Date: Tue, 05 Mar 2002 12:25:20 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: capitalist cuba?


Harry Cleaver:
>Louis, can't you read? I said: "Would the Cuban government agencies that
>oversee investment shift investment to Miami if rates of surplus value and
>rates of profit were higher there and if it were legal for them to do so?
>I don't know." If I believed the Cuban government would invest in Miami
>I would have said "yes", not "I don't know."

Of course I can read. That is what I meant when I referred to
"agnosticism". Your agnosticism bothers me.

>The Cuban government has displayed no hostility toward the production of a
>surplus that I have ever heard of. Its socialist ideology makes it hostile
>to "profit" just as the Soviet Union was hostile to "profit" but that
>never kept either one from doing their best to realize a surplus, and the
>highest rate of surplus that it could manage.

>From reading the autonomists and other untainted breeds of communists, one
would never gather that the main problem of Soviet-type economies,
according to many economists, is that the production of surplus (or profit,
depending on your terminological preference) seemed to matter little at
all. From Alec Nove to Wlodzimierz Brus, you hear an unending tale about
the lack of dynamism in so-called socialist societies. Although I am not
privy to the financial data of the Cuban consumer goods producing sector, I
somehow doubt that the same kinds of strategic planning goes on as it does
at the Gap or Coca-Cola.

>I didn't notice anyone mentioning foreign investment in Cuba. The question
>raised concerned relative rates of surplus extraction.

Yawn. That's not the interesting question, Harry. It is rather whether
Cuba's economy is run on the same basis as Jamaica's. If you believe so,
then I urge you to watch "Life and Debt", the documentary on Jamaica.
Follow that up with Carlos Tablada's book on Che Guevara's economic
theories and practice. If Guevara was a capitalist functionary then the
term has no meaning whatsoever.

Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org




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