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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, incomes, jobs, debts, ours, our children's. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, preparing me to offer you updates every week. Before we begin today, a couple of announcements I think will interest you. I'm happy to mention to those of you in the Los Angeles area or who might be there next weekend, that from the 3rd to the 5th of November at the Los Angeles Trade Technical College, 400 West Washington street, there will be the Left Coast Forum, a replica of the Left Forum that happens every spring in New York City, but its own west coast variation. I will be talking the evening of November 3rd, but I urge you, if you are interested, if you are in the area, this will be a chance to see what academics, what activists are doing in the United States to make the kinds of changes that ever more of you are interested in. You can find out more by going either to Left coastforum or to leftforum.org and that will give you all the information about the speakers and the panels and all the activities. The other announcement is a response to what many of you have asked for. You wanted to know how has Marxian economics, an approach to economics that is critical of capitalism? How has that evolved in recent decades? What's going on in the field of Marxian economics? How have criticisms and proposals to go beyond capitalism? How have they evolved in that tradition? It's an important question and there are plenty of answers, but many of them are gathered together in a new book that I thought you might be interested in, published by the very large international publisher known as Routledge International or Routledge Publishers, based in the United Kingdom but globally distributed. The book is called A Handbook of Marxian Economics, published this year, 2017. So it's right up to date. It's got a group of editors who've assembled a whole raft of different articles on different subjects so you can kind of sample the field. The lead editor is David Brennan. B R E N Nan so I recommend if you're interested in what Marxian economics has to say, this handbook of Marxian Economics, edited by David Brennan and others, is a useful way to get into this material. Let's turn then to the economic updates for this week. The first one captured my attention not just because it's a horrible story, and it is, but also because it tells us something about what's going on in the American economy from an angle that you don't often hear about. Here's the Way this story. Across the country, towns and counties are having more and more difficulty for performing their basic functions. Why? The answer's not far to search for. Corporations in America have dozens literally of ways of evading their share of taxes. Wealthy people likewise either have the laws in place to allow them to escape taxation, or they buy the political influence that gets them those laws. We know the story and the end result is that cities and towns across the country are not able to raise the money, the tax revenue that in the past funded basic functions. And here's an example. One of the things that cities and towns and counties and states have to do is to handle probation. If people violate the law, anything from a speeding ticket to more serious offenses, they can be found guilty in the judicial system and be required, for example, to pay a fine and or to undergo probation. You don't go to prison, but you are kind of in a limbo place. You have to really behave yourself and do nothing wrong for a while and then you're done with your probation. But of course, to handle this system, you have to have probation officers, probation offices, all of that to save money. Cities and counties and cities, states are beginning to privatize probation. And recently in Craighead County, Arkansas, it kind of blew up on them and attention finally was turned. Here's what it turns out happened in Craighead County, Arkansas. But it happens. The system becomes corrupted. Here's how it the public institution, the city, the town, the county says we can't afford the probation system anymore. And instead of shutting it down, which would raise other kinds of problems, they privatize it. They turn it over to a private probation company. So here's what violate the law, a speeding ticket. The judge says you must pay X dollars of fine and, and you must be on probation for a year, 18 months, whatever the private company now administers, if you don't pay the exact amount of money on the right day, the private probation company has the right to assign fees and penalties and then to jack it up, say you now owe not just the original fine, but all on top of that, fees and penalties. Why is this different from any other kind of situation? Because if you don't pay, the probation company explains to you you're going to go to jail. Now, normally in a western law, for centuries, we don't put people in jail who haven't paid fines. Other ways are found to deal with this problem. Otherwise, you're putting poor people, those who miss a payment they owe, into jail. And that's what we used to call poorhousewe don't do that anymore. But it turns out when a system begins to break down that the things we didn't do anymore turn up getting done. Anyway, moving right along to the second one, I found another statistic this last week that illustrates the that if there's an economic recovery going on, it doesn't include large numbers of people. In this case, it has to do with people having their electricity shut off because they haven't paid, or paid in full their electric bills. Let me give you some of the numbers. I think they will stun you the way they stunned me last summer. 