Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 15:16:49 -0600 (CST)
From: "Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave-AT-eco.utexas.edu>
Subject: Re: AUT: capitalist cuba?


On Thu, 7 Mar 2002, Louis Proyect wrote:

> Harry Cleaver:
> >Preobrazhensky called it "primitive socialist accumulation" during the
> >industrialization debates. And the only thing 'socialist" about his
> >approach to exploiting the peasantry was the word.
>
> I wonder why Harry leaves out the debate that took place over how such
> policies should be implemented. Bukharin and Stalin advocated leniency for
> the wealthy kulak, while Preobrazhensky and others favored expropriating
> it, while at the same time supporting the poor peasantry. In other words,
> there were class differentiations reflected in the various approaches.
> While I have no idea what Harry's opinion was on all this, I would have not
> only favored a crackdown on the wealthy kulaks, but described that policy
> as socialist without the scare quotes.

Assuming that such things as kulaks existed, what crackdown would you have
favored Louis? Shooting the lot and taking over their land and then
putting other peasants to work on it to produce a surplus by the
state with little in return? That's pretty much what happened isn't it?
Yes, that was Soviet socialism and one of the many reasons why lots of us
want nothing to do with anything that even remotely resembles it.

> When Bukharin and Stalin achieved
> victory over their opponents, using a mixture of repression and demagogy,
> the results were catastrophic. Stalin lurched violently against the
> capitalist class in the countryside and Soviet agriculture suffered for
> decades.

Geez, I thought you just said you would 'crackdown" on
kulacks/agrarian-capitalists?

At any rate you need to restudy the history of who said what when in the
industrialization debates as well as the history of implementation.
There were no good guys. The only debate was over HOW to exploit the
peasantry. Bukharin, like Keynes, would have exploited by giving to
get, but the objective was still exploitation. And given that the
peasantry were the vast majority of the Soviet people, the Bolshevik
debates boiled down to one over how to exploit the country for their own
purposes.

> >I see no evidence of any change in the antagonism between the Soviet
> >people and the Soviet state that continued to strive to accumulate capital
> >right through to the end.
>
> The source of the antagonism was not that capital was being accumulated, as
> you put it, but rather that the ruling elite protected its privileges with
> secret police and censorship while failing to respond to the desire of the
> masses for consumer goods.

Is that the elite that you don't want to call "ruling class"? The
privileges it was protecting was primarily its power to subordinate most
people's lives to the accumulation of capital --not whether they got the
choice cuts of meat in party stores. The subordination of consumption to
investment lasted all the way through the proto-Keynesian period of the
60s when the ghost of Bukharin ressurected from where Stalin had
laid him and peasants on collective farms were granted, at long last, a
share of their collective labor in the form of higher wages and pensions.

> For all of this chatter about "accumulating
> capital", Harry would seem to have absolutely no idea how a largely
> agrarian and backward society like China or Cuba, whose economy had been
> distorted by a century of colonialism, can modernize its infrastructure.

Louis you keep tossing out this "well if you don't like the way it was
done, then give me a better approach" line. As one clearly sympathetic to
central planning I can understand that you want an alternative central
plan. I won't offer you one, I wouldn't want to construct one. As a
general rule those who work the land understand better than anyone how to
improve agriculture, and I would look to workers for methods to improve
manufacturing --regardless of the history of distortion which is
omnipresent in capitalism. The uncomfortable truth is that in isolation
from the productive capacity of the world's working class, any group of
workers finds its possibilities sharply limited by its available
resources. The problem with Soviet, and most other Soviet-style,
socialists is that they impose their own agenda on the people whose
interests they falsely pretend to represent and they do it with violence
and maximum feasible exploitation. The secondary problem is that their
agenda is that of accumulating capital --including the accumulation of the
population as working class. For some of us the whole point of revolution
is to break free of life sentences to hard labor, to reduce work to one
voluntary dimension of self-realization and to free time and energy for
other forms of collective activity.

> Without machinery to relieve cane-cutters from the need to do back-breaking
> work, who can even begin to imagine what progress will look like, let alone
> socialism. Where is such machinery to come from? From reading Toni Negri?

In the first place Cuban workers would be a lot better off producing other
foods than sugar, an export crop aimed at supplying an artificially
inflated and addictive demand --whether for sweets or alcohol. For
whatever sugar is produced, sure they should get machinery if they want
it (and I imagine that they do). Where is it to come from? Preferably from
the factories that currently produce it, whereever they are located.

> >That "lax labor discipline" was a form of resistance: one of the few forms
> >of resistance available in a police state. All through the post-WWII
> >period the state tried one form after another to impose work on the
> >recalcitrant population.
>
> Resistance? Is that what you call it? I would describe it as singularly
> ineffective. If that's what "refusal to work" is supposed to accomplish, it
> hasn't fared very well.

On the contrary, it completely subverted Soviet accumulation and so
weakened the system that in the end it simply collapsed. The Soviet
state could force Russians to mine coal and build steel mills but it
could neither force them to write good software nor risk what they might
do with it.

But the overthrow of the Soviet regime --in Eastern Europe and the USSR--
was as doomed as the earlier revolution. Only this time it was not the
Bolsheviks imposing work with the excuse of limited resources, it was the
ex-nomenclatura, backed by the IMF, imposing work with the excuse of
limited resources.

