****************************************************************************************************** Socialism Without the Workers: Cuba's "Transformation," the Value-Form, and the Politics of From Below ******************************************************************************************************
The largest restructuring of the Cuban economy since 1959 was decided in a week, by unanimous show of hands, over the heads of the class in whose name it was passed. The blockade strangling the island is an imperialist crime that must be opposed without condition. Neither fact obliges socialists to lend the Havana bureaucracy political confidence. On 18 June 2026, in a special session of Cuba's National Assembly summoned six days earlier and concluded in a single afternoon, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero presented 176 measures in a speech of nearly two hours. They were adopted by unanimous show of hands. The session closed with President Miguel Díaz-Canel intoning the old slogan—"Socialism or death!"—over a package that a London-based Cuban economist described, without much exaggeration, as the most profound transformation of the island's model since the revolution itself. The contents are not modest. The reforms remove the cap on the number of workers a private enterprise may employ, authorize private banks and non-state exchange houses, open formerly reserved sectors to foreign direct investment, permit foreign investors to operate without forming joint ventures with the state, allow Cuban and foreign capital to acquire equity stakes in state companies, open the door to private real estate development, and—most pointedly—end the universal subsidized basic basket established in 1962, restricting it henceforth to retirees and those officially designated vulnerable. Raúl Castro, participating by video conference while under U.S. indictment, sent a written letter to the Politburo and the Assembly calling the measures "beneficial" and urging their rapid implementation. The official framing insists nothing has changed in essence. "We are not renouncing socialism," Díaz-Canel told the deputies; what is at stake, he said, is "the dilemma of how to continue the process of socialist construction" under the longest blockade in history. Marrero was more precise in the idiom of administration: the measures "do not constitute a deviation from our socialist project; on the contrary, they respond to its development." A University of Havana economist was more candid still on state television, conceding that the reforms will produce inequality—some will gain access to money and wealth, he said, while others will not—and that this is the unavoidable consequence of changing how the economy is managed. We should take all three of these men at their word, though not in the way they intend. The reforms are indeed not a deviation from the Cuban project; they are its clarification. And the inequality the regime now concedes as a regrettable side effect is not an accident of the new "tools and instruments" but the necessary social form of the relation Cuban planning never abolished. To see why requires setting down the campist lens through which the Western left habitually reads Havana, and picking up three others: the critique of the value-form, the third-camp tradition, and Hal Draper's distinction between the two souls of socialism. ------------------------------------------------- What the value-form lens sees that campism cannot ------------------------------------------------- The campist reflex—and it is a reflex, not an analysis—reads the June package as a tragic but understandable retreat: a beleaguered workers' state, strangled by imperialism, forced to readmit the market it had banished. On this account the reforms measure the distance Cuba has been pushed away from socialism by external pressure, and the appropriate socialist response is sorrow plus solidarity. The premise beneath the sorrow is that Cuban planning had, prior to June 2026, transcended the law of value, and that what we are now watching is value's reintroduction. This premise is false, and the value-form tradition—Backhaus, Bonefeld, Postone, Heinrich—explains why. Value, on this reading, is not a quantity of wealth that a state can hold, hoard, or hand out. It is a social form of labor: the specific way in which the labor of private, mutually independent producers is retroactively validated as social only through the exchange of its products. Where labor is divided among separate units of production that relate to one another through the products they exchange—and where those products must therefore take the money-form to count as social wealth—the value-form is present, whatever the juridical ownership of the units. Nationalization changes the name on the title deed. It does not, by itself, abolish the social form of labor. Cuba's economy never escaped that form. It produced for the world market; it priced its exports in convertible currency; it disciplined its labor through the wage; it measured the success of its own enterprises in money. The bureaucratic command apparatus did not stand outside value relations directing a freely associated producers' plan—it stood inside them as a collective intermediary, a single national capital confronting the world market and confronting its own working class as the buyer of their labor-power. The dollar was always the real measure of social wealth on the island; the libreta and the universal subsidy were use-value provisions grafted onto a value economy, not evidence that value had been overcome. Read this way, the June reforms are not the readmission of a