How was the USSR supposed to pay people? You go to the store and get annthing you want?
--- On Sat, 6/14/08, Mike Ballard <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> From: Mike Ballard <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Cuba to abandon salary equality
> To: "lbo lbo" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Date: Saturday, June 14, 2008, 8:31 AM
> Chris writes:
>
> > 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'
>
> The carbon atoms in your body were forged inside a star
> somewhere, billions of years ago.
> http://www.myspace.com/ballardoso
>
>
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