Workers Participation: The Challenge of Cuban Socialism

From the beginning of the Revolution until the demise of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s socialist economy evolved from a centralised system based on moral incentives along the lines promoted by Ernesto Guevara to a more self-financed model focused on material incentives similar to that which obtained in the Soviet system. However, workers self-management was never seriously considered as an alternative model for the building of socialism.

Socialism however does not necessarily require state control of the whole economic system within a hierarchical structure. The objective of the current article is to understand the contributions that workers administration of the means of production could make to the “update” of the Cuban economy. Such contributions are consistent with the socialist principle of workers emancipation from all forms of subordination. Nonetheless we analyse the challenges and limits of self-management as a means to mitigating economic problems and equitably improving living conditions.

1. Workers participation

1.1. Self-management in the socialist thought

Self-management, as a principle of economic organisation, emerges at the end of 18th and the beginning of the 19th century as a collective answer to the labour exploitation of the Industrial Revolution and as a project of workers emancipation. It was influenced by the associative socialism of Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon, Lerous and Proudhon (Defourny and Develtere, 1999; Singer, 2004). The main expressions during this period were cooperatives, mutual societies, and workers associations (Moulaert and Ailenei, 2005).

Utopian socialists and the first cooperative organisations were mobilised by a deep anti-capitalist sentiment and aspirations for social transformation. Robert Owen advocated for a federation of local communities organised in self-reliant cooperatives as mean towards workers liberation. John Francis Bray - for whom mere government changes were not a real alternative - promoted social changes through united workers buying out the means of production via networks of cooperative associations. William Thompson, the founder of Irish socialism, also believed in the capacity of workers collective action and mutual cooperation to achieve their goals, rejected the notion of competition as either an essential element of human nature or necessary for the fulfillment of people’s common needs, and encouraged the creation of cooperatives by trade unions. Jean Jaurès called for a social property in which the assets are collectivized and delivered to the workers for them to manage under specific conditions (Chanial and Laville, 2006; Gambina and Roffinelli, 2011; Miranda Lorenzo, 2011; Ranis, 2016).

The most emblematic case of cooperative organisation during this period was the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers consumption cooperative founded in 1844 in England and considered to be the mother of modern cooperatives. Aiming to be an authentic self-managed organisation and a real tool for a fairer society, this cooperative decided to adopt the principles of democratic control: one-person, one-vote; political and religious neutrality; cooperative education; open and voluntary adhesion (Singer, 2004). Later many cooperatives were to apply the principles implemented by the Pioneers to their own organisation.

Likewise, Karl Marx evinced a favourable view of cooperatives in some of his works. In the ‘Inaugural Address of the International Working Man’s Association’ of 1864, Marx declared:

But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labour over the political economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands”.’ (1936: 439).

In the same paragraph, he continues:

[…] they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labour need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the labouring man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart. (1936: 439-440)

In Volume 3 of Capital, there is a similar approach to the co-operative organisation. For Marx, co-operatives factories symbolized a superior form of production to that of capitalism by liberating workers from their submission to the will of their Masters and by abolishing labour-capital relations.

The co-operative factories of the laborers themselves represent within the old form the first beginnings of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antagonism between capital and labor is overcome within them, although only in the form of making the associated laborers their own capitalists, that is, enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labor. (Marx, 1909: 521)

Those passages show the strategic role Marx ascribes to the cooperative movement as a new way of economic organisation without masters. But if Marx understood the need to confront the wage system under capitalist relations and recognized the value of cooperatives as a counterweight to capital-workers exploitation relations, he reproached the associative socialism of the utopians for allegedly ignoring the class struggle and the conquest of state power as preconditions for workers liberation. If for Marx political and revolutionary action were fundamental, for utopian socialists only experience, training and diffusion of cooperative organisations would lead to workers autonomy (Gambina and Roffinelli, 2011; Ranis, 2016).

Yet utopian socialists ignored not only the role of class struggle but also the possibility of negatives outcomes emerging in collective ownership such as the predominance of the self-interest of the new collective owners at the expense of social needs. Notwithstanding their oversights and misunderstandings, the utopian socialists’ contributions to the cooperative societies model provides concrete alternatives based on mutuality and reciprocity that could be of a great value for the updating of Cuban socialism (Chanial and Laville, 2006).

1.2. Leaving behind workers self-management

Over time, self-management as a principle of economic organisations and a way for workers emancipation was abandoned in practice and theoretical construction. Numerous cooperative organisations gave up the basic principles of participation, democracy and equality of all members and a significant number of cooperatives started to be operated by workers chosen by directors who in turn were chosen by shareholders. Shareholders did not work in the cooperatives and workers were not shareholders (Singer, 2004).