banished market but the more open assertion of a value relation that was always operative. When state companies are now permitted to participate directly in the foreign-exchange market and to set their own wage systems, when the universal subsidy is replaced by targeted cash transfers to the "vulnerable," when enterprises are reconstituted as joint-stock ventures with equity stakes—the law of value is not entering the building. It is being allowed to speak in its own voice rather than through the ventriloquism of the plan. The "shift from subsidizing products to subsidizing people" is the textbook movement from direct use-value allocation toward monetized, marketized distribution. Commodification is advancing, yes—but under bureaucratic management, by administrative fiat, exactly as it was managed before. The blockade accelerates this, and here the value-form lens and the anti-imperialist one converge rather than conflict. By strangling the island's use-value circuits—oil, medicine, food, electricity—Washington forces the regime to chase ever more desperately the one thing that can pierce the siege: hard currency, value in its money-form. The reforms are the regime reorganizing the whole society around the production of exchangeable value, because exchangeable value is what the blockade has made scarce. Imperialism and marketization are not opposites here. The first is producing the second. The campist cannot see this because campism mistakes the legal form of property for the social form of labor. It counts state ownership as socialism and the market as capitalism, and so can only narrate June 2026 as a fall. The value-form tradition counts neither: it asks whether the producers have collectively mastered their own social labor, or whether their labor still confronts them as an alien power mediated by money and the wage. In Cuba it always did. That is the unsentimental content of "not a deviation but a development." ------------------------------------------------------ Neither Washington nor Havana: the third camp restated ------------------------------------------------------ If the value-form analysis dissolves the campist romance, it does not for one moment soften the indictment of imperialism—and this is where the third-camp tradition earns its keep, because it is the only position that can hold both truths at once without collapsing into either apologia. The blockade is an imperialist atrocity. Following the U.S. ouster of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuelan oil—as much as half of Cuba's fuel supply—was cut off; an executive order then threatened tariffs against any country shipping oil to the island, globalizing the siege. By mid-2026 the Cuban energy ministry announced the country had simply run out of diesel and fuel oil. The human toll, as documented by international monitors and on-the-ground reporting, falls precisely where collective punishment always falls: rising infant mortality, food production collapsed by well over half, medicine at a fraction of normal supply, daily blackouts of twenty to forty hours, nearly nine in ten families in extreme poverty. Journalists in Havana have named it accurately as the collective punishment of a population, weighing heaviest on the poor, the pregnant, the children, and the old. Layered atop this is the indictment of Raúl Castro on the Maduro template, open musing from the White House about "taking over" the island, and civil-defense preparations for a possible invasion. This is regime-change imperialism in its most naked form, and the duty of socialists—above all socialists in the United States—is to oppose it flatly, unconditionally, without waiting for Havana to earn our defense by good behavior. The third-camp tradition of Draper and Shachtman was built precisely to make this distinction sayable. Its formula is not "a plague on both houses," the lazy caricature its detractors prefer. It is this: we defend the Cuban people against imperialism without lending political support to the bureaucracy that rules them. The object of our solidarity is the seven million working people of the island, not the apparatus that decides their fate by unanimous show of hands. Defending Cuba means defending them—their lives, their sovereignty, their right to determine their own future free of both the Marines and the planners. It does not mean ratifying the claim of Díaz-Canel and Marrero to embody that future. And the most telling detail in the whole June episode is precisely a third-camp detail: the conspicuous absence of the working class as a subject. In the reform package, workers appear in exactly two guises—as wage-recipients whose wages enterprises will now set with greater "flexibility," and as "vulnerable people" to be subsidized by targeted transfer. They appear nowhere as authors. The same population that the state arms for a "war of the entire population," that Díaz-Canel summons to give their lives for the revolution, is trusted to die for the economy but not to govern it. That asymmetry is the signature of the social order the value-form analysis describes: a class that is everywhere as labor-power and nowhere as power. -------------------------------------------------- Draper's two souls, and the criterion that matters -------------------------------------------------- Here Hal Draper supplies the decisive instrument. In The Two Souls of Socialism he cut the entire socialist tradition along a single axis—not reform versus revolution, not gradual versus violent, but from above versus from below. Socialism-from-above is emancipation delivered to the masses by a benevolent elite that knows their interests