The Nature of the New Human Being
Bearing in mind that we must situate the new men and women envisioned by Guevara in a communist society, in what ways has their human nature been transformed? In other words, what are the features that make them distinctive?
Before answering this question, it is important to avoid an error found in many commentators on Guevara that consists in identifying Guevara’s new human beings with various practices that Guevara advocated, such as voluntary labor, the use of moral incentives to achieve society’s economic goals, or “socialist emulation.”36 These practices are, indeed, essential components of Guevara’s political thought (as we shall see in the following chapter), but they serve to promote the emergence of the qualities essential to the new human beings rather than being essential hallmarks of these beings.
A careful reading of Guevara’s works reveals two essential attributes or elements that distinguish the new human beings emblematic of communism and their distinctively communist ethos. The first of these is a commitment to a radical egalitarianism, by which I mean support for a rough equality of condition for all, coupled with an adherence to the principle of equal consideration of interests.37 In contrast to the case of the second basic element that I shall discuss, Guevara seldom explicitly advocates or appeals to radical egalitarianism. It is, rather, a commitment that is implied, or presupposed, by many of his other positions, but that is, on the other hand, reflected in many of his own actions and practices, such as his rejection of any special privileges for himself and his insistence on strict equality of treatment among his coworkers with regard to such things as the content and size of meals. (The anecdotes attesting to Guevara’s extremely egalitarian practices and policies in distributing benefits and burdens among coworkers and comrades are legion.38) Still, Guevara’s speeches, talks, and writings do occasionally include explicit defenses of radical egalitarianism (just as they also include some statements registering his belief in the de facto equality of all39). At an August 1961 meeting, for example, he remarks, “It is not good . . . for there to be soap in Havana if there is no soap in the countryside: if there is no soap in the countryside, there should not be any soap in Havana. Or soap should be distributed so that there is soap everywhere. . . . Ours is a regime that wants everyone to have the same possibilities, the same treatment, and every citizen to feel that he is exactly the same as any other, another compañero [comrade] in the great work of building socialism.”40 During a speech in December of the same year, Guevara would underscore that socialism—an ideal he embraces—rests on “a regime in which conditions are the same for everyone.”41 Approximately three years later, Guevara would use the inauguration of a factory to declare that, while the United States represents “those who want to live off the exploitation [of others], discriminating against men because of the color of their skin, their religion, the money they have,” Cuba represents “the struggle of those who seek to make all men equal, to make opportunities the same [for everyone],”42 the viewpoint that he identifies with “Cuba” in this speech plainly being his own. In any case, this “radical egalitarianism”—a well-established concept, incidentally, in contemporary political philosophy—is, in connection with Guevara’s thought, perhaps best described as a “communist egalitarianism,” since it can only be fully realized in a communist (classless) society—class stratification precludes radical egalitarianism—and because Guevara identifies the bearer of this new value with the human beings who make up that society.
The second, closely related (for a reason that I will explain presently) attribute of the new human beings is a significant expansion of moral concern, in the sense of adherence to a far more comprehensive notion of one’s social duty. In contrast to what we find in the case of the radical egalitarianism that Guevara advocates, this aspect of the new human being is reflected in countless statements throughout Guevara’s works. As Guevara says in a typical expression of this idea, included in a lecture delivered in May 1964, “these individuals [who perform voluntary labor] are giving a part of their lives to society without expecting anything in return, without expecting any kind of payment, simply fulfilling a duty to society.”43 It is precisely this expansion of one’s social duty that Guevara has in mind when he refers, in “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” to the need to create individuals who have “much more responsibility.”44
As I noted above, the new human being’s heightened sense of social duty is closely related to the commitment to a radical egalitarianism. Indeed, it would not be incorrect to say that the former is a corollary of the latter: if we truly view others as deserving of the same consideration and treatment as ourselves, then we shall attach the same importance to the satisfaction of their needs as we do to our own, shall, in other words, grant them the same claim on our attention. Consequently, we shall strive to attend to their needs with (approximately) the same energy as we devote to meeting our own needs.45 This commitment explains Guevara’s fondness for the well-known remark by José Martí, Cuba’s greatest writer and national hero, which he cites, or rather paraphrases, on innumerable occasions: “A real man should feel on his own cheek the blow inflicted on any other man’s.”46
At the same time, to describe this principle as a corollary of Guevara’s radical egalitarianism may be to misrepresent it somewhat, since Guevara sometimes suggests that his notion of social duty does not entail merely attaching the same importance to others’ needs and interests (or those of society as a whole) but that discharging one’s social duty, as in fulfilling our responsibilities at work, is actually more important than satisfying one’s own needs and those of his or her family, that “we have to be ready to sacrifice any individual benefit for the collective good.”47 In short, Guevara sometimes seems to be defending a notion of social duty that represents a rather severe degree of personal sacrifice.
