Sunday, November 24, 2013

Vladimir Ilich Maduro, and the New Venezuelans at Work

If this, from El Universal, sounds familiar;
Centralization and control. The measures announced by President Nicolás Maduro involve stepping up the socialist model the government has been trying to implement since 1999.
The National Foreign Trade Corporation (whose establishment has not yet been published in the Official Gazette) will be the agency in charge of administrating foreign exchange for the public and private sectors.
The Foreign Exchange Administration Board (Cadivi), the Ancillary Foreign Currency Administration System (Sicad), the Foreign Trade Bank (Bancoex), public banks, as well as a corporation that will tend to public and private imports, will all be under the command of the National Foreign Trade Corporation.
Furthermore, the government aims at updating the record of private businesses that apply for US dollars and at centralizing imports. Maduro wants to go further still by deciding what goods will be imported and whether they can be brought into the country at a lower cost.
....The socialist economic model defined by the government some years ago is intent on reducing the role of the private sector in order to give way to new forms of social property. Accordingly, the private enterprises themselves must be transformed.
It's because it's known to Marxists as 'The Transformation Problem' (apparently, for Maduro, la transformación no es ningún problema). It has been one of the most embarrassing errors in logic for the true believers in the Labor Theory of Value ever since. As Lenin put it, ad nauseum;

The appearance on the historical stage of a new class in the role of a leader of society never occurs on the one hand without a period of upheavals, struggles and storms, on the other hand, without a period of false steps, experiments, wavering and hesitation with regard to the choice—of new methods that will fit the new objective circumstances. The perishing feudal nobility took revenge on the bourgeoisie, which was conquering and displacing it, not only by conspiracies, attempts at insurrections and restoration, but also by torrents of ridicule at the inability, clumsiness and blunders of the “insolent upstarts” who dared to take hold of the “sacred helm” of the state without the ancient training of the princes, barons, nobility and aristocracy for this work—quite like the revenge of the Kornilovs and Kerenskys; Gotz and Martovs,[10] and other heroes of bourgeois morality or bourgeois skepticism, on the working class of Russia for its “insolent” attempt to seize power.

Of course, many months and years must pass before the new social class, a class heretofore oppressed and crushed by want and ignorance, can get accustomed to the new situation, can take account of everything, regulate its work and produce its own organizers. It is self-evident that the party, which leads the revolutionary proletariat, could not have gained experience in organizing large enterprises including millions and tens of millions of citizens; that to change the old habits of agitation must take a good deal of time. But it is not impossible, and—provided we have a clear understanding of the necessity of the change, a firm determination to accomplish it, and persistence in pursuing a great and difficult end—we will attain it. There is a great deal of organizing talent in the “people”; i. e., among the workers and among the peasants who are not exploiters; they have been oppressed, ruined and discarded in thousands by capitalism; we do not as yet know how to find them, how to encourage, assist them and give them prominence. But we will learn how, provided we start learning this with all the revolutionary zeal, without which no revolution can be victorious.

1 comment:

  1. Step 1: List all of the needed and desirable functions and products in society. Establish slogans and goals.

    Step 2: Build office buildings, assign rooms, and install desks and chairs for the new managers to be selected.

    Step 3: Nationalize the employment and job search agencies.

    Setp 4: Take resumes and accept the best from among the loyal, installing a few in each of the rooms.

    Step 5: Exhort them all to revolutionary greatness!

    Step 6: ????

    Step 7: Welcome an amazing utopia where all want has been abolished.

    - -
    Wags have unfairly and mindlessly compared this approach to an episode from the cartoon series "South Park".
    Underpants Gnomes:
    (1) Collect underpants.
    (2) ???
    (3) Reap huge profits.
    (See the video starting from 17:35. Sorry for the 30 second commercial.)

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