The Political Theory of Che Guevara
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For Guevara, collective discussion and consultation complement study and training as preparation—and one could just as well say (additional) “education”—for worker control of production and for socialism more generally. In referring to discussion and consultation, Guevara has in mind both the handing of all manner of problems arising at the workplace and worker involvement in the process of production planning. As for the former, Guevara advocates “discussion of all problems without fear, openly discussing them”—or, as he puts it in a July 1961 article, “criticism and self-criticism will be [in the new society] the foundation of daily work but carried to their utmost in the Production Assembly . . . where the work of the Administrator will be subject to questioning and criticism on the part of the workers he manages.”79 Guevara’s commitment to worker participation in economic planning, which of course includes decisions bearing on production, is no less robust. Collective planning is as feasible and essential in an economy in the process of building socialism as in a socialist economy itself, since collective ownership of the major means of production already exists and the purpose of production is already the satisfaction of the needs of all; and on numerous occasions Guevara underscores the importance of involving workers, or rather the “masses” as a whole, in this planning. Thus, in a very brief speech delivered in February 1961, Guevara stresses the need for “the participation of the masses in all of the work of planning the nation’s economy,” and it is a theme that he likewise highlights in the “Our Industrial Tasks” article cited above.80 In a word, Guevara espouses democratic planning—he himself uses this terminology81—and his commitment to this principle was such that it actually appears in one of Guevara’s final texts, an unfinished communiqué drafted in Bolivia in early 1967, which demands, among other things, the “participation of workers and peasants in the tasks of planning the new economy.”82 (Incidentally, Guevara also defended the democratic self-organization of peasant associations in Cuba, explicitly urging that they be formed from the bottom up.83)
Among the many reflections of Guevara’s commitment to collective discussion and consultation are the bimonthly meetings with senior administrative staff from the Ministry of Industries (including provincial delegates), which were held from January 1962 to December 1964. Volume 6 of El Che en la Revolución cubana, the first comprehensive edition of Guevara’s works, includes the transcripts of many of these meetings (taken from recordings of the sessions). With their frequent shifts between theoretical discussions and considerations and detailed analyses of very specific practical problems and challenges confronting administrators within the Ministry of Industries, the meetings demonstrate the depth of Guevara’s commitment to a view that he articulates in a speech before newly trained administrators in December 1961: “Theory is indispensable for the development of the revolution and for acquiring a superior consciousness, but it must always be combined with practice.”84 Besides reflecting Guevara’s belief in the unity of theory and practice, the meetings exemplify his commitment to collective discussion and consultation; and while these sessions involved administrators and senior management personnel, Guevara sought to institutionalize the practice of discussion and consultation in every workplace within his ministry and to enable all workers to participate in these collective deliberations. (It was a practice that he followed with his guerrilla comrades-in-arms, too.85) If, as Orlando Borrego reports, Guevara found this volume of his “collected works”—which he saw, along with the rest of the collection, shortly before leaving Cuba for the last time—particularly “interesting,”86 this was surely due in part to the value of the discussions it contains, a value that they would lack had the meetings not included such extended exercises in collective deliberation.
