I need to know about?

Once the bourgeois state is overthrown, there'll still remain bourgeoisie elements that the working class will need to defend itself against through a Proletarian state. This is Marxist-Leninism 101.

Though, like I've stated plenty of times in this thread, revisionism is present in China & with the private sector growing stronger, I worry of what's to come, possibly the re-emergence of the bourgeois state. The only elements left fighting for the workers is thankfully the leadership of Hu Jintao & the Left wing section of the CPC.

penguinfoot

15th September 2010, 05:10

The Vegan Marxist

15th September 2010, 05:39

The Vegan Marxist

15th September 2010, 06:24

I'd also like to show this article as well, where just recently the CPC have created a new regulation in order to strike down against corruption within the Party & government agencies:

http://www.idcpc.org.cn/english/events/100711.htm

The Vegan Marxist

15th September 2010, 06:43

The real question is why anyone would ever think that Cuba was every socialist or non-capitalist in any way - capitalism is a system of generalized commodity production under which the production and circulation of commodities is regulated according to the law of value, and in this context it can only be obvious that Cuba is capitalist because the fact that Cuba is situated in geopolitical competition with a whole range of other countries, of which the United States is only the most important means that the managers of the Cuban economy have a limited range of choices in the way they allocate resources and control distribution - with it being through these forces of competition that both individual enterprises and, in the case of Cuba and other state-capitalist societies, whole countries are forced to obey the law of value. In other words, the labour activity of Cuban workers is still alienated in that it is controlled and directed by forces that are alien to them and exist above them as powers beyond their control, and this is incompatible with any basic notion of socialism because socialism is supposed to involve the assertion of rational control over the goods that workers produce and the production process itself - it is this assertion of rational control, and with it the end of the fetishism of commodities, that marks the end of alienated labour.

Thanks to a fellow comrade who has more patience than I when it comes to dealing with these "state-capitalist" theorists, he had given a small critique in response to Penguinfoot's claims shown above. The comrade's name will remain unknown for obvious purposes:

Right. It's kind of an interesting argument. I assume it comes from the ISO. It can be broken down into a couple of component parts.

First is the definition of socialism, which is based on the concept of alienation. This is a person who has read Marx's Economic and Political MANUSCRIPTS, where alienation is an important concept, and prefers the notions in those to the ideas of his later works, in which the word alienation is hardly to be found. In his later works, you get things like, "In this sense, the whole theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence: The abolition of private property." And it is clear that by socialism Marx refers simply to the collective ownership of the means of production.

These early manuscripts of Marx are still tainted by idealism. This is presumably why they are MANUSCRIPTS, i.e. why Marx chose never to publish them in his lifetime.

Then, capitalism: Generalized commodity production where the law of value applies. But then what are we to make of the Critique of the Gotha Programme, in which we are told that in the lower stage of communism, workers will receive under the principle "to each according to his labor." How is this to be understood if not in terms of commodities distributed by the theory of value? A MARXIST conception of socialism is that it has to be built on what is left over from capitalism.

Finally, to his notion of competition. He says that the managers of the Cuban economy must obey certain laws because of their need to compete with the U.S. No doubt that's true, but what laws? He doesn't say, because if he lists them, he'll either entirely undermine his position or look like an idiot.

Very simply, there is no law that says that all the surplus value a capitalist extracts from his workers has to be reinvested to keep his product competitive. None. Capitalists do many other things with surplus value, such as speculate, buy sports cars, invent new needs and expand production.

Furthermore, a socialist economy has an intrinsic advantage over a capitalist one in competition because it is not wasteful and anarchic. So, a socialist economy can produce more wealth with less investment.

Barry Lyndon

15th September 2010, 07:07

This makes me feel sad...is this really the end of Cuban socialism? :(

The Vegan Marxist

15th September 2010, 07:35

This makes me feel sad...is this really the end of Cuban socialism? :(

Quite the opposite actually. There's going to be stumbles that'll need to be fixed as time goes by, but these measures being implemented are necessary in order to save the economy. If Cuba was to remain on the same route as it was going, Cuba, along with its socialist economy, would collapse. Not due to this.

penguinfoot

15th September 2010, 08:47

You're basing this whole assertion of yours with the idea that Cuba is competing with other countries through commodity production

This seems like a strange question to ask. You might as well ask why it is that individual capitalist enterprises within a particular market are compelled to structure the division of labour and the whole of the production process in a way that allows for their commodities to be produced with the least amount of labour time possible and in a way that will allow the enterprise to gain an edge over its competitors - the direct and unavoidable answer is that if the capitalist did not do this and instead sought to emphasize other priorities and values in the course of production, perhaps by giving workers extensive opportunities for participation in decision-making or even by paying workers high wages, they would rapidly find themselves being overcome in the conditions of capitalist competition, and would end up either having to yield to the imperatives of the market or join the ranks of the working class as a result of their enterprise going out of business. The same is true of state-capitalist countries or corporate trusts in that the threat of extinction is what drives entities of these kinds to act in the ways they do.

Now, in the case of the Soviet Union, the key factor that imposed the law of value on decision-makers and compelled them to accept a given ratio between wages and surplus value was the process of military competition between the Soviet bloc and the United States, because the only way the Soviet Union could maintain military parity (which in practice meant spending large amounts of the state budget on the maintenance of both a nuclear arsenal and a powerful conventional military - which both comprise forms of non-productive consumption from the standpoint of Marxian economic theory, broadly synonymous with the personal consumption of the ruling class in other capitalist economies) was by maximizing the accumulation of surplus value, due to it only being through the surplus value extracted throughout the economy that the purchasing of arms (and the building-up of an industrial sector that enables the production of arms and equipment on a vast-scale) was possible. In simple terms, if the Soviet Union had decided to narrow the ratio between wages and surplus value and spend the surplus value that continued to be extracted on the upgrading of consumer industries and the provision of services that were of benefit to the vast majority of the Soviet population, then it would not have been able to match the geopolitical and military strength of the most advanced capitalist countries.

I submit that the military factor is not the most important one in the case of Cuba. But the law of value still holds in Cuba through other factors - one of these is the fact that there is greater competition between enterprises within the Cuban economy that in other past and present state-capitalist societies, including within the growing private sector, as detailed in the article under discussion, because this means that the law of value holds for individual economic actors and not just for the decision-making of the planners at the apex of the economy. An additional key factor is the role of exports, especially tourism (which is technically classed as an export in bourgeois economics because it involves an injection of income into an economy) in that the need to remain competitive relative to other producers of tourism requires, again, the structuring of production in accordance with the law of value. I hope we can agree that the tourism sector is absolutely central to the survival of the Cuban economy, due to the level of income it provides, and that the tourism sector being situated in an international setting therefore has key implications for how we characterize the social formations that are present in Cuba.

Socialism is determined on the owners of the means of production & the role of the State.

Firstly, you're making quite a lot of assumptions about the meaning of socialism, and you're especially assuming that socialism should be viewed as a distinct mode of production, situated between capitalism and communism in historical space. For Marx, if not for Lenin, socialism never had this meaning, in that, to the extent that he did use socialism to refer to a kind of society rather than a political movement, it was seen to have the same meaning as communism. Secondly, if we do accept the value of socialism as a historical concept, then, whilst it's true that socialism and all other modes of production can be defined in terms of the ownership and use of the means of production, there is a difference between, on the one hand, the judicial expression of ownership relations, and, on the other, the actual relations of production that obtain in a given society. The fact that a society may commit itself rhetorically to the collective or state ownership of the means of production does not make that society socialist because it does not rule out the actual existence of wage-labour, which is itself part of a society based on generalized commodity production.

Hu Jintao & the Left wing of the CPC, if you've paid close attention to their whereabouts, have been trying to decrease sections of the SEZ.

Quite the contrary, what originally defined the SEZs as distinct from other regions of China was that they permitted foreign investment, and in this respect the number of areas where foreign investment is possible has only grown in the past decades, all of this taking place under the careful guidance of the Chinese government. In fact, the Chinese constitution now explicitly protects the right to own private property, just as it did in 1954.

Incidentally, what kind of a Maoist views contemporary China (or Cuba, for that matter) as socialist?

To quickly deal with some of the "points" of your friend

These early manuscripts of Marx are still tainted by idealism. This is presumably why they are MANUSCRIPTS, i.e. why Marx chose never to publish them in his lifetime.

If Marx not choosing to publish the 1844 Manuscripts in his own life time is indicative of those texts being idealist and not suitable for study, then we had better reject the last two volumes of Capital as well, because the published versions of those texts were compiled by Engels on the basis of Marx's notes. More to the point, the continuity of Marx's ideas is a matter of much debate within the Marxist tradition, and I think we can assume that you aren't familiar with those debates, but let it be pointed out that alienation is still central to Marx's later work, not least his concept of commodity fetishism, which figures prominently in the first volume of Capital - the basic notion of a fetish is bound up with alienation because a fetish is something that is the product of human activity but is then bestowed with independent attributes and power over human beings by its creators. For Marx, this is true of commodities just as it is true of religious idols.

15th September 2010, 09:40

How can there be class struggle if the bourgeoisie have been driven out of society's hierarchy?

Is there some new class I need to know about?
The bureaucratic class, for one.

