Guiding the PCC: an in-depth and open
discussion of Raúl's 26th of July speech
By Pedro Campos Santos
http://www.kaosenlared.net/noticia.php?id_noticia=40452
Translated by Dana Lubow
Edited by Dawn Gable
The economic, social, and political problems that face the Cuban revolutionary process, Fidel’s absence, and an eventual change in United States’ policies regarding the blockade, aggression towards rapprochement and interference, demands a revitalization of socialism in Cuba.
A document from the political publishing house circulated in the Cuban Communist Party and the Cuban Labor Office, focused on the debate of Raúl’s recent 26th of July speech, in which he was critical of internal deficiencies and called for “structural changes” in order to confront the existing situation.
In a concrete step towards participatory democracy, responding to a clamoring rising from the revolutionary grass-roots that has been spreading over the past several months and which recall the productive open assemblies of 1980, the document proposes an in-depth debate around the main topics of the speech be carried out in an absolutely open and trusting environment. Opinions and proposals are being solicited regarding the topics broached by Raúl such as food production, import substitution, production augmentation, efficiency, savings, and productivity, fiscal deficit and the decision to build socialism, the only element that a revolutionary Cuban will never question. Other opinions and suggestions related to the economic and social situation of the country must also be debated.
The document includes a quote from “The eternal flame” one in a series of reflections of the Commander in Chief, which Fidel called his “other proclamation”: “The struggle must be relentless against our own deficiencies and against the arrogant enemy who tries to take possession of Cuba it must be sacred to strengthen without breaking our capacity and defensive preparation. Nobody has the least illusion that imperialism will negotiate with Cuba.”
This direction of the Party demonstrates the revolutionary leadership’s capacity to correct itself and it is an opportunity that communists and revolutionaries, manual workers and honest intellectuals can’t let pass without stating all their opinions and proposals, in order to change this discussion process into a revitalized source of Cuban socialism. However, for some skeptics it will be seen as nothing more than “another democratic appeal to the IV Congress or a little escape valve to relieve membership pressure.”
Raúl’s 26th of July speech and Fidel’s reflections clearly indicate the complex position the Cuban Revolution is going through which seems invisible to those who just don’t understand the historic and decisive moments we are living. The changes that Raúl asked for won’t be carried out soon. The intensity of social contradictions will rise to an unforeseeable situation, given the increase of popular dissatisfaction and the intensity and extent of questioning the current of management of the economy, politics, and society.
The harsh reality that is difficult for us to accept is that the historic Commander will probably no longer be in any condition to continue leading the process. The preparation which the empire is clearly carrying out to gradually change its political tactics (**) in regards to the blockade, aggression toward rapprochement, and invasion and to apply their new tactics as soon as it might be considered opportune, requires us to accelerate the essential changes in the system in order to guarantee—as quickly as possible—a revitalization of the Cuban socialist project to rescue it from it’s current stagnation.
The defense of the Revolution is a military concern, but it is also an economic, political, social, and above all a concern with popular support.
No government of the former neo-capitalist socialist state, not even the Soviet Union which defeated fascism in World War II, with all its nuclear and space development was in any condition to withstand the “peaceful” imperialist onslaught of “convergence” and “bridge building” programs. Ninety miles from the historic enemy, with an economy in crisis, so much economic and social dissatisfaction, proto-capitalist obsessions introduced during the Special Period, and the imperialists already convinced that we no longer rely on Fidel the only way to confront capitalism is to radicalize socialism and make it more participatory, democratic, self-managed, inclusive, and integrated. We must move toward towards participatory, self-managed socialism, which in turn will transform thinking, disparity between manual and intellectual labor, and equivalent market exchange relationships: the Socialism of the 21st Century.
The historic responsibility for the consequences of not advancing in that direction, which will be suffered by socialism in Cuba, Latin America, and the world, will fall on those who oppose, from their own bureaucratic machine the correction of the current course and who shoot down the Party’s call to debate.
Raúl said that production must increase in order to increase wages. That’s true: if production is not increased, higher wages cannot be paid. But if there is no hope of higher wages, an increase in production is not likely. The chicken or the egg? They are interrelated, interdependent factors, and one can’t be preferred over the other. The problem is in the concept of how to organize work, available resources, and productive forces in order to increase production and put it in service of the interests of all Cubans and not just some of them.
