Re: [OPE] Che Guevara Economics of Revolution

Dear Agafonow,
        Who I am supposed to address, in response, to your last message? You?
Helen Yaffe? Your interpretation of H. Yaffe's book, that you have
not yet read (¡¡¡)?
Awesome¡ You derive, implicitly-explicitly (it's hard to know), HARD
hypothesis from a book before reading it (¡¡) (Congratulations!!). You
"don't want to rush to make a judgement" (I'm citing you); but that's
exactly what you do. Why would you have to read the book? You already
know the conclusions (I guess, it's only a guess, that you read that
part; maybe before buying the book. Shame one you.)
In my opinion, humble, your analytical "method" is essentially flawed.
Sorry¡; about my humble opinion.
        I have learned to know, from your prior responses to people that
DARE to comment ANY of your posts, that, probably, your response to
me (if any) will lead to state that :
        a) I am a complete ignorant about anything related with what you state;
        b) I am a Stalinist.
        It would be fruitful not to receive this type of response. Maybe we
could start to communicate. Maybe.
Regards,
Abelardo Mariña-Flores

El 19/02/2009, a las 01:55 p.m., Alejandro Agafonow escribió:

> 1) Helen Yaffe: ** The caricature of Guevara as a romantic guerrilla
> fighter… It censors the complexity of economic decisions and debates
> within the Cuban Revolution, as if the revolutionaries who seized
> power on 1 January 1959 were chaotic adventurers whose economic
> policies were based on a naïve ideological agenda and not reflecting
> concrete conditions and constraints in the process of development.**
>
> I read the Cuban papers on this controversy and after writing a PhD
> dissertation on the controversy of the impossibility of economic
> calculation, my impression of the Cuban controversy is pretty much
> that Che Guevara and his comrades were chaotic adventurers.
>
> But this is not a problem of Cuban Marxists economists only. The
> Marxist thought–before Cottrell and Cockshott–suffered from an
> utopianism that impeded them to comprehend basic economic problems,
> and it keeps being the case indeed, as C&C’s work has not been
> assimilated and still is unknown by many Marxists.
>
>
> 2) Helen Yaffe: **The research carried out for this book involves
> interviews with 50 of Guevara's colleagues during his work as
> President of the National Bank of Cuba (1959-1960)… Their ideas,
> values and capacities evolved with their experience of working at
> his side.**
>
> One thing is the economic pragmatism that Cubans were forced to
> adopt at the heat of Cold War, and other thing is the capability to
> synthesize these pragmatic decisions in the form of a stylized
> theory able to offer a distinct contribution to economic theory,
> providing an instrument to guide the chaotic adventure of other
> communists (e.g. Chávez in Venezuela).
>
> If the contribution of the Cuban economic experience is gathered in
> the papers of the Cuban controversy, this stylized theory is
> definitely missing. I have not read yet the book of H. Yaffe, but I
> hope to find a clear differentiation between both realms. If not, it
> is unlikely to find any good insight into the feasibility of a
> socialist economy. But I don’t want to rush to make a judgement.
> I’ll buy and read it soon.
>
> Regards,
> A. Agafonow
>
> De: Gerald Levy <jerry_levy@verizon.net>
> Para: Outline on Political Economy mailing list <ope@lists.csuchico.edu
> >
> Enviado: jueves, 19 de febrero, 2009 15:41:43
> Asunto: Re: [OPE] Che Guevara Economics of Revolution
>
> Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution
> by Helen Yaffe
> 'I didn't know Che had any economic ideas' has been a frequent reply
> I've received when telling people about the topic of my research and
> my book Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution. It reflects the
> caricature of Guevara as a romantic guerrilla fighter with idealist
> notions of how human beings are motivated and how social change is
> brought about. The consequence is to overlook his contribution to
> Cuba's economic development and socialist political economy debates
> and hence to lose any lessons that can be drawn from his endeavours.
>
> It censors the complexity of economic decisions and debates within
> the Cuban Revolution, as if the revolutionaries who seized power on
> 1 January 1959 were chaotic adventurers whose economic policies were
> based on a naïve ideological agenda and not reflecting concrete
> conditions and constraints in the process of development. For
> example, Cuba's incorporation into the socialist bloc's trade
> relations, its continued dependence on sugar as a principal export
> and the importation of 'backward' technology from the socialist
> countries are viewed as political preferences -- with little
> recognition made of the limits placed on Cuba's development path by
> the imposition of the US blockade or the denial of credit from the
> Western countries. It also plays into the interpretation that sees
> Fidel Castro as synonymous with the Revolution, so that all policies
> were generated by this one omnipresent individual according to his
> whims, psychological traits and struggle for domination.
>
> The research carried out for this book involves interviews with 50
> of Guevara's colleagues during his work as President of the National
> Bank of Cuba (1959-1960), head of the Department of
> Industrialisation (1959-1961) and Minister of Industries
> (1961-1965). These individuals were not passive or homogenous.
> They were as varied and complicated as the rest of us. Their ideas,
> values and capacities evolved with their experience of working at
> his side. From their recollections springs a dynamic and rich
> history of grappling with problems, searching for solutions and
> experimenting with policies, structures and techniques. Guevara's
> own voice emerges through them -- giving us an insight into the
> development of his own work and ideas. It is also recorded in the
> internal meeting transcripts, reports, speeches, articles and
> letters consulted during the research for this book.
>
> In late September 2008, George W Bush, perhaps the most neo-liberal,
> anti-regulation, aggressively imperialist US president in history,
> declared: 'The market is not functioning properly.' What did he
> mean? The market is failing to secure the continued accumulation
> and expansion of capital -- threatening a crisis of the entire
> capitalist system and throwing into question the most basic premises
> of bourgeois economics. For decades it has been hammered into us
> that only the free market ensures efficiency, productivity and
> growth -- the profit motive via cutthroat competition, deregulation
> and removing all constraints to 'rational economic man'. But what
> form of rationality justifies the fact that 200 individuals have
> more wealth than over 40% of the world's population? What logic
> leaves 12 million children under the age of five to die every year
> from malnutrition, diarrhoea and easily preventable diseases? Is
> this a rational way for humanity to organise production and
> distribution -- making hundreds of species extinct each day and
> leading the world towards an ecological disaster?
>
> If the market isn't functioning what alternatives are there? There
> have been few such poignant moments in history to talk about the
> economics of revolution. In rescuing Guevara's work as a member of
> the Cuban government, this book hopes to place his economic ideas
> firmly on the table for consideration in the search for alternatives.
>
> Helen Yaffe, a Teaching Fellow in Latin American history at
> University College London, is the author of Che Guevara: The
> Economics of Revolution. She has an article in the March 2009
> issue of the journal Latin American Perspectives, a special issue
> commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. This
> article first appeared as an entry in her blog on 12 December 2008
> under a creative commons 2.5 license.
>
> URL: <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/yaffe180209.html>
>
>
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Received on Fri Feb 20 05:56:47 2009