[permaculture-oceania] Re: Cuba discussion

[Terry Leahy]

Dear Permaculture Oceania,

It was distressing but not that surprising to find that Duroyan Fertl believes I am "being extremely simplistic".  When I talk about "alienated labour" and being forced to have a job, this is not some kind of statement that Cuban society is unusually brutal in forcing people to work.  I am using this analysis from Marx's early writings to describe a situation that exists in capitalist societies as well as in the kind of state socialist societies of which Cuba is an example.  It means that people have to work for a wage in money in order to get a reasonable living.  This is clearly not something that happens in all types of societies ( for example in traditional Aboriginal or Native American societies).  Secondly, when they are in these paid jobs they basically have to do what they are told by the person who is paying their wage.  Decisions about what to do at work are made by the person who is in charge - there is no democracy in work or at the best a bit of consultation.  Finally, decisions about what to make or how to distribute what is made are taken by the same people who are in charge of the enterprise and pay the wages.  The workers cannot decide what to make or how to distribute it.  Again this is all very different from the situation that pertains in Hunting and Gathering societies or in Horticultural stateless societies.  

It is of course true that within this general context people can be more or less enthusiastic about what they do and can accept these orders from above with more or less equanimity.  Nevertheless the overall fact is that labour is coerced in the sense that people have to have a job and have to take orders to get access to the social product.  It is this overall situation which explains the kind of incidents and attitudes which Kjell Kuhne and others have described so accurately.  It also explains the way that people in capitalist economies have to be controlled and organised to work as required by their bosses or they can be counted on to slack off, take sickies, be difficult with customers etc.  This process of control is an ongoing and daily reality in both kinds of social order - capitalist and state socialist.  For example my son works at a clothing shop and on Saturday he started to close the till and count the takings at 5.45 so as to finish at 6.00 and was promptly called outside for a short chat with the boss about how important it was not to give a bad example to the new staff and so on.  

Now it may be that in Cuba this situation is being radically revised and real community control (not just consultation) is being implemented all over the countryside.  I have purchased the video and am looking forward to watching it.  My comments on this would be two fold.  One, I will need to be convinced (more on this later).  Half the time this is just window dressing.  It is an attempt by those in power to develop an enthusiastic team while the basic rules of the game stay the same.  It is not that different to what Volvo tried in Sweden with its workforce.  It is always very revocable and workers can be quite cynical about it.  But maybe something more profound is going on and we will see Cuba evolve into a genuine gift economy where workers really make their own decisions about what to produce and how to distribute it.  In which case the Cuban state will just "wither away" as marxists say, since no one will have any reason to obey the state's orders - their access to the social product will come from the decisions of other collectives of workers to provide them with resources, they will not depend on the state to provide them with raw materials or consumer goods.  At best the state will be a coordinating body in which people meet to organise their interactions with each other.  I have to say that I think it much more likely that Cuba will cease to be a socialist economy and will take the capitalist road as demands for change intensify.  But you never know.

Now on a point raised by Russ.  Yes, you are right about my decades of experience and disillusion with socialist experiments.  In 1975 my parents were in the left wing of the ALP and took a trip to China.  Their slides and films were amazing.  To see all these cities where people only used bicycles and buses to get about was an inspiration.  At the time Chairman Mao was sending middle class young people into the country side to "learn from the peasants".  To us at the time this seemed like the height of radical practice as he was breaking down the distinctions between professional and manual work and trying to achieve a new kind of democratic organisation of production.  While we were aware of some problems we also believed that China showed much about how a socialist regime could work to destroy class and create real workers' control.  How sadly wrong this turned out to be.  Factions of the party sent the children of other factions into the countryside as a kind of punishment - the young people were sent away where they could be routinely humiliated by dominant party factions.  It was just a myth that this exercise had anything to do with restructuring authority in production.

So what is the motivation of people to work in a gift economy where there is no assured  link between what you and your group of fellow workers produce and what you get back from other people as gifts?