15th September 2010, 09:43

Once the bourgeois state is overthrown, there'll still remain bourgeoisie elements that the working class will need to defend itself against through a Proletarian state. This is Marxist-Leninism 101.
Although the bourgeoisie are no longer organised as a social class, just reactionaries who want the old days back. Now, since there are no classes (since the petit-bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie have both been overthrown, so only a mass of classless people remain), the workers' government cannot be called a state. The workers' state is bullshit, unless, of course, you are willing to tell me that the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie somehow still occupy a class status when they have been expropriated or if there are other, as of yet unheard-of, social classes that somehow exist after the last class-based society (and mode of production which paved the way for the existence of social classes) was overthrown. Explain to me how a [workers'] state (which, in a Marxist definition, necessitates the existence of social classes) can exist without social classes; I'm all ears.

penguinfoot

15th September 2010, 09:51

Explain to me how a [workers'] state (which, in a Marxist definition, necessitates the existence of social classes) can exist without social classes; I'm all ears.

Although I obviously don't hold the absurd position that there is something socialist about either the PRC or Cuba, what you seem to be overlooking is that the overthrow of capitalism in one country does not mean that classes have ceased to exist in other countries where capitalism has yet to be overthrown, and in this context the point of a workers' state - a centralized body of power that arises from the irreconcilability of class antagonisms and defends the position of the ruling class - is to defend a revolution against attempts on the part of the international bourgeoisie to overthrow it. In a sense I agree with what you are saying because the White armies in Russia were not strictly classes in themselves or even the representatives of classes because there was no longer a bourgeoisie in Russia after the October Revolution - rather, these were political actors without entrenched social roots, even if they stood a lot to gain from the restoration of Tsarism and capitalism - but their strength arose from the links they created with the segments of the bourgeoisie that did continue to exist in other countries outside of Russia. In this sense, the completion of the revolution on an international scale is synonymous with the dissolution of the state.

15th September 2010, 10:09

Although I obviously don't hold the absurd position that there is something socialist about either the PRC or Cuba, what you seem to be overlooking is that the overthrow of capitalism in one country does not mean that classes have ceased to exist in other countries where capitalism has yet to be overthrown, and in this context the point of a workers' state - a centralized body of power that arises from the irreconcilability of class antagonisms and defends the position of the ruling class - is to defend a revolution against attempts on the part of the international bourgeoisie to overthrow it. In a sense I agree with what you are saying because the White armies in Russia were not strictly classes in themselves or even the representatives of classes because there was no longer a bourgeoisie in Russia after the October Revolution - rather, these were political actors without entrenched social roots, even if they stood a lot to gain from the restoration of Tsarism and capitalism - but their strength arose from the links they created with the segments of the bourgeoisie that did continue to exist in other countries outside of Russia. In this sense, the completion of the revolution on an international scale is synonymous with the dissolution of the state.
We have to be semantic in this instance, when determining if something is actually a state or not, otherwise we could claim anything was a state or a classless society. You have to correctly identify whether or not a certain government is a state or not, representing a ruling class if it is (which implies that the ruling class is above other classes). Simply having a government which defends itself from outside reaction (even if from the ruling class of another society) doesn't make it a state. A state is an organ of a ruling class (or a section of it) of a particular society with its own social hierarchy and class order. You can have classless individuals defending themselves against those who occupy a ruling class position in another society. If anyone disagrees with this, then hunter-gatherers in primitive communist societies couldn't possibly have defended themselves against armies of the ruling class of asiatic societies.

bricolage

15th September 2010, 11:54

Both the PSL & FRSO-FB! realize this, & uphold it still today.
Oh right, well that's changed my mind then...

The Vegan Marxist

15th September 2010, 12:28

Oh right, well that's changed my mind then...

You seem to have garnered the idea that I actually cared about your opinion. If this is so, then I apologize. I'm here to state the facts, not care of what you have to say or think.

Also, it's good to know that out of everything I've posted, ranging from the statistical graphs, to the detailed articles, etc., out of all that you decided to use a straw man tactic & quote a single statement without the rest. It really is good to know we [communists] have people like you on our side. :rolleyes:

bricolage

15th September 2010, 12:31

You seem to have garnered the idea that I actually cared about your opinion.
I heart you too.

Also, it's good to know that out of everything I've posted, ranging from the statistical graphs, to the detailed articles, etc., out of all that you decided to use a straw man tactic & quote a single statement without the rest.
I could have quoted all your defences of Cuba, North Korea, Laos, Vietnam as socialist, your fundamental misconception of what socialism/communism is and so forth but I was under the impression that they had already been taken apart by other posters.

Also I did it for the lulz.

Also look up what strawman means.

It really is good to know we [communists] have people like you on our side. :rolleyes:
Don't worry, we aren't on the same side.

ZeroNowhere

15th September 2010, 12:33

Generalized commodity-production and wage-labour in China are just illusions, people. In fact, everything in this world is a dream, to borrow an idea from that proletarian revolutionary Descartes. In reality, China is currently (and has been, for quite a while) undergoing proletariat revolution, and therefore is undergoing the dictatorship of the proletariat (http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/alternatives-to-capital/karl-marx-the-state.html). On the other hand, Marx was wrong about how, "The political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery," as clearly the opposite is the case, but then he was just too idealistic sometimes, perhaps.

S.Artesian

15th September 2010, 14:24

Wow, this was a load of crap. You're basing this whole assertion of yours with the idea that Cuba is competing with other countries through commodity production. This is an absolute farce, as is the "state-capitalist" theory, given that you're not stating what laws you're talking about. Are you an ISO member? Socialism is determined on the owners of the means of production & the role of the State. When we analyze Cuba of such, I find it hard to understand where people don't see the fact that Cuba is as a matter of fact Socialist.

Actually, that's not a load of crap. What do you think the Veradero is if not competition with other countries for tourist dollars? What do you think exports of nickel and sugar cane are if not competition with other countries for hard currency?

Are the sugar-cane, the nickel, not commodities? Are they not produced by wage-labor in Cuba?

The Veradero with its resort hotels and beaches and restaurants, that's not commodity circulation?

Of course those things are.... doesn't mean there's a local bourgeoisie in charge of the Cuban economy. The fundamental act of the revolution was expropriating the bourgeoisie. It does mean Cuba functions in the world economy; it does mean the attempts at resolution of the internal economic problems and inadequacies drives Cuba into greater participation in the world markets.

The question for Cuba, as for China, is exactly what sort of social relations of production, the relations between the producers and their own social labor is being promoted, "quickened," by recent events.

Clearly, the direction and the emphasis is upon strengthening capitalist social relations of production, whether it be by so-called "self-employment" when there is no way such massive increases in self-employment can be supported or absorbed in the economy, thus leading to greater poverty and greater need for the unemployed to sell their labor as an exchange value; or if it is by SEZ, maquiladoras, cheap labor policies, and FDI.

Cuba isn't going to be the "next China," or the "next Brazil" which was touted as the "pre-China China" because there isn't an extra trillion dollars of foreign direct investment looking for a place to call home, free of regulation, labor laws, etc. There is no need, in the midst of the current widespread overproduction, for the bourgeoisie to build another export machine like they did in China.

So yeah, the future looks pretty grim for the people of Cuba

Even if so, this doesn't make China any less Socialist. Again, the SEZs is a sign of revisionism & a road to capitalism. Hu Jintao & the Left wing of the CPC, if you've paid close attention to their whereabouts, have been trying to decrease sections of the SEZ. Problem is that a good amount of the CPC are right-wing dominated & continue to hold on to the ideal of "market socialism". So this is tough stand to take, but a stand needing to clarified.

That's not a Marxist analysis, nor an accurate one. I have been paying close attention to the Chinese economy. The capitalist character of actual economic production is clearly established, with market relations replacing "socialized" relations in every aspect of peoples' daily lives. Hu Jintao can try anything he wants, the left wing can talk any game they want, but the direction of the economy will not be changed by anything less than a proletarian revolution.

This isn't an issue of "right-wing revisionism." It is one of the social organization of production.

Crux

15th September 2010, 14:55

The bureaucratic class, for one.

Since the early ninties Bourgeoisie has been allowed in the CPC, which has created quite an amount of interbreeding. Oh and our friend of Hu Jintao thought here, it's good to see you see a bright future for Hu-Jintao-Thought in Cuba as well. Well, not good for anyone who actually advocate socialism and worker's control, but good that you are honest about your allegiances. May I suggest yet another name change then, though?

RadioRaheem84

15th September 2010, 15:23

The economy is in grave crisis. The youth are all rather skeptical about it. Some private biz at the service level: hairdressers, plumbers, restaurants, repairs, house painting, etc. might be an improvement, as long as they dont start privatizing the utilities,nickle mines, sugar and tobacco industries, medical care and the like. I was down there last Feb. things are not going well. There's now a forced devaluation and still much poverty. People are having a hard time getting by, a lot of hustling and minor pilfering of state supplies and resources. This new development might energize the economy.

- Michael Parenti on Cuba

I emailed him to get his response.

RadioRaheem84

15th September 2010, 17:13

The Vegan Marxist

15th September 2010, 19:57

This seems like a strange question to ask. You might as well ask why it is that individual capitalist enterprises within a particular market are compelled to structure the division of labour and the whole of the production process in a way that allows for their commodities to be produced with the least amount of labour time possible and in a way that will allow the enterprise to gain an edge over its competitors - the direct and unavoidable answer is that if the capitalist did not do this and instead sought to emphasize other priorities and values in the course of production, perhaps by giving workers extensive opportunities for participation in decision-making or even by paying workers high wages, they would rapidly find themselves being overcome in the conditions of capitalist competition, and would end up either having to yield to the imperatives of the market or join the ranks of the working class as a result of their enterprise going out of business. The same is true of state-capitalist countries or corporate trusts in that the threat of extinction is what drives entities of these kinds to act in the ways they do.