Whatever the actual degree of personal sacrifice required by Guevara’s notion of social duty, it will clearly diminish as communism becomes more and more fully realized in a society. There are several reasons for this, or rather several different ways in which fewer and fewer sacrifices will be required. First of all, with the increasing automation of production and the advent of abundance, society will require fewer and fewer sacrifices in terms of expenditure of labor, levels of consumption and comfort, and so on. Second, as society achieves more and more perfect equality, on the one hand, and more and more people assume the necessary sacrifices, on the other, there will be less need for sacrifice on the part of the better-off to aid those who are worse off, and the burden of sacrifice for each individual will diminish. (This is another obvious way in which a commitment to radical egalitarianism affects the scope of one’s level of social duty.) Third, fewer and fewer sacrifices will be required as society evolves toward communism for the simple reason that people will cease to perceive many actions as sacrifices. For one thing, Guevara argues, not implausibly, that the more one accustoms oneself to sacrifice, the less burdensome the sacrifice becomes—that is, the less one thinks of it as a sacrifice. For another, Guevara assumes that as society evolves toward communism, the members of society will come to identify more and more fully with society as a whole, so that in working for society one is serving one’s own interests and therefore much more likely to perceive sacrifices for society as directly benefitting oneself and thus barely sacrifices at all.48 In any case, we shall have occasion to return to the question of social duty, as well as the role of sacrifice in Guevara’s political thought, in subsequent chapters, as they are relevant to Guevara’s views on work under socialism, internationalism, and other questions.
Once we understand what the essential—“essential” also in the sense that the proper functioning of a communist society requires them—features of the new human being are, it is easier to comprehend why this being can only exist within a communist society—that is to say, why this is the communist human being: full egalitarianism in the sense of rough equality of condition can only
exist in a classless society, and people will only cease to regard social duties as a burden when abundance has ensured that all of their material needs are satisfied and automation has rendered all jobs tolerable, if not enjoyable.
A clear idea of these basic features of the new human being, or new person, also makes it easier to grasp the meaning of a term that Guevara invokes in characterizing and defending his conception of the building of socialism—namely, “consciousness.”49 References to consciousness abound in Guevara’s writings, lectures, talks, and speeches. He speaks, for example, of “deepening” consciousness, “developing” consciousness, “improving” consciousness, “raising” consciousness.50 And, while he sometimes refers to “revolutionary” consciousness or “political” consciousness,51 as often as not Guevara uses the word without any qualification. The frequency with which Guevara uses the term attests to the importance of this concept in his political thought, as does the decision by Orlando Borrego, one of Guevara’s closest collaborators during his years in Cuba, to underscore this facet of Guevara’s political outlook—“his emphasis on the development of consciousness as the force driving humanity toward communism”—in his brief preface to the first multivolume edition of Guevara’s works.52
While Guevara sometimes uses “consciousness” as shorthand for commitment to the revolutionary process, he generally also uses the word to evoke a certain moral orientation or outlook, or a set of moral commitments: indeed, this is what is distinctive about the new “consciousness.” Guevara effectively says as much when he writes of the need for the “development of a consciousness in which there is a new scale of values,”53 and, in any case, that this is what he has in mind can be readily inferred from Guevara’s usage of “consciousness,” mention of which is often accompanied by a reference to “duty” or “social duty.”54 The moral commitments in question, the constituents of this new consciousness, are essentially those that will lead enable Cubans to establish socialism and eventually communism, which is to say, those dispositions, attitudes, and values that help to nurture egalitarianism and a heightened sense of social duty. These are the values that need to be deepened, developed, improved, and raised, and it is because they lead to socialism that the consciousness they make up is a revolutionary consciousness. We shall return to the question of consciousness later in discussing other aspects of Guevara’s political thought, and not least of all because Guevara himself says, in a little-known text (an undated report to Cuba’s Council of Ministers), that he regards his approach to “the accelerated development of the worker’s consciousness as a socialist producer in this stage of society” as “a shortcut for reaching socialism in less time” and, indeed, his “small contribution to the practice of Marxism-Leninism.”55
