The Political Theory of Che Guevara

by Renzo Tramer Llorente

  Yet, while we should endorse Guevara’s views on moral incentives, careful consideration of Guevara’s conception of voluntary labor reveals that it is vulnerable to a number of theoretical and practical objections. In particular, I think we should question Guevara’s conception of work as a “need” as well as his claim that a commitment to—that is, participation in—voluntary labor represents the true communist attitude with regard to work.

  The problems with Guevara’s conception, and defense, of voluntary labor become apparent once we understand the sense in which all work within a communist society will be “voluntary.” In a communist society, comprehensive provisions for human welfare will have eliminated the economic coercion that obliges people to work. In addition, jobs will have been restructured with a view to making them inherently satisfying, all people will share more or less equally the benefits of society’s productive capacities, and the working day will have been drastically shortened. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that in such circumstances work will indeed become a genuine need (or “want” [Lebensbedürfnis], to use the language of Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Programme”), at least if we accept the premise—a central component of Marx’s philosophical anthropology—that human beings achieve self-realization primarily through their labor (that is, through “purposive productive activity”67): since people will, as a rule, strive for self-realization, they will feel a strong need for some kind of work, even in the absence of any external compulsion or material incentives, and consequently all of their labor will be “voluntary,” including that which constitutes their regular job. But notice that this is not what Guevara means by “need” when he refers to this concept in connection with voluntary labor.68 When Guevara refers to work as a need, he has in mind a social duty, labor for the benefit of society as a whole, that an agent feels compelled to perform. That he understands “need” in this sense is clear, for example, from a passage in his 1964 speech at the “Youth and the Revolution” conference (cited at note 36 above), as well as in the one passage in “Socialism and Man in Cuba” in which he explicitly addresses this topic: “We are doing everything possible to give work this new status as a social duty and to link it . . . with voluntary work based on the Marxist appreciation that one truly reaches a full human condition when no longer compelled to produce by the physical necessity to sell oneself as a commodity.”69 Guevara’s contention, then, is that work has become a need when one welcomes it as a social duty, an obligation that one eagerly assumes and discharges, without any fear of sanction for failing to perform the duty and without any expectation of material rewards for fulfilling it; by accustoming ourselves to the practice of voluntary labor, which familiarizes us with the social importance of work and severs the link between labor and remuneration, we develop this very attitude toward work. In short, Guevara thinks of the need produced by voluntary labor in exclusively moral terms, as a strong, abiding preference for acting on (i.e., discharging) a moral duty, the fulfillment of which should afford us happiness,70 just as he believes that work in general should be viewed as “a moral necessity.”71 By contrast, when Marx observes that labor under communism will have become “not only a means of life but life’s prime want,” it is because he assumes that work will have become—or, rather, also have become—intrinsically satisfying in a nonmoral sense; that is, that we will enjoy work for itself—indeed, for what could legitimately be called self-interested reasons. I stress “also” here because the young Marx likewise refers to a need for work in the sense of a preference for benefitting others—satisfying their needs—through work.72 Still, the main emphasis in Marx’s conception of work as a need has to do with the nonmoral sense of individual self-realization just noted, whereas when Guevara refers to the need for work resulting from the practice of voluntary labor he almost invariably conceives of this need for work in a moral sense.73

  The problem in this connection is not that Guevara’s thesis involves a departure from Marx’s thinking—that consideration alone would be a frivolous reason for criticizing it—but that Marx’s explanation as to how and why work could become an essential need (or want) is more plausible than Guevara’s. And the reason that Marx’s perspective proves more plausible is that it assumes that in most cases work will not truly become a need (in the sense of “life’s prime want”), no matter how much a worker identifies his or her work with a social duty, unless and until jobs are radically restructured—that is, unless and until work itself becomes inherently desirable. Indeed, Marx’s declaration that labor will become “life’s prime want” is immediately preceded by references to “the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour” and “the antithesis between mental and physical labour.”74 It is only after transcending the conventional (capitalist) division of labor, eliminating the crippling separation of mental and manual labor, shortening the working day, and introducing job rotation that all work will be intrinsically satisfying and entirely free of the alienation that characterizes most jobs, to one degree or another, today. Once this has been accomplished, there will exist a need for work not only in the sense of a preference for benefitting others through work—which, as just noted, Marx’s outlook also assumes—but also in the sense of a desire to perform labor as part of one’s striving for self-realization.

