El Blog de Montaner

Raúl Castro is intent on building an efficient and productive socialism, capable of generating profits. That is why he has just laid off half a million unneeded wage earners.
The objective is to detach 25 percent of the labor force from the state within 18 months. That’s 1.3 million workers who will be put on the street so they may be absorbed by the still-unborn private microentrepreneurial sector. Castro and his claque keep repeating that the revolution cannot feed an army of idle workers. Subsidies must be trimmed, social benefits must be reduced.
The general is very confused. He understands nothing. He is hampered by his lack of experience in the business world, worsened by half a century of his authoritarian rule of the army.
The search for efficiency and productivity are the means used by capitalist enterprises to compete in the market. They are not goals. Entrepreneurs do not save, invest and manufacture fine products for love of their fellow men but out of fear that other entrepreneurs will displace them from the market.
Without competition there is neither development nor progress. The agony of producing increasingly more and better, using the least possible amount of resources, a permanent norm of the rigorous capitalist economy, is the consequence of competition. Where it doesn’t exist, where monopolies prevail, or where monopolies are subsidized by the government, private enterprises tend to be inefficient, become technologically backward, creak under the weight of bloated payrolls and raise the prices of their products to compensate for their ineptitude.
The aims of entrepreneurs are closely linked: to make money and gain social prestige. In general, the more money, the more prestige and vice versa. Some, the few, have a philanthropic instinct, but this solidarity-driven impulse does not make them better or worse creators of wealth, though it does make them more interesting and benevolent human beings.
The aims of communists are different. Their bureaucrats do not produce because they feel the urgency to make money and gain prestige that spurs the entrepreneurial individuals. The best of them (a few) do so to redeem humanity; the worst of them, because they want to gain power within the Communist Party. To that end, they build egalitarian societies based on the collective property of the means of production, where they suppress liberties and subject the whole of society to the torture of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” administered by incompetent fanatics.
The “legitimization” of that atrocious model of organizing society is the fact that it guarantees everyone a symbolic wage and certain basic goods, scant and bad though they may be, because quality, comfort and progress are not part of the objective of collectivist states, as shown by the communist experience in Europe or China during Maoism. It’s a miserable little life, without any hopes of improvement, but at least you don’t have to “earn it.” It’s imposed upon you.
After emphatically repeating, for the umpteenth time, that he is not renouncing socialism, Raúl Castro has nevertheless turned to the capitalist methods to produce goods and services, as if in Cuba there existed a market economy based on competition. This has led him to adopt the worst of both worlds: a socialism without social benefits or subsidies, added to a capitalism without competition, without freedom to produce, and without a market, watched closely by the political police because hoarding and inequalities will not be permitted.
That’s like trying to cure cancer with cough syrup. This confusion between means and ends, between methods and the objectives of basically different systems will soon reveal its shortcomings.
That’s what happened to Gorbachev in Russia in the late 1980s. He tried to adapt some capitalist norms to make Soviet socialism more efficient and within a few years discovered that the Marxist-Leninist monster cannot be reformed. That blunder, that absence of reason, that spawner of monsters has to be demolished. Kindly, with controlled blasting and without bloodshed — but it must be demolished.