Thus, the four-year period that stretches from April 1961 to April 1965 is of particular importance for the crystallization and expression of Guevara’s mature political thought: from mid-April 1961 on, circumstances no longer obliged Guevara to articulate his ideas in guarded, somewhat equivocal language, and, on the other hand, what he wrote after April 1965 is—with the notable exception of his “Message to the Tricontinental”—either of little interest as regards the central ideas of his political thought or simply restates what he said and wrote earlier. For all of these reasons, I devote particular attention to the texts dating from this period in expounding and analyzing Guevara’s political thought, without neglecting in the least what Guevara said and wrote during the first years of the revolution (or, for that matter, prior to the revolution) or after leaving Cuba in the spring of 1965. For by January 1959 Guevara was, to borrow Engels’s description of Marx at the latter’s graveside, “before all else a revolutionist,”33 and, as we shall see, a revolutionary outlook characterizes Guevara’s political thought from beginning to end.
1
The New Human Being
Whatever other differences may separate them, radical (left-wing) thinkers typically are at one in assuming that major social progress requires some sort of transformation of human nature. This is certainly true of Marxist thinkers on the whole, the more specific radical tradition within which Guevara’s thought should be situated. But what exactly do radical social theorists have in mind when they assert that it is necessary to transform human nature?
The Transformation of Human Nature
To begin with, it should be noted that the “nature”—that is, that dimension of our nature—that is to undergo a transformation is not our physical nature but rather a part of our psychological nature.1 More specifically, what radical social thinkers have in mind is an array of motivations, aspirations, values, preferences, and dispositions common to the immense majority of people, and that consequently define their society’s prevailing ethos. The transformation in question refers to a substantial modification of these values, preferences, motivations, and so on, either by heightening, expanding, and intensifying them or by tempering, reducing, or eliminating them.
Of course, the insistence on the need to transform human nature presupposes that at least certain aspects of human nature are indeed susceptible to change, but this premise, which, following the philosopher Joseph H. Carens, we may call the “plasticity” view of human nature, is widely accepted by social scientists.2 Everyday experience should also incline us to accept this premise, since it is not uncommon to have friends or acquaintances at least some parts of whose personalities were deliberately and decisively shaped by, say, their families or religious communities. If, then, the available sociohistorical evidence indicates, as Carens claims, that “human nature is so flexible that, given the proper conditions of socialization, almost any goals could be adopted on a widespread basis in a society”3 (the essence of the “plasticity” view) and everyday experience suggests the same conclusion, radical social theorists, including Guevara, would seem to be on safe ground in accepting the proposition that at least some sort of transformation of human nature is possible.
What does the Marxist tradition say about the ways in which human nature needs to be transformed? In the works of Marx and Engels themselves, we actually find little in this regard beyond (1) some general expressions of adherence to the “plasticity” view (as in the well-known sixth thesis of Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”4) and (2) a foundational commitment to a theory of history, according to which changes in a given society’s mode of production inevitably effect changes in its “superstructure,” which includes those constituents of human nature that I mentioned above.5 To be sure, we also find statements to the effect that the working class will be transformed, and must be transformed, in the course of bringing about its own emancipation6 and, more generally, that human beings will be very different following the abolition of capitalism.7 On the whole, however, Marx and Engels say very little about the specific ways in which human nature will change, or need to change, and their reticence in this regard plainly derives from their aim to theorize as “scientific,” rather than “utopian,” socialists. As “scientific” socialists, they sought to limit themselves to identifying, and drawing conclusions on the basis of, present social tendencies and developments, instead of attempting to anticipate the future, which, they held, would be peopled by men and women who are truly free for the first time in history and therefore bound to lead their lives in ways that we, constrained and crippled as we are by capitalist society, can scarcely begin to imagine.