One advantage of interpreting “consciousness” in this fashion, incidentally, is that such an interpretation sheds considerable light on Guevara’s notion of disalienation. Guevara seldom uses the terms “alienation” or “alienated” in his works, but they do have a prominent place in “Socialism and Man in Cuba” and precisely in connection with the new men and women; indeed, “the ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration,” declares Guevara in this essay, is “to see human beings liberated from their alienation.”56 Although Guevara does not elaborate on the nature of the alienation that he mentions here, it is clear that he links disalienation with moral renewal, as is evident in a 1963 interview with journalist Jean Daniel: “Economic socialism without a communist morality does not interest me. We are fighting against misery, but we are fighting against alienation at the same time.”57 Overcoming this alienation, or producing disalienation, involves a recognition of, and practice in accordance with, social duty, the creation of an egalitarian social ethos, and the elimination of “man’s exploitation of man,” as Guevara will insist on countless occasions.58 In any event, the main point is that this consciousness is the context within which those elements constitutive of the new person can begin to take shape before developing more fully under socialism and finally being completely realized under communism. And it is the practices that I mentioned above and will discuss in the following chapter—voluntary labor, the use of moral incentives, and socialist emulation—that promote this new consciousness, or moral orientation.
A Strategy of Debourgeoisification
As noted, the consciousness that Guevara wishes to nurture is best understood as a transitional stage in the evolution from the outlook typical of a member of a capitalist society to that of the new human being who is to emerge with communism. It is worth dwelling on this point because it helps us to appreciate that the crystallization of this consciousness involves both positive and negative developments (recall the aim of “liberating” human beings “from their alienation”). Specifically, it involves freeing oneself from a certain acceptance of and attachment to capitalism, a rejection of what Peruvian philosopher Augusto Salazar Bondy once called the “capitalist conception of existence.”59 In other words, it involves a debourgeoisification, and it is not unreasonable, therefore, to claim that Guevara’s ideas on the transformation of consciousness amount to a strategy of debourgeoisification (a term that, to my knowledge, he never uses).60
To be sure, this could be interpreted as a rather trivial claim, or as one that attributes to Guevara a rather unimpressive “strategy”: after all, since the new human beings will be members of a communist society, they will be nonbourgeois, or postbourgeois, by definition: there can be no bourgeoisie in a classless society; hence no member of such a society can be “bourgeois” in any sense. But in my view it is not a trivial claim, although I am using “debourgeoisification” in a way that departs somewhat from standard usage. Social scientists and political commentators normally employ the term “bourgeoisification” (or embourgeoisement, a French term sometimes used in English-language works) to refer to the tendency of workers and other nonbourgeois social strata to assume bourgeois attitudes, values, and preferences; in a word, it normally refers to their adoption of a bourgeois lifestyle; debourgeoisification, therefore, involves the converse—namely, a rejection or repudiation of this lifestyle. As I shall be using the term, “debourgeoisification” denotes not merely a rejection of the values and attitudes characteristic of a particular social class or sociocultural stratum within capitalism but also a rejection of the values and attitudes characteristic of capitalism as such. This construal or use of “debourgeoisification” is, I submit, actually consistent with a broadly Marxist approach to social analysis, and we find warrant for it when we reconsider Marx and Engels’s own use of the term “bourgeois.”
