Class struggle in the Cuba enterprise - humanaesfera

It is understandable that someone considers a kingdom where there is a wicked king much worse than one where there is a kind king. It is impossible to deny that it is better to work at Volvo than at Foxconn. And undoubtedly, subdued and impotent, it remains only for the proletarians to choose to obey between the worst and the least worst faction of the ruling class in the market and geopolitical universal competition. All this is understandable. That the social indicators of Cuba are less worse than other similar countries is even something humanly worthy of applause. What's upsetting is that the regimes of nationalized capitalism are supposed to be "communism" or "post-capitalism." In praxis, accepting and propagating this fantasy means supporting that from the outset any struggle that begins to put into practice the question of overcoming capital, commodity and state must engage in the market and geopolitical competition among the various ruling class factions, by supporting one country against another, one ideology against another, one enterprise against another, one ruling class against another. The only result of this is to support the suppression of the class struggle, the destruction of the self-constitution of the proletariat as a class, in short, is to encourage the oppressed to continue to engage in body and soul in attack and mutual slaughter in order to defend their "good" kings against other "bad" ones.

Indeed, in countries of nationalized capitalism (such as Cuba, USSR, etc.), the proletariat remains deprived of means of life and production. He continues to be forced to sell himself (his ability to act and think, his workforce) to capital, to private property (the mere legal fact that property is nationalized in no way alters it in practice), submitting himself to the ruling class in exchange for money in order to survive. There, the proletariat continues to transform the world through its work into a world from which he is private, in a hostile world that accumulates against he as the ever increasing power of the proprietary class (the state businessmen), which dominates him, submits him and exploits him.

However, none of this matters to those who call the Cuban regime "communism" or "post-capitalism." For these, the mere fact that a faction of the proprietary class preaches supposedly "socialist" ideas and say try to apply them in their country or in their enterprise is what is relevant, not the praxis, not the everyday life, not the social relations of production. They see everything upside down through the glasses of the ruling class, which sees the world from top to bottom, as if it were the application of ideas to matter, to society.

Moreover, the ideology of the ruling class is never capitalist, but always non-capitalist or even anti-capitalist. Even neoliberalism, apparently the more "purely capitalist" ideology, denies that profit is the goal, and states that the market exists to satisfy human needs, by being, as he argues, "the most efficient and proven system for dealing with scarcity and meeting needs, as well the only one that allows equality and freedom. " It makes no sense to expect the ruling class to assert truly capitalist ideas, in which he simply declares without euphemism his interests in proletarianization, exploitation, profit, overthrowing competitors, and so on. Both in Cuba and the US and Brazil.

Officials of capital accumulation, personifications charged with the practical and impersonal application of the law of value (abstract labor) over society, lest they be overturned by "more efficient" competitors in this application, the various factions of the proprietary class compete first and foremost to subdue the proletariat, to suppress their struggle (the class struggle). They compete to recruit the proletarians on several competing fronts so that the proletarians attack themselves in the name of defending a faction of the ruling class against others. It is in the name of fictitious communities - politics, nation, ethnicity, citizenship, ideology, identity, religion, market, state, enterprise - that they try to divert the dissatisfaction from the praxis, from the universal daily life, from the globally interconnected relations of production, to channeling this dissatisfaction into society of the spectacle.

When the proletarians, here and there, throughout the world and everywhere, fraternize against their “own” ruling classes, by imposing themselves upon them as a world-historical class, by suppressing private property - and therefore the state and enterprise, the nation and the commodity - and by subjecting the globally interconnected means of life and production to the power of freely associated individuals according to their desires, needs and capacities, only then will there be communism.

humanaesfera, November 2016

* “If now in considering the course of history we detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent existence, if we confine ourselves to saying that these or those ideas were dominant at a given time, without bothering ourselves about the conditions of production and the producers of these ideas, if we thus ignore the individuals and world conditions which are the source of the ideas, we can say, for instance, that during the time that the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honour, loyalty, etc. were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the concepts freedom, equality, etc. The ruling class itself on the whole imagines this to be so. This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up against the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e. ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.
[...]
Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet won even this trivial insight. They take every epoch at its word and believe that everything it says and imagines about itself is true.” (The German Ideology)

(Translated to English by humanaesfera from the original article in Portuguese: Luta de classes na empresa Cuba)