> >It's only a problem when work is being imposed and resisted. And the
> >cynicism derived from the combination of imposed work and restricted
> >production of quality consumer goods. Why give of your time and energy to
> >work when the product of your labor is being accumulated by the state for
> >your further enslavement.
>
> I agree. But the Cuban people don't seem to feel enslaved, from what I've
> seen.

Most American's don't feel enslaved either. When has that become a
criteria for anything?

> Perhaps you'd prefer to talk about the USSR exclusively, where your
> categories might arguably have some relevance.

If the "categories" have relevance in the USSR they have relevance
elsewhere --especially in a Soviet client state.

> In any case, the thread has
> been about Cuba where capitalism does not exist. Oops, I forgot. You think
> that Cuba has always been capitalist. How forgetful of me.

The "thread" has been about whether capitalism exists in Cuba or not, not
"about Cuba where capitalism does not exist." Sorry but you seem to have
forgotten most of your interlocutors' comments.

> >There was plenty of unemployment in the USSR. Some was overt; most was
> >covert: "hidden" unemployment where people were kept "at work" but were
> >doing nothing in exchange for minimial subsistence.
>
> Oh, *that* kind of unemployment. I see plenty of that here around me at
> Columbia University.

That's supposed to be a response? First you complain that no one wants to
talk about unemployment. Then when people do, you ignore what is said and
toss off flippant remarks. An approach that makes your previous claims as
to being capable of civil debate a joke and explains why a lot of people
don't want to take the time and trouble of arguing with you.

> >No Louis, I was implying no such thing. You want to see Cuba as a
> >socialist country whose government is more responsive to the needs of its
> >citizens than capitalist countries. Because you don't see that government
> >fitting production to demand as in capitalism (and I would suppose not
> >trying to manipulate that demand either) then I was wondering about any
> >evidence about how the Cuban planning state knows what production is
> >needed and desired by the population.
>
> Were you? I suggest you take a look at my review of Arnold August's
> "Democracy in Cuba and the 1997-1998 Elections":
>
> http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/state_and_revolution/democracy_in_cuba.
> htm
>
> It illustrates how Cuban democracy addresses the questions of everyday
> life, down to the level of bus service.

"Addresses the questions of everyday life, down to the level of bus
service" --that includes how the state fits production to the desires of
the Cuban people? I don't mind being refered to other writings, but you
could at least indicate how that other writing answers the question asked?

> >people's wants and desires (however manipulated they may be). If such
> >methods are not used in Cuba, then what methods, if any, are used by the
> >planning state to determine those desires and wants? If there are none,
> >then what you have is a paternalistic state deciding what's "good" for
> >people without regard to their own desires.
>
> see above.

(ditto)

>
> >Cuba does not represent any more of a realization of Karl Marx's hopes
> >than Jamaica or the Dominican Republic. Caveat: there was a revolution
> >in Cuba. Marx certainly hoped for revolution. But he didn't hope for
> >revolution just cause he liked revolutions; he hoped for them as a means
> >to get beyond the endless subordination of peoples lives to capitalist
> >accumulation.
>
> You really have no idea how Cuba could have avoided "capitalist
> accumulation", do you? Perhaps they should have waited until the 22nd
> century, when the forces of production had ripened sufficiently.

No Louis, no one argues that anyone, in Cuba or elsewhere, should "wait"
until the "forces of production' have "ripened". They ripened long ago.
People should always struggle, where, when, and to the extent they can.
And they should win what they can and craft improved bases for struggle in
the future.

The bitter reality of 20th Century socialism is that time after time
the perfectly reasonable hope and desire to get beyond capitalism has been
used to rationalize a savage reimposition of capitalism, from primitive
accumulation to on-going accumulation. The endless calls for "national
liberation" merely heralded an accumulation of capital in isolation. Among
other things it has led to the kinds of endless rationalizations for the
imposition of local, resource-scarce accumulation of people like yourself
claiming "no other path was possible" --an argument used by neoliberals
today. Marx said it long ago in the 1844 Manuscripts: getting beyond
capitalism will happen at the level of the whole, or it won't happen.
Fortunately today, the class struggle has been moving more rapidly than
ever toward the level of the whole, and that is encouraging. The
imposition of homogeneous capitalist institutions and policies on everyone
everwhere in this neoliberal phase has created a common enemy and
undermined, to some degree, capital's ability to divide and conquer. The
implication is that any given struggle will be able to gain more, the more
it is interconnected and linked to struggles elsewhere. And people will be
the better able to craft new worlds the more they can draw on the world's
resources as a whole.

> >The point has already been made by others debating with you: just because
> >people struggle and win some improvement in their lives doesn't mean they
> >have moved beyond capitalism.
>
> I don't think that the USA risked nuclear with Cuba because it was worried
> that the government was responsible for some "improvement" in the lives of
> the people.

1.That is hardly an answer.

2.Leaving aside the complexities of Kennedy's motivations, I can hardly
believe that you are citing him as an authority on the nature of Cuban
society. The Cold War was partly about which were the most efficient and
effective means of organizing the imposition of work and the accumulation
of capital. Cuba at the time was seen as part of the Soviet approach to
that organization and as distained as its patron. That distain did not
make them post-capitalist --any more than the rejection of German fascism
made it post-capitalist.

<snip>

Basta



............................................................................
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Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
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............................................................................



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