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Category: Economics

Ernesto “Che” Guevara: A Rebel Against Soviet Political Economy

We reproduce this article, despite our disagreements with its conclusions about “Cuban socialism,” for its insights and research into Che Guevara’s economic thought. – ML Currents Editorial Board. by Helen Yaffe In January 1962 Guevara told colleagues in Cuba’s Ministry of Industries (MININD): “In no way am I saying that financial autonomy of the enterprise with moral incentives, as it is established in the socialist countries, is a formula which will impede progress to socialism.” [1] He was referring to the economic management system applied in the Soviet bloc, known in Cuba as the Auto-Financing System (AFS). By 1966, in his…

Che Guevara and the Political Economy of Socialism

by Rafael Martinez Che Guevara is widely known to the world as the romantic-idealist revolutionary. The economic thought of Che Guevara has not really been widely publicised as the Argentinean born revolutionary is commonly known for his works on the guerrilla warfare, whose underlying idealist and voluntarist approaches to the struggle of the oppressed masses against capitalism and imperialism have been exposed and rejected altogether by the Marxist-Leninists. It is most appropriate, however, to pay special attention to Guevara’s economic works, as his contribution to the economic transformation of Cuba during the early stages of the revolutionary process was central…

Alienation: The Pain of All Working People

by Francis Isolde Any person who is conscious at any level of what happens in the world, from occurrences within their immediate surroundings to larger forces driving political economy in one nation-state or many, must comprehend that there is something wrong. Working men and women who toil day in and day out to make ends meet for themselves and their loved ones understand this feeling of “wrongness” particularly acutely. As well, we are separated from one another, made to feel that we cannot trust in and rely on one another, and an essential loneliness follows from this. There is something…

The Market Under Socialism

ALLIANCE May 2005 Introductory Note With the permission of the Committee of the Stalin Society, I am circulating to members a statement on the present situation in Albania by another former Secretary of the Albanian Society and myself. An Albanian translation is being circulated underground by Albanian Marxist—Leninists. I am taking the opportunity at the same time to circulate a clarification and amplification of the points I made in the discussion which followed Ella Rule’s excellent paper on Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR’. THE MARKET UNDER SOCIALISM by W. B. Bland Is there a Market under Socialism?…