When we turn to later Marxist thinkers, however, we find not only agreement with Marx and Engels’s views regarding the inevitability of change in human nature8 but also far less circumspection when it comes to specifying the sorts of changes that will occur, and will need to occur, for there to exist a truly liberated society. Rosa Luxemburg, for example, not only contends that “socialism in life demands a complete spiritual transformation in the masses degraded by centuries of bourgeois class rule” but goes on to state that “one cannot realize socialism with lazy, frivolous, egoistic, thoughtless, and indifferent human beings. A socialist society needs human beings who . . . are full of passion and enthusiasm for the general well-being, full of self-sacrifice and sympathy for their fellow human beings.”9 On could also cite in this connection the “new sensibility” and “new needs”—which, to the extent that we assume them, modify our nature—defended by Herbert Marcuse,10 the later Georg Lukács’s interest in creating a new human being,11 or, to take an example from a contemporary Marxist philosopher of an analytical orientation, Andrew Levine’s insistence that “people must become more communal and more inclined to subordinate private to general interests.”12
One could cite many more examples of statements from Marxist thinkers that postulate the kind of transformation of human nature required for a socialist or communist society. The common element in nearly all such pronouncements is the idea that the transformation in question will consist in a moral transformation, that in some sense human beings can, must, and will undergo such a change and that the process of creating a socialist, and ultimately communist, society will involve what we might call a moral enhancement of human nature.13 This is, I take it, what Engels has in mind when he observes, “A really human morality which stands above class antagonisms and above any recollection of them becomes possible only at a stage of society which has not only overcome class antagonisms but has even forgotten them in practical life.”14 In short, many facets of the human nature—much of the individual’s motivational structure—that we identify with “homo economicus” and “possessive individualism”15 will have to disappear or, at the very least, be quite significantly attenuated if a socialist/communist society is to prove viable. But Marxists assume that they will in fact disappear, given the right institutional arrangements and provided that certain socioeconomic conditions have been satisfied.
Like other Marxists, Guevara believes that the viability of a “higher” society requires a transformation of human nature; socialist and communist societies cannot succeed without such a transformation. Yet Guevara’s ideas on human transformation have attracted far more attention than those of other thinkers in the Marxist tradition, and this exceptional attention was the result of two factors in particular: the emphasis that Che himself places on the role of human transformation in the establishment of socialism (i.e., the idea’s salience in his thought) and the fact that Guevara occasionally uses the striking term “new man” (hombre nuevo) to refer to the end product of this transformation. Unfortunately, Guevara’s conception of the post-transformation human being has been widely misunderstood, when not deliberately caricatured.16 Such a treatment of Guevara’s idea of the new man makes a fair assessment of his political thought nearly impossible, and for this reason alone an accurate notion of this idea is indispensable. This is what
I seek to provide in the present chapter.
The New Human Being and Communism
Before considering the specific qualities or traits with which Guevara associates the new man, it is necessary to say a bit about the use of the term—for which I shall generally be substituting the terms “new person,” “new men and women,” or “new human being”17—in Guevara’s works and the role and scope of the concept in his thought. Guevara was by no means the first thinker in the Marxist tradition to stress the importance of creating a new man. Indeed, an anthology on “communist morality” published in the Soviet Union in the 1960s actually contains an index entry for the “moral makeup of the new man.”18 Still, it is probably fair to say that if the term and its variants are a familiar part of political discourse today, it is above all due to the influence of Guevara’s use of “new man.”
In one sense, the close association of the term “new man” with Guevara, as opposed to the characteristics belonging to this new human being, proves rather surprising for the simple reason that Guevara seldom uses it in evoking his revolutionary hopes and objectives. At the same time, this association is not at all surprising if we bear in mind that the one text in which Guevara employs the term on several occasions is in fact his best-known, and probably most widely read, political essay—namely, “Socialism and Man in Cuba.” Despite its brevity (about sixteen pages in a popular English-language anthology of his writings), this essay is remarkably comprehensive, addressing topics that range from the early history of the Cuban Revolution to the status of art under capitalism and socialism, and the problems besetting attempts to promote a socialist consciousness among Cubans in the initial stages of the revolutionary process. But if there is one theme common to all of the topics discussed in the essay, it is the theme evoked in its title: the nature of the individual under socialism and communism and the measures required to bring communist men and women into being. It is precisely because the essay offers a compendium of Guevara’s views on a number of essential questions pertaining to revolution and social transformation that it is generally regarded as the single most important document that Guevara produced.19 Indeed, Cuban philosopher Fernando Martínez Heredia’s characterization of the text as “Che’s Communist Manifesto” hardly seems unreasonable20; and “Socialism and Man in Cuba” is widely considered to be a major contribution to Latin American socialist thought in general and Latin American Marxism in particular.21 (Significantly, it is the only work by a Latin American thinker that David McLellan includes in a “chronological table” of important works in Marxist theory included in his encyclopedic Marxism after Marx.22)
If, then, “Socialism and Man in Cuba” is an exceptionally important work in Guevara’s oeuvre and in Latin American Marxism in general, and the term “new man” figures prominently in this text,23 it is really no wonder that many identify Guevara with this term (especially considering that Guevara insists throughout his works on the importance of transforming human beings, albeit generally without using the term “new man”). But what does Guevara himself mean in speaking of a new man?