900,000 homes in Texas went dark because of unpaid bills. That's triple the number 10 years ago in the state of Texas. Number two, California, 714,000 homes, the most on record for the state of California. Across the United States as a whole, millions of people are being disconnected from electricity. And let me remind everyone, that doesn't just mean that your toaster isn't working and you can't watch tv. It means that if you have a child in school who had an assignment to work with a computer to do something, he or she can't do it. The ramifications of being cut off of electricity have long term social consequences that ought to make a society stop and pay some attention. But the story actually gets worse. The Trump administration released its 2018 budget and in that budget, they got rid of the LIHEAP program. In case you don't know what that is, let me tell you. Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. It's a program of the federal government that helps poor people if they qualify to pay at least part of their electricity bills. Last year, 2.9 million households. Wow, turned and got some help. So why is it being canceled by the Trump administration? Well, according to Mick Mulvaney, the Director of the U.S. office of Management and Budget, he cited the figure of 11,000 people who didn't qualify but who got help. Now, let's see, 2.9 million people disconnected who needed help. 11,000, which is 0.0001% of this, cheated in some way, weren't qualified, were even dead in some cases. Is there corruption in government programs? Usually some. But to use a tiny fraction of corruption to cancel out what millions of people need, there's no justification for that. There never was. I want to give you some good news, and it's about the country called New Zealand. Halfway around the world, they just have a new government led by a 37 year old woman, Jacinda Ardern, and she the head of the Labour Party There is quite an interesting candidate. She is in charge of a coalition government. There are two other parties together with her that have formed the government and taken it away from the last 10 years of a conservative government. The conservative government in when the global capitalist crash happened in 2008 and stayed in power to administer an austerity program afterwards. The people of New Zealand have had enough and they abandoned the Conservatives and turned the government over to Jacinda Ahern and her coalition partners. Here are some of the things she ran her election on. The election happened last month in September. And so we know exactly what she's committed to. Her biggest issue was that it was shameful in her mind that New Zealand, one of the world's industrialized economies, has the worst problem of homelessness of any of them. And for her, she called this a, quote, unquote, failure of capitalism. Her words. She said, you judge a system, among other things, by whether it provides the most basic needs of, of a population. Housing is a basic need. To be the number one country for homelessness in the world is a failure of that system. In New Zealand, she's on tap to raise the minimum wage to the equivalent of $11.50 per hour. We don't have anything remotely like that. We still have a federal minimum wage at $7.25, and her coalition partners are pushing to raise it from $11.50 to around $15 or $16. So there the government is doing what we still have to have millions of people demonstrating out in front of McDonald's or Walmarts to maybe get in a few years. A remarkable turnaround in New Zealand. And it's not the only country where this is happening. I want to talk to you also about an update that has to do with this lingering struggle over the Affordable Care act, otherwise known as Obamacare. I'm going to assume you are familiar with what President Trump decided to do after he and the Republicans failed to override that bill in, in the Congress that didn't get enough votes. So what President Trump did was announce something that he can do just as president. He will not allow the government to give to the insurance company the promised subsidies for low income people to get health insurance. So here's how this works. The law mandates that, that the insurance companies must give lower rates to people who qualify who have little or no income. So that's continuing. The president cannot stop that. What the president can do is not give to the insurance companies the subsidies that they got to help them pay for the cost of giving insurance at a low discounted rate to poor people. So here's it's interesting. What is the insurance industry going to do? And they've made no secret of their plans. If they don't get the subsidies that the federal government promised them in the Affordable Care act and if they are required by law to give a low rate to poor people, then the only way they can pull that off is they say is one of two raise the rates of everybody else to compensate them for what they have to give in a discounted rate to the poor. In other words, set the health insurance needs of the poor against those of everybody else to create the maximum anger, resentment, hostility and the second option for