Marx and Engels use the term “bourgeois” in at least three different senses. First of all, they employ the term to designate a certain economic relation: one is “bourgeois” (or a bourgeois) if one is a member of the bourgeoisie, the social class comprising the owners of the means production; in a word, one is (a) bourgeois if one is a capitalist.61 This is the objective criterion employed by Marx and Engels, Marxists and a broad left-wing tradition as the basis of the concept “bourgeois” in a limited, more or less “technical,” sense. Yet the term “bourgeois” is also used by Marx and Engels, as it is within the Marxist tradition generally, to refer to capitalist society as a whole when they wish to specify the mode of production that defines this society or social formation (and that corresponds to the socioeconomic nature, or designation, of its ruling class). In other words, for Marx and Engels, the term “bourgeois society” is synonymous with “capitalist society”62—a society whose level of capitalist development is such that capitalist relationships constitute the predominant or most decisive ones within society—so that to say “bourgeois relations of production” is equivalent to saying “capitalist relations of production.” Finally, Marx and Engels and the Marxist tradition sometimes use the term “bourgeois” to refer to the economists, philosophers, political analysts, and the like who regard the capitalist mode of production as natural and inevitable, and whose work serves t
o justify this socioeconomic formation, even when their intellectual activity is not consciously intended to serve as such a justification.63
These are, then, three common, very prominent uses of the term “bourgeois” in the thought of Marx and Engels, as well as in the history of Marxist thought: the term is used to refer to a member of a certain socioeconomic category, to a specific mode of production, and to a certain attitude toward, or perspective on, prevailing economic realities. Notice that all three senses imply that to reject that which is bourgeois is, whatever else it may be, to reject capitalism, and, since one cannot reject capitalism without rejecting the values and attitudes that are (uniquely) constitutive of capitalism, we may understand debourgeoisification as a rejection of these attitudes and values. In other words, it may be used to refer not only to an opposition to the attitudes and values of some within capitalism but also the values and attitudes constitutive of capitalism as such.64 Guevara’s insistence that Cubans’ consciousness must be “developed,” “deepened,” and so on, can be understood, I submit, as one way of speaking about, and trying to promote, just such a process of debourgeoisification. As Guevara writes, “a capitalist world . . . instills [in people] a whole series of preconceptions that remain in the subconscious and are reflected in everyone’s attitudes, even when it is something unconscious,”65 and he also observes, in a passage that echoes well-known remarks by Marx and Lenin, that “the working masses who today are beginning the task of building socialism are not pure. They are made up of human beings who carry along with them a whole series of bad habits inherited from the previous epoch. I say bad habits they have—we have—we all have those bad habits inherited from the previous epoch.”66 In short, one had to contend with the dispositions, expectations, aspirations, habits, and so on of people who had undergone a capitalist socialization whose effects were enduring and not likely to disappear overnight. Indeed, in a December 1963 meeting with his collaborators at the Ministry of Industries—that is, nearly five years after the triumph of the revolution—Guevara emphasizes that it was necessary to confront “all of the vices, all of the defects that capitalism has left us, with the same people, with all of us with our capitalist mentality, a few years ago always thinking about how much we were going to earn, how we were going to get our little house, the yacht, or in many cases food.”67 It is, in fact, precisely because of the persistence of this outlook instilled in people by capitalism that Guevara realized that Cuba would have to continue using “material” incentives and rewards—despite his own opposition to this policy—during the period of building socialism (I shall say more about this topic in chapter 2). In short, the old mindset was plainly as much of an impediment to progress as the opposition of the bourgeoisie and the machinations of imperialism, and hence the imperative of replacing this mindset, however arduous the process might be, with the values, attitudes, habits, and commitments that will help to usher in socialism and ultimately issue in the new men and women of communism.
The Political Theory of Che Guevara Page 4