  To be sure, Guevara also recognizes the importance of reconfiguring the entire labor process so as to ensure that all work becomes conducive to human flourishing. This “humanization of work”—his term—will involve “putting the machine in the service of man,” as he tells his colleagues at the Ministry of Industries during a March 1962 meeting; and in a speech delivered the previous year, Guevara underscores the need to “strive to make work as mild as possible, as interesting and humane as possible.”75 In a word, the future promises “the liberation” of human beings “by means of the machine.”76 However, Guevara also tends to regard these things as long-term goals, the immediate priority being to raise productivity (not an unreasonable position, given Cuba’s economic situation at the time).77 In addition, and more significantly, Guevara plainly prioritizes the resocialization of workers—that is, a policy of encouraging workers to embrace their jobs, whether or not enhanced, as their social duty—over the humanization of work (“new generations must be formed whose main interest is work”78). In other words, as regards the process of turning work into a need, he lays far greater emphasis on a subjective transformation of workers—the assimilation of their duty and their ability to take pleasure in discharging it—than on the objective transformation of jobs themselves.

  In fairness to Guevara, there were plainly major obstacles to enacting such changes to work in Cuba in the early 1960s, given, on the one hand, the country’s state of underdevelopment and limited technological options and, on the other, the US government’s policy toward the island, which combined continuous efforts at political destabilization, including support for the internal counterrevolution, and economic asphyxiation.79 Attempts to transform the labor process in such circumstances might well have resulted in temporary inefficiencies and disruptions in production and thereby curbed economic development. If Guevara pays relatively little attention to the transformation of the labor process itself, the reason may lie partly in his appreciation of these constraints and a realization that, to put it in more orthodox language, the objective conditions for liberating labor did not yet exist during the early years of the Cuban Revolution. To the extent that this was the case, Guevara’s priorities reflect a political realism that belies, at least in this instance, a propensity for “voluntarism,” one of the vices routinely imputed to Guevara and a question to which I shall return in the final chapter. Still, even on those occasions on which Guevara refers to the work of the future, which will be creative and enjoyable, and speaks of the pleasure that this work will afford, he typically also mentions social duty and seems to presuppose that much of the worker’s pleasure will come from the satisfaction of having discharged this
duty. In a speech delivered in October 1962, for example, Guevara evokes “a future in which work will be man’s greatest dignity, a social duty, a pleasure given to man, the most creative activity there is.”80

  One problem with Guevara’s conceptualization of unalienated work as a need, then, is that he focuses almost exclusively on, or in any case unduly prioritizes, the moral dimension of this need; and this is why the practice that he advocates as a means of effecting this transformation of work into a need—voluntary labor—appears unlikely to succeed in fully transforming work into a need—that is, a need in both a moral and nonmoral sense. In short, while voluntary labor might constitute a necessary condition for the achievement of the transformation of work into a need, it is by no means a sufficient condition: profound modifications to the content and conditions of work, changes (some of which were mentioned earlier) that would enable the activity of work itself to serve as a vehicle for self-realization, are also indispensable. One simple way to appreciate this point is to recall the several varieties of alienation that Marx identifies in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. If Marx’s account is broadly on the mark and production under capitalism typically entails, for instance, the worker’s alienation, or “estrangement,” from the labor process itself,81 work will continue to generate alienation—and hence will not be perceived as a need by the workers themselves—until the labor process has been radically restructured; and this will be true even if we have successfully developed an ethos involving a commitment to work as a social duty (whether or not this arises through the practice of voluntary labor).

  In reality, there would seem to be good grounds for assuming that voluntary labor in Guevara’s sense may not even prove especially effective in generating the, so to speak, “moral” need for work, that is, a need in the sense of a preference for benefitting others through work. Recall that when Guevara refers to voluntary labor he means labor performed in addition to the work constituting one’s normal, paying job, and also, of course, in addition to the work consisting of household labor (an important consideration when thinking about the demands that voluntary labor would impose on many women today). This is precisely what should lead us to question Guevara’s assumption that the practice of voluntary labor will lead one to develop a “need” for work. First of all, the fatigue arising from regularly engaging in voluntary labor after finishing one’s full-time, paid work is liable, over the long run, to diminish the appeal of work rather than enhance it. (Voluntary labor is not the same as voluntary supplementary labor.) Second, the notion of work as a social duty will strike most people as unattractive if discharging this duty seems overly demanding. In other words, if performing one’s duty regularly requires actions that, in most people’s minds, entail rather considerable sacrifice and even heroism, few will regard this “duty” as in fact constituting a duty. After all, we normally identify heroism—and Guevara actually refers to the need to “perpetuate” a “heroic attitude in daily life,” such as that which prevailed during the “missile crisis” of October 1962 and Hurricane Flora the following year82—with deeds that go beyond the demands of duty, or what are called “supererogatory” acts in the parlance of moral philosophy. Accordingly, if voluntary labor likewise requires a “heroic attitude in daily life,” it is reasonable to assume that people will not regard performance of voluntary labor as a “duty.” In sum, even if voluntary labor contributes to the development of certain aspects of political consciousness and in that regard serves, as Guevara often insists and as already noted above, an “educational” purpose, there is good reason to conclude that voluntary labor may actually fail to yield what I have called the “moral” need for work.83