Now, in the case of the Soviet Union, the key factor that imposed the law of value on decision-makers and compelled them to accept a given ratio between wages and surplus value was the process of military competition between the Soviet bloc and the United States, because the only way the Soviet Union could maintain military parity (which in practice meant spending large amounts of the state budget on the maintenance of both a nuclear arsenal and a powerful conventional military - which both comprise forms of non-productive consumption from the standpoint of Marxian economic theory, broadly synonymous with the personal consumption of the ruling class in other capitalist economies) was by maximizing the accumulation of surplus value, due to it only being through the surplus value extracted throughout the economy that the purchasing of arms (and the building-up of an industrial sector that enables the production of arms and equipment on a vast-scale) was possible. In simple terms, if the Soviet Union had decided to narrow the ratio between wages and surplus value and spend the surplus value that continued to be extracted on the upgrading of consumer industries and the provision of services that were of benefit to the vast majority of the Soviet population, then it would not have been able to match the geopolitical and military strength of the most advanced capitalist countries.

I submit that the military factor is not the most important one in the case of Cuba. But the law of value still holds in Cuba through other factors - one of these is the fact that there is greater competition between enterprises within the Cuban economy that in other past and present state-capitalist societies, including within the growing private sector, as detailed in the article under discussion, because this means that the law of value holds for individual economic actors and not just for the decision-making of the planners at the apex of the economy. An additional key factor is the role of exports, especially tourism (which is technically classed as an export in bourgeois economics because it involves an injection of income into an economy) in that the need to remain competitive relative to other producers of tourism requires, again, the structuring of production in accordance with the law of value. I hope we can agree that the tourism sector is absolutely central to the survival of the Cuban economy, due to the level of income it provides, and that the tourism sector being situated in an international setting therefore has key implications for how we characterize the social formations that are present in Cuba..

..If Marx not choosing to publish the 1844 Manuscripts in his own life time is indicative of those texts being idealist and not suitable for study, then we had better reject the last two volumes of Capital as well, because the published versions of those texts were compiled by Engels on the basis of Marx's notes. More to the point, the continuity of Marx's ideas is a matter of much debate within the Marxist tradition, and I think we can assume that you aren't familiar with those debates, but let it be pointed out that alienation is still central to Marx's later work, not least his concept of commodity fetishism, which figures prominently in the first volume of Capital - the basic notion of a fetish is bound up with alienation because a fetish is something that is the product of human activity but is then bestowed with independent attributes and power over human beings by its creators. For Marx, this is true of commodities just as it is true of religious idols.

Here's in response to this:

From stupid to stupider.

First:

Reject Capitalism because it's idealist? But in what way is it idealist? I can show you very concretely how there is idealism in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. You cannot show me how there is idealism in Capital, because there is none. This is really the key point. We don't need to understand these works as books of the Bible, in which we argue which ones are divinely inspired and which aren't. Instead, we should study them and reach a judgment about them BASED NOT ON WHO WROTE THEM BUT THEIR INTRINSIC MERITS.

Further: The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts were written in 1844. Marx lived a further 39 years. He had TIME to publish them. He had no time to publish the last two volumes of Capital.

Further: Engels -- Marx's literary executor and closest collaborator -- published the last two volumes of Capital. So, if they are not Marxist, then Engels is not Marxist.

Next, alienation and Volume I of Capital:

I reiterate: the word is barely even used. The critique of capitalism in Capital is an ECONOMIC critique, showing that it imposes such things as the iron law of wages and crises of production. It is mentioned that commodities become alienated and that even a person's body becomes alienated. Mentioned in describing the process, no more.

Further, "alienation" is used in a different sense, the sense of transferring ownership. In contrast, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, we have this:

"Just as private property is only the perceptible expression of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes to himself a strange and inhuman object; just as it expresses the fact that the manifestation of his life is the alienation of his life, that his realisation is his loss of reality, is an alien reality:"

That is, alienation is the process of "becoming objective for himself", becoming to himself "a strange and inhuman object."

The word is the same but the concept is quite different.

Next, this: "More to the point, the continuity of Marx's ideas is a matter of much debate within the Marxist tradition, and I think we can assume that you aren't familiar with those debates,"

Despite the snideness and arrogance of this remark, in the end it is a refusal to ENGAGE in that debate. It is simply saying, "Enough dust has been kicked up around this issue that I may proclaim any view on it that I like without any real risk of having to change my view."

In fact, the debate is between people who understand Marx and people who don't. How can you hold that a statement like this:

"Just as private property is only the perceptible expression of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes to himself a strange and inhuman object;"

Is materialist? You can't. Private property, the objective, social, material -- albeit socially so -- underpinnings of society are merely the reflection of "man" -- whoever that is -- becoming objective for himself? The opposite is of course true to a materialist: "Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life? " -- from the Manifesto.

In fact, the consistent use of the concept of "man" throughout the Manuscripts is what Althusser referred to as an "anthropology", and it is in sharp contrast to Marx's later works in which men are NOT treated as individual instances of some generalized -- fundamentally ideal or nearly even Platonic -- MAN, but rather as concrete beings in their own right, each different from another, but most importantly different from another depending on their social class.

As to the rest, it is a very stupid nonanswer to my critique. Let me develop my critique of the economic underpinnings of the state capitalist theory a bit more, and you can hopefully see what I mean:

A capitalist owns a certain factory. At the end of the year, he has accumulated a certain amount of money. That money can be divided into three categories:

VARIABLE CAPITAL, i.e. what he will need to pay out in wages in the coming year.

CONSTANT CAPITAL -- and more particularly the capital necessary to replenish his stock of constant capital.

And surplus value.

Now, what does he do with the surplus value?

The ISO -- and your friend is almost certainly ISO -- says that he has to reinvest ALL of that surplus value in increasing his stock of constant capital so that he can produce his goods more cheaply in the next year.

But this is plainly and obviously not correct.

First: Capitalists in fact CONSUME some part of that surplus value. This is why there are such things as yachts, mansions, $1,000 sandwiches, private jets, etc. What percentage a capitalist consumes is not fixed. Leontiev suggested it was 20-40%. This surplus value which is consumed does nothing whatever to increase the competitiveness of the capitalist.

Second: The capitalist EXPANDS PRODUCTION. This is why there are crises of OVERPRODUCTION. This has only a marginal effect on the capitalist's competitiveness.

Third: The capitalist INVENTS NEW NEEDS. Why is there such a thing as a Pokemon card, a frappucino, or a cocaine cartel? Because capitalists CANNOT profitably invest all their capital in existing industries, so they must create new industries, and to do this, they must create new "needs." Huge amounts of money -- that is, of SURPLUS VALUE -- are, of course, expended on the process of CREATING these needs. None of this expenditure makes the capitalist more competitive.

Fourth: The capitalist SPECULATES. This is why we get housing bubbles, dot com bubbles, etc. Naturally this speculation has no impact on the capitalist's competitiveness.

So, to begin with, a socialist state being forced to compete with capitalist states in the economic sphere would have to expend just as much of the surplus value on increasing the productivity of its workers as the capitalists do. How much is that? More than none and less than all is all we can say definitely.

In fact, I am quite sure it depends on the industry involved. In some industries, the pace of capital accumulation is so quick that more or less all the accumulated surplus value has to be reinvested, and perhaps even to remain competitive a capitalist must constantly raise new capital from outside the industry. I refer in particular to the manufacture of computer parts.

But in sugar? Very little increase in capital is required to remain competitive.

This is actually enough to thoroughly demolish the ISO's state capitalist line. The only response they can make to this is to kick up dust.

But wait. There's more:

First, socialist states can increase productivity more efficiently and with a lower expenditure of capital because they operate in a planned, scientific manner. That is, rather than a bunch of capitalists all rolling out expensive ideas of how to boost production, some of which wind up as costly flops, a socialist state can accumulate all the good ideas, test them, and roll out the ones that work in an orderly fashion.

Second, socialist states are not subject to internal crises of overproduction, during which capital is destroyed. Thus economic activity actually DECREASED in France during the 1930s, and barely increased in most of the capitalist world due to the massive crisis of overproduction known as the great depression. Socialist states don't have these interruptions to their development.

Third, not all commodities are actually subject to the law of value.

Take computer parts for example: Year after year, the price of these commodities goes steadily downward, as capital accumulates in the industry and less labor power is required to create them.

Then take oil: The price of oil goes up one year and down the next. It varies enormously from year to year.

When oil went from $20 per barrel to $100 per barrel, had something occurred which suddenly meant it required five times as much labor to extract a barrel of oil from the ground? Of course not.

The price of natural resources is sometimes governed by the law of supply and demand.

One of Cuba's main exports is nickel. Nickel prices are down hugely lately. This is not due to increased automation in the nickel mining industry. It is instead due to the economic crisis which has decreased the market for nickel and therefore the price.

Tourism is also a complicated case. No amount of labor can build an Old Havana or a Fidel's Base Area in Hawai'i. Thus, a percentage of Cuban tourists are going to go to Cuba even if the tourist infrastructure -- the capital -- is significantly less than in other areas.

Next, we deal with Tony Cliff's idiocy. It was Tony Cliff's argument in his book, "State Capitalism" that the method of capitalist competition between the capitalist world and the Soviet state was actually MILITARY competition.