The main objective of cooperative organisations ceased to be the collective ownership of the means of production and workers emancipation through the control of the entire economic process via democratic decision making (Miranda Lorenzo, 2011). According to Paul Singer (2004) the principle of self-management was abandoned by workers practices and struggles due to the reconciliation of the proletariat with the condition of salaried employee in the context of welfare state and full employment. The main objective of the workers became obtaining salaried work, eschewing self-management as a symbol of emancipation.

Many Marxist theorists and most of the 20th century socialist experiences abandoned the ideal of a society of associated workers, focusing instead on the state as sole instrument of transformation. They prioritized state-led planning and control over the means of production to avoid the anarchical production, characteristic of capitalist systems. As a result, they failed to explore the role of workers self-management in the overcoming of workplace alienation.

Bruno Jossa (2005) traces the failure to the scant attention provided by Marxists to the cooperative movement since the Paris Commune. The reasons could be attributed to economic difficulties experienced by the cooperative movement during the 1870s and the increasing equation of socialism with nationalisation of the means of production following the Bolshevik revolution. Marx definitions of cooperatives as firms where associated labourers become ‘their own capitalist’ could also be a factor of rejection of cooperatives by Marxists. In fact, cooperative organisations were seen as parochial groups of people disengaged from social needs, and therefore in contradiction with the idea of a socialist society.

Cuba in some ways is no exception to this reality. After the Revolution, the government implemented a massive nationalisation of the means of production, giving priority to state enterprise. With a reduced role for cooperatives in the economic process, even the agrarian sector was turned into an industry of agricultural workers. The Cuban government came to control more than 70% of the country agricultural land, consolidating thus over time a significant state presence in the island agriculture (Guevara, 2009).

If significant achievements were made towards a more egalitarian society with universal access to health and education, redistribution of land and elimination of illiteracy and unemployment to name a few, the Revolution proved unsuccessful in creating a less alienated working class with workers organising themselves in collectively and democratically run enterprises.

The abandonment of self-management as an emancipatory project and the strengthening of state socialism can be attributed not only to the state but also to the proletariat as well. In contrast with other countries such as Venezuela under the Bolivarian Revolution, the favourable economic conditions in Cuba during the existence of the Soviet Union concealed the state’s inability to guarantee efficient production while dampening popular resistance to the state control. And in this sense, workers accepted the lack of power in return for security and an improvement of conditions of life. As Jacques Marzin (2013) shows in relation to the rural sector, during the agrarian reforms in Cuba agricultural workers from former latifundios (large estates) and capitalist companies did not aspire to access land ownership but instead sought work with dignified wages to satisfy their needs. Workers were more interested in improving their standard of living than owning the means of production.

The revolutionary leadership did not show much interest to workers control as a tool to build socialism either. Rather, they saw the cooperatives as obstacles to economic planning and an egalitarian society. Fidel Castro, for instance, thought state enterprises to be a more advanced mode of production than the cooperative model:

Whenever I speak of higher forms (of production), I have always thought and I still think that state enterprise is the highest. I have always liked the idea that agriculture would develop like industry, and that the rural worker would be like an industrial worker. An industrial worker does not own the industry or the production; he is owner as people, as part of the people he is owner of this industry, as part of the people he is owner of this production. (Castro Ruz, 1982)

Between 1965 and 1966, in his Apuntes críticos a la economía, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara wrote in relations to the Soviet Manual of Political Economy (Yaffe, 2013) that there were no solid arguments to deny that the cooperatives may generate capitalism: ‘Although it has collective tendencies, it is a collective in contradiction with the big collective. If it is not a step towards more advanced forms, it gives way to a capitalist superstructure and produces contradiction with society.’ (Guevara, 2006: 117).

According to Guevara, overcoming this contradiction requires state control of the whole economic process and central planning. These would lead to an egalitarian society and abolish commodity-exchange relations, competition and capitalist profits. His focus on eradicating competition, the market, and exchange-value system led him ignore the role of workers management of the means of production as an essential way to eliminate alienation (Farber, 2016). Thus, he failed to see that the main contribution of cooperative organisations was not the formation of collective property of the means of production but the adoption of a democratic and participatory process for the management of economic organisations – something seems fundamental for non-alienated work.

For Guevara there were no difference between the state’s and workers’ interest in a socialist society. Thus, he expected workers to accept social responsibility and sacrifice themselves for the whole society in spite of their lack of power and participation in the decision-making process. By implementing a hierarchical division of labour with centralised economic planning under state control, the system reproduced the division between doing and thinking of capitalist enterprises, reproducing workers as alienated human beings.

