The Cuban Revolution and Western Intellectuals and Cuba: A Personal Report (continued)

There is some indication that introduction of material incentives might be linked to the prospects for internal democratization. Readers of my Liberation essay will notice my extremely critical reaction to their introduction. I was particularly reacting to introduction of economic mechanisms that seemed to emulate the Soviet path of development, and to Cuban efforts to rewrite Che Guevara's objection to adoption of these incentives. It would be well to review at greater length than I do in the essay what these objections were.

Since 1968, the Cuban government decided to use moral incentives as the basis for increasing productivity, and to reject commodity categories and schemes of financial self management. Che Guevara rejected Soviet economic models that he felt were based on operation of the law of value. He wrote:

I am against material incentives because I regard them as incompatible with socialism. . . . The law of value is meaningful in a capitalist society in which the economy is based on profit. It is meaningless in a socialist society. We have no reason . . . to conform to the economic laws of capitalism as if our aim were merely to run the old system more efficiently.

Che rejected what he held to be a mechanical view, that the type of incentives used had to relate to the exact level of development of the productive forces. He defended the thesis that "it is through the revolutionary praxis of the masses, by constructing socialism by socialist methods, that both the economic structures and the behavior of man can be changed." Mobilizing workers by means of individual material interest--through competition between workers for higher individual wages--was rejected as a "vestige of the habits of the former society," as an ideological "leftover from capitalism." Socialism, Che argued, could not "overcome capitalism with its own fetishes"; it could not be built "if the economic basis adopted is one that undermines, distorts, or counteracts the development of collectivist consciousness."

Che did admit the objective necessity of using material incentives during a period of transition to communism. But he stressed that these could not be a primary mechanism and could not be allowed to become an end in themselves. The society had to fight against their use and work to hasten their disappearance. Emphasis was to be put on material incentives of a social character; i.e., advances in the economic/social fabric for all. To move toward socialism, Che wrote, one had to strive "to bring about the progressive abolition of material incentives--with all the habits, scale of values, and ideology they imply--and their replacement by 'moral incentives' . . . the social and political consciousness of the masses":

Material incentives will not play a part in the new society being created; they will die out as we advance. We must establish the conditions under which this type of motivation that is operative today will increasingly lose its importance and be replaced by nonmaterial incentives such as the sense of duty and the new revolutionary way of thinking.

The simple question I ignored, I feel in retrospect, is what happens if that sense of duty does not universally exist? I ignored the problem pointed to by economist Bertram Silverman, in his anthology Man and Socialism in Cuba: The Great Debate. Without forward movement in the economy, dependency upon moral incentives might undermine a worker's identification with the Revolution and militate against the development of consciousness. In trying to stimulate productivity exclusively through use of moral incentives, the government came to depend upon mechanisms of ideological control. "A system of incentives that relies upon political directives from above," Silverman wrote, "becomes just another form of repression."

In theory, the Cuban leaders were trying to subvert bourgeois individualist consciousness when they relied upon moral incentives. Cuba, moreover, lacked the financial resources to support an all-out program based upon material and financial incentives. Moral incentives were supposed to raise consciousness to the point where people would work hard because they found work to be a positive value and be cause they felt responsibility to the collective society. Slowly, the well-being of the entire population would rise, as Cuba would move along the road to communism. On a temporary basis, Paul M. Sweezy argued, Cuba would have to undergo a militarization of work, as the government would encourage each citizen to contribute maximum effort and to voluntarily restrict consumption.

This path, Peter Clecak has argued in his book, Radical Paradoxes: Dilemmas of the American Left, 1945-1970, leads to the investing of moral incentives with "exaggerated and unearned moral import":

For if moral incentives under austere conditions encourage a crude form of egalitarianism and community, they may also discourage the development and expression of independent critical thought. The whole enterprise rests on a foundation of stifling conformity, in part 'voluntary' but largely coerced. This in turn not only insures the emergence of clumsy bureaucracies, despite campaigns to increase flexibility in decision-making, it also guarantees the monopolization of power by a minority, usually personified by a maximum leader, who decides on the nature of the ideals and sets the specific tests of compliance. And when the official ideology entails nothing less than Communist ideals, leaders will predictably become suspicious of the majority who are so easily corrupted.