This is interesting first of all for its idiocy. Wars follow MILITARY laws, not economic ones. Transposing one set of laws into another willy-nilly is absolutely LAUGHABLE.

But it is also interesting in this respect: The ISO's conclusion that existing socialist countries are state capitalist is not actually based on any particular set of facts. Their ideological ancestors concluded the Soviet Union was state capitalist based on its huge military expenditures in the 1930s. When it turns out that this was not a general law of "state capitalist" countries, but a particular event in the history of the Soviet Union, necessitated by the looming threat of German invasion, they simply SWITCHED RATIONALES.

This is a basically idealist mode of proceeding: We start with a conclusion, then develop facts to fit it.

We can see this quite clearly when we try to transpose the supposed class basis of state capitalism from the Soviet Union to Cuba.

The ISO's view on the Soviet Union is that a group of state capitalists headed by Stalin overthrew the True Leaders of the Russian Revolution -- Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kaminev (though in fact all of them can be shown clearly to have betrayed the revolution) -- and installed a system in which the Stalinists were in effect the capitalists.

Thus there was a working class revolution, which, however, was betrayed.

So, who betrayed the Cuban revolution? The very same faces are leading the country now as led the revolution.

Even if we are willing to give to Castro the capability of deceiving the whole Cuban working class, it still won't help: Why on earth would Castro have bothered to install STATE CAPITALISM -- with all the trouble it has brought -- if his motivation was simply to set himself up as a capitalist? Why not simply step into Batista's shoes?

Further: How is it that this process of betrayal of the revolution, which, if we logically extend the ISO's view, must have occurred not only in the Soviet Union, but also in Cuba, China, Vietnam, Korea, and Ethiopia... How is it that it happens EVERY SINGLE TIME?

Naturally the ISO DOES NOT extend its own views in this way, because when they are extended to their logical conclusion, their stupidity is quite obvious.

Instead, Paul D'Amato's Cuba article actually does not say what class overthrew the Batista regime. I asked him personally what class made the Cuban revolution, and he shrugged his shoulders and gave me a boyish grin. I said, "Come on. Are you a Marxist? What class made the Cuban revolution?" He said, "Stop haranguing me," and turned away.

ZeroNowhere

15th September 2010, 20:26

I would advise that the discussion of Marx's early works be taken elsewhere; perhaps VM can present his views as a humour thread in Chit-Chat. Other than that:

Then take oil: The price of oil goes up one year and down the next. It varies enormously from year to year.

When oil went from $20 per barrel to $100 per barrel, had something occurred which suddenly meant it required five times as much labor to extract a barrel of oil from the ground? Of course not.

The price of natural resources is sometimes governed by the law of supply and demand."Your view of Marx is laughable and idealistic; wait, what? The law of value? No, I have no idea what that actually involves. Still, it can't possibly involve man's creations and past labour coming to dominate him, so that his realization forms an alien reality, and his social relations taking the form of things and standing over him, leading to atomization and man's social relations being replaced by relations between things in something similar to Feuerbach's analysis of the Christian god; that would be idealist."

This is a basically idealist mode of proceeding: We start with a conclusion, then develop facts to fit it.While I'm much more with Paresh Chattopadhyay than Tony Cliff, an idealist mode of proceeding would actually look more along the lines of: the finite has no veritable being, but rather only the infinite.

S.Artesian

15th September 2010, 21:27

Everyone that I have talked to about Cuba, academics, economists and journalists assured me that this is a positive venture. A much needed one at that!

Apparently, the Cuban Economy needs this.

They're all hoping for the best.

No offense comrade, but are those academics, economists, journalists in or outside of Cuba? Do any of them stand to lose their jobs because of this "positive venture"?

What's being introduced is a greater leeway for capitalist production relations. Now you might want to argue that like the NEP, it's necessary, but then you need to explain how, 50 years after the revolution, and after receiving so much in the way of aid and support from the fSU and its former allied countries, Cuba now finds itself in need of an NEP.

The Vegan Marxist

15th September 2010, 21:30

No offense comrade, but are those academics, economists, journalists in or outside of Cuba? Do any of them stand to lose their jobs because of this "positive venture"?

What's being introduced is a greater leeway for capitalist production relations. Now you might want to argue that like the NEP, it's necessary, but then you need to explain how, 50 years after the revolution, and after receiving so much in the way of aid and support from the fSU and its former allied countries, Cuba now finds itself in need of an NEP.

Because the economic crisis is international. Every country is showing some form of temporary "retreat" in order to try & control its inflicted economy.

S.Artesian

15th September 2010, 21:34

Although I obviously don't hold the absurd position that there is something socialist about either the PRC or Cuba, what you seem to be overlooking is that the overthrow of capitalism in one country does not mean that classes have ceased to exist in other countries where capitalism has yet to be overthrown, and in this context the point of a workers' state - a centralized body of power that arises from the irreconcilability of class antagonisms and defends the position of the ruling class - is to defend a revolution against attempts on the part of the international bourgeoisie to overthrow it. In a sense I agree with what you are saying because the White armies in Russia were not strictly classes in themselves or even the representatives of classes because there was no longer a bourgeoisie in Russia after the October Revolution - rather, these were political actors without entrenched social roots, even if they stood a lot to gain from the restoration of Tsarism and capitalism - but their strength arose from the links they created with the segments of the bourgeoisie that did continue to exist in other countries outside of Russia. In this sense, the completion of the revolution on an international scale is synonymous with the dissolution of the state.

Point of historical accuracy, there was a bourgeoisie still intact and still functioning after October... it took the revolution into 1918to expropriate all their property. Emigration certainly spiked after October, but the bourgeoisie were not immediately expropriated.

The White Armies represented what they had always represented, that particular accommodation of Russian capitalism, with the bourgeoisie both relying upon, and restricted by the landowners.

RadioRaheem84

15th September 2010, 21:34

No offense comrade, but are those academics, economists, journalists in or outside of Cuba? Do any of them stand to lose their jobs because of this "positive venture"?

What's being introduced is a greater leeway for capitalist production relations. Now you might want to argue that like the NEP, it's necessary, but then you need to explain how, 50 years after the revolution, and after receiving so much in the way of aid and support from the fSU and its former allied countries, Cuba now finds itself in need of an NEP.

One was a scholar of Cuba from the UK, the other Michael Parenti, the other Noam Chomsky, the other Monthly Review, and the last the PSL (Party for Socialist Liberation).

All have expressed their enthusiasm for the NEP like reforms. All hope for the best. They all agree that the Cuban model is in crisis.

S.Artesian

15th September 2010, 21:37

Because the economic crisis is international. Every country is showing some form of temporary "retreat" in order to try & control its inflicted economy.

Yeah every country is "showing some retreat"? Every country is a capitalist country bearing down on the working class and the poor to aggrandize more value, reduce costs, transfer wealth up the social ladder. Is that the great prospect for socialism these positive measures promise for Cuba?

Every country is showing retreat? Indeed, based on conditions in the internal and world markets. And that is exactly what puts the truth opposite your claim that Cuba doesn't compete with other countries in the world markets.

S.Artesian

15th September 2010, 21:42

One was a scholar of Cuba from the UK, the other Michael Parenti, the other Noam Chomsky, the other Monthly Review, and the last the PSL (Party for Socialist Liberation).

All have expressed their enthusiasm for the NEP like reforms. All hope for the best. They all agree that the Cuban model is in crisis.

Well, that's a grab bag of people and groups who haven't been right about the world markets and the contradictions of capitalism in 30 years. Yean, I know I'm exaggerating, but Monthly Review? Noam Chomsky?

Hoping for the best? Now that's a solid Marxist analysis. I hoped for the best when a co-worker was diagnosed with lymphoma and started chemotherapy.

We'll keep in mind their "enthusiasm" and "positive evaluation" when the Cuban unemployment lines start snaking down the Malecon.

gorillafuck

15th September 2010, 21:56

Micheal Parenti supported perestroika, just so you all know when referencing his views on this subject.

mykittyhasaboner

15th September 2010, 22:01

Micheal Parenti supported perestroika, just so you all know when referencing his views on this subject.

Where did he express this support?

RadioRaheem84

15th September 2010, 22:18

Yeah, I've never heard this.

gorillafuck

15th September 2010, 22:22

Where did he express this support?
Yeah, I've never heard this.
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/16/opinion/l-in-spirit-of-glasnost-a-half-toast-to-perestroika-717589.html

4 Leaf Clover

15th September 2010, 22:32

Because the economic crisis is international. Every country is showing some form of temporary "retreat" in order to try & control its inflicted economy.

I think before starting a debate , we should all see what will happen with Cuban economy. These porcesses of implementing some market elements make us worry , because i don't see if they are reversable. Esspecially because one and only ideologist in Cuban CP is about to kick the bucket. Definitely a bad trend and a bit discouraging for us all. However , no matter how much change is made , no one puts any hopes in capitalism , because even the biggest propagators of this economic model realized that it can't work and became its critics , but i guess the worst that could happen to Cuba is Chinese model.

Comrade Marxist Bro

15th September 2010, 22:38

Cuba. Abolished by Raul.

We Shall Rise Again

15th September 2010, 23:32

Why don't comrades who are supposedly socialist reserve their judgement until we can look more effectivly at the new moves we are told are happening in Cuba?

Reacting to stories in the hostile bourgiouse press is not the conduct of those commited to the revolutionary project, but of giddy teenagers.

