Re: Prostitution in Cuba

[MARIPOWER716@xxxxxxx]

>Two decades before the fall of the Soviet Union, the
state bureaucracy was trying to clamp down on
drinking.  Not because it was a "new" problem or
because the Kremlin had any problem with the social
custom of "drinking."

They tried to close down pubs, arrest people found
drinking during working hours and they did many other
things.  They just went to the statistics and found
out that absenteeism was so high and pervasive than
entire branches of industry were losing and losing
big.

The question of prostitution in Cuba, which is not
separated and distinct from the general problem of
mass hustling on the streets, is a *big problem* not
because the moralistic overtones of the existence of
prostitution per se, but as a more widespread symptom
of both cracking of the political regime, passive
resistance to it, demoralization of layers of society
and a generalized economic crisis.

That problem was a pre-announcement of larger, deeper
and broader crisis in the Soviet Union and had little
to do with the "capitalist penetration" of USSR's
society.

As absenteeism in the Soviet Union was the first
passive, non-progressive form of opposition to the
regime, the proliferation of hustling in Cuba is also
a similar phenomenon. <



Reply:


Without question there are a host of issues and social problems whose
totality constitutes what Marxist or at least a segment of Marxist call 
"Economic
Problems of Socialism." Socialism in Cuba cannot - not, manifest the economic
problems of socialism. One must develop a somewhat intense understanding of
political economy and its distinct laws, a tempered Marxist approach to 
transition
as an actual dialectic and an appreciation of the human condition as it exist
and evolves.

I have no intention of questioning your defense of the Cuban revolution. You
are not required to understand the Marxist doctrine to defend revolution.

Allow me to touch on the above taking the long route, which happens to be the
quickest way to the essence of what is being described. I have some
experience with absenteeism as a former union representative and autoworker for 
30
years and once possessed the statistical data on this phenomenon for the United
States of North America. Not to go to work - to be absent, is only part of the
meaning of absenteeism. Absenteeism as a social category has quantitative
dimensions determined by what is considered "chronic" and is defined different 
in
different societies and during different period of time. In the auto industry
during the 1970s and 1980s it was not uncommon for absenteeism to range between
15-20 percent of the entire workforce and on Mondays and Friday's as high as
30 percent of the workforce in the major industrial centers. Were these absent
workers protesting "the regime" or is something deeper involved?

During the 90s absenteeism was defined different in the auto industry and a
10 percent rate was considered chronic. Does this mean the workers were now
supporting "the regime" or is something deeper involved?

Why is going to work important? To answer this question in a Marxist manner
requires understanding how the law of value operates on the basis of bourgeois
property relations and why and how the law of value "operates" with socialist
property relations. How come the workers in the former Soviet Union were not
simply fired, when in America you are fired for chronic absent from work?

Where the Soviet economy lost big - rates of productivity and absolute
products, was not absenteeism as defined by bourgeois property relations, but 
the
workers simply not working and instead playing checkers, chess and reading the
party press. Soviet coffee breaks are the stuff of legend. Getting a cup of
coffee meant you left the factory, went to the store to get coffee and after
standing in line when home and made the coffee, then sat down to drink it - then
returned to work. Simply having more coffee on the shelf would have cut down on
the waiting in line time and increased Soviet production. Why did the party
leaders, government officials and bureaucratic hacks make the workers stand in
line for coffee, when they could raise production by supplying coffee on site
at the plant? Whose jobs was it to order and distribute the national coffee
supply? Why was this guy not jailed or shot, after all there are instances where
striking workers were shot?

The answer is because he had not been allocated enough money to purchase the
coffee from the coffee producing countries. The coffee producing countries
insist on real money - gold rubles, or something exchangeable on the world
market. Here is how we back into the law of political economy and the Marxist
conception of value, or rather the meaning of exchange-value and commodity
production.

>That problem was a pre-announcement of larger, deeper
and broader crisis in the Soviet Union and had little
to do with the "capitalist penetration" of USSR's
society. <

"Capitalist penetration" sounds like a metaphor for sex, which it is because
such penetration on the level of political economy is not possible.  What is
being described is presented incorrectly and theoretically impossible. All
industrial systems of production are value-producing systems no matter what the
property relations. The property relations determines the shape of the
historically evolved social relations Marx calls capital.

Bourgeois property relations means that production and reproduction is driven
on the basis of the striving and quest for maximum profits, which creates the
pathway or circuit of capital investment. This is so because bourgeois
property relations emerge from the private producer who owns his tools, 
instruments
- means of production, and engages exchange as individuals constantly needing
to expand his private enterprise on the basis of expanding exchange. Hence the
allocation of his capital and distribution of labor power is compelled to
follow the pathway - circuit, of profitability. This is the law of capitalist
production or industrial production on the basis of bourgeois property relations
and has been summed up by generations of Marxist as the striving for maximum
profit.

Comrades forget that the law of value can be a regulator of production only
under capitalism because private ownership of the means of production -
bourgeois property, engenders competition between capitals, anarchy of 
production and
crises of overproduction.