To begin with, we should note that the new men and women whom Guevara conjures up in “Socialism and Man in Cuba” and other texts is synonymous, for Guevara, with communist men and women. That is to say, in discussing the “new human beings,” Guevara has in mind human beings within a communist society. (Note that I am following the convention, established by Lenin on the basis of his interpretation of Marx, of calling the first, immediately postcapitalist stage of communism “socialism” and the second, more advanced, stage “communism,” a convention that Guevara also follows.24) This is often overlooked or misunderstood,25 partly because the inconsistency in Guevara’s language in “Socialism and Man in Cuba” can give rise to misinterpretations. For example, while Guevara writes at one point that “to build communism it is necessary, simultaneous with the new material foundations, to build the new man and woman,”26 he elsewhere refers, in the very same essay and in connection with the theorization of the transition to socialism, to “the two pillars of the construction of socialism: the education of the new man and woman and the development of technology.”27 Given this ambiguity and apparent inconsistency, it is perhaps not surprising that the author of a highly praised biography of Guevara, Jon Lee Anderson, not only claims that Guevara in fact advocates the creation of a “new socialist man” but also inadvertently changes the title of Guevara’s most famous essay in both Spanish and English to reflect this misinterpretation: “Socialism and Man in Cuba” becomes, in Anderson’s biography, “Socialism and the New Man.”28 Yet, while Guevara’s most celebrated essay deals chiefly with problems arising in the attempt to forge a socialist society and readers’ confusion is therefore understandable, the new men and women to whom Guevara refers are members of a communist society. Guevara makes this clear when he refers to “the new society in which individuals will have different characteristics: the society of communist human beings”29; one of these “characteristics” is, as we shall see in the next chapter, the fact that the new human being will work in the absence of any material incentives to do so, whereas the use of some material incentives will still be necessary, according to Guevara, under socialism. We might also note in this connection the letter that Guevara wrote to Fidel Castro not long after the publication of “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” in which he states that “the creation of the communist man” was one of “the two fundamental problems” faced by his new approach to economic policy, the Budgetary Finance System (discussed in chapter 5).30 In short, the being whom Guevara evokes is neither the human being who undergoes self-transformation in the process of building socialism nor even the typical individual in a full-fledged socialist society but rather the communist human being.
Why is this consideration important? The answer is simple: it prevents us from making the mistake of assuming that Guevara believed that the transformation of human nature that he envisions, and whose advent would supposedly be hastened by the social and economic policies that he defends, could be realized in the short-term, a notion that most people would surely regard as completely implausible. Indeed, it is worth pointing out that in the very same essay Guevara declares, “What we must create is the human being of the twenty-first century”31; at the time in which Guevara was writing his landmark essay, the twenty-first century was still thirty-five years away—that is, at a remove of almost two generations. And he elsewhere acknowledges that his generation may have to burn itself out in the work of simply building socialism.32 To say this is not to deny that even under socialism our human nature will already have undergone a significant modification. To the contrary, as Guevara puts it in his speech in Algeria in February of 1965 (his last major public appearance), “Socialism cannot exist without a change in consciousness resulting in a new fraternal attitude toward humanity, both at an individual level . . . and on a world scale,”33 an attitude that, no doubt, represents a change in human nature. What is more, there may even be anticipations or glimpses of the communist person during the process of building socialism. Indeed, in an August 1964 letter to exiled Spanish poet León Felipe, Guevara relates that he had recently attended an event full of enthusiastic workers and that there was “an atmosphere of the new man in the air.”34 Still, the representative human being under socialism is a mere precursor to the new person in the classless, stateless society that is communism; in the transition from socialism to communism the moral transformation of human beings will continue, and the success of communism depends on this success of the further transformation.35
The Political Theory of Che Guevara Page 3