the insurance companies? Quit the whole business. Just cancel everybody out and stop providing it. Some companies are expected to go one way and some the other. The losers, the mass of the American people. It is an extraordinary exercise in bad government, not serving the people who elected it to go in there before turning to the next economic update, let me remind you to make use of the two websites that we maintain for your use. These websites allow you to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram to see what we're doing on YouTube. In other words, to be a partner and share with us the kinds of work which involved collecting this information, making these analyses, and then distributing and sharing them with with other interested people. The two websites are rdwolff with two Fs com and democracyatwork.info. these are also websites that allow you to communicate with us, to tell us what you like and don't like, what you would like to see covered. We read these emails and we use them in organizing the programming that we offer to you each week. So please make use of both websites. They're there for your purpose. They're updated many times a day. Share what you find there with others. That's why we put it rdwolff with two Fs com and democracyatwork.info. the next update has to do as much with who said something as with what this person. Said person is Nigger woods, the dean at Oxford University in England, one of the most establishment places you could find in the world of economics. And here's what Dean woods said in the middle of October. Neoliberalism, the form that capitalism has taken in the last two or three decades, is on trial, said Dean Woods. In the United Kingdom, where Dean woods is located, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn accuses neoliberalism of increasing homelessness. Rather like the new Prime Minister of New Zealand throwing children into Poverty and causing wages to fall in many cases below subsistence. A quarter of a century ago it was said that if the government intervenes in the economy, it makes matters worse. Now we see, says Dean woods, that if you remove the government it can have the same effect and that therefore we have to rethink this. And then Dean woods has the courage to say what so few of the people in this kind of a position dare to say, that the fastest growing economic units in the world over the last 10 years have been overwhelmingly state managed, state interventionist types of capitalism, exactly the opposite of what used to be argued. China is the fastest growing, but so is India. So are many other countries. And not only are they growing faster than the neoliberal. The government gets out of the picture countries, but the government gets out of the picture countries like Britain and the United States are having more and more troubles. Their inequality is getting worse while that in those other countries isn't. Their child poverty rates in those hands off from the government are, are getting worse while those in the government intervention are getting better. In other words, the wind is changing. And where before it was popular to say private capitalism is solution, government is the problem. It's now reversing. It's the private capitalism that's the problem and the government intervention that's the solution. This has happened before, this oscillation between more and less government intervention. And it is usually justified either way with the same arguments. In the 1970s, Reagan and Thatcher said the government's too much involved. Everything will get better if we get the government out and people believed it. Now it's going the other way and people increasingly are believing it. I understand the anguish about the bad performance of neoliberal capitalism. Getting the government out of all kinds of things is part of what brought us to the crash of 2008. So I understand wanting to push in the other direction, but I would like to add an analytical understanding from the history of economics. Maybe the problem isn't more or less government intervention. Yes, that's what the profession loves to debate. But it's an old debate and it's a very stale debate. Because maybe the problem isn't which form of capitalism we got. Maybe the problem is that we don't look beyond these two forms, that we don't seem to be able to manage to think of an economy as either organized into corporations that do whatever they want, or organized into corporations that do pretty much what they want, but the government limits them and controls them and regulates them. Maybe we go back and forth between the two forms of capitalism. Because the problem isn't a form of capitalism. The problem is capitalism itself. The problem is a system in which a tiny group of people, the heads of the big corporations, the boards of directors, the major shareholders pretty much have the cards in their hands. And all we're debating is whether the government limits them a little, a little more, a little less. But maybe the problem isn't the limits more or less. Maybe the problem is we shouldn't allow a small group of people in an economic system to make all the decisions that everybody else has to live with. Maybe the problem is we don't have a democratic economic system and we never did. And we're now facing the music that pretending that all we have to discuss is a little more government intervention a little less misses the boat misses the issue, keeps our debate