Soviet socialism and even Cuban socialism express fundamentally different
property relations that are obvious in the distribution of labor-power and 
cycles
of reproduction. In the case of Cuba, which has no gold supply anything like
the old Soviet Union; whose world commodity - sugar, has suffered from price
collapse and possess little means to engage exchange in the world market, the
economic problems of socialism become extremely acute. Not capitalist
penetration or rather bourgeois property rights interpenetration but being tied
together by a thousand threads on the basis of infrastructure development, 
industry
and being part of the world market. The military question and relations between
socialism and capitalism is important but not relevant to this discussion.

Prostitution - selling pussy primarily, and men selling sexual favor to
secure means of exchange, alongside black market activity is a direct 
expression of
the impact of the law of value as bourgeois property relations in the world
market, and not necessarily an opinion about "the regime." Stated another way,
no country on earth and exist and expand its productive capacity within
engaging exchange - without importing and exporting, due to the character of the
world market as division of labor. The nature of the regime has nothing to do
with this. The character of policy of "the regime" has nothing to do with this
historically evolved economic relationship.

Add the growth of knowing what is available in the world market and its
impact in the mind and one begins to make out the difference between "heads" and
"tails" and the complexity of the actual class struggle. This is not a question
of the character of the regime, although it is now obvious why ideological
firmness and militant steadfastness is the hallmark of a serious party of
socialism in power. Your statement below betrays the inability to grasp the most
elementary understanding of political economy, politics as the logic of the 
class
struggle and the proletarian Marxist standpoint.

Fortunately, the defense of socialism does not require understanding of
political economy or Marxism.

>The question of prostitution in Cuba, which is not
separated and distinct from the general problem of
mass hustling on the streets, is a *big problem* not
because the moralistic overtones of the existence of
prostitution per se, but as a more widespread symptom
of both cracking of the political regime, passive
resistance to it, demoralization of layers of society
and a generalized economic crisis. <

There is no such thing called a generalized economic crisis within socialism
as you state. The economic crisis of which you speak is 99.9% a political
crisis between socialism and capitalism as antagonistic property relations. 
There
is no policy that can be enacted by any group of leaders that can overcome
this political crisis between antagonistic property relations short of the
overthrow of bourgeois property.

Before detailing the specific - exact, character of the economic law of
socialism as it arises on the basis of commodity production it is necessary to
present the Marxist standpoint concerning the difference between commodity
production and the bourgeois property relations. Then we shall return to our 
absentee
workers and on these bases unravel the property relations and why the workers
were not and could not really be fired. In America you get fired and I have
negotiated enough grievances to be very clear about the ABC's of property
relations as social forms.

Bourgeois property relations do not and cannot penetrate proletarian property
relations no matter what its form. Something else takes place that connects
these antagonistic property relations through exchange in the world market.

Karl Marx can bring clarity on this issue and later the theorist of  "state
capitalism" can be shown to be the buffoon and charlatans they are.

"On the other hand: if we consider the historical foundation on which this
process develops, from which manufacture arises, the industrial mode of
production whose characteristic feature is the division of labor, then this
concentration can only take place in the form that these workers are assembled 
together
as wage workers, that is as workers who must sell their labor-power because
their conditions of labor confront them as alien property, as an independent,
alien force. This implies that these conditions of labor confront them as
capital; in other words, these means of subsistence and means of labor (or, what
amounts to the same things, the disposal of them through the intermediary of
money) are in the hands of individual owners of money or o commodities, who as a
result, become capitalist. The loss of the conditions of labor by the workers
is expressed in the fact that these conditions become independent as capital or
as things at the disposal of capitalists.

". . . Once capital exists, the capitalist mode of production itself evolves
in such a way that it maintains and reproduces this separation on a constantly
increasing scale until the historical reversal takes place."
(Theory of Surplus Value Part 3, page 271).

Capitalism is not the industrial system and the industrial system can be
defined on the basis of its fundamental characteristic, which Marx makes clear 
to
a 10 year old. Ownership of real means of production (conditions of labor)
confronts the worker as an alien force because he is not the owner and these
conditions of labor confront the worker as an independent force. The conditions
confront the worker as an independent force -alien, because they our outside his
will and ownership and become an independent agency called capital and this
capital is at the disposal of an individual called a capitalist or who evolves
into a capitalist. Capital must come into existence first in order for the
bourgeois property relations to emerge as a systematic totality. This process
most certainly does not evolve as categories but there is no other way to
understand why socialism is socialism.

While Cuban socialism is worth defending you are absolutely incorrect to
state that the crisis of socialism in the USSR had nothing to do with capitalism
because the world market prevents countries from leaving the orbit of importing
or exporting for any significant amount of time. More than ideology and
policy is involved although ideology and policy is important in face of a 
military
threat. Political economy is involved on a much higher level than hustling,
prostitution or engaging the black market. After all America has the largest
black market on earth and no stranger to prostitution and hustling.

End part 1

Melvin P.