This pattern, René Dumont argues, is in reality what emerged in Cuba. Moral incentives under conditions of austerity worked to reinforce a Left-wing authoritarianism. A direct line exists, Dumont claims, "between this rejection of material incentive and a political conception opposed to all liberalization." Since the economy was based upon heavy investments and low consumption, there was only a limited use for money. Cuba suffered from a general lack of consumer goods, and rationing was introduced as a device to apportion scarce essential items including clothing and food.

Dumont viewed this situation as a communism of austerity, and he saw a way out of it through adoption of material incentives. Instead of depending on voluntary mobilization and the use of "productive labor" of intellectuals, white-collar workers, civil servants, and students for production, Dumont argued for economic techniques that would make regular labor more efficient. The work productivity of these voluntary teams, especially in agriculture, did not amount to one quarter the efficiency of regular trained agricultural labor. Dumont argued that the wages of regular base agricultural labor should be doubled. Such a step would brings regular labor to the fields, instead of inducing farmers to leave for the cities. The wage increase would also be accompanied by a rise in the price of foodstuffs.

Productivity in Cuba had declined by half between 1958 and 1963. The 1963 harvest were 75 percent less than those of 1960, although the number of work days was on the rise. Dumont observed the different behavior of two work crews. One was paid by the day and was noticeably slow; the other by the job and worked more efficiently and productively. This episode proved to him that "workers were still responsive to material incentives, although already there was talk of abandoning them." Once abandoned, he argued, Cuba saw the militarization of the labor force and growth of a bureaucratic, hierarchical society. What Che Guevara had called "moral incentive" had in reality become moral coercion. Incentives of a material form, however, still existed--for the Party and army bureaucracy. Political and administrative leaders had what the rank and file were denied.

A Cuban worker, Dumont concluded, would feel more linked to the production process if militarization was ended. "To deny material incentives and the advantages of a partially free market is to deny their political corollary; a certain liberalization." Just as the most important officials are paid more, Dumont claimed that "the humblest workers would in the present stage also be responsive to material incentives."

Dumont favored using such incentives in combination with small work collectives, cooperative production and distribution centers, which workers would run themselves and enjoy seeing prosper. He favors, in other words, a decentralized socialism. While he acknowledges that such a stage of organization would be an imperfect form of socialism, he argues that it would allow for the production of food and clothing, as well as for the accommodation of public criticism.

At the present moment, Fidel Castro and the Cuban leadership seems to have met many of Dumont's criticisms. They have retreated from their previous position, and have introduced material incentives in the factories. Yet, this step seems to also be related to emulation of the very Soviet model of market production that has created so many negative consequences in Soviet society, of which Dumont himself is readily critical. It also seems only hypothetical that the use of such incentives can be correlated with a development of what Dumont calls political liberalization. At present, the close Cuban-Soviet tie, as I have argued, seems more connected with a retreat from the Revolution's earlier flexibility, and with the rise of ideological and political conformity. Perhaps the correlation between material incentives and liberalization is not as firm as Dumont would make it appear.

The issue, as I have indicated, is far more complex than I originally understood it to be. The complexity of the debate over material versus moral incentives, however, does in no way negate concern for creating an institutional mechanism of socialist democracy. On this point, friends of the Cuban Revolution abroad should conceive their duty to be that of giving critical support, of not refraining from criticism when I it is sorely needed. I can think of no better way to end this preface to my article than by citing the closing words of René Dumont:

It is absolutely indispensable to try to give all friends of the Cuban Revolution a more complete and different view from that of its officials and propagandists. . . . as Gramsci tells us, "Seek the truth, and tell it, because only the truth is revolutionary." Though this awesome truth is difficult to arrive at, we must not give up striving for it, even under the pretext of other duties and responsibilities.

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