Because Guevara thought that moral incentives had to be the centre of human motivations in the socialist system, he rejected material incentives to stimulate workers. Nevertheless, by excluding workers participation in the economic process, he made workers mere consumers of the goods provided by the state and by doing so work became a means to obtain material benefits and better conditions of life rather than a sphere of self-realisation.

Moreover, a system where the entire responsibility for the well-being of the people is conferred to the state and where workers aspirations for better labour conditions, wages and social rights is not expressed in the workplace may undermine the political support of people to the socialist state as soon as it cannot guarantee social demands.

The Cuban revolutionary government failed to recognize that workers control of the means of production was not just a matter of material versus moral incentives but that it was in itself a political incentive. Responsibility for the production would itself constitute an incentive. In fact, workers may assume their responsibility for the economic process only when they have the power over the process (Farber, 2016).

This situation led to the consolidation of an economic system characterised by the predominance of the state enterprise and administrative centralism with unsatisfactory yields and production due to the absence of spaces for participation, responsibility and initiative of the workers.

1.3. Restoring self-management as a socialist practice

Various models of work organisation combining social ownership and workers management or co-administration of state enterprises have emerged in recent years providing creative alternatives to the state socialism of the last century. These have the potential to overcome workers alienation in capitalist enterprises and in state companies (Cruz Reyes and Piñeiro Harnecker, 2011).

Some of these innovations arising among workers with ambitions for social transformation have combined community participation, workers management and social property forms. By doing so, self-management is no longer limited to the workplace and the collective property but reaches the community and the social property and brings a radicalism to traditional cooperatives. This might help counterbalance issues of self-interest depicted by Guevara and cooperatives members acting as their own capitalists as claimed by Marx.

After the declaration of bankruptcy of many enterprises following the economic crisis of 2001 produced by decades of neoliberal policies in Argentina, a new movement of ‘Empresas Recuperadas por los Tabajadores’ (ERT) - Movement of Recovery Factories - came to life in the country under the slogan: Occupy, Resist and Produce.

Workers of the reclaimed factories saved their jobs by keeping the factory working where the capitalists failed to do so. The workers also understood that their autonomy did not relieve them of social claims. The ERTs orientated their activity towards people needs and developed cultural and educative activities for the surrounding community among other initiatives (Ruggeri, 2011).

Within the movement, the Zanon ceramic, tile and porcelain factory soon became the most emblematic example of democratically run factory: all policies are made through majority decisions, there are no permanent leadership position, the responsibility functions are rotating, leaders and delegates can be revoked, wages differentials are held to a minimum and discrimination for religious or political reasons is prohibited. Not only have Zanon workers kept their jobs by organising the production in a non-capitalist way through the abolition of labour-capital relations or wage system; they have also developed strong and close ties with the surrounding community (Ranis, 2016).

Interestingly, unlike traditional cooperatives, workers of the recovered Zanon factory have advocated for the national ownership of the factory under workers control instead of workers ownership. They have also organized the factory for service to the community and not the market. Similar initiatives have emerged in countries such as France, Spain or Greece in recent years.

Venezuela has become the most important field of experimentation with workers and community participation since the Bolivarian Revolution assumed power. After the failure of an early experience promoting traditional cooperatives at the beginning of the Chavez government, which ended by adopting a capitalist logic of profit maximizations, an innovative process to engage local communities in the economic process was implemented (Azzellini, 2011). Since 2008 the Bolivarian Revolution has been promoting a new model of self-management through the Communal Direct Social Property Enterprises. These are enterprises have social ownership over non-strategic means of production and are directly managed by the workers and community through communal councils and cooperatives. They are meant to take over local services such as transport, electricity and water and, in doing so, they are operating for the satisfaction of social needs (Azzellini, 2013).

These experiences of local self-administration, influenced by the ideas of István Mészáros, are formidable examples of the revival of self-management in socialist practices although supported and accompanied by the state (Azzellini, 2011; Azzellini, 2013). The state is not there to decide over the entire economic process but to facilitate financial and technical resources and guarantee legal conditions.

Experiences such as the comunas in Venezuela or Zanon factory in Argentina demonstrate the emancipatory power of workers participation and show that workers management does not necessarily mean workers acting for their own interest or prioritizing exchange value. On the contrary, they represent innovative spaces for experimentation with non-capitalist forms of production under workers and community control. They also prove the necessity for the state to create a legal and regulatory environment propitious for horizontal coordination from below and community participation in order to guarantee the social responsibility of those organisations (Gambina and Roffinelli, 2011).

