Ignoring Incentives as Buying Power Continues to Drop

Ignoring Incentives as Buying Power Continues to Drop
July 6, 2012
Pedro Campos

HAVANA TIMES — In the "Guidelines" document of the Sixth Congress of the
Cuban Communist Party, the clearest reference to the need for work
incentives can be found in Guideline 170 [appearing as Guideline 156 in
the final document].

It reads: "Ensure that wage policies guarantee that everyone is
remunerated according to their work; that this policy results in quality
products and services; that it results in increased production and
productivity; and that a real correspondence is established between
wages and the ability to satisfy the basic needs of workers and their
families."

Even this evidences that the party's main goal is not to incentivize
work or to meet the needs of the workers; instead, it is to create
"products and services" and "increase production and productivity."

The ends and means are out of sync. The "Guidelines" rely principally on
increased production through technocratic measures. Yet they forgot
what's most important: Without the incentive to work, there will be no
increase in production.

The wages of workers — not to mention socialism as the path to the
abolition of wage labor exploitation — is not the priority of the
bureaucracy.

Now, four years into the "updating of the model," they have again raised
retail prices in the hard-currency stores. This action is a means of
offsetting the state's economic deficits that were created by its own
policies.

Again, the inefficiency of the statist system falls on the shoulders of
the people…onto the workers.

Unfortunately, the government-party is clinging onto its old
neo-Stalinist dogmatic schemes of state-centered wage-labor production,
the imposition of workplace discipline, centralized "planning," state
monopoly control over markets and the political system of the
"proletarian dictatorship" (meaning absolute control by the
state-government-party over the country's political life).

Our "Leninists" still don't understand Lenin. He pointed out that
socialism was generalized cooperativism, and not even their Marxism
allows them to understand that the revolution was a change in the
relations of production, one in which cooperatives should be the new
mode of production.

They fail to comprehend that wage labor was the mode of existence of
capitalism and that workers should abolish it and struggle for the
establishment of freely-associated labor [cooperatives] and a democratic
republic of the workers.

Prices are rising and output is falling, they say, because of rising
international food prices.

Yet they forget that Cuba was always producer-exporter of food and that
all of their economic philosophy about the state as a centralizer of the
property, life and farms of Cubans has caused the country to go from
being a major exporter of food to a major importer of it.

So, where's the problem? Is it with international food prices or with
the government's philosophy and economic policies?

The bureaucracy is continuing with its state-centric policies and
forgetting about work incentives, banking that labor will forget about that.

Later, they won't be able to pin the blame on imperialism or
"counterrevolutionaries" seeking capitalist restoration, already hard to
identify.

If they don't know how to build socialism, let the workers do it.
—–
Pedro Campos: perucho1949@yahoo.es

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