very narrowly limited instead of open to asking the more fundamental questions. The next economic update has to do with the way that the United States is exceptional is unique. We are the only country among the advanced industrial countries in the world that does not have a federally mandated paid vacation time. In other words, there's no law in the United States the way there is in Britain, France and Germany and Italy and Scandinavia and on and on and on. We don't have this law which says that a working man or woman who goes to work every week, 9 to 5, Monday to Fridayall that must be given X number of weeks of paid a time to relax, a time to be away from the job, a time to recoup your relationships with your children and with your spouse and with your community, to recharge your batteries. In France, it's five weeks. I know the French economy pretty well, and I know that the French working class will not give that up without a catastrophic struggle. It means too much to them. They've built their lives around this. Why is the United States unable, unwilling? The working people in other countries fought bitterly to get this time off. The American working class didn't. Or at least it didn't yet. And the question is why? But there's a bigger question which the Europeans now have to face, too. Because you fought for it in the past doesn't mean you'll keep it. The new leadership in places like France, with Mr. Macron, are interested in reducing it, maybe even eliminating. Turns out that in a modern capitalist system, whatever the working class achieves in benefits, in job security, in wages, is always tentative, is mostly temporary. Why? Because the ultimate decision is not in their hands. They fight for it. If they're lucky, they get it. But they're always facing an employer class who is as interested today as it was last month, last year, last century in getting it back, taking these benefits away, reducing them. All across Europe, these benefits like paid vacation time are being eroded, are being picked to death. It turns out that if a union or a whole working class fights for something with an adversary employer, even when it wins, it discovers, usually not very long later, that the winning is temporary. You're always in the struggle and the other side is always looking to take it away. That's why people get interested in things like worker co ops, because then the workers are on both sides of the discussion. They are the workers who do the work, but they are also together their own employer. Then there isn't the adversary situation and then you don't have to worry that the other will take it away from you after you struggle. The last economic update we'll have time for has to do with an entity you probably never heard. Families for Excellent Schools. Fesa. Who are these people? Well, they pretend, and they do a lot of publicity to push this, that they represent a certain point of view among parents of school children and concerned citizens. And so they battle to get certain goals. Particularly recently in Massachusetts and other states, New York among them, they have been fighting to expand the freedom of charter schools, to do end runs around the old rules of what can and cannot happen in a public school, to employ people who haven't the qualifications, to take shortcuts, to impose all kinds of quasi ethical behaviors on teachers and students in terms of what public teachers have gotten. But why I am telling you this is that it turns out that a new law and a new research by the Boston Globe in Massachusetts found out that a tiny number of very wealthy people bankroll the ready families for excellent schools. And they've been fighting because they have interests, business interests, in running charter schools, in servicing charter schools. They want privatization of education because it's a realm of much profit. And in America they can parade themselves as a popular organization because they have the money. Well, their efforts were defeated in Massachusetts by a groundswell of organization from below, which raised lots of little bits of money from union teachers and so on. But often the victories go the other way. And when that happens, we face a society which allows money to trump a democratic decision making process. That's why change is the order of the day. We've come to the end of the first half of economic update. Thank you very much for being with us. Stay with us. After a short intermission, we will be right back. Sam, They sentence me to 20 years of boredom for trying to change the.
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System from within I'm coming now I'm.
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Coming to reward them first we take Manhattan then we take Berlin.
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I'm guided by a signal in the heavens I'm guided by this earth mark.
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On my skin I am guided by.
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I'm guided by the beauty Cut our.
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Weapons.
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First we take Manhattan.
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Then we take B I really like to live beside you, baby I love your body and your spirit and your love but you see that night Moving through my station.
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I told you.