I support any moves that protect and defend Socialism in Cuba, and will not rush to judgement.

How many of the nay sayers have been to Cuba?

Have seen the health and education systems at work?

Have seen the democratic control workers have in conjunction with the Government over the means of production?

Give the ongoing Cuban revolution time, and more importantly comrades, give the people your support.

RadioRaheem84

15th September 2010, 23:39

I just think there is a bit of caution by some leftists because of the past reforms that left other socialist regimes taking the capitalist road.

We Shall Rise Again

15th September 2010, 23:44

I just think there is a bit of caution by some leftists because of the past reforms that left other socialist regimes taking the capitalist road.

Indeed, and i can understand that.

But comments such as ' cuba abolished by raul and other hysterical outburts are pointless at this stage.

We dont have enough info on how this plan will work in practice yet, therefore we should reserve judgement.

Look at conditions currently facing Cuba. Faced with the ongoing us embargo, and now the world wide crisis, it is clear some changes and tweeks need to be made in order to defend the revolution and protect and indeed advance the socialist system.

bricolage

16th September 2010, 00:07

Because the economic crisis is international. Every country is showing some form of temporary "retreat" in order to try & control its inflicted economy.
yeah, they tend to call it austerity cuts in most of the place.

RED DAVE

16th September 2010, 00:23

Vietnam & Laos, yes, because the majority of the means of production remain collectively owned between the workers & the State.Some people can't recognize state capitalism, moving towards private capitalism, if it bites them on the ass.

RED DAVE

The Vegan Marxist

16th September 2010, 03:03

Some people can't recognize state capitalism, moving towards private capitalism, if it bites them on the ass.

RED DAVE

Many of us have already expressed our worries & doubts against the "state-capitalist" theory, in which every one of you continue to spew it no matter what is proven to be wrong. I've had my say about China, given what analysis through articles, statistics, etc., & I've had my say about Cuba. It's apparent that this thread has been derailed by many of us, I'm just as guilty, & so it's time we end this here & let people who's wanting to stay on topic with the thread to continue.

gorillafuck

16th September 2010, 03:13

fa2991

16th September 2010, 03:29

It could work to the benefit of the workers, ultimately, if cooperatives start to play a larger role in the economy. I've been complaining about the lack of soviets in Cuba for ages, and cooperatives would be a nice start, as long as the government keeps them in check.

RED DAVE

16th September 2010, 03:29

I never argued that China is state capitalism transitioning to private capitalism. I argued (and uphold the view) that modern day China is capitalism and that Maoist China was definitely socialism (albeit bureaucratic).How did socialism, the rule of the working class, change into capitalism, the rule of the bourgeoisie, without a working class revolt to try to stop this?

How is what happened in China any different from what is happening now in Cuba?

RED DAVE

The Vegan Marxist

16th September 2010, 03:29

I never argued that China is state capitalism transitioning to private capitalism. I argued (and uphold the view) that modern day China is capitalism and that Maoist China was definitely socialism (albeit bureaucratic).

Sent you a message so we can continue having this conversation away from this thread to not further derail it.

S.Artesian

16th September 2010, 03:31

Many of us have already expressed our worries & doubts against the "state-capitalist" theory, in which every one of you continue to spew it no matter what is proven to be wrong. I've had my say about China, given what analysis through articles, statistics, etc., & I've had my say about Cuba. It's apparent that this thread has been derailed by many of us, I'm just as guilty, & so it's time we end this here & let people who's wanting to stay on topic with the thread to continue.

I'm not spewing anything, particularly "state capitalism," a characterization I do not hold as accurate. However, explaining or rationalizing the changes proposed for Cuba based on "all countries are doing it" is hardly a defense of socialism.

The thread hasn't been derailed at all. The thread is extrapolating upon the proposed changes, based on previous experience with such changes.

You don't like the answers you're getting to the original question? Life is like that some of time-- hell, life is like that most of the time.

The Vegan Marxist

16th September 2010, 03:54

I'm not spewing anything, particularly "state capitalism," a characterization I do not hold as accurate. However, explaining or rationalizing the changes proposed for Cuba based on "all countries are doing it" is hardly a defense of socialism.

The thread hasn't been derailed at all. The thread is extrapolating upon the proposed changes, based on previous experience with such changes.

You don't like the answers you're getting to the original question? Life is like that some of time-- hell, life is like that most of the time.

Like I've told Zeekloid, I wasn't particularly talking about you, rather people like Red Dave & the rest of the ISO "state-capitalist" theorists.

I've already stated that I completely feel the changes taking place in Cuba is in the form of an NEP due to the international economic crisis. These are measures, whether good or bad in the end, that is being used to try & protect Socialism within Cuba. I seriously doubt that Cuba is going to collapse because of these measures, as have people like Cuban scholars & Michael Parenti correctly points out as well.

Kibbutznik

16th September 2010, 04:14

How can there be class struggle if the bourgeoisie have been driven out of society's hierarchy?

Is there some new class I need to know about?
Yes. In the Soviet Union, the class of bureaucrats, professionals, engineers and scientists who held a monopoly on political power were called the nomenklatura (comes from the Latin nomenclatura, meaning a list of names).

And it's not unique to degenerated workers' states. Every modern capitalist nation has what Michael Albert calls a "coordinator" class of professionals. In political terms, they're the lieutenants and foot soldiers of the bourgeoisie, who in general have left the management of the state as well as the corporation to salaried professionals.

penguinfoot

16th September 2010, 05:48

I can show you very concretely how there is idealism in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.

Firstly, on the issue of the "early Marx", it may be true or false that Marx does not explicitly refer to the word alienation as much as he does in his earlier works but this does not mean that the theme of alienation does not occupy an important place in his later works as well as in his whole body of thought, and this is largely demonstrated by the attention Marx devotes to the fetishism of commodities in the very first chapter of Capital - the concept of commodity fetishism cannot be separated from alienation because, as I've already pointed out, the meaning of the word fetish for Marx is an object or entity which is the result of human activity in the sense that it is brought into the world by human labour and thought but then comes to occupy a position above human beings and exercise power over them, with men endowing the entity with features and attributes that distort its real nature, especially its origins in the activity of ordinary human beings. The concept has its origins in the notion of men endowing an ordinary object with religious significance and then coming to worship that object despite its ordinary-ness, but Marx gives the concept a new meaning with its introduction into his critique of political economy, with this meaning being largely derived from Marx's study of alienation and human nature under capitalism. The fetishism of commodities, for Marx, means men treating commodities as if value were inherent in the objects themselves rather than the product of a given set of social relations, and objectified labour asserting its power over human beings - and so the dissolution of the fetishism of commodities can only be understood as the assertion of man's rational control over the products of his activity. Thinkers like Althusser have no choice but to ignore the place of commodity fetishism in Capital because Althusser himself argues in his theory of ideology that ideology is what allows for the creation of subjects and that ideology will therefore persist into communism in the sense that men will continue to perceive and interact with the social world through ideological categories, rather than grasping the world in its totality and without the aid of illusions. More than this, alienation as a concept is also central to the economic categories Marx uses, especially in the case of variable capital, and its distinction from constant capital - by acknowledging that wage labour itself is capital, Marx is acknowledging the alienated character of that labour, is pointing out that labour is so alien as a form of activity that it has become primarily a form of capital rather than a means for the enrichment and development of human beings. In light of these points, it seems very hard to accept that Marx simply tossed the humanist critique of capitalism inside in favour of supposedly embarking on an analysis which posits men as traeger of relations of production and so on.

The one point where I think we are in agreement is that we should judge Marx's writings on their intrinsic merits, which means, what they can offer us as revolutionaries operating in the conditions of late capitalism in terms of their ability to offer a critique of capitalism and to articulate a positive vision of what an alternative society might be like, and on those grounds it seems difficult to ignore the arguments put forward in the 1844 manuscripts because now more than ever working people are deprived of control over the structure of the labour process, and are dominated by the products of their own labour - these are critical insights that cannot and should not be overlooked.

The ISO -- and your friend is almost certainly ISO -- says that he has to reinvest ALL of that surplus value in increasing his stock of constant capital so that he can produce his goods more cheaply in the next year.

I've never said this at all, in fact, I characterized military spending as analogous to unproductive consumption. It is logically impossible for the capitalist to use all of the surplus value in the way you specify because then there would be nothing left over for the consumption of the capitalist - not even at the level of subsistence. Nonetheless, the drive to lower the labour time required for the production of a given commodity through the introduction of labour-saving technology is a central influence on the decision-making of the capitalist because it is by doing this that they are able to gain a temporary advantage over their competitors, and it is also this drive and the process of other capitalists catching up with any labour-saving innovations that have been made that ultimately leads to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, with all its countervailing tendencies, as the ratio between constant and variable capital diminishes. I think you're broadly right in saying that the intensity of competition and pressure to introduce these innovations depends on particular industries, and we both know that there are even some industries, such as the oil sector, where countries intentionally restrict the scope of production and innovation, but if we're talking about tourism, then it seems hard to deny that tourism is amongst the more competitive industries, and that there is pressure for the Cuban state to reduce the cost of tourism services, and to structure the rest of the economy in a way that makes investment in tourism on a large scale possible.

First, socialist states can increase productivity more efficiently and with a lower expenditure of capital because they operate in a planned, scientific manner.