  In light of the preceding considerations I think there is little justification for endorsing Guevara’s proposition that voluntary labor constitutes “the genuine expression of the communist attitude toward work in a society where the fundamental means of production belong to the society.”84 Or, rather, we should only endorse, at most, a qualified version of this proposition: voluntary labor may constitute one element of a communist attitude toward work within a society still undergoing the transition to socialism, a society in which committed communists will hardly be satisfied with merely discharging the duties that are the same for everyone (Guevara emphasizes that voluntary labor is labor performed over and above the labor required by one’s social duty85). But in such a society, a communist attitude toward work is at least as authentically expressed through an active commitment to job restructuring and enhancement, or efforts to overcome the conventional division of labor under capitalism, or rather divisions of labor: the opposition between “mental” and “manual” labor, strict occupational specializations, and divisions on the basis of gender. With regard to a communist society, on the other hand, voluntary labor as understood by Guevara will be irrelevant to the “communist attitude toward work,” since, as noted earlier, all work will be voluntary in a very straightforward sense, while voluntary labor as Guevara conceives of it will be quite unnecessary. In short, the regular performance of voluntary labor in Guevara’s sense proves exceedingly demanding in a society undergoing a transition to socialism and quite superfluous in a society that has already achieved socialism or communism.

  Some Neglected Aspects of Guevara’s Philosophy of Work

  While it is important to draw attention to the problems with Guevara’s conception and defense of voluntary labor, I would like to end this chapter by emphasizing the validity of two of the general premises and considerations that inform his thinking on work in general (and that partly explain Guevara’s commitment to the practice of voluntary labor), a topic that, as noted at the beginning of the chapter, represents a central problem for social theory in general and radical social theory in particular.

  The first of these considerations concerns the division of labor, which Marx once said “is in a certain respect the category of categories of political economy.”86 On numerous occasions Guevara acknowledges the importance of not only overcoming the class stratification deriving from the opposition between manual and mental labor but also of eliminating the opposition itself (a basic goal for Marxists, and one reflected in the passages from Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Programme” cited in the previous section). For example, in concluding his address to the Eleventh National Workers’ Congress in November 1961, Guevara emphasizes that the ultimate purpose of such things as technological development, worker education, and increased productivity was “the erasing of differences at work, the erasing of the differences between manual and intellectual labor, the erasing of class differences, [and] also the erasing of differences between the city and the country.”87 Guevara’s determination to transform the division of labor is reflected, as we have seen, in his commitment to voluntary labor. But that is not the only expression of this determination. Guevara’s call for greater worker participation in the management and administration of plants and factories should also be interpreted as a condemnation of the capitalist division of labor,88 since a policy designed to heighten such worker involvement will also serve to undermine conventional forms of occupational specialization. The same is true of his “mandatory demotion” policy, introduced in 1964, which required all upper-level administrators within the Ministry of Industries to spend one month a year working at a lower position within the branch of industry under their authority, or otherwise connected to the branch that they administered. While the main aim of this policy was to familiarize administrators with aspects of production operations for which they bore ultimate responsibility, it was a measure that also challenged the traditional division of labor.89 Finally, one could also cite Guevara’s efforts to encourage his administrators to do voluntary labor in factories during at least part of their vacation periods.90 In sum, Guevara’s statements and policy proposals, as well as his own actions, plainly demonstrate his commitment to the principle enunciated by Marx in The Civil War in France: “With labour emancipated, every man becom
es a working man, and productive labour ceases to be a class attribute.”91

  A second consideration concerns the materialism informing Guevara’s approach to transforming the status, or meaning, of work. Simply put, Guevara assumes—in keeping with the Marxist assumption that the content of our fundamental values and attitudes derives, in the last analysis, from the material conditions of our lives—that in order to overcome what we might call the “bourgeois” conception of work people must begin working in a different way, and this is one of his motivations for so vigorously promoting the practice of voluntary labor. To be sure, Guevara engages in a great deal of moral suasion over the course of his writings, speeches, and talks, and I have already discussed his belief in the use of moral incentives. Yet he never loses sight of the need to change people’s lives in order to change their ideas. In other words, Guevara’s belief that new ways of working as well as exhortation were necessary to produce a new attitude toward work shows that he was neither a mechanistic (or “economistic”) materialist (he does not assume that the desired change of outlook will automatically arise from the socialization of the means of production and new forms of work) nor an “idealist” (he does not hold that changing people’s minds suffices to change reality). The “spiritual rebirth in one’s attitude toward one’s own work” would have to have both material and moral foundations.