A gift economy is one in which there is no money and no wage labour. Instead people produce things for their own consumption or as gifts for other people. An economy like this would be a vast extension of the kinds of voluntary work now done by citizen groups such as Lions' Clubs or Cleanup Australia. It would not be a return to some earlier pre-industrial tribal society. Clubs and associations would still produce technologically complex goods and services. But these would be produced as gifts, not with the expectation of financial returns. People would be motivated to give by desires for social status and the social pleasure of giving. The standard of living would be the effect of multiple gift networks (Vaneigem 1983). There is no state in a gift economy utopia. Coordination of activity is by links between collectives of producers and consumers, and by collectives of researchers, media and administrative workers.

In terms of ethics, the gift economy operates with an ethic of generosity and egalitarianism. Pleasure is taken from giving to those who are in need. This ethic is not just extended to the human species but also applies to the natural world, with other species being regarded as having ethical value and appreciating gifts of care and concern. 

The way I have put this so far emphasizes the role of generosity and love in the gift economy and it certainly is important. On the other hand, it is not very sensible to suppose a set of saints to run such a society. We can see selfish interest operating in the gift economy in a number of ways. Firstly

*	Giving as a real pleasure - the desire to give is as much our human nature as more obviously self centred desires.
*	The enjoyment of social prestige and affection coming out of gifts to others.
*	While some production is of gifts for the community at large or for unknown others, the gift economy also operates through production for our own use or at least for known locals, kin or friends. 
*	Finally, people operate the gift economy as a structure that pays off as a total system - to benefit themselves and other people. They are aware that gifts are necessary if they and everyone else is to live well. It is treasured as a social system that works better than the other alternatives - which have already been tried with such calamitous effects! (for more on these points see Marx and Aristotle on Ethics , Human Nature and the State on my octapod website; also Lecture: Deep Ecology)


In a gift economy there is no authoritative command over labour. Although there is no hope of a totally equal society - in terms of everyone getting exactly what they want and having totally equal status - there is no systematic advantage to a small section of ruling families. There is no systematic or pervasive exploitation of other people’s work. For the most part, people involved in exchanges are ending up with a roughly similar possibility of autonomy, creativity, sexual pleasure, social pleasures and physical well being. There is an ethic of generosity and abundance which leads people to act to direct gifts or labour to those who need it as well as to those who are close personal or family friends, members of the same ethnic culture or whatever. Ownership of the means of production is shared fairly equally and is vested in those who are doing the work of producing things, giving them a choice about how to give away what they produce to others, whether we are talking about food, housework, transport and housing, songs and artworks or sex and friendship. 

Basically I suppose there are two ways to secure motivation to do necessary work.  

The first is to get people together who have a passion for some task or useful hobby - for example trains.  Then you let them work out how to roster the work between them so no one ends up with all the boring work.  You generally do not have situations where some people get all the interesting work and the rest of the work force is bored - the tedious drudgery is built into the tasks - so doctors and nurses also clean the wards and wash the sheets.  The specialisation we think is necessary for efficiency is largely a myth and the product of education systems that are divorced from work experience.  So in this context doctors and nurses might specialize in a smaller range of medical skills than now to give them plenty of time for the drudgery - there would be more "professionals" with maybe a smaller range of professional skills than you have now; although all workers in the sector would have a broad knowledge of medicine as a whole.  

The second is that when a task needs to be done that no one wants to do - it is no one's passion or at least not enough to get the job done.  In this case what you have to do is to localise the task so that it is like housework.  It becomes very clear that you have to get it done to live in that locality.  It can be rostered or maybe the least high status people end up doing it as a chore in the most negative situations.  For example this is exactly how you would deal with sewerage in a gift economy/simpler way situation.  It would be by composting toilets and each household would handle their own composting system.  Within the household, tasks like taking out the bucket, ensuring a supply of leaves, grass etc, building the framework and so on would be rostered or maybe people would volunteer.  

Systems of social control would be necessary to make this work effectively.  For example if a household was not handling its sewerage this could affect everyone and other people would feel fine about intervening with whatever was necessary to fix the problem - ranging from counselling and discussions; to getting someone else to do it for them; to moving the failed household members out of the house and into other houses that were getting this task sorted adequately.  Or moved into some kind of hostel situation if their problems are addiction and depression etc.  Again, a voluntary collection of social workers runs the hostel because fixing dysfunctional and depressed individuals up is their passion. 

