On January 17, 2013, Keith Harrington writes an op-ed on Truth-Out.org:
To listen to the mainstream American media, however, you’d never know it. As a video supplement to a recent New York Times article makes clear, the corporate press has already made up its mind on how the story of Cuba’s economic liberalization is bound to end:
“In a state defined by all-consuming communism for the past 50 years,capitalist change comes in fits and starts, and only at the pace that the government is willing to allow.”[Emphasis added]
In other words, Cuba’s post-communist story ends just like China’s – in capitalism, because according to orthodox dogma, there’s nowhere else to go. Trapped by the limited possibilities of this dichotomist capitalism-or-communism mentality, mainstream commentators lack the perspective needed to appreciate (much less inform others) that a transition away from a state-dominated command economy might conceivably lead to a type of market that is very distinct from our elite-shareholder-dominated and profit-fixated capitalist model.
But that is precisely the nuanced story we find in Cuba when we dig just below the surface and consider the very guidelines the Cuban government has adopted to steer the transition process. Since the state unveiled its nuevos lineamientos or new guidelines for economic development in 2010, the easing of government restrictions on private entrepreneurial activity has only constituted a single aspect of a much broader picture of change. Unfortunately, The New York Times and its ilk have gotten so hung up on the privatization shift, that they’ve left out crucial details about the types of private enterprises the Cuban government is attempting to foster.
Specifically, the government is placing high priority on the development of worker-owned-and-managed firms and has recently passed a law intended to launch an experimental cadre of 200 such firms. Under the law, workers – rather than government bureaucrats or elite boards of directors – will democratically run the businesses, set their own competitive prices, determine wages and salaries and decide what to do with the profits they generate. In other words, Cuba’s new worker cooperatives will operate pretty much along the same lines as their successful cousins in the capitalist world, including Spain’s Mondragon Cooperative Corporation.
But what sets the Cuban cooperative experiment apart and renders it such an incredible opportunity for the global worker-cooperative movement, is its occurrence in a political-economic milieu that is currently free from the distorting effects of capitalist competition. This is significant because while cooperatives have proven just as competitive as capitalist firms in a capitalist context, when capitalist profits and growth assume top priority, worker-owned firms may be compelled to act more like capitalist firms and subordinate core objectives such as worker empowerment and well-being, community development and environmental sustainability. Indeed, as cooperatives grow, even the percentage of actual worker owners in their ranks has been known to decline, as we’ve seen with Mondragon.
In short, the worker-ownership movement could greatly benefit from a national-scale economic environment that will allow cooperative enterprises to develop according to their own particular democratic nature and exhibit their true potential, free from the profit-above-all dictates of capitalism. No country bears as much promise in this respect than contemporary Cuba.
Normam Kurland, President of the Center for Economic and Social Justice (www.cesj.org) comments:
I like the fact that the worker cooperative movement is heading in the right direction and is beginning to offer a more just market-based and property-based alternative to monopoly capitalism. Of course, they lack the more revolutionary principles developed by Kelso, especially our Capital Homestead Act and how to make every citizen an owner. And they make the systemic mistake of limiting their financing to past savings and/or requiring workers to reduce their consumption incomes to become owners. But, we welcome the challenge of a movement that at least is becoming aware of turning workers into worker-owners.
The solution to income inequality, prosperity, opportunity and economic justice is to focus on OWNERSHIP CREATION and implement the Just Third Way Master Plan for America’s future (http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797).
The fundamental economic solution is to create income for EVERY American by simultaneously broadening private, individual ownership of FUTURE productive capital economic growth and fully paying the profit dividends to the new American owners of the income-producing capital assets of our corporations.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