Underlying the basis of the entire issue is the principal contradiction of state socialism; the contradiction between its egalitarian distributive goals and its capitalist means of production (salaried work and market organization focused on earning profits for the state) and the inheritance of the capitalist system – transferred to state capitalism— with production becoming more and more socially widespread and the appropriation of property and social surplus becoming further concentrated, before in capitalism, now under the state machine. Instead of advancing towards more socialization, excessive state-ism has meant just the opposite.
The solutions to these contradictions lie in the socialization of property and surplus appropriation, as well as in the democratization of power and society. Consequently, this is part of the current phase of the Cuban process; the completion of the social revolution that began with nationalizations and the socialization of those nationalized properties, providing them to the workers and social collectives in the form of direct ownership or in usufruct (co-managed worker state) in order to guarantee sharing of the surplus.
To do this it is necessary to rectify the erroneous concept that socialism is a matter of distribution, state ownership is synonymous with socialism and state ownership strengthens the proletarian state. Socialism is a matter of production relations that determine distribution and consumption. Socialization is a sharing of property, not centralization. The state, contrary to what is expected, goes against and weakens the democratic worker’s state.
In order to deepen the socialist revolution, the current governmental apparatus, one part of which is elected and the other appointed, supported by state ownership and indirect representative democracy, needs to slowly transform itself into the democratic state of the workers based on the socialization of property and surplus and the direct participatory democracy of the workers and the people in the main decisions that concern business and communities, including the referendum. As such, it would revive popular support for the socialist democratic state of the workers, who would then have reason to recognize it as their own. This would strengthen the real grassroots’ revolutionary enthusiasm of manual and intellectual workers, increase the working class’ capacity to truly control all of society, substantially increase production and savings, distribute among everyone the weight of social responsibility of the country’s multifaceted development, stimulate the initiative of labor and social collectives and would generate much more surplus than presently to develop general plans of social interest, including the priority of defense, with the approval of all, .
The recently decreed Laws 251 and 252 addressing the performance of managerial staff and the “Perfeccionamiento Empresarial” (Business Improvement System) propose to improve productive organizations by essentially appealing to clearly subjective issues such as workers’ ethics, requirements and “greater worker participation” in the productive process but without giving them the leverage of effective management to achieve it. But those decrees don’t imply structural changes, like Raúl call for.
In the seminar just given to business leaders to put these two decrees into practice, Second Vice-President Lage states “what isn’t efficient isn’t socialist.” We need to just self-critically recognize that except for occasional moments and projects, the economic sector based on State property and salaried workers, as the norm has not been efficient and when it has been in appearance, as in the past few years, it has been due to the low salaries paid to the workers, That is the only real explanation for the high growth indices but little impact on the Cuban standard of living. If they paid salaries that are due the workers, the costs of the workforce would make neo-capitalist state socialism state unfeasible. It has theoretically and practically shown that the only way of surviving such a concept of socialism is by not paying corresponding salaries to productive workers.
Three basic problems seriously affect Cuban poverty: food, housing and transportation; luckily health and education is kept at acceptable levels, despite its deficiencies. To try to resolve these problems by infusing more resources into the current bureaucratic organization is more of the same thing without achieving the necessary results. The solution is in structural organizational changes of the productive system: to decentralize decisions and control of the resources, in combination with the widest workers’ and producers’ participation and initiative in management and collective decision making regarding production and the control of economic results. This tends to replace the classic capitalist mode of salaried labor for the generic socialist mode of associative or cooperative labor. (***)
If the majority of the current state organization (including land, medium and small industrial companies and services) were structured in an associative, cooperative, self-managed, and co-managed way, giving property to the workers in usufruct while keeping state control of strategic companies, there would be nothing to fear from the development of simple commercial production in agriculture, industry, and services, for the simple, demonstrated reasons that cooperative and self-managed production is quite superior in efficiency and socio-political content and small private enterprises, in the medium and long term, would naturally tend towards being cooperatives.
The discussion that many of us have been calling for, has commenced.
The next article will present 15 concrete proposals for revitalizing socialism in Cuba.
August 31, 1007 perucho1949@yahoo.es
*PCC Communist Party of Cuba
** See Alerta Cuba: EE.UU. puede cambiar su táctica política, no sus fines estratégicos. http://www.kaosenlared.net/noticia.php?id_noticia=40293
*** See article La forma genérica de la producción socialista es la Autogestión Empresarial Obrera. Debe extenderse socialmente
http://www.kaosenlared.net/noticia.php?id_noticia=22291