Because of their emancipatory potential, we believe that these new practices are of great value to the reform of the Cuban economy. These experiences have revived self-management as a new socialist claim by pushing workers and left organisations beyond the economistic battles for better wages, working conditions and monetary redistribution within hierarchical relations or the inclusion into the labour market of unemployed people. Control of the means of production is the site of the main struggle for real emancipation. They have also contested the notion that state control is the only alternative to capitalist enterprise.

The remarkable Peruvian Marxist Carlos Mariategui (1969) called for a genuine socialism, one that is not a copy of other programs, but an original creation. Beyond Mariategui recognition that there is no universal model and the need for Cuban challenges to be understood in the complexion of their own social and cultural reality, Cuba may nonetheless be inspired by other non-capitalist experiences.

2. Cuban socialism and workers participation

2.1. Workers participation in Cuba since the Revolution

Even if cooperatives are not socialist per se, Eduard Bernsteid claims that ‘as workers' organisations they have in them enough of the socialist element for them to be developed into valuable and indispensable instruments of socialist emancipation’ (1899: 179). In fact, they allow workers to control their own work, decreasing workers alienation (Marcuse, 2015).

The socialisation of the means of production does not guarantee that the workers will have any degree of control over them and that social relations will be deeply altered. On the contrary, workers may remain subject to an institutional hierarchy that restrains their participation in the workplace and reduces their responsibility to the sole completion of tasks assigned to them in exchange for a fixed wage, which negatively impacts the performance of the enterprise.

In Venezuela, this contradiction between workers and state administration in times of the Bolivarian Revolution led to a reinvigorated movement for workers control (Azzellini, 2013). Nevertheless, this was not the case of Cuba where the advantageous relations with the Soviet Union over the course of the Revolution allowed the island to overcome many economic inefficiencies to satisfy basic social needs. This advantageous situation muted resistance to the State control. Nevertheless, the collapse of the Soviet Union highlighted the fragility and dependency of the Cuban economy and also the limit to state administration of the whole economic process. The collapse provided the space for the emergence of an innovative movement of community self-organisation mainly for food production.

Urban residents began to organise themselves to secure their own alimentation by growing food in home gardens, individual or collective plots, balconies, roofs or whichever space available. This popular and autonomous movement of food production developed from below but soon became a governmental programme through the ‘Movimiento de Agricultura Urbana’ - The Urban Farming Movement. It provided land, water and training in organic techniques.

Compared with limits of the state-run companies’ provision food for the people, the urban farms became a formidable demonstration of community self-organisation for the satisfaction of social needs: ‘food production in the neighbourhood, by the neighbourhood and for the neighbourhood’, although supported and accompanied by the state (Altieri et al. 1999; Douzant-Rosenfeld, 1999).

More recently, along with Cuban policies to promote foreign investment and the self-employed sector, there has been a modest emergence of new forms of socialist economic relations that exhibit greater agency by the people in the administration of the productive assets.

This development has been accelerated by the changes introduced in Cuba since the 6th Congress of the ‘Partido Comunista Cubano’ (PCC) - Cuban Communist Party. After an extensive popular consultation, the PCC approved in April 2011 the ‘Lineamientos de las Política Económica y Social del Partido y la Revolución’ – The Guidelines of the Economic and Social Policy Guidelines of the Party and the Revolution. The guidelines underline the need for the reform of the Cuban economic system and make way for the recognition of new forms of property and employment.

With the recognition of other forms of ownership, the Cuban government hoped to solve the developmental inefficiencies by focusing the state property in strategic and essential means of production. This allowed for the emergence of cooperative, private and mixed property promoting both productive development and workers’ motivation.

Historically Cuban Revolution had already experimented cooperative organisation with Cooperativas de Crédito y Servicios (CCS) - Credit and Services Cooperatives - founded in 1960 and the Cooperativas de Producción Agropecuaria (CPA) - Agricultural Production Cooperatives - established in 1970. The CCSs are voluntary associations of small farmers aiming to acquire machinery, agricultural inputs, credits and technical services offered by the state to increase agricultural production. The members of CCSs work individually and privately own the land and the produce (Alvarez, 2004; Gaceta Oficial, 2002). The CPAs, conversely, are formed by independent farmers who after a voluntary decision join their lands and other fundamental means of production (Alvarez, 2004).

After the fall of the Soviet Union, new advances were also made in the agricultural sector through a large-scale decentralisation of land management. This phenomenon arose as an answer to the economic, energy and food crisis known as the Special Period in Time of Peace. These opened the doors to a wide range of self-management experiments and forms of community participation mainly for food production, not only in the countryside, but also in the cities (Hanon, 2015).

