Cuban minister of foreign trade whose 1963 essay on the law of value opened the Great Debate
The son of the anti-Batista fighter Menelao Mora by his first marriage, he held the rank of comandante. Minister of foreign trade from 1961, he argued in an article in Comercio Exterior in June 1963 that the law of value, understood as the relation between limited resources and growing needs, does not disappear under socialism but acts through the plan, even inside the state sector. Without naming them, the article was aimed at those, Guevara among them, who treated the whole state sector as "one big enterprise"; Guevara replied in October, and the Great Debate began.
Also known as: Alberto Mora Becerra
Activities and affiliations
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1961–1965
Cuba state institutionsMinister of Foreign TradeMain
Economy, finance and planning
1963: the law of value operates inside the state sector too
"On the Question of the Operation of the Law of Value in the Cuban Economy at Present" appeared in June 1963 in issue 3 of Comercio Exterior, the journal of the Ministry of Foreign Trade, and was reprinted in October in the Ministry of Industries' Nuestra Industria. Mora summed up the view of "some comrades" who accepted that the law of value operated between the private and the state sectors but denied that it operated between state enterprises: for them the whole state sector was already "one big enterprise".
Mora took the operation of the law of value to mean that production is regulated by value and products are exchanged according to their value. If value is understood as the relation between limited resources and growing human needs, he argued, that relation does not vanish under socialism but acts, through the plan, as one of the regulators of production. The argument underpinned enterprise-level cost accounting, the economic calculation system.
Guevara answered in October with "On the Concept of Value", and in 1964 Bettelheim and Mandel joined the theoretical debate. Though it named no one, Mora's article is counted as the first real contribution to the Great Debate.