The Cooperative as a Proletarian Corporation: The Global Dimensions of Property Rights and the Organization of Economic Activity in Cuba

Since the 1970s, the relationship between productive property, and the state and individual has been contested in Marxist-Leninist nations. Though China has moved to permit robust private activity and the private aggregations of capital in corporate form, Cuba has strictly adhered to traditional communist principles. In the face of recent financial upheavals, Cuba is seeking to liberalize its approach to economic organization, but in a way that would retain a state monopoly of the use of the corporate form while opening a small and well-managed consumer oriented private sector. Among the most innovative alternatives being developed is the cooperative, which has the potential to develop into a useful form of what this Article calls a proletarian corporation. But innovation faces substantial hurdles. This Article examines in Part II the context for the development of this new approach to cooperative organization. Part III then turns to a close study of the cooperative and its constraints, starting with a consideration of the agricultural cooperative as template for changes. It then turns to a critical consideration of the development of a theoretical basis for changing the function and operation of cooperatives developed by Cuban intellectuals, and ends with an examination of the transposition of that theory into the guidelines for restructuring the Cuban economy (Lineamientos) adopted by the Cuban government, and then articulated through a regulatory framework. Part IV then briefly considers the role of the cooperative in efforts to internationalize the Cuban economic model through vehicles such as the Alianza Bolivariana. This Article concludes that while the cooperative fits nicely within Cuba’s efforts to develop a complex and well-integrated program of economic organization, its theoretical elegance remains in tension with the realities of Cuban politics. This tension increases the risk that cooperatives will be reduced to little more than a means of privatizing central planning

The Cooperative as a Proletarian Corporation: The Global Dimensions of Property Rights and the Organization of Economic Activity in Cuba

Since the 1970s, the relationship between productive property, and the state and individual has been contested in Marxist-Leninist nations. Though China has moved to permit robust private activity and the private aggregations of capital in corporate form, Cuba has strictly adhered to traditional communist principles. In the face of recent financial upheavals, Cuba is seeking to liberalize its approach to economic organization, but in a way that would retain a state monopoly of the use of the corporate form while opening a small and well-managed consumer oriented private sector. Among the most innovative alternatives being developed is the cooperative, which has the potential to develop into a useful form of what this Article calls a proletarian corporation. But innovation faces substantial hurdles. This Article examines in Part II the context for the development of this new approach to cooperative organization. Part III then turns to a close study of the cooperative and its constraints, starting with a consideration of the agricultural cooperative as template for changes. It then turns to a critical consideration of the development of a theoretical basis for changing the function and operation of cooperatives developed by Cuban intellectuals, and ends with an examination of the transposition of that theory into the guidelines for restructuring the Cuban economy (Lineamientos) adopted by the Cuban government, and then articulated through a regulatory framework. Part IV then briefly considers the role of the cooperative in efforts to internationalize the Cuban economic model through vehicles such as the Alianza Bolivariana. This Article concludes that while the cooperative fits nicely within Cuba’s efforts to develop a complex and well-integrated program of economic organization, its theoretical elegance remains in tension with the realities of Cuban politics. This tension increases the risk that cooperatives will be reduced to little more than a means of privatizing central planning

Global Panopticism: States, Corporations, and the Governance Effects of Monitoring Regimes

Regulatory power has become fractured. Its assertion both by public and private bodies is well known. Less well recognized is that the expression of this regulatory power has been fracturing as well. No longer confined to positive regulation or judicial decision, the techniques for enforcing regulation are substituting for regulation itself. This paper examines surveillance as a mechanism through which power is asserted and regulation effected in a world of shared public/private governance. For this purpose, understanding the nature of surveillance as a technique of governance, and as a substitute for governance itself, is a key element for understanding political authority as it is developing. The paper focuses on surveillance as a new form of lawmaking through which the old boundaries between the public and private, national and transnational, are not relevant. It explores the ways in which the construction of complex systems of conscious and permanent visibility affects the power relationships among states, economic entities and individuals. To understand the complexities and vectors of surveillance is to grasp the shape of converging public/private governance in this century. To that end, this paper first suggests an approach to the unbundling of the normative and methodological assumptions of surveillance. That approach can be usefully divided into four aspects, normative, informatics, control, and governance, each of which is developed in turn. The paper ends with an elaboration of the regulatory consequences of the manipulation of these aspects of surveillance. Drawing on theories of gouvernmentalité the paper suggests the ways in which governance is increasingly elaborated through the techniques of its own power. The attention lavished on surveillance in its many forms evidences the ways in which law, in a sense, is now expressed through different forms. Democracy and the Transnational Private Sector, Symposium. Indiana University School of Law – Bloomington, April 12-13, 2007

A Process Theory of Natural Law and the Rule of Law in China

This Article analyzes China\u27s efforts to implement the rule of law and proposes a constructive, post-modern normative theory of law based on the Process Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and the Radical Empiricism of William James. This process theory of natural law provides a novel theory of natural law that eliminates the perceived illegitimacy arising from legal indeterminacy and closes the ontological gap between legal theory and practice. Process natural law also mediates many of the cultural differences between the East and the West through the telos of beauty (unity-in-diversity), which entails maximizing both an Eastern aesthetic sense of order (emergent harmony or spontaneous order) and a Western rational sense of order (complexity arising from diverse individual orderings). In accordance with the telos of beauty, process natural law further supports a culturally sensitive conception of the rule of law because, as Whitehead emphasizes, [e]ach society has its own type of perfection. This conception of the rule of law allows for important cultural differences to be reflected in the interpretation of democracy and formal legality and in the instantiation of individual rights in the law. Thus, the ideal rule of law may look quite different in the United States ( U.S. ) and China and may continue to evolve in our constantly changing, pluralistic, and multicultural world

Spartan Daily, November 4, 1965

Volume 53, Issue 32https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/4737/thumbnail.jp

God(s) over Constitutions: International and Religious Transnational Constitutionalism in the 21st Century

Symposium on Religion, Religious Pluralism, and the Rule of La

The BG News November 3, 1982

The BGSU campus student newspaper November 3, 1982.https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/bg-news/5058/thumbnail.jp

The BG News October 4, 1988

The BGSU campus student newspaper October 4, 1988. Volume 71 - Issue 26https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/bg-news/5840/thumbnail.jp