You make it seem as if planning is specific to socialism and as if there's something uniquely socialist about planning - it's not, of course, as large corporations engage in planning everyday, and what distinguishes socialist planning from the forms of planning we see under capitalism is that the former is orientated towards meeting the needs of working people rather than meeting the imperatives of accumulation. The former type of planning requires that decision-making is not subject to external forces that limit the options available to those who are making the decisions and yet Cuba exhibits the exact opposite because decision-making is constrained by the need to respond to the pressures of the international market. The decision-makers are subject to forces beyond their control.

Second, socialist states are not subject to internal crises of overproduction, during which capital is destroyed

There are also means that capitalist governments can adopt to postpone their crises, one of which is the permanent arms economy, which diverts surplus value that might otherwise be devoted to labour-saving innovations to the production and purchasing of arms, and in doing so slows the rate of capital accumulation, including its tendency to diminish the ratio between constant and variable capital - but the more important issue here is that even if the fact that Cuba is a state-capitalist society means that it is possible for it to avoid some forms of capitalist crisis, not least because both consumption and production are planned, it still remains the case that the Cuban economy is situated in the context of a capitalist world-system and that crises which originate at any point in the world-system have consequences for Cuba and other state-capitalist countries, because of their ramifications for world trade, on which Cuba, like every other country, is dependent. In fact, your friend 'The Vegan Marxist' is tacitly recognizing this by arguing that the current economic reforms are the result of an international economic crisis, just as you recognize the same dynamic in the case of nickel, and this was even more true during the special period, when the collapse of the Soviet Union had profound ramifications not only for Cuba but also for other countries such as North Korea and the whole of the former Soviet bloc.

Third, not all commodities are actually subject to the law of value.

This is something of a distortion, because Marx's position (in Wage Labour and Capital, 'By what is the price of a commodity determined?') was not that there are some commodities that are subject to the law of value and others that are subject to the laws of supply and demand, but that both are important for the majority of commodities, and that the law of value is what determines the point around which the price changes due to fluctuations in supply and demand, and the quantity which determines the magnitude of those price changes.

It was Tony Cliff's argument in his book, "State Capitalism" that the method of capitalist competition between the capitalist world and the Soviet state was actually MILITARY competition.

Actually, Cliff explicitly acknowledged the possibility of Russia "[trading] extensively with countries outside her empire", and the potential for commercial rather than military competition to be the main influence on decision-making inside the Russian economy - and in Cuba it is precisely the former that is more important. The fact that the law of value expressed itself in a striving after use values in the form of a vast military apparatus does not show that the law of value did not obtain or that the Soviet economy was socialist because the use values were themselves only a means of realizing a given end, that is, securing victory in geopolitical competition with the United States, this geopolitical conflict being itself a symptom of the imperialist stage of capitalism. In a sense it is analogous to the fact that the capitalist seeks to maintain competitiveness by investing in labour-saving innovations not just because they enjoy the thrill of competing on the market or because they like the formal status of being a capitalist rather than being a proletarian but because the threat of being sucked into the ranks of the working class is a very real one that they would rather avoid - the equivalent for the decision-makers in a state-capitalist society would be losing out in geopolitical competition, which would, in the long run, endanger their own material privileges.

So, who betrayed the Cuban revolution? The very same faces are leading the country now as led the revolution.

I don't think that the Cuban revolution was betrayed, because the Cuban Revolution was never socialist - Che Guevara tried to make it seem as such in retrospect by arguing in his 'Reminiscences' that the Sierra guerillas represented the proletariat as an ideological force even though the actual role of the proletariat as a social body was fairly unimportant, but what the Cuban Revolution was really about was a section of the petty-bourgeoisie seeking to rally the peasantry and carry out the goals of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in conditions where the working class had been unable to do so as part of the process of permanent revolution as a result of the opportunism of the official Communist Party, the PSP, who joined Batista's cabinet, and initially condemned the J-26-M. The decision of Castro and his comrades to side with the Soviets and to radicalize the revolution cannot, in my view, following Farber, be explained entirely in terms of Cuba's relationship with the United States because the challenges posed to the new Cuban government by the US only means that it would be impossible for the revolution to maintain a moderate course, based on a minimal program of democratic reform - it did not settle the question of whether the revolution would be radical, opting for a more progressive set of policies, or whether, having taken state power, Castro would bow to the pressures of the United States and stand in opposition to all forms of change in the countryside, and what resulted in the former course was, in my view, the leadership role of Fidel Castro.

16th September 2010, 06:43

I never argued that China is state capitalism transitioning to private capitalism. I argued (and uphold the view) that modern day China is capitalism and that Maoist China was definitely socialism (albeit bureaucratic).
I'm sorry, but if socialism is workers' control (although I do not distinguish between socialism or communism), how can a bureaucratic system (which entails bureaucrats holding decision-making power and controlling the economy) be considered socialist? All decision-making power must be in the hands of the workers for an economic system to be considered 'socialist'.

16th September 2010, 06:47

Since the early ninties Bourgeoisie has been allowed in the CPC
Indeed, but I was referring to a class that has time and time again emerged as a ruling class after each of the "communist" revolutions of history.

Crux

16th September 2010, 08:37

Indeed, but I was referring to a class that has time and time again emerged as a ruling class after each of the "communist" revolutions of history.
I disagree with the distinction of Bureaucracy as a separate class.

gorillafuck

16th September 2010, 12:06

I'm sorry, but if socialism is workers' control (although I do not distinguish between socialism or communism), how can a bureaucratic system (which entails bureaucrats holding decision-making power and controlling the economy) be considered socialist? All decision-making power must be in the hands of the workers for an economic system to be considered 'socialist'.
Capitalism isn't only defined by the presence of some sort of management, unless you throw everything Marx said about it out the window.

VM, I'll respond to your PM when I am not about to go to school.

enrici

16th September 2010, 12:50

Is this not a good thing? Isn't it about putting the means of production in the workers' hands, because isn't that what Marxism is about?

4 Leaf Clover

16th September 2010, 13:11

No changes in division of matter can happen during night. Neither Marx thought people can overthrow Capitalism and have brand new political economical and social system next day. Thats why materialism was developed as theory. Thats why Socialism exists. To create class consciousness , abolish class diversity , and make a new material continuity as generations and generations get adapted to the way things work. As link between workers , industries , collectives and other social bodies get strengthened and fair trade flourishes , so will the need for authority and mutual governing bodies vanish

Specifically on Cuban model , according to what i said above , implementing market socialism features is nothing but reaction

16th September 2010, 13:21

Capitalism isn't only defined by the presence of some sort of management, unless you throw everything Marx said about it out the window.
Not everything. Mainly just the bits about classes only being determined by property relations (leaving management layers to be considered "working class").

I view managers and bureaucrats controlling capital and the means of production in the absence of property-holders as a kind of capitalism.

The Vegan Marxist

16th September 2010, 17:42

Firstly, on the issue of the "early Marx", it may be true or false that Marx does not explicitly refer to the word alienation as much as he does in his earlier works but this does not mean that the theme of alienation does not occupy an important place in his later works as well as in his whole body of thought, and this is largely demonstrated by the attention Marx devotes to the fetishism of commodities in the very first chapter of Capital - the concept of commodity fetishism cannot be separated from alienation because, as I've already pointed out, the meaning of the word fetish for Marx is an object or entity which is the result of human activity in the sense that it is brought into the world by human labour and thought but then comes to occupy a position above human beings and exercise power over them, with men endowing the entity with features and attributes that distort its real nature, especially its origins in the activity of ordinary human beings. The concept has its origins in the notion of men endowing an ordinary object with religious significance and then coming to worship that object despite its ordinary-ness, but Marx gives the concept a new meaning with its introduction into his critique of political economy, with this meaning being largely derived from Marx's study of alienation and human nature under capitalism. The fetishism of commodities, for Marx, means men treating commodities as if value were inherent in the objects themselves rather than the product of a given set of social relations, and objectified labour asserting its power over human beings - and so the dissolution of the fetishism of commodities can only be understood as the assertion of man's rational control over the products of his activity. Thinkers like Althusser have no choice but to ignore the place of commodity fetishism in Capital because Althusser himself argues in his theory of ideology that ideology is what allows for the creation of subjects and that ideology will therefore persist into communism in the sense that men will continue to perceive and interact with the social world through ideological categories, rather than grasping the world in its totality and without the aid of illusions. More than this, alienation as a concept is also central to the economic categories Marx uses, especially in the case of variable capital, and its distinction from constant capital - by acknowledging that wage labour itself is capital, Marx is acknowledging the alienated character of that labour, is pointing out that labour is so alien as a form of activity that it has become primarily a form of capital rather than a means for the enrichment and development of human beings. In light of these points, it seems very hard to accept that Marx simply tossed the humanist critique of capitalism inside in favour of supposedly embarking on an analysis which posits men as traeger of relations of production and so on.

The one point where I think we are in agreement is that we should judge Marx's writings on their intrinsic merits, which means, what they can offer us as revolutionaries operating in the conditions of late capitalism in terms of their ability to offer a critique of capitalism and to articulate a positive vision of what an alternative society might be like, and on those grounds it seems difficult to ignore the arguments put forward in the 1844 manuscripts because now more than ever working people are deprived of control over the structure of the labour process, and are dominated by the products of their own labour - these are critical insights that cannot and should not be overlooked.