This process of land decentralisation gave place to the emergence in Cuba, in 1993, of a new form of cooperative organisation, the Unidades Básicas de Producción Cooperativa (UBPC) - Basic Units of Cooperative Production. The UBPCs seek to improve agriculture production giving farm workers a plot of state land in usufruct for an indefinite period. Inspired by the CPA experience of farmers lands collectivisation, the UBPC’s major innovation is the self-management of state-owned land.

The transformations in Cuban agriculture toward great community participation represented the first step towards a new economic model characterized by the democratization of the production process and the participation of workers in the management of the social property (Hanon, 2015).

Nevertheless, the dismantling of State Farms in the UBPC was not followed by an immediate increase of productivity, profits and wages. These can be attributed to the importance of sales commitments to the state, elevated debt incurred to acquire the means of production in a difficult economic context, a low degree of autonomy due to administrative subordination in the UBPCs early stage, and a weak sense of ownership - understood as decision-making capacity and control of the productive process (Douzant-Rosenfeld, 1999; Nova Gonzalez, 2011).

However, several dynamic cooperatives achieved remarkable results such as the ‘UBPC Organopónico Vivero de Alamar’, an organic urban farm located in Alamar near Havana. Founded by only 5 members in 1997, it currently provides employment to over 150 workers, most of them from the neighbourhood (Fernández Domínguez, Cruz Reyez and Arteaga Hernández, 2007). Managed as a UBPC, the Organopónico represents an innovative collective self-management experience of social property providing the surrounding population with fresh vegetables, ornamental flowers and medicinal plants at affordable prices produced by agro-ecological and sustainable farming methods.

The success of this cooperative derives comes from efficient management and the workers sense of belonging to the unit, both of which are related their model of participatory democracy, management autonomy, and profit sharing. This achievement calls for a thorough reflection on the need to further decentralisation and autonomy in the management of economic units oriented to the creation of use values and governed by principles that are compatible with socialist ideals.

Compared to other initiatives in the world, Cuba offers a rare environment for experimentation with worker-managed enterprises. Having abolished the bourgeois state, its advantages include highly educated population, nationalised means of production, reduced inequality, and social support for building socialism with a greater democracy and community participation in the economy.

In circumstances where workers organisations operate in a capitalist economy, they have to contend with a financial sector controlled by private banks, a competitive environment, the lack of public investment, restricted access to the market, and the unswerving submission to a system dominated by the market that forces workers to self-exploit their labour force. Under such conditions, many self-managed organisations are compelled for their own survival to adopt the capitalist logic and focus their priorities on cost reduction and income generation over job creation and social-needs satisfaction.

On balance, then workers in Cuba have stronger environment for self-management than their counterparts in capitalist countries. However, incorporating new forms of self-management may require further experimentation by organisations that are shaped by the principles of cooperation, social commitment, sustainability, and the ethics and the logic of the reproduction of life. To strengthen the democratic process, this experimentation should be subject to community monitoring and evaluation, so that t may choose what is most appropriate for Cuban economy (Santos, 2009). If this is not the case, the further development of productive forces driven by short-term benefits, competition and capital reproduction to the detriment of people and nature could very well undermine the Revolution. Implementing self-management practices means developing the economy of the country through a socially and ecologically viable model, with higher economic efficiency, in a context of collaboration, dialogue and collective participation which are closer to Cuban socialism principles (Arruda, 2006).

2.2. Cuban socialism at a crossroads: private or cooperative sector?

The construction of socialism under the domination of the state as sole provider of resources and solutions to the problems that affect society had intrinsic problems. On the one hand there is the risk of the constitution of a bureaucratic caste that mobilises to defend its privileges instead of developing socialism – as occurred in the Soviet Union (Lebowitz, 2012; Boron, 2014). On the other hand, the absence of autonomous decentralised instances of the state power, responsible for and involved in the management or co-management of productive resources and the construction of socialism, may result in a passive behaviour from the community, as all problems must be solved solely by the state.

For this reasons, it is necessary to move forward immediately with the renovation of socialism in Cuba, and not back to capitalism. Expending socialism can take the form of a greater role for people in the exercise of collective power in work spaces and to local communities in economic process. Only determining role in process of production invests workers in its results. Reforming the revolution along these lines is consistent with Marx’s speculation in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

Proletarian revolutions, on the other hand, like those of the nineteenth century, criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts… (1936: 319).