better than they do: the enlightened bureaucrat, the technocratic planner, the vanguard substituting itself for the class. Socialism-from-below is the self-emancipation of the working class, the principle that the liberation of the workers must be the act of the workers themselves, or it is not liberation at all. By this criterion—the only criterion that finally matters—the Cuban state has always been an instance of socialism-from-above, and the June package is socialism-from-above renovating itself toward the market without ever, at any point, becoming self-emancipation. The reforms were announced by the president on the 12th, blessed by the Politburo on the 17th, and rubber-stamped by the Assembly on the 18th: a three-step cadence inside a single week, the class informed of the result. Whether the old model was more statist or the new one more market-oriented is, from the standpoint of from-below, a quarrel between two managers over how best to administer a population. Neither pole returns power to the producers. Draper's point was exactly that the property form is not the question; the locus of power is the question. A nationalized economy run over the heads of the workers is not their state, and a marketizing economy run over the same heads is no improvement in the dimension that counts, however the welfare arithmetic shakes out. Draper's companion polemics sharpen the edge. In his work on the myth of bureaucratic "Leninism" and on the dictatorship of the proletariat, he insisted that a workers' state without workers' rule is a contradiction in terms—that when the Party and the security-economic apparatus substitute themselves for the class, what results is not the rule of the proletariat but the rule of an administrative stratum over it. The Cuban case furnishes the image almost too neatly: GAESA, the military-linked conglomerate threaded through nearly every sector of the economy, is both the regime's commanding economic height and, now, a designated target of U.S. sanctions. The same apparatus that administers the workers' labor administers the "transformation" of its terms. The deputy who confessed the reforms were overdue, delayed by "a lack of consensus," was describing a consensus among administrators, not a deliberation among producers. What follows, for Draper, is not paralysis but precision. The correct posture is uncompromising opposition to the blockade and the threatened intervention— combined with zero political confidence in either Díaz-Canel's "transformation" or Washington's promised "freedom." Both are programs of socialism-from-above for Cuba: one administered from Havana, one to be administered from Miami and the State Department. The only outcome a socialist can actually advocate is the one neither offers—an outcome the Cuban working class wins for itself. ------------------------------ The conjuncture, and the wager ------------------------------ Put the three lenses together and the shape of the moment becomes clear. The value-form analysis tells us the "opening" is less a betrayal of socialism than a clarification of what the Cuban economy always was—a national capital confronting its workers and the world market, now reorganizing openly around the production of exchangeable value because the blockade has made value scarce. The third-camp tradition tells us to oppose that blockade absolutely while refusing the bureaucracy our political confidence, because our solidarity belongs to the island's working people and not to the apparatus that legislates their lives by unanimous hand. And Draper tells us the criterion by which to judge every party to the conflict: not what they own, but who decides—and that by this measure both Havana's plan and Washington's market are species of rule from above. The danger of the conjuncture is that the immense desperation now accumulating on the island—the families in extreme poverty, the forty-hour blackouts, the Cubans who say openly that even a war would at least end the suffering—will be drained into one of three dead ends: into emigration, into exhausted endurance, or into a U.S.-sponsored "transition" that hands the island's workers from one master to another. The wager of socialism-from-below is that there is a fourth possibility, and that it is the only one worth the name: independent working-class organization on the island, capable of defending Cuba against the empire and of contesting the bureaucracy's monopoly on deciding Cuba's future. Whether that possibility is live is not something a writer in the United States can declare from a distance. But naming it is the precondition of everything else, because the other three outcomes will be named loudly enough by Washington and Havana both. "Socialism or death," the Assembly chanted, ratifying the largest marketization in sixty years. The value-form tradition lets us hear what the slogan conceals: that the socialism in question was always a particular way of administering value, and that the choice on offer in June 2026 was never socialism versus capitalism but one form of capital's rule versus another. The third camp lets us refuse that choice without abandoning the island to the Marines. And Draper lets us remember why we refuse it—because the emancipation of the Cuban working class, if it is to mean anything, will have to be the act of the Cuban working class, and no decree of the National Assembly, however unanimous, can be that act on its behalf. [Draft for LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal. Figures and events as of late June 2026.] -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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