I've never said this at all, in fact, I characterized military spending as analogous to unproductive consumption. It is logically impossible for the capitalist to use all of the surplus value in the way you specify because then there would be nothing left over for the consumption of the capitalist - not even at the level of subsistence. Nonetheless, the drive to lower the labour time required for the production of a given commodity through the introduction of labour-saving technology is a central influence on the decision-making of the capitalist because it is by doing this that they are able to gain a temporary advantage over their competitors, and it is also this drive and the process of other capitalists catching up with any labour-saving innovations that have been made that ultimately leads to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, with all its countervailing tendencies, as the ratio between constant and variable capital diminishes. I think you're broadly right in saying that the intensity of competition and pressure to introduce these innovations depends on particular industries, and we both know that there are even some industries, such as the oil sector, where countries intentionally restrict the scope of production and innovation, but if we're talking about tourism, then it seems hard to deny that tourism is amongst the more competitive industries, and that there is pressure for the Cuban state to reduce the cost of tourism services, and to structure the rest of the economy in a way that makes investment in tourism on a large scale possible.

You make it seem as if planning is specific to socialism and as if there's something uniquely socialist about planning - it's not, of course, as large corporations engage in planning everyday, and what distinguishes socialist planning from the forms of planning we see under capitalism is that the former is orientated towards meeting the needs of working people rather than meeting the imperatives of accumulation. The former type of planning requires that decision-making is not subject to external forces that limit the options available to those who are making the decisions and yet Cuba exhibits the exact opposite because decision-making is constrained by the need to respond to the pressures of the international market. The decision-makers are subject to forces beyond their control.

There are also means that capitalist governments can adopt to postpone their crises, one of which is the permanent arms economy, which diverts surplus value that might otherwise be devoted to labour-saving innovations to the production and purchasing of arms, and in doing so slows the rate of capital accumulation, including its tendency to diminish the ratio between constant and variable capital - but the more important issue here is that even if the fact that Cuba is a state-capitalist society means that it is possible for it to avoid some forms of capitalist crisis, not least because both consumption and production are planned, it still remains the case that the Cuban economy is situated in the context of a capitalist world-system and that crises which originate at any point in the world-system have consequences for Cuba and other state-capitalist countries, because of their ramifications for world trade, on which Cuba, like every other country, is dependent. In fact, your friend 'The Vegan Marxist' is tacitly recognizing this by arguing that the current economic reforms are the result of an international economic crisis, just as you recognize the same dynamic in the case of nickel, and this was even more true during the special period, when the collapse of the Soviet Union had profound ramifications not only for Cuba but also for other countries such as North Korea and the whole of the former Soviet bloc.

This is something of a distortion, because Marx's position (in Wage Labour and Capital, 'By what is the price of a commodity determined?') was not that there are some commodities that are subject to the law of value and others that are subject to the laws of supply and demand, but that both are important for the majority of commodities, and that the law of value is what determines the point around which the price changes due to fluctuations in supply and demand, and the quantity which determines the magnitude of those price changes.

Actually, Cliff explicitly acknowledged the possibility of Russia "[trading] extensively with countries outside her empire", and the potential for commercial rather than military competition to be the main influence on decision-making inside the Russian economy - and in Cuba it is precisely the former that is more important. The fact that the law of value expressed itself in a striving after use values in the form of a vast military apparatus does not show that the law of value did not obtain or that the Soviet economy was socialist because the use values were themselves only a means of realizing a given end, that is, securing victory in geopolitical competition with the United States, this geopolitical conflict being itself a symptom of the imperialist stage of capitalism. In a sense it is analogous to the fact that the capitalist seeks to maintain competitiveness by investing in labour-saving innovations not just because they enjoy the thrill of competing on the market or because they like the formal status of being a capitalist rather than being a proletarian but because the threat of being sucked into the ranks of the working class is a very real one that they would rather avoid - the equivalent for the decision-makers in a state-capitalist society would be losing out in geopolitical competition, which would, in the long run, endanger their own material privileges.

I don't think that the Cuban revolution was betrayed, because the Cuban Revolution was never socialist - Che Guevara tried to make it seem as such in retrospect by arguing in his 'Reminiscences' that the Sierra guerillas represented the proletariat as an ideological force even though the actual role of the proletariat as a social body was fairly unimportant, but what the Cuban Revolution was really about was a section of the petty-bourgeoisie seeking to rally the peasantry and carry out the goals of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in conditions where the working class had been unable to do so as part of the process of permanent revolution as a result of the opportunism of the official Communist Party, the PSP, who joined Batista's cabinet, and initially condemned the J-26-M. The decision of Castro and his comrades to side with the Soviets and to radicalize the revolution cannot, in my view, following Farber, be explained entirely in terms of Cuba's relationship with the United States because the challenges posed to the new Cuban government by the US only means that it would be impossible for the revolution to maintain a moderate course, based on a minimal program of democratic reform - it did not settle the question of whether the revolution would be radical, opting for a more progressive set of policies, or whether, having taken state power, Castro would bow to the pressures of the United States and stand in opposition to all forms of change in the countryside, and what resulted in the former course was, in my view, the leadership role of Fidel Castro.

My friend's responded to a part of it, though he'll respond to the rest once he finds time to do so:

Well, this is what I meant by kicking up dust. By writing a lot, he attempts to obscure the issues.

I wrote specifically that this:

"Just as private property is only the perceptible expression of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes to himself a strange and inhuman object; just as it expresses the fact that the manifestation of his life is the alienation of his life, that his realisation is his loss of reality, is an alien reality"

From the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts was idealist and backwards. He has written hundreds or perhaps thousands of words, and yet hasn't responded to that, so far as I can tell.

Why not? Because he can't. So he'd rather talk about something else.

He attempts to identify that concept of alienation with the fetishism of commodities. It won't work. The conception of the fetishism of commodities is the other way around: "It is, however, just this ultimate money form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers. "

That is, the money form of value and the mystery surrounding commodities simply lies in the fact that they hide the objective social relations between producers. The chaper is important not as fundamentally solving the problem of why capitalism is bad for us, but rather in showing a way in which bourgeois political economists go wrong.

Nothing to do with a person confronting his own self as something alien, etc., etc.

His critique of Althusser suggests very, very strongly that he doesn't understand Althusser in the slightest. Perhaps he hasn't actually read any Althusser? Althusser said that capitalist ideology is not automatically destroyed by revolution, but rather that a struggle against it has to continue. This is hardly a call to ignore the influence of bourgeois ideology.

Althusser also talks about a different kind of ideology, one which is concerned not with drawing a veil over the world but merely with organizing principles and common values, which will not disappear. But pretending the two things are the same is just dishonest.

Moving on, of course, this fellow has nothing to say about whether Marx's views actually developed over the course of time or not. Nor does he have anything to say about whether or not Marx AT ANY POINT was idealist. As Althusser says, the key question in looking at an ideology is how the questions of the ideology differ from the real questions. Here we see the distorting effect of his ideology: He cannot ask when Marx became a materialist.

Now this:
"More than this, alienation as a concept is also central to the economic categories Marx uses, especially in the case of variable capital, and its distinction from constant capital - by acknowledging that wage labour itself is capital, Marx is acknowledging the alienated character of that labour, is pointing out that labour is so alien as a form of activity that it has become primarily a form of capital rather than a means for the enrichment and development of human beings."

This is very useful to show what he's really doing. He's taking Capital, which doesn't mention his concept at all, anywhere, and "finding" it, somewhere in the background. Very like Bible interpretation. Very silly. Did Marx talk about alienation (in the earlier sense) in Capital? Our friend purports not to know, but the answer is actually no. But our friend says, "Well, there are some things in there that to me are kind of like alienation."

The analysis of Capital is not based on how people FEEL about things, but on real, hard economics. You could, it is true, go back and reanalyze the thing based on feelings. But that wouldn't be Marxism.

I said: "The ISO -- and your friend is almost certainly ISO -- says that he has to reinvest ALL of that surplus value in increasing his stock of constant capital so that he can produce his goods more cheaply in the next year."

He replies: "I've never said this at all, in fact, I characterized military spending as analogous to unproductive consumption."

And it's true, neither he nor the ISO has EXPLICITLY said it, because it's so obviously stupid. However, it is the ONLY way in which the things they say are correct.

They say that the "state capitalist" has to exploit the workers just the same as the real capitalist, that otherwise he will lose in competition. Why? If in fact only some small part of the surplus value has to be reinvested to remain competitive, or to maintain military security, then only that small part of the surplus value can't be given back to the worker to consume. In contrast, in capitalism, the worker generally gets no more than the minimum for subsistence and reproduction -- the Iron Law of Wages.

I said before there was nothing left for him to do but kick up dust. That's what he's doing here with all the empty language. This is the hole in the ISO's theory, and one which no amount of empty words can plug.

The rest is a little interesting, because he goes back and forth between his idealist conception of socialism -- one which is actually found nowhere in Marx -- and a materialist conception having to do with the exploitation of workers.

He says that tourism requires an awful lot of investment. He has no idea how much investment tourism requires, particularly Cuban tourism requires, and he is making this up because it suits his theory. He has hit on a point which he thinks can save him -- if tourism happens to require an enormous amount of investment year after year to keep up, I suppose because last year's Hilton will no longer cut it, and he thinks there's no way I can show him to be wrong about this.

Keep in mind, what we are talking about is not replacing the stock of fixed capital, but rather actually INCREASING it to serve the same number of tourists. That means not repairing the existing hotels, or building more hotels, but upgrading the hotels year after year after year. Obviously that's not that big of an issue in the tourist industry.