Some reforms implemented in recent years may prove counterproductive for the future of the Revolution. To overcome economic difficulties, openness to mixed enterprises and the participation of foreign capital is being contemplated (Boron, 2014). These forms of economic organisation, along with the cuentapropismo - self-employment – currently have a primary role in the reform of the economy to the detriment of the promotion of solidarity-based economy and self-managed organisations.

Foreign companies have been favoured by new investment laws promoting tax benefits. Foreign capital, for instance, can now own an entire enterprise, well beyond the 49% limit of the past. Further, private entrepreneurs or the self-employed are now allowed to hire employees. The government expects that progressive taxes on the use of wage labour and a progressive income tax system will prevent the consolidation of capitalist relations (Ranis, 2016). These foreign investment and self-employment policies are introducing elements in clear contradiction with Cuba’s socialism tradition. In promoting foreign investment, Cuba is accepting the purchase of labour power and empowering capitalists with the right to command workers in the labour process.

Are those economic actors – motivated by self-interest and profit maximization – the only alternative to address the dysfunctions of state ownership and over-centralisation? What are its implications for those who believe and struggle for socialism in Cuba? Will they continue to sacrifice themselves for a system that now allows, accepts and even encourages a private sector based on profit maximizations? Could Cuba expect a self-managed sector to take care of the rest of the society while approving at the same time the development of a self-oriented sector with the capacity to hire labour and be guided by the law of value, income maximization, and capital accumulation?

Even if the island’s socialist logic dominates, the economic reforms to attract foreign investment and the promotion of individual entrepreneurship are distorting a reward system based on solidarity and cooperation with one of competition and self-interest. It is creating a more unequal society to the detriment of the fixed-income jobs of the public sector, ironically held by the most committed supporters of the Revolution. Because these reforms may undermine such support, the development of new spaces for workers participation under non-capitalist mode of production as a more complementary alternative for the reform of Cuban socialism.

While some difficulties and inconsistencies with socialist principles may arise in the self-managed sector, a kind of work organisation where capital-labour relations have been overcome by associative work must be prioritized over economic entities based on workers subordinations to the owners of capital.

The positive results of Cuban cooperative organisations such as the ‘Vivero de Alamar’ which – as soon as the government guaranteed more autonomy – achieved waste reduction, better product quality and higher productivity suggests that hierarchical relations causes inefficiency and not the absence of market economy relations (Fernández Domínguez, Cruz Reyez and Arteaga Hernández, 2007). In fact, even capitalist enterprises are experimenting with democratic management processes obtain to higher levels of workers motivation. This suggests that participation may be key to achieving better economic results (Piñeiro Harnecker, 2011).

In this regard, cooperative organisations under workers control could provide an alternative to solve the economic problems of the island within the framework of socialism. Nevertheless, in order to avoid workers reproducing the logic of capital, enterprises under workers control should apply mechanisms of citizen control and community participation in economic planning, dissociate labour and capital income, and limit the distribution of benefits among members.

2.3. New path towards associated producers in Cuba

Since the end of the Soviet Union with its ramifications for Cuban economy, the island has been recovering, defending its revolution and searching for its own new way towards an effective socialism without betraying its historical commitments. Bonaventura de Sousa Santo (2009, 6) noted the trade-offs of recovery process, “…the long-term temporality of civilization change must for a while be subordinated to the immediate temporality of urgent solutions”. Cuba’s biggest challenge is to solve its issues in a socialist way, in order to satisfy social needs but also create the conditions for a greater participation of people. The United States of America’s hostility and the end of the Soviet Union pressed Cuba to focus on the resistance to and the negation of the old world, in detriment to the socialist experimentation with diverse alternatives towards the construction of the new world.

In recent years, the government has slowly embraced workers cooperatives in its public discourse by way of the Lineamientos de las Política Económica y Social del Partido y la Revolución – Economic and Social Policy Guidelines for the Party and the Revolution – formulated at the 6^th Congress of the Communist Party in 2011. Along with the focus on foreign investment, the document included five specific guidelines concerning the cooperatives, spreading these organisations to new economic sectors, creating the Cooperativas No Agropecuarias (CNA) - Non-Agricultural Cooperatives -.

Following these guidelines, the Decree Law N°305, in November 2012, brought further support for the development of CNAs (Gaceta Oficial de la República de Cuba, 2012). According to this Decree Law, the cooperatives are based on the following principles: voluntarism, cooperation and mutual assistance, collective decision and equal rights among partners, autonomy and economic sustainability, cooperative discipline, social responsibility, contribution to the planned economic development and to the welfare of the cooperative members and their families.