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Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's edition of Economic Update. I am very pleased to be able to have with us not one, but two experts on something that I have spoken about on this program from time to time and that I want to go into more detail with our guests today and what we're going to be talking about is Cuba, and in particular a new way of organizing the Cuban economy that is being discussed and debated, but has implications not only for the future but Cuba, but for the future of socialism as an alternative to capitalism. And that's why it's so important to learn about it from people who are intimately involved. So let me welcome and introduce first on my left here, Dr. Umberto Miranda Lorenzo. He's a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy in Havana, Cuba. His PhD dissertation was about self management as an alternative to present structures of global economics. He has published works on self management and cooperatives in both English and Spanish and has run study abroad programs for U.S. universities in Cuba for many years. He's currently a visiting professor at the University of Rhode Island. My second guest is Dr. Richard McIntyre. He's a professor of economics and chair of the Economics Department at the University of Rhode Island. He is co director of the University of Rhode Island's program in Cuba and also has chaired the Cher des Amerique at the University of Rennes number two in the spring of 2017. He is the author of Our Worker Rights Human rights, published in 2008, and co editor of Knowledge Class and Marxism Without Guarantees, a book that is forthcoming, dated 2018. And he has kindly agreed to come back later this year onto this program to talk about that book and what it represents. So let me turn and welcome both of you to the interview process we have. So let's jump right to Is my understanding that, and please correct me, that Cuba has made a decision to at least change part of its economic activities, its direction, and that is to specifically designate the organization and building of worker co ops as the way to organize factories, offices, stores, in Cuba. And that means that the issue isn't so much public versus private enterprise as more organizing it in a top down hierarchical way versus a collective democratic way. Is that a reasonable thing? I've just said? Is that conform to your sense of what's going on in Cuba? Who's going to start?
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Well, I think the way to understand it is that in 2012 the Cuban Communist Party at its congress made a declaration and said that we want to dramatically increase the share of the economy that's organized through cooperatives. We're five years later, some of that has happened, some laws and regulations have been passed, but there's a number of blockages with I think Umberto can talk about in some detail that are preventing this from really taking off.
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Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you for inviting me to your program in Cuba in 2011. The last Congress of the party started well even before they started something, they called it upgrading or updating the economic model. We're good at using euphemisms. So it's not economic reform, it's an updating of the economic system. In that updating there were two major changes. One is the introduction of more introduction of private business, small private business, which was a way to compensate around over 1 million workers in the state owned sector. On the other hand, there was the introduction after 2012 of new co ops for first time in Cuban history after the revolution in the urban areas and industrial sectors because prior to that it was just in the agricultural sector. It was a big step in terms of moving away from this state owned central planning system. And I think the positive side of it is that many sectors of the state owned enterprises were alleviating the restrictions and people started working in co ops. That being said, part of the process war was since the very beginning co opted because it was a turning in just one overnight from state on enterprises to co op. So people went to.
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If I could interrupt. When it converted from a state enterprise into a worker co op, did it also then become a private enterprise or was still within the state?
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No, no. It's a kind of difficult explain experiment because the infrastructure and the patrimony of the co ops is still the means of production, still stay home. The management is in the hands of the workers. And on the other hand the patrimony that is getting added after producing is part of the co op like bank accounts and part of the products they buy in part of the infrastructure they acquire after that. But the facilities, the buildings, where they are. For example, I was carrying study on co ops in Havana, the new ones. One is a bus, co ops, collective transportation. Another one was textile. And in both of them major production belong to the state. There is no way in the foreseen future that it would change, but at least it's a step instead of moving towards a more collective decision making process.
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I think the issue is that there's a struggle going on in Cuba that part of the bureaucracy doesn't want the opening to private industry, but they don't want to lose control to the cooperatives either. So they created the law. The co ops are there, but the directors of the co op were not elected by the members. They they were appointed by the state. So Umberto describes this as kind of like being in limbo right now that the state centered economy is going away, but the cooperative economy is not quite ready to be born yet. Somewhere in the middle.
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But is there at least a verbal or an ideological commitment to building the co op sector to make it larger and eventually a dominant part of the economy?
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There is. I mean, the number in the 2002 declaration was 35% of the economy, something like that. So there is a statement that, yes, this is what we're going to do. On the other hand, they suspended licenses for new co ops about a year and a half ago and have not started that up yet. So for instance, Umberto's son would like to start a cooperative bakery. They have a plan. He has his friends who are willing to do this, but they can't get a license because it's been stopped by the state. So it's limbo right now.
