Reviewed by Al Campbell
Since at least 2005, the Cuban leadership has stressed that Cuba remains committed to building a human-centred alternative to capitalism, their version of socialism, but that neither they nor anyone else has a recipe or instruction manual for how that is to be done. The Soviet manuals, which had such a powerful influence in the twentieth century on people around the world trying to build socialism, were not appropriate for building genuine socialism for two reasons. First, as the adjective ‘really existing’ widely used today to differentiate the Soviet system’s ‘really existing socialism’ from ‘socialism’ makes clear, the system it gave instructions to build was not the emancipatory project of socialism that had driven, and continues to drive, so many progressive human social developments since the 1800s. But even deeper than that obvious point, even if the Soviet system had continued from the 1930s on to be the socialism-in-construction that it was in the first decade following the 1917 Revolution, the social project of building socialism cannot be simply copied from one culture, one time period, and one specific political situation and balance of forces, to a different culture, time period, political situation, and balance of forces.
In a major speech at the Aula Magna at the University of Havana on 7 November 2005, Fidel Castro stated this forcefully, to flag that this was not a workable solution for Cuba’s project of building socialism:
Here is a conclusion I’ve come to after many years: among all the errors we may have committed, the greatest of them all was that we believed that someone really knew something about socialism, or that someone actually knew how to build socialism. It seemed to be a sure fact, as well-known as the electrical system conceived by those who thought they were experts in electrical systems. Whenever they said: “That’s the formula,” we thought they knew. (F. Castro 2005)
More picturesquely, Raúl made the same point on 18 December 2010, in a speech during the closing ceremony of the Sixth Session of the Seventh Legislature of the National Assembly of People’s Power. Comparing the building of socialism to the original flights into outer space, he called it un viaje a lo ignoto (a journey into the unknown), an expression that has been used repeatedly in Cuba since then in discussions of the issue.
While we have counted on the theoretical Marxist-Leninist legacy, according to which there is scientific evidence of the feasibility of socialism and the practical experience of the attempts to build it in other countries, the construction of a new society from an economic point of view is, in my modest opinion, also un viaje a lo ignoto. (R. Castro 2010)
Two ‘buzz phrases’ attributed to the Zapatistas soon after the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union nicely capture the necessary socialist alternative to applying recipes, the protagonistic design and implementation of the socialism-in-construction by the members of the emerging society itself: “we make the path by walking”, and “we walk asking”. This approach is at the core of the new political economic model for constructing socialism that is continuing to emerge in Cuba today and is reflected in all the major documents from the 2010s and 2020s defining it. For example, from the 2017 version of the constantly evolving model and referring to the original formulation in the same year of the most theoretically broad of the model’s defining documents, the Conceptualización (2017):
The updated Model, which is in accord with the present Conceptualización and is based on the advances in the theory of socialist construction and its interaction with practice, is not conceived of as a finished and static archetype, but rather as an active and perfectible prototype. (PCC 2017: 13)
This is why this new edition of Carlos Tablada’s work, with all its proposals, many of which have their own important short track record of implementation, is such a valuable contribution of ideas to today’s broad and rich worldwide discussion on how to go about transcending capitalism. It’s a discussion in which the weight of the false recipes of the Soviet manuals, which Che argued so strongly against, has been greatly reduced since 1991, but they still have plenty of echoes. It’s a discussion whose importance has been manifested to growing numbers of people since the 2007–2009 world economic crisis, and still further since the COVID-19 disruption of 2020. It’s a discussion that accepts that building socialism is ‘a journey into the unknown’. And it’s a discussion that more and more realises that building socialism is not something that can be done for the majority of society that will then simply continuously reproduce it, but rather that socialism must necessarily not only be collectively implemented by society, but beyond that, socialism needs to be collectively designed by society as well.
One of several points so important for today’s discussion that Che stressed over and over throughout many of his pieces in this collection is that socialism can only be built by actors conscious of what they want to build. Since most people who live under capitalism have developed a consciousness and worldview appropriate for their surviving as the exploited in capitalism, this means that building the socialist consciousness necessary to build socialism is of prime importance. Further, that consciousness cannot be developed by the masses through reading, lectures, or even participatory discussions (though all those are important and make their contributions), but rather only through their participation in the struggle itself to build socialism. Socialist consciousness is necessary to build socialism, but it cannot be developed prior to the fight to build socialism. Rather, it can be built only in that fight, in a back-and-forth process of advances in building socialism and advances in building a socialist consciousness. And that, as Che stressed, requires that the steps one takes in attempting to build socialism be such that they indeed build a mass social consciousness, and not some alternative mass consciousness (as for example was created in the Soviet Union).
I want to briefly indicate a very important additional ‘deepening’ of Che’s contributions that this fourth edition brings to the worldwide discussions beyond the previous editions (and beyond the important contribution that simply reissuing the same material 27 years after it was last issued, in a world that as indicated above is now significantly different in its relation to the project of building socialism than was the world in 1997). In a short five-page introduction to the current edition, the editor, Mary Alice Waters (who also edited all the previous English language editions), points out this important addition for reflecting still more deeply on Che’s ideas. While all previous editions already referenced many published works by Che to support the positions argued as to the meaning of his work, there was also a lot of then-unpublished material that Tablada had access to and quoted. A condition for his access to this unpublished work, however, was that quotes used not be indicated by quotation marks, and that he did not list the unpublished sources. But these works were finally all published, especially in Apuntes críticos a la economía política in 2006 and the seven-volume edition of Che’s writings issued between 2013 and 2016. What this means for understanding Che’s writing at an even deeper level is that when desired one can go back and look at what he said in the context in which he said it, and with a deeper understanding of the debates his writings were part of. Then in addition, passages from the Soviet economic manuals to which Che often referred are for the first time included in footnotes, again greatly deepening the understanding of his references, in this case of what he was arguing against.
With most (not all) books that I review, I have found that listing the chapter titles (and subsection titles – if they exist), which are usually laboriously reflected on by the author to indicate their content, to be one of the most efficient ways to tersely indicate the content of the book. In this book they certainly are.
The title of the book stresses that above all it addresses many issues of concern during the transition to socialism, as opposed to under socialism. Following the essential but too often forgotten aphorism that “if you don’t know where you want to go, you can’t know what road will take you there”, the first three of the eleven chapters constitute Part One, “Economic management under socialism: Questions of theory and method discussed by Che.” These are:
- Chapter 1:
The economic management system and its categories
- Chapter 2:
The Marxist view of politics as concentrated economics; its importance in economic management under socialism
- Chapter 3:
The relationship between the Budgetary Finance System and the Economic Accounting System in the management of a socialist economy
Following these, the rest of the chapters constitute Part Two, “The economic management system in the first stage of building socialism in Cuba”:
- Chapter 4:
The emergence of the Budgetary Finance System
- Chapter 5:
Economic planning: its function as principal organiser of the socialist economy
- Chapter 6:
The role of money, the banking system, and prices
- Chapter 7:
Unequal exchange
- Chapter 8:
Che and voluntary work
- Chapter 9:
Incentive systems
- Chapter 10:
Questions of leadership, organisation, and management of social production under the Budgetary Finance System
- Chapter 11:
Cadre policy: political leadership and development of administrative and technical personnel.
I want to end by underlining a point this review has repeated several times. If a reader is looking for a recipe for building socialism, they should not look to this book. In fact, there is nowhere they should look to find such a recipe since such blueprints cannot exist. But if a reader is looking for ideas to consider for building socialism today, this is a rich source for thoughts about many different dimensions of the process to reflect on.