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5.0 out of 5 stars
A Look at Che Guevara's Economic and Political Thought, October 7, 2006
While silk-screened images of Che abound on tee shirts around the world, few are aware of the study this leader of the Cuban revolution gave to economics, banking, finance, incentive systems, and, most important, the role of voluntary labor.
Introducing this book is a speech by Fidel Castro on the twentieth anniversary of Guevara's assassination. In it, Castro urges the world to take a good look at Guevara's contributions to creating a socialist society in Cuba. In reality, under the impact of opposing views, along with aid, from the then-Soviet Union, many of Guevara's ideas had been left by the wayside.
Castro's speech, given in 1987, was part of broad effort to return to the Guevara course-an effort to completely change society and, in the process, make it possible for human beings to change as well. The speech, and the book, take an honest look at Cuba's errors along the way -and the efforts made to correct them.
The essence of what Che stood for was well put by Castro, who said, "Che believed in man. And if we don't believe in man, if we think that man in an incorrigible little animal, capable of advancing only if you feed him grass or tempt him with a carrot or whip him with a stick--anybody who believes this, anybody convinced of this will never be a revolutionary..."
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Che and Cuba continue Marxism, not Stalinism, July 5, 2006
This review is from: Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism (Paperback)
This is an award-winning book, specially praised by Fidel Castro when it appeared. It charts the revolutionary political and economic strategy that Che Guevara advance in building the Cuba revoltuion. Che besides being a political leader and an internationalist fighter, was one of the leaders of the economic struggle to build a socialist Cuba.
His ideas stand in start contrast to those that were advised by the Soviet Union and Cuban Communist Party members who had looked to the Soviet Union. Rather than the bureacuratic approach of centering on offering material incentives, and increasing social differentiation, Che put forward a strategy remarkably similar to that advanced by Lenin and Trotsky in their struggle with Stalin. Che believed that while economic growth had to be based on realism, science and the limiatations of the Cuban revolution, that the political mobilization of the Cuban masses, their attention to the world revolution, and the struggle against bureaucratic priveledge has to be at the center of the revolutionary Economy.
Tablada gives an excellent description of Che's ideas, not only in theory, but how they were practiced in the first five years of the Cuban revolution.
The publication of this book was a result of a renewed struggle by the Cuban revolutionists to revive Che's ideas and the struggle against buraucratic priviledge in Cuba after Cuba rejected the Soviet model at the end of the 1970s. This is why a Cuban socialist revolution, almost the total opposite of the Stalinist bureaucracies that collapsed in the USSR and Eastern Europe still stand.
Tablada is a clear writer who provides great explanations of complex economic concepts and clear documentation.
While this pamphlet is not always available on Amazon, it is always available from BooksfromPathfinder, an Amazon Z store that you can get to by clicking on New and Used further up this page!
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3.0 out of 5 stars
The economic thought of Che Guevara, June 11, 2011
This review is from: Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism (Paperback)
Carlos Tablada's book "Che Guevara: The economics and politics in the transition to socialism" is a Cuban book originally published in 1987. The English translation was issued in 1989 by Pathfinder Press, the publishing arm of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, an ex-Trotskyist group which supports the Cuban regime. The book was published during a period in Cuban history known as "the rectification", a kind of anti-perestroika during which the Cuban Communist Party attempted a return to the earlier and more "heroic" phase of the revolution. Part of this meant unearthing the political and economic ideas of Ernesto Che Guevara, who had been largely scrapped during the 1970's.
Tablada's book is written in a style both rhetorical and dense, with a lot of quotations from Marx and Lenin. It sometimes deals with issues that are probably near-esoteric to everyone but scholars of Cuba and perhaps elderly Cubans. For this reason, "Che Guevara" could be a heavy read. Still, I admit that the book is less loaded with rhetoric than works published in the Soviet bloc sensu stricto. Due to its "in-house" character, Tablada's exposition of Guevara's economic thought will probably mostly interest advanced students of recent Cuban history, or perhaps very intellectual Marxists.
Che Guevara criticized what he called "the economic accounting system", in fact the planned economy in the Soviet Union, which the Cuban revolutionary found too moderate. He was even more sharply critical of Tito's self-management after a visit to Yugoslavia. Guevara's alternative was "the budgetary finance system", a super-centralized planned economy, under which the entire economy of Cuba was treated as a single company. Prices were to be set based on political priorities, not economic efficiency. Thus, prices on basic foodstuffs, for instance, could be lowered below their "real" price, while luxury items could be priced far above their market price. The profits of each individual company would go directly to the national budget. In this way, unprofitable businesses would be quickly subsidized with profits from profitable businesses. The entire system would be supervised from a tightly-knit centre, and subjected to rigorous and efficient controls.
There was a small problem, however. How can the state know which enterprises are efficient and profitable, if the market prices (the real prices) are completely suppressed? How can "prices", "profits" or "wages" even *exist* in a system where the pricing mechanism has been dispensed with? In practice, Guevara's system would entail super-detailed planning in physical units, payment in kind, and rationing. Indeed, Cuba did have rationing the first years after the revolution, and Tablada candidly admits that the budgetary finance system would have entailed a strict planning and control of the population's consumption patterns. Another hallmark of the system was reliance on voluntary labour (the book features several photos of Che himself carrying out such). Curiously, the Cuban regime also instituted the typically Soviet system of bonuses for overfulfilment of the production quotas.
Guevara's ideas would make Austrian economists weep, and even I find them somewhat unrealistic, and at times frankly incomprehensible. Interestingly, Guevara himself seems to have understood that no reliable economic indicator of efficiency could exist in his radically socialist system. To solve the problem, he proposed to use the world market prices as a measuring stick for the Cuban economy. In other words, he was cheating! After attacking the Soviet system for its backhanded reliance on the "law of value", Guevara was forced to rely on it himself, by treating Cuba as a single company operating on the world market. The world market would tell the planners the real prices of various products, who could then be priced higher or lower than their actual value before reaching the consumers - in effect, a more centralized version of what many governments around the world are doing already through subsidies or sales taxes.
As already mentioned, in the absence of world market prices, Guevara's system would become a form of War Communism based on planning and payment in kind, and strict rationing. Now, it could be argued that this is perfectly acceptable, since the goal is social equality, not market "efficiency". The problem with Cuba and other state socialist lands is, of course, their somewhat "Pharaonic" quality. I'm not sure if that counts for social equality! And while Pharaonic Egypt lasted for millennia, socialism didn't even last a century. Guevara's system lasted even less, suggesting that there was *something* wrong with it...
Today, "Che Guevara: Economics and politics in the transition to socialism" feels very dated. In fact, Castro had to reverse his politics shortly after its publication, due to the ignominious collapse of the Soviet bloc. But that's another story.
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