Brian Green:
>State farms were officially named co-ops, yes. You are referring here to the
>'basic units of cooperative production'. Here's the deal with these. Workers
>collectively 'own' the machinery and the harvest; land, however, remains in
>state hands, production quotas are set by the state, and the coop can only
>sell its produce to the state, at government-set prices. The country's
>established pay scales do not apply, but rather wages vary according to
>productivity, a measure intended to establish a subsistence-based incentive
>to labour - sounds alot like pieve-work/ commission to me!
I know I should just ignore this nonsense, but my god, it is just so
blatantly wrong. Green says that co-op land remains in state hands,
production quotas are set by the state, at government-set prices. And what
is this evidence of? Capitalism? The reason that prices are set is that the
government wants to prevent price inflation, as occurred in Nicaragua
during the last years of Sandinista rule. This is a socialist measure and
is intended to keep a steady supply of food to the urban working-class. And
wages vary according to productivity? How beastly. In the United States,
wages are not tied to productivity but to the dictates of finance capital
which brings in people like the CEO of Scott Paper who lays off workers and
freeze wages--all so that the share price goes up. In Cuba, there is no
unemployment. There is poverty, alas. What Brian Green is agitated about is
poverty and austerity and social decay. He really has no answer for any of
this, except vague calls for new approaches to socialism. How this will
raise the standard of living in Cuba is beyond me.
Everybody should find the time in their lives to read Harrison Salisbury's
"900 Days", which is the story of the siege of Leningrad. After a year or
so, people were forced to make bread out of sawdust and rancid grain. They
died in the tens of thousands from from malnutrition and lack of heat. The
bodies stacked up in the street because nobody had any strength to bury
them. Salisbury says that Leningrand withstood the siege because there was
a lingering sense of the worth of socialism, even with the experience of
Stalinism. Leningrad was home to many intellectuals and revolutionaries who
held on to the vision of the 1917 revolution.
Brian's posts are the equivalent of a complaint about Russian socialism
during the 900 days. "We have to disassociate ourselves from a socialism
that allows people to eat loaves of bread made up of sawdust and rancid
grain," I can hear him saying. Well, of course we do. But, for god's sake,
this is a function of being under siege from Nazi imperialism. Cuba is
under siege as well and all the social misery and austerity measures are
occuring because the wolf is at the door. Instead of preaching to the Cuban
government not to make concessions, the only honorable thing that we can
call for is an end to the blockade. Blockade and siege is what American
leftists should fight against, not try to dispense spurious advice that
nobody is in a position to act upon.
Louis Proyect
