Socialist industrialisation

By Victor Alvarez Rodriguez

Translated by Owen Richards

Socialist industrialisation is a planned process of rapid growth and development of productive capacities and dedicated technologies towards transforming raw materials into basic inputs, intermediate goods and products of final consumption, with the aim of satisfying the growing demands and needs of the national productive apparatus and of the population.

It is the engine driving the transformation of the rentier economy—in which almost everything is imported and little is produced—toward an independent and sovereign new economy.  It's the only possible strategy to change the primary export model that the major industrialised powers imposed on us, condemning us to be exporters of oil and raw materials, into a new model of production able to efficiently replace imports, diversify exports and, in this way, to save and generate new sources of foreign exchange that makes us less dependent on oil revenues.

Socialist industrialization is a fundamental component of an economic policy designed to advance towards the achievement of the goals of food and productive security and sovereignty.  It's the best way of creating genuinely useful jobs, whose remuneration has as its counterpart the production of an abundant supply of goods and services destined to meet the basic and essential needs of the working people, without upsetting the balance that should prevail between supply and demand and which helps stabilise prices.  Furthermore, to meet domestic demand with domestic production will avoid exchange rate settings—which push up the import components and rebound on cost structure—exceeding inflationary pressures.  This therefore requires the intelligent management of macroeconomic and microeconomic policy; i.e., setting the exchange rate to express the true productivity of the non-oil economy; a tax and tariff policy that discourages imports and encourages domestic production; and monetary and financial incentives for productive investment.

And, most importantly, socialist industrialisation is based on new forms of social property that liberate the worker from the exploitation of capital.

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