The main purpose attributed by the government to CNAs is the production of goods and services for the satisfaction of social needs and cooperative members interests through the promotion of more decentralised decision-making, a stronger sense of ownership and increased solidarity among members. Such cooperatives are authorized in the following sectors: trade and gastronomy, sale of agricultural products, construction, transport and auxiliary services (like car upholstery, for instance), small industry, accounting services, recycling and energy.

These CNA cooperatives assume all cost and profits achieved and can be formed by combining assets of members or with the means of production of the state patrimony taken in usufruct, leased, or any other legal form which does not imply transference of property. Most of the CNAs are, in fact, created with state patrimony (Vuotto, 2016).

Their full development is limited by The complexity of regulations, the lack of inputs, and inadequate information dissemination about the policy itself and the new regulations. In addition, the training given to the new cooperative members has generally been centred on legal and accounting issues, neglecting the development of the cooperative culture.

Nevertheless, greater workers management and control of the workplace would lead to increasing democratisation but also efficiency. That cooperative organisation increases the sense of belonging, the quality of products and/or services, the incomes, the motivation and the teamwork, is suggested by the fact that only a few of the CNAs have experienced losses. Indeed, Ojeda Suris (2015) suggests that resources are used more efficiently as members of the cooperative protect the means of production and prevent their diversion.

In this context, self-management is a feasible alternative to the traditional state-oriented socialist system, providing a greater participation of workers in the administrations of the economic entities while promoting the development of individual and collective capacities, and promoting a complementarity between the appropriation and redistribution by a central authority and the appropriation and redistribution within the economic organisations themselves.

Thus, Cuba could move towards a socialism of self-managed economic units, oriented by the reproduction of life of the whole society and not of capital, thanks to the potential for convergence between the state action and the self-organisation of the community and the workers.

For the redefinition of the economic organisation of Cuba toward a greater autonomy for the economic entities to succeed, a politics of education around the cooperative culture as a model of work, management and social development is needed. A cooperative education needs to be oriented not only to the current workers but to the universities, primary and secondary students through study programs. The cooperative spirit does not emerge spontaneously, but involves educating youth and workers about cooperation, social responsibility, use-value creation, protection of nature, social-needs satisfaction and new horizontal, democratic and participative models of economic administration (Singer, 1998; Coraggio, 2013; Lopez and Buffo, 2015; Vuotto, 2016).

2.4. The imperative for a redefinition of the state’s role

Rethinking socialism from the principles of self-management expands the range of possibilities. It gets beyond mere resignation to capitalist measures as the “update” of the Cuban system and its central State as a response to regulating and planning an economy with low levels of worker participation.

Promoting self-management requires the mobilisation of new reasoning and economic practices that are non-capitalist, yet non-state centred. It implies new relations of production, appropriation and distribution under an ethic of caring for life that favours economic democratization (Gibson-Graham, 2006).

As implied earlier, a participatory socialist society calls for a diversity of associative and cooperative forms of self-management and co-management of the productive resources under various forms of collective or social property (Coraggio, 2011). This opens spaces for sustainable experiments, autonomous work, community planning and self-organisation of neighbourhoods.

Nonetheless, the modification of the productive matrix of the country does not erase the role of the state in the economy in the way that neoliberalism promotes. Self-management should not be a movement against the state but a new combination of different instances of deliberation and participation, from specific, centralised areas of decision-making to a more active roles for local communities in the definition and organisation of the economic process.

The promotion of self-administrated entities requires the intervention of the state. It must fulfil its functions of progressively redistributing resources and revenues, channelling these toward essential investments for the development of the country. It should also control strategic and vital means of production. These state functions can be combined with multiple forms of property, management and appropriation of surplus in other economic areas, yet this involves a proper division of decision possibilities at each level, from local to national.

The implementation of new forms of management can encompass local-level strategies such as participatory budgeting or participatory strategic planning to strengthen democracy and increase the role of community in economic planning – allowing for the re-absorption of state power by the community (Coraggio, 2014).

Also, the adoption of self-management to “update” socialism demands the public implementation of institutional material as well as legal, financial and technical support (Chaves and Monzon, 2003). Self-managed entities need to be legally and institutionally recognized as economic actors and partners in the creation and application of public policies. As for the material, technical and financial support, budget policies and public organisations ought to be created to provide such support and promote cooperative incubation.

The State may play a fundamental role not only in the redistribution of incomes but also of productive resources to be managed by workers. State institutions could create public contracts that take into consideration self-managed actors as providers of the public administration needs. Award these actors the right to operate and provide goods and services essential to the public could be governed by contractual relationships. Further, contracts between state institutions and self-managed organisations could include environmental provisions or other clauses of general interest (Chaves and Monzon, 2003; Defourny and Nyssens, 2011).

