The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

[Ibon]

Something I wrote on this topic back in March post984998.html?hilit=Cuba#p984998

I would like to take this opportunity to thank AmericanDream for his thoughtful posts. I don't agree all the time with what you say but your singular focus on capitalism and how it is churning out a world of self indulgent consumers is very compelling.

I do think you are giving capitalism to much credit though. I suspect the day will arrive when we will be collectively celebrating community values and look back at this era of capitalism as a dismal failure. Maybe we will even start to do that before capitalism takes us all the way to the end game of our self indulgence. I sure hope so.

[americandream]

Universal prosperity as in, an unremitting exhaustion of the earths resource base by way of annual growth premised consumerism, and communism, in the same breath, is an oxymoron. A communal order that revolves around American style object fetishism is not communalism, notwithstanding what mental gymnastics one may subject oneself to. By the very nature of its anti-commercialism, communist prosperity MUST, as a matter of fact, be of a different, less opulent magnitude.

Grasp this simple fact and you grasp the dialectic nature of systems.

I also anticipate the eventual failure of Cuba. For the same reasons China and the USSR failed. We daily beam them images of the life of aplenty in the midst of their simplicity and hey, what do you expect.

The original premise of socialism is that capitalism is inefficient and socialized government ownership of the means of production and centralized planning would produce an economy that would make the people richer.

That didn't work out so well. Communist China and the USSR were much poorer then the west. Communist Cuba is not only poorer then surrounding countries now.....its much poorer than Cuba was back in 1959 before the socialists took over.

Its hardly the fault of capitalism that socialism failed to produce universal properity as promised by the socialists.

[efarmer]

americandream wrote:
"By the very nature of its anti-commercialism, communist prosperity MUST, as a matter of fact, be of a different, less opulent magnitude."

<end of quote>

Q. What are you drinking Joe?

A. I'm having a bottle of People's Prosperity Light, it's got that big prosperity taste, but is less filling and it removes the toxic opulence that Capitalist injects in their brew, and gives you just a tad more flatulence to share with your comrades.

Q. It looks very similar to Capitalist's new Austerity Magnum Grande, but in a much plainer bottle.

A. True, but Austerity Magnum Grande is an unsustainable beer, People's Prosperity can continue to churn out 4 tenths of a bottle per every productive communal worker on a weekly basis, as well as build up a surplus in good grain harvest years.

Q. So you think I should give it a try?

A. In the old days, I would pull off a shoe and beat on the bar to make the pitch, but now
I figure for every week you turn a People's Prosperity Light down, I am 4 tenths of a bottle
closer to sucking the foam from an ice cold Prosperity Light, maybe even with a chaser of Worker's Paradise.

[Plantagenet]

efarmer has picked out the "money quote" ---thats for sure!

By the very nature of its anti-commercialism, communist prosperity MUST, as a matter of fact, be of a different, less opulent magnitude.

I travelled quite a bit in both the USSR before it collapsed and in communist China* before it allowed capitalism and I still travel there---I'm going back to China in the fall. You are quite right that communist "prosperity" was of a "different, less opulent magnitude" then western prosperity. The average person was much much poorer in both socialist societies then in adjacent capitalist countries. This pattern continues today with socialist Cuba and socialist North Korea.

Socialist economics failed in its promise to create greater prosperity then Capitalism---thats why the USSR collapsed and Communist China gave up on socialism.

However, the new system of state-owned capitalism in China is currently out-competing private capitalism in the west-----perhaps this new hybrid Chinese "state capitalism" system is the wave of the future? Its successfully taken China from a society of rural peasants and urban workers in Mao jackets riding bicycles to a very affluent society with ritzy shopping malls and SUVs in the cities inside a vast country filled with rural villages where rural peasants still plow with water buffalo.