There would be no police to enforce this; it would be by voluntary action of neighbourhood busy bodies supported by community sentiment - or not depending on whether the way the neighbourhood busy body was handling this was seen as appropriate or over the top.  In the latter case, other neighbourhood busy bodies would intervene on the side of the aggrieved failed composters.  These kinds of structures are documented for egalitarian stateless societies such as the Nuer (Evans Pritchard).  One kind of organisation is like JPs really - a set of individuals known as leopard skin chiefs who adjudicate community conflicts and whose advice is generally followed even though they do not have any reliable coercive force to back them up.  

How control of violent and anti-social action is achieved without a state monopoly on violence is that infringements are punished by individuals who see themselves as injured parties or at any rate take on the voluntary role of enforcers of community norms. This is not random violence. Enforcement only receives community support if the guilty party is regarded as truly guilty according to widely shared norms in the community as a whole. Otherwise the aspirant enforcer is regarded as the rogue element and restrained by kin and friends of the supposed guilty party. Something like this mechanism of social control is inevitable in any economy without a state. In the case of the kind of gift economy proposed here it would have to be invoked to defend the economic structures of ownership within a gift economy and to protect people from random violence.  It could well include community courts, voluntary judicial officers and case law.   

Terry

>>> Russ Grayson <info at pacific-edge.info> Sunday, 17 September 2006 8:11 pm >>>
Well, here we have a classic dilemma. Who to believe? Kjell Kühne reports on
his observations in Cuba and Duroyan Fertl does the same. But they disagree.

THE VALUE OF DILEMMA
Both have been to Cuba, however this does not necessarily grant authority.
This  is because of the dilemma of proximity. Being close sometimes prevents
us seeing the big picture, the entire context.

And to derive authentic information from proximity depends upon asking the
right questions and truly considering the responses even when they differ
from what we would prefer to believe. It also depends on the people we ask
those questions of being free to answer them truthfully.

Only Kjell and Duroyan know how those things apply to their observations.

THE VALUE OF SKEPTICISM
A skeptical attitude is useful when approaching questions such as those
under discussion even when we have a predisposition to particular answers.

By that I mean retaining the attitude to look for evidence, to ask why and
how, even of those things we would prefer to be true.

The difficulty with this is that it leads to a shattering of belief in how
we think things should be. We discover two things: (1) the world is a far
from perfect place (2) we have to abandon or modify cherished beliefs.

Skepticism is often mistaken for negativity, however it is the exact
opposite. Negativity leads to disempowering while skepticism discloses the
way things are so that we can then act on them.

THE DILEMMA OF CUBA
In the subject under discussion - Cuba - I suspect, and here I guess, that
we see a clash of the youthful and commendable search for workable
alternatives to early-C21 turbo-capitalism manifest in Duroyan and the
perspective of Terry with decades (ok Terry, I know you're not that old) of
observation and disillusion with so-called socialist societies which, in the
end, turned out to be nothing more then the petty, despotic feifdoms of a
bureaucratic ruling class.

What I suspect we all agree on is that the Cuban experience in trying to
feed themselves carries lessons of value to the rest of the world. We just
have to agree to disagree on aspects of Cuba like the suppression of writers
and dissidents and the matters Terry brought up in his recent posting. My
attitude is that Cuba has achieved much in developing its food supply and
simply continuing to exist in the face of what most of the world now
considers an unnecessary economic blockade which, I think, demeans the
United States and its history and ideology of freedom and democracy.
Likewise, I think the imprisonment of writers and journalists demeans Cuba
and the ideals of the Cuban revolution.

PAST AS PRESENT
Duroyan's staunch defence of Cuba reminds me of his organisation as it was
in 1968. Then, it likewise defended Cuba and, at the time, the image of Che
Guevara served as the beacon of a new world that that youthful cohort could
play a role in creating. Doubt only started to creep in with the Soviet
tanks as they rumbled into Czhekoslovakia.

Hey, Duroyan, are you Robyn Francis' son?

On 15/9/06 5:33 PM, "Duroyan Fertl" <duroyan at yahoo.com.au> wrote:

> Kjell Kühne


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