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Why did it happen in the first place? In other words, where does the impetus, where does the pressure come that led even to the limited amount of interest and exploring of co ops? Why did this happen in Cuba and at this time?
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Well, first of all, we are under crisis. I mean, we're located in the global economy too. We're part of that. And there is an economy with a lot of fatigue in terms of lack of incomes, lack of loans, et cetera. And at some point the government had to get rid of part of the business, but not release it to the private initiative. So then the initiative of co op was a good idea. The thing is that there are steps that were not taken. First of all, there is a sort of ignorance about what is a co op, the principles of co ops and so on. If you take the. Well, even in Cuba, in terms of legislation, there are specific legislations for each specific kind of co ops, which it doesn't take into account that the Co op is a specific form of management, production and ownership and collective one. So there are legislation for co ops and credit and services co op for agricultural production, co ops of basic unit of cooperative production, that all of them were agricultural one, but with different legislations and then a new legislation which is an expression of not understanding exactly what is going on, but at least it's a step to let it go. And some of them are successful. The other thing is there are many good experiences of co ops in Cuba, but they're invisible. Nobody knows about it. Part of the work the Institute of Philosophy is doing is putting the new CO ops in contact with these good experiences so they know how it could go. Because you have to train people, you have to educate people for that. If you don't know what is a co op, how does it work? It's difficult in Cuba in front of a challenge, you have to move to a society more inclusive, in which everybody fits in. How do you do that? No more. This central planning system is no longer working today. The state is not the only one providing incomes, jobs, education, even education, health care. How you move to a society not individualistic and follow the patterns of capitalism, but more inclusive. This is a major debate in Cuba and the co ops are central in that debate.
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That's really what stimulated me to think about having this kind of a program. Because as we were discussing before, the world for a long time has thought that there are only two options. Either the state takes a major role and organizes, or the private sector. And we were supposed to debate the strengths and weaknesses of these two. And we have watched for a century now oscillations between these two approaches as if there were nothing else. So it strikes me that Cuba is a pioneer, no matter how limited that it is, saying, well, we don't want the private capitalist, we made a revolution, we don't want that. We have now experimented with state managed. And there are enough problems with that system that we're going to try to something else, but we're not going to be trapped in that either. Or has enough happened in Cuba that this is something you can generally take to the rest of the world as an alternative? Or is it still too early?
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I think it's still too early. I mean, what you have in Cuba is a legacy of social solidarity, that this is a legacy of the revolution. People don't want to be exploited. They don't want the gross inequality that they see in capitalist societies. This is almost universal, at least in my experience. But the Cubans themselves are still learning from other Latin Americans. So, for instance, cooperative experiments in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina are things that the Cubans are pointing to and saying we need to learn from them. So there's interchange now. People from Latin South America are coming to Cuba, Cubans are going there, and it's developing. I think there has to be a shakeout in the power structure within Cuba in terms of the more regressive elements of the bureaucracy who want to hang on to whatever they have, no matter what, have to go away somehow and open the door for more popular democracy of all kinds. Not democracy as we understand it here in the United States, but a real social democracy. And I don't think the Cuban model is generalizable yet, but they are working at exactly what you're saying, which is the rejection of this either or model, which, by the way, is happening many, many places and in many, many ways. But the Cubans want to, at least their stated goal is to take it much further than most other places here.
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In the United States. One of the ways that Americans became aware of Latin American co ops was a film made by Naomi Klein and her husband called the Take, a film which documents the early part of the century, the crisis in Argentina and. And the abandonment of many factories by the capitalists who literally left, and then the workers moving in and reopening these and running them themselves. Was that an important story for the Cuban cooperative movement? Did it play a role in strengthening their ability to see a future for Cuban co ops?
