From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-panix.com>
Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2002 17:55:40 -0500
Subject: Re: AUT: Cuba - Capitalist ?!


On Thu, 07 Mar 2002 06:24:05 +0800, Kurasje Archive wrote:
>The 'immediate producers'  - the wast majority
>of the population  -  are devided from the
>'means of production' and thus socially and
>existentially 'enslaved' to an existence as
>'wage labours' selling their 'labour power' as
>commodities in exchange for money (as means to
>purchace other commodities neccasary for
>survival and reproduction) to some 'employer',
>who owns or represents ownership of 'the means
>of production', which the 'immediate producers'
>by this basic social relationship of production
>cannot just command for their own needs.
>
>Sorry about the length/complicity of this
>sentence, but it is supposed to expres some
>basic 'marxism':

Your sentence is long, but it is not complex. Basically you have no 
idea about how people in Cuba could have emancipated themselves. They 
are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Either they accepted 
Batista's dictatorship with all the degradation and violence and 
poverty it entailed, or they would do nothing because they lacked the 
advanced technology and productivity of labor to build communism. If 
the Cuban government could not stop selling sugar on the world 
market, dispense with money, and release cane cutters from the need 
to put in 8 hours of work per day, they could not satisfy you. Of 
course, it would be against the materialist concept of history to 
assume that any such measures could be taken. That is why I regard 
your arguments not as Marxist, but idealist. You have the ideal of 
communism in your mind but no inkling how to achieve it. Marx and 
Engels started out as non-scientific socialists in the 1830s but soon 
abandoned this approach. It is surprising to see it resurface now 
under the rubric of "autonomism".


-- 
Louis Proyect, lnp3-AT-panix.com on 03/06/2002

Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org




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