> I know nothing about Cuba, but the whole "salary ceiling" system was very
> unpopular in the USSR.
============================
Lots of discussion about this on Lou Proyect's list. Be interested to hear
more on the unpopularity of the system in the USSR. My take: Cuba is being
forced to follow the path taken by the Soviets, Chinese, and others who
abolished and then restored capitalism:
http://www.marxmail.org/msg42977.html
http://www.marxmail.org/msg42945.html ************
As Marx pointed out, where there is wage labour, there is capital. It's no wonder to me why the trasition to communism beccame a transition to full blown industrial capitalism.
Mike B) **************
The very development of modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favour of the capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labour more or less to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation.... By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement.
At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never-ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto, A fair day's wage for a fair day's work! they ought to inscribe on their banner the
revolutionary watchword, Abolition of the wages system!
Marx, 'Value, Price and Profit'
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