Cuba Needs to Unleash Creative Energy

Cuba Needs to Unleash Creative Energy

March 28, 2014

Vicente Morin Aguado



HAVANA TMES — Michael A. Lebowitz, Canadian economist and professor at

the Simon Frazer University in Vancouver, answered our questions

regarding: Socialism and the Party, the New State from the bottom up,

cooperatives and self-management, Cuba and its economy.



HT: What does the Cuban economy need as a factor of the first order to

succeed?



Michael A. Lebowitz: I don't think it is appropriate for me, as an

outsider, to make specific proposals for the Cuban economy. However, on

the basis of my studies of countries which attempted to build socialism

in the 20th century and several years as an adviser in Venezuela, I

think I can make some general comments.



If you wish to build a new society, it is essential to find ways to

unleash the creative collective energy of the people. It is important to

create conditions in which people through their practice can transform

circumstances and themselves.



In the Soviet Union and countries which followed that model, this was

sorely lacking. The tendency was to think that all solutions and all

movements toward socialism were to be determined at the top and

transmitted to the bottom. The result was that people did not develop

their capacities, that they were alienated in the workplace and

communities and did not and could not defend the gains that were made in

those societies. And we know the result: capitalism triumphed. In short,

even though some people may think it is more efficient to make the

decisions at the top, it should be understood that this is a

disinvestment in people.



I spent a number of years living and advising in Venezuela during the

period when Chavez was president. It was evident there in the communal

councils and workers councils that when people have the ability to make

the decisions that affect them, they develop strength and dignity. One

of the wonderful characteristics of Chavez was that he had confidence in

the ability of people to develop and to build socialism and he never

hesitated to encourage them. If you want to solve the problem of

poverty, he said, you have to give power to the people. Chavez was

consistent on this point: he stressed the importance of producing new

human beings, and he often cited Che Guevara on the necessity to build

new socialist human beings.



HT: Is an economy possible completely based on self-management and the

cooperatives?



ML: I think self-management of state-owned enterprises and cooperatives

are an important way of unleashing the creative energy of people. They

build solidarity within those workplaces and demonstrate essential

aspects of a society based on cooperation rather than competition.

However, I don't believe that you can build a just economy limited to

these islands of cooperation. Their inherent tendency is the

self-interest of the members of these collectives.



For example, in Yugoslavia the orientation of self-managed enterprises

was to maximize income per worker. They functioned within the market

and, rather than building solidarity within the society, the tendency

was to generate inequality in the society. When every group of workers

is looking out only for itself, who is there to look out for the

interests of the working class as a whole?



It is a myth (a dangerous myth advanced by those who are either ignorant

or ill intentioned) to argue that, when everyone acts out of their own

self-interest, the interests of all are advanced. That is the mythology

of Adam Smith and neoliberal economics. In Yugoslavia: the stress upon

self-interest and the market produced the destruction of solidarity

within the society and ultimately the destruction of Yugoslavia itself.



I believe that it is essential that there be an organized voice which

expresses the needs of people and thus acts as a corrective to the

self-orientation of the members of the enterprises. In Venezuela, the

stress has been to bring together the communes (composed of a number of

communal councils) and the workplaces in those areas to explore the ways

in which the workplaces can serve the needs of the local communities.



Obviously, it is not only the needs of local communities have to be

taken into account. However, it is very important that the members of

these workplaces understand their responsibility to society. Otherwise,

you can get the perverse situation which existed in Yugoslavia where

state taxation (for the purpose of equalizing development in the

country) was attacked as exploitation by a Stalinist state.



HT: Do the cooperatives need the unique party and the state as

institutional rectors of the nation?



ML: I definitely believe that you need the state. How else can you deal

with the problem of inequality and problems of national importance like

defense? However, I think it is important to begin to build a different

kind of state – a new state.



In Venezuela, Chavez described the communal councils as the cells of a

new socialist state. They were institutions characterized by

protagonistic democracy, a democracy in practice, in which people

develop through their own activity. And he saw these as the building

blocks to move to communes and from there to the creation of a communal

city and from there upward to the new national state – a state from below.



Obviously, that new state cannot possibly develop overnight and it

necessarily coexists with the old state for a period of time. But the

goal should be to build that new state consciously – precisely because

it is a state which produces the people required for a socialist economy.



I don't think that such a new state emerges spontaneously. It requires

conscious effort. It requires the battle of ideas. It requires

leadership. In short, it requires a party which recognizes the necessity

to create the conditions in which new socialist human beings produce

themselves. And that means, I think, a party with a different focus –

not a focus upon making decisions at the top and enforcing discipline

within the party but one which creates the conditions internally for

people to develop all their potential and initiative, one which contains

within it different tendencies and which respects minorities, a party

oriented toward building socialism which can listen and learn.



HT: Do you think cooperatives are the answer to the problems of Cuban

agriculture?



ML: Certainly the problems of Cuban agriculture are very serious and

much depends upon a solution to these. While these problems have unique

characteristics (reflecting particular decisions that were made in the

past), it is essential to understand that there are many common

characteristics in other countries of the South.



In many places, people have abandoned the rural areas in part because of

the inability to compete with the highly subsidized agriculture of the

United States and other developed capitalist countries. It is not at all

a level playing field – poor and developing countries are pressured not

to subsidize rural production but nothing is done about the subsidies

(direct and hidden) in the rich countries. The result is that many

countries of the South lack food sovereignty despite their fertile land

and end up importing substantial amounts of their foodstuffs.



This is the situation in Venezuela, where there was an enormous movement

from the countryside to the cities in the period before Chavez's

election; a particular factor there was an overvalued currency (due to

oil exports) which meant that rural producers could not compete with

imports.



The result was that Venezuela was importing 70% of its food and much of

its countryside was empty. How was it possible to reverse that and to

develop food sovereignty? In a paper I did for the Venezuelan Ministry

of Economic Development in 2008, I stressed that if you want to

encourage food production, you have to encourage food producers and, in

particular, you have to encourage new entry into agricultural production

especially of young people.



And, I argued that this goes far beyond simply increasing food prices

for the producers (which does not necessarily mean increasing prices for

consumers). It means developing an infrastructure, schools, cultural

facilities and access to modern communications. In short, you have to

create the conditions in which young people do not see themselves as

turning their back on civilization to work in the countryside. This is

obviously an investment – an investment for the future which goes far

beyond a simple solution of raising prices for agricultural production

and leaving things to the market to solve the problem.



If a society is prepared to make such an investment (which needs to be

widely discussed so people understand its necessity), then the next

question is what should be the nature of the relations of production in

agriculture. From what I've said earlier, it is obvious that I think

that forms of self-management (whether under state ownership or

cooperative ownership) are essential. It should be obvious, too, that if

society is making this investment, then the self-managed enterprises

need to recognize their responsibility to society.



If Cuban society is not prepared or is unable to make such investments,

I fear that the prospect is one of shortages, high food prices and

continued high food imports (especially with the aging of the rural

population).



Source: Cuba Needs to Unleash Creative Energy - Havana Times.org -

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