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Well, it's an influence, is a very strong influence, actually. I was there. I met the people in Brooklyn, for example, this textile industry. I personally am in touch with those who are guiding the movement in Argentina. And I think that many Cubans are aware about experience. They're in contact with experience. Thing is that co ops still is not a movement. I cannot say it's a movement in Cuba. It's more than economic sector, but not a movement, not a social movement. And this is the step we need to take. Because what makes really powerful the co op movement in Argentina or in Uruguay, for example, with these urban development co ops is that they're moving and they're not focused just on the economy is a social experience in which people are practicing solidarity, people are practicing a collective forms of decision making, which for me, in my opinion, is the major challenge for Cuba right now as a society as a whole. The government implemented economic reforms, economic changes or upgrading of the system, which is okay, but the economy is too tied to the politics, and we need to at least change it in terms of providing More power to elected positions. And the new CO ops, for example, the ones that are created lately in the urban areas and industrial sectors. It's interesting that the body of direction of those co ops are not exactly elected. They were the former board of the state owned enterprises and people voted for them, but they're not elected. And then the General assembly, they meet every three months or so and they just voted for something. Okay, everything is fine. We need to implement more democratic ways of decision making and decentralizing. The decision making for me is crucial. And Cuba decision making is too centralized, too central, in few hands. And you need to consult people. People need to know what are we going to do in the future? Because we're part of it. And this is a very highly educated society. So changing that system, not in the way of, I mean I'm not talking about having these democracies, so called democracies in Latin America. The actual democracies starts in the working place and when the people can really decide about their future and be consulted about that. And particularly when, because it's an imperative, you cannot go voting every decision every day and every hour. First of all, everybody must participate in the most strategic decisions that are going to affect the whole society. But also we need to have people. The ones making decisions have to be the ones I choose, the one I voted and the white. They have to respond to me every day, which is different. And this is the challenge for Cuba. We need to move to that kind of society. I don't know exactly how it's going to be, but co ops had a tremendous role in terms of if we make available a change in the practice of co ops in Cuba, if we implement a good educational and training program for these new co ops, I think it would create the basis of a new movement in terms of more democratic practices at the workplace.
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I find it fascinating because we have exactly the same problem here. We have now across the United States a significant growth of co ops. Here in New York City we have one of the largest ones in the United states. There's now 1800 or more immigrant Latin American women, by and large very successful, has grown dramatically and they're popping up all over the place. But we're not yet a social movement. There has to be some chemistry, something that has to happen to give the people who are forming these the notion that they are not just making an enterprise, they are part of social change. And they are partly attracted here to that because it's romantic and they know it's needed. But they're also probably Frightened that it's going to go up against the existing structure, which will make obstacles. So it may not be as different.
- [49:42]
C
I'm actually a little more optimistic. I mean, in Cuba, you have to remember that Cuban society in the 1970s and 80s was maybe the most statist society in the history of the world. I mean, they out Sovieted the Soviets, so they've got a long way to come. And a lot of it's education here. It's education too, though. And we just got. We're getting a law in Rhode island to allow the incorporation of industrial and service co ops. One of the legislators who had questions about this, as legislators will, his question was, can people really manage their own enterprise? I mean, are they smart enough to do that? So there's an ignorance out there that's just unbelievable. Not in the immigrant communities, though, because folks who are coming out of Central America and South America, this is in their culture already. So it's not surprising to me that you talk about the hospital group here in Rhode Island. It's the group Progreso Latino that's the primary force behind this. So I think this is gonna spread out from the immigrant communities, from young people who, you know, the corporate capitalism has abandoned them. And I think in the United States there's this opportunity with more education, growth of the movement amongst young people and immigrants. Cuba's fighting some things that we don't have. They're more ambitious than we are. If 35% of the economy is going to be cooperative, that's pretty ambitious, that is. But they're struggling with some issues that maybe we don't have.
- [51:24]
A
Can you tell us a little bit about. Let me put it differently. Is it that statist hill that has to be overcome? Is it the notion that somehow workers themselves can't manage an enterprise and so they need an expert, a director, someone sent down by the state with supposed qualifications. Is it that that has to be changed or is it something else?