Actually Cuban tourism involves profoundly less infrastructure than tourism in most other countries, and some tour operators have been sharply critical of Cuba for this reason. He says the whole rest of the Cuban economy has to be milked to provide capital for tourism. That would make tourism an unprofitable industry... I acknowledged that something like that probably went on at certain points in the history of computer parts manufacturing, but if it were to go on long run, there would be no investment in the industry

"use values were themselves only a means of realizing a given end,"

Awesome. Use values were only a means of realizing a given end. What does he think the word "use" means? If I am producing only for myself, does he not think that I produce a blanket to realize the given end of staying warm at night? A sandwich to realize the given end of feeding myself?

In other words, we'll always be under capitalism until we stop producing things in order to use them.

Not even Tony Cliff was this silly. Cliff's idea was that the workers had to be exploited to produce those guns in the same way that capitalist workers had to be exploited for competitive reasons. If he doesn't get that, perhaps he hasn't read Tony Cliff in the original.

Actually, producing things for their use values, i.e. guns to kill fascists, is the antithesis of commodity production.

UPDATE: Here's the rest of his response (take note, where he says "he" on the first response has changed to "you" in the 2nd part of the response, just to be clear:

To continue:

"The one point where I think we are in agreement is that we should judge Marx's writings on their intrinsic merits, which means, what they can offer us as revolutionaries operating in the conditions of late capitalism in terms of their ability to offer a critique of capitalism and to articulate a positive vision of what an alternative society might be like, and on those grounds it seems difficult to ignore the arguments put forward in the 1844 manuscripts because now more than ever working people are deprived of control over the structure of the labour process, and are dominated by the products of their own labour - these are critical insights that cannot and should not be overlooked. "

We are NOT in the slightest bit in agreement on this, because it constitutes opportunist nonsense.

You say we should judge theory on whether or not we can motivate people with them. I say we also have to judge it on whether or not it is CORRECT.

In the world of capitalist politics, it is normal to say things that sound good or help your case whether they are true or not. Marxist politics should be better than that: We should be honest and principled.

But furthermore: No revolution has actually ever occurred in which the main complaint was alienation. Think of Lenin's demands: "Peace, Bread, Land." Not "An end to alienation." I don't think even YOU know what you mean by alienation. The broad masses of people will never bother to learn because they will never care. It is NOT a useful slogan. The useful slogans in the U.S. today are not far removed from "peace, bread, land," because the basic contradiction -- between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat -- remains the same.

The only ones concerned about "alienation" are a small sector of the petit-bourgeoisie which is too small to be revolutionary whatever its outlook, but which in practice has not fully broken from bourgeois ideology and so is only an unstable ally for the proletariat. I refer, concretely, to ISO.

I wanted to go back and point something out here:

Going back to the question of where surplus value goes: Unless ISO is right in their insinuation that it is all consumed in increasing the productivity of labor -- which he concedes they are not -- then his version of "capitalism" would be free of things like the iron law of wages and crises of overproduction. Thus it is not capitalism in the sense that it produces poverty in the midst of abundance, that it produces out of control production, that it risks destroying the planet, that it inevitably produces wars, etc. His "capitalism" is lacking the features of capitalism which cause people to give their lives to overthrow it.

On the question of the tourist industry, a slight further point: Tourism in Cuba is a money maker for the country. It is not a money sink. It is something in the economy that works well, producing good jobs and money for foreign exchange. It is not a drain on the Cuban economy. His thesis that the rest of the economy is drained to support Cuban tourism is the reverse of the actual fact, namely that Cuban tourism played a major role in revitalizing the rest of the economy. How is that possible? It's possible because surplus value which was created in the tourism industry was used in other sectors, rather than the reverse.

"I characterized military spending as analogous to unproductive consumption."

What kind of a person considers that building the weapons that defeated Hitler was "analogous to unproductive consumption?" Military construction in the USSR saved the world. But your ideological outlook does not allow you to see that.

Now, this gem:

"There are also means that capitalist governments can adopt to postpone their crises"

Capitalist governments cannot prevent crisis. This is Bernsteinian bullshit. I can personally remember seven economic crises in the United States, and I'm not that old. Only the ABOLITION of capitalism can prevent crises. That is why there were no crises of overproduction in the USSR, but there continue to be such crises in ALL THE CAPITALIST ECONOMIES. It doesn't matter what measures they take, whether military production or the latest theory from the Federal Reserve Bank. The crises come and they will keep coming until capitalism is abolished.

That's Marxism. What you are peddling is something else, the kind of thing a person might step in if he is careless in a stable.

"the more important issue here is that even if the fact that Cuba is a state-capitalist society means that it is possible for it to avoid some forms of capitalist crisis, not least because both consumption and production are planned, it still remains the case that the Cuban economy is situated in the context of a capitalist world-system and that crises which originate at any point in the world-system have consequences for Cuba and other state-capitalist countries"

Oh, really? So, suppose that we were talking about the Soviet Union in pre-World War II days. It had very little foreign trade. Capitalist crises abroad barely affected it. In fact, it grew by leaps and bounds in the midst of the Great Depression. Are you conceding, then that the Soviet Union was not "state-capitalist?"

I think not. I think that when you answer that question, you will simply trot out one of your other definitions of state capitalism, the one that seems most suitable for the particular argument.

Really, it is true that Cuba is to some extent integrated into the world capitalist system, and therefore it is affected by the world economic crisis. This is a consequence not of its internal system of organization, but of its size. Its internal organization is socialist, not capitalist. It is insulated to a considerable extent from the world economic crisis, as we can see from the fact that homelessness, unemployment, food insecurity, lack of access to medical care, etc., have not gone up, while they have gone up in nearly every other country in the world. But it is not perfectly insulated.

That it is not perfectly insulated from the world economic crisis tells us nothing about the social basis of the state, the system of organization of the economy, the class nature of the Cuban revolution, or anything else. All it tells us is that Cuba is too small of a country to be entirely self-sufficient.

Now, this:

"I don't think that the Cuban revolution was betrayed, because the Cuban Revolution was never socialist"

So, in response to this whole long section of his dusk kicking, hand waving, etc., let me ask again:

WHAT CLASS CARRIED OUT THE CUBAN REVOLUTION?

What class expropriated the Cuban bourgeoisie? Cause they were pretty seriously expropriated. You can find them all over the web complaining about how that bastard Castro took their stuff. That's their explanation: Castro did it. But Marxists -- unlike the gusanos and unlike the ISO -- favor a class analysis.

You have two choices. The first is D'Amato's choice of denying that the proletariat was in fact the class that overthrew Cuban capitalism. The problem with this is that there is no one else to fill the proletariat's shoes, so there is no answer for the above question. Of course, his solution -- often favored by the ISO, but difficult to maintain in a debate -- is simply to fail to mention the expropriation of the Cuban bourgeoisie and hope no one points it out. So you mention "more progressive policies in the countryside" but not that if you owned a factory in Cuba in 1958, the state had taken it from you by 1962.

Your other choice is to claim that the proletariat was betrayed. But in this case, of course, no betrayal ever took place.

S.Artesian

16th September 2010, 18:29

Point of fact: Marx uses the term alienation throughout his economic notebooks and manuscripts when describing the labor process under capitalism, the opposition of labor to the conditions of labor, the contradiction between the labor process and valorisation process. These notebooks were written between 1857 and 1864 and are coincident with the drafting of Capital.

And Marx actually talks about alienation in the drafts of Capital, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
If you actually study these manuscripts you'll see that the very same concepts Marx initially grappled with in his manuscripts of 1844 resurface in these manuscripts, are expanded upon in these manuscripts, and in fact are reiterated in these manuscripts.

So before we start replaying Althusser's "rupture" between the young "idealist" Marx and the old "materialist" Marx, let's take some time to read volumes 28, 30, 33, 34 of the collected works, where alienation in all its material significance as a result of the labor process under capitalism, as the origin of value is examined.

Now as far as Cuba goes, well, I've been there, I've done some work with some of the Cuban railway people, and there is no doubt that the economic footprint of the tourism industry is large, is demanding, and provides services to the tourists in exchange for hard currency that it does not provide for the Cuban people, and that those services, since Cuba is not a fully developed country, depend upon and inhibit the overall development of the economy.

I believe it was at the 2000 Encounter on Economics and Underdevelopment in Havana that a paper was presented exactly analyzing the impact, the economic "footprint," of tourism on underdeveloped countries-- and the costs of providing the electricity, the services, the more varied and higher grade foodstuffs, etc. to the tourist industry.. and, like "oil-rich poverty" today, and the "sugar cane wealth-poverty" of the past, the overall impact of tourism is negative for the development of economies.

Let's be clear, Cuba only turned to the tourism to generate currency after the withdrawal of aid from the fSU, and the terrible times of the "special period." Nobody should blame the Cubans for doing what they did, but neither should we ignore the impact of the tourism industry on the economic relations, meaning more precisely-- that while a teacher or doctor in Havana may make $30 a month, a waiter at one of the international resort hotels will make that much in tips in one night. Nothing wrong with being a waiter. There is definitely something wrong with such gross inequality of compensation.

The issue cannot be glossed over by saying -- oh we're actually increasing the stock of fixed capital-- that's wonderful if we're accumulating exchange value-- quantities of value. But we need to look at more than mere quantities of value, of fixed capital, we need to look at the specific quality of the fixed capital-- that is to say is it production based on need and use, or is it production based on accumulation of value. And we answer that question by looking at the social relations of production-- what social relations are being "augmented," amplified by the expansion of the tourist industry?