Cuba Grants 171,000 New Private Work Licenses
HAVANA TIMES, March 21 — The Cuban authorities granted 171,000 new licenses to persons interested in private work on the island, in some of the 178 activities approved since October 2010, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security reported. That figure represents more than double the independent labor force that existed prior to the labor reform, reported IPS.
Well, I’ve proposed a comradely discussion, but no frothing-at-the-mouth ultra-Leftist, Trotskyist or otherwise, has deigned to speak up. I wonder if it is because none of these people have any intention of ever giving up the Marxist mantra of the state owning all the instruments of production, and thereby abolishing the institution of private property rights?
Isn’t there anyone out there in ultra-Left land who can engage in a forthright discussion?
Marx said the state must own everything. Many countries experimented with this concept. Every such experiment has proved the concept unworkable in the long run. Now, no one is interested in discussing or trying to reach a workable, cooperative, retention-of-private-property socialism.
What the heck is wrong with our world socialist movement!
The desperate return to small entrepreneurial enterprise by the Cuban party and government is of great interest to socialists in the US. What it brings into the ongoing conversation regarding programmatic development is the relationship between the industrial and commercial working class and the so-called small bourgeoisie.
When the socialist movement first reared its cooperative, anti-capitalist head in the first half of the 1800s, the bankers and capitalists saw the need to split the developing working class from the peasantry and small urban entrepreneurial sectors politically. This they did by injecting a new communistic ideology into the socialist movement.
This new communism spat upon the peasantry and small shopkeepers, calling them not only conservative, but reactionary. It also set forth a bizarre program of expropriation of peasant land and urban shops.
Both these programmatic assaults split the working class and the small entrepreneurial classes politically and handed the latter over to the political manipulation of the bankers and big capitalists. This split has lasted to the present day in countries like Cuba and North Korea.
What is happening now in Cuba is that the retrograde, anti-socialist program of spitting on and undermining the small entrepreneurial sector is being discarded in a desperate attempt to save socialist state power. Unfortunately, no one is discussing theoretically this return to private enterprise as a necessary element of workable socialism.
This lack of theoretical discussion hurts our struggle for a socialist republic in the United States and other capitalist countries. Let us begin a serious, comradely theoretical discussion on the role of the small entrepreneur, private property rights and the market in a workable form of socialism.