- [51:53]
C
I think in the United States, that's what has to be changed. I mean, in other words, I always tell my students, the problem is in your head. When we talk about neoliberalism. It's in your head. You see the world that way. In Cuba, though, it really is a sort of class struggle that's going on. And maybe you can talk more about that than I can.
- [52:15]
B
Yeah, first of all, it's almost 60 years of a centralized system with a very strong, strong bureaucracy. And on the other hand, the process in Cuba had to do a lot with the independence. You're playing with the future of the nation every time you try to implement any change. And I think it could justify a little bit of conservatism at the part of the people of the government. But on the other hand, it ignores completely the value that people give to independence in general Cuba, people have to have a voice about it. For example, the experience in Argentina with workers taking the factories back. They are the ones who have been producing all the time, so they know exactly what to do and they have proven that they can do it again. In these experiences we're having in Cuba, we're putting people to dialogue because good experiences are invisible. You need to make it visible. You need to make people know that these experiences exist. They have their cooperative that has changed the entire community. Cooperative that have assumed the challenge of building schools, building hospitals in the community, even when the Ministry of Education didn't have the budget.
- [53:42]
A
So this has happened, but the problem is it isn't widely known.
- [53:45]
B
Of course we need to put in touch people to dialogue. Let's suppose that there is a good intention and people forget about it. Well, we realize it and we are trying to join the dots and put people to dialogue. And see, okay, you're starting a co op. Look at this one. It's a good experience because actually most of the the most successful co ops in Cuba, they're very efficient, they're very successful economically, but above all they're very successful socially in terms of incorporating everybody. Particularly because they have a very participatory system in their production everywhere, every day.
- [54:30]
A
It's intriguing to me because a classic critique of the formalized democracy we have here is that it has no reality. And one of the reasons it has this abstract once every year we go into a little booth and move a handle as if this is democracy. And one of the arguments was made, you're never going to have a political democracy that's vibrant and real because you exclude any democracy in the workplace where people spend five out of seven days and all their adult lives. And if you exclude that from the workplace, you can't be surprised that people have no appetite and no intention and no passion for it anywhere else. In a society that says it wants 35% of itself to be co op at some point is even if it doesn't want to, setting in motion very powerful movements. If you give people these rights, these positions in the workplace, they're not going to stop. They're going to want them everywhere.
- [55:30]
C
And I think the bureaucracy sees that, you know, at least those parts of the. I mean, let's not paint with too broad of a brush. Those parts of the bureaucracy that are blocking really probably afraid more than anything else that this is dangerous and it threatens me. And therefore I have to come up with some ideological explanation as to why we can't do it, because I can't say it's bad for me. And so this has been blocked. The other thing that's been blocked is even the private enterprises, the restaurants, the paladins, no more applications for that too. So something's going on within the leadership that we don't fully understand.
- [56:10]
A
A quick last question. You've been taking students from Rhode island, from the University of Rhode Island. Is there interest? Are the students excited by what they see and what they're learning? In other words, I'm really asking, can this experiment being fought out in Cuba have a positive impact on what's going on in the minds of Americans?
- [56:32]
B
I think it's a two way channel. I have to say that when I come here, my mind change a lot because I discover new things and different things that I never heard about. Exactly. Happens the same with the students when they go to Cuba.
- [56:49]
A
Cuba.
- [56:50]
B
It's the same. The same thing.
- [56:52]
A
Thank you both. As happened so often in these interviews, I wish we had more time, but at least you've sparked an interest and you've shown us that there's one more reason beyond all the others that the channels of communication between the United States and Cuba ought to be opened wider rather than constricted.
- [57:11]
C
Absolutely.
- [57:12]
A
And thank you all for joining us. I hope you found this kind of conversation about really momentous changes being fought out in Cuba as interesting as I have. I want to thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis that has partnered with us for many years, and urge all of you to partner with us as well. Use our websites, share what you've learned, be part of a process of changing the way Americans think. And I look forward to talking with you again next week. Sam.