The opening to new forms of economic experimentation must be combined with an active role for the state in securing universal access to health and education, protecting the people from social and environmental risks, and maintaining low levels of inequities, and even limiting inordinate accumulation - even the context of social property under workers management could lead to inequalities in revenue as Lebowitz (2015) points out.

Moving forward with the decentralisation of the state functions and the consolidation of an economic system based on self-management requires non-state, socially-responsible economic units that favour the creation of use value and take responsibility for the collective well-being. Without solidarity between these non-state enterprises and the community, self-management cannot guarantee the success of the economic transformation because these entities might focus on their own benefits and against the interests of society as a whole.

According to Lebowitz (2015), this is precisely the situation that obtained in Yugoslavia. Solidarity would grow within self-managed enterprises, but not with the community outside the enterprise walls. In fact, even if self-management offers an alternative to hierarchy, the matter is not only who manages the means of production but also towards what purpose. Nevertheless, the failure of the Yugoslavian experience is not to be attributed to workers self-management per se but to the implementation of a market self-management model focused on profit maximization. As a result, workers were put into competition with one another, aggravating of inequalities and discouraging solidarity.

The Yugoslavian experiences do not vitiate the claims for self-management. To the contrary, these invite close attention to the problems that emerged. Solutions involve establishing limits to the redistribution of benefits (within enterprises) to minimize opportunistic behaviour focused purely on profit maximization, promoting community processes for policy deliberation, democratizing control over the new self-administrated entities, and creating an environment for cooperation between self-managed organisations.

Conclusion: Expanding Worker-Community Cooperation

State ownership of the means of production within a hierarchical structure keeps workers alienated. For this reason, this article has encouraged Cuban socialism to experiment with new forms of workers participation and workers control over their work. The aim is to minimize their alienation and emancipate them from any forms of subordination. Different combinations of workers participation, collective ownership, and workplace organisation exist. Cuba should find those best adapted to the characteristics of Cuban socialism. As Cuban government did several times, a process of popular consultation may be launched in order to define new forms and structures of workers management.

Self-managed organisations have demonstrated themselves to be an ideal way for redefining social relations and democratising the economic sphere. Nevertheless, if self-managed organisations prove that workers can run factories themselves without capitalists; horizontal relations and solidarity will not necessarily spread to the rest of the society.

This is why the incorporation of these new economic actors must be followed by an increased control over the productive process by the community. This control is necessary to collectively define the processes of production, distribution and consumption of such goods and services as are democratically identified to be fundamental to the well-being of the entire society. As the foregoing conversation has suggested (following Lebowitz, 2012a), the creation of communal councils may help with this identification process. In these councils, neighbours can directly define their needs, identify the resources and productive capacities available in the territory, and discuss the economic model. Greater autonomy for the local community with its active participation in the design of new ways of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of good and services may allow an increased level of autarchy, understood as the capacity of the community to satisfy its need with its own resources (Coraggio, 2011).

Then, those instances of planning at the local level should be combined with mechanisms of democratic planning at the regional and national level. By doing so, the implementation of bodies of community participation may allow the identification of supply excesses at the local level and/or needs which cannot be satisfied with the resources of the respective community. The information obtained at the local level could be then submitted by delegates to discussions at the national level. In this way, a satisfactory coordination between needs and capacities could be implemented, minimizing territorial inequalities, establishing priorities, and guaranteeing the well-being of the whole society.

To promote community participation, various mechanisms can be explored and combined. For example, spaces can be organized for community monitoring, evaluating alternatives, and local-level deliberation. These may assist with the allocation of public funds to develop policies aimed at resolving social problems identified by members of the community (De Jesus, 2006).

The reorganisation of state power for greater community autonomy and workers participation calls upon the consolidation of instances of inter-community reciprocity, the articulation of cooperatives from different geographic areas, and the redistribution of assets by a central authority to address unequal material conditions between regions and between self-managed organisations.

We do not believe the role of the state in the economic process will disappear, but it needs to be redirected toward strategic economic areas, to be active in the reductions of emerging inequalities, and to be promoter of a framework for collaboration and solidarity. Furthermore, the implementation of a socialism of self-managed organisations requires the continuous development of the social and political conscious of the workers and people education about cooperation as model of work and economic organisation.

Unlike other countries dominated by capitalist relations of production and reproduction that determine the general logic of development, Cuba is an ideal setting for experimenting with new forms of self-management and workers participation that may solve key economic problems within a socialist framework and contribute to the renovation of the twenty-first century left.

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