One of the reasons that it is worth discussing this aspect of Guevara’s thought at some length is the fact that two commentators already mentioned have faulted Guevara for in effect ignoring the working class. According to Samuel Farber, giving “economic and political power” to “the working class and its allies” was not “a defining element” of Guevara’s Marxism, and Farber likewise maintains that Guevara “would not even consider anything resembling workers’ control of production.”87 In a similar vein, Mike González asserts that Guevara “did not see the organised working class as a central actor in his vision of revolution” and that “it is the revolutionaries, and not the working class, who are the key actors in his conception of revolution.”88 As should be obvious from the summary of Guevara’s ideas in the present section, Farber’s claims prove wholly untenable. With regard to González, the notion that the working class was not a key actor in Guevara’s conception of revolution—a claim also made by Farber—is minimally plausible only if one reduces “revolution” to actions leading to and culminating in the overthrow of a capitalist social order and one is concerned only with Guevara’s position on “the central question of the role of the working class as the agent of revolution” (to use Farber’s words89). While Guevara does stress, in an interview just a few months after the triumph of the Revolution, that “working class participation in the struggle to achieve freedom was absolutely essential,”90 it is true that he ascribes a preeminent role to the peasantry and armed revolutionary vanguard in his theory of guerrilla warfare and holds that this form of struggle is the most effective and reliable method for overthrowing capitalist regimes. One could, therefore, plausibly maintain that the working class was not a key actor in Guevara’s conception of revolution if that is all that is meant by “revolution.” For Guevara, however, the overthrow of an oppressive regime constitutes but one aspect or phase of the revolution; that is to say, Guevara’s “ideology of revolutionary warfare” does not exhaust his conception of “the revolutionary process” (I take both phrases from González91). This should go without saying in light of the section on Guevara’s conception of revolution in chapter 4 above, is implicit in the idea of “socialist revolution”—one does not find a functioning socialist society on the morrow of the capitalists’ capitulation—defended by Guevara,92 and can be inferred from any number of passages in his works.93 Adherence to such an outlook hardly makes Guevara an unorthodox Marxist: Marx and Lenin likewise identify “revolution” not only with the conquest of political power but also with the ensuing period of social transformation.94 Indeed, both González and Farber themselves plainly regard the events that occurred after January 1959 as forming part of the revolution that occurred in Cuba, as does virtually everyone who addresses the topic of the Cuban Revolution. Consequently, it is difficult to understand why they should come to the conclusion that Guevara’s notion of revolution marginalizes or ignores the working class. Similarly, one wonders why they should both maintain that Guevara departs from Marxism on the issue of worker’s self-emancipation.95 Guevara plainly believes that much of the process of worker self-emancipation takes place after the overthrow of capitalist rule, as did Marx,96 whether or not the working class was the principal agent of this overthrow. Indeed, many of the practices and policies that Guevara advocates, such as education and training or voluntary labor, are intended precisely to facilitate the self-emancipation of workers in the postrevolutionary period—that is, in the period following the overthrow of capitalist rule and during which society begins the work of building socialism. Naturally, one might dispute the value of these practices and policies in attaining the desired end or even question Guevara’s conception of “proletarian self-emancipation”97 but not Guevara’s commitment to the principle itself. “The seizure of power by the working class is a historical necessity,” said Guevara in April 1962,98 and he did not hesitate to embrace all of the corollaries and implications, including proletarian self-emancipation and worker control of production, of this view.
Guevara’s Economic Philosophy
While an extended treatment of Guevara’s ideas on economics, economic theory, and economic policy lies beyond the scope of this work, it is important to mention at least some aspects of these ideas in
a study of Guevara’s political thought, if only on account of the numerous connections between the political and economic dimensions of this thinking.
It should be emphasized at the outset that, contrary to what one might assume, given the fairly common perception of Guevara as a “romantic” or “utopian” whose political project exemplified a “voluntarism” blind, or indifferent, to economic realities, Guevara developed his economic outlook in light of a comprehensive yet detailed understanding of the Cuban economy. That Guevara was extraordinarily well informed as regards the characteristics of the economy, and its industrial sector in particular, will be apparent at once to anyone who reads his speeches, lectures, and articles bearing on this topic, which, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, abound in statistical data and lots of other information on production and the operation of the Cuban economy in general. Some typical examples of such texts include Guevara’s March 1961 lecture on foreign aid and Cuba’s development, with its highly detailed discussion of factories, or the December 1963 televised lecture in which Guevara explains new salary scales and production norms.99 Guevara also possessed an impressive knowledge of both the economic and technical dimensions of that sector of production that has historically dominated the Cuban economy—namely, the sugar industry—as is evident in both his January 1962 television appearance to discuss the second “People’s Sugarcane Harvest” and his speech a few months later at a national conference on sugar.100 In addition to speeches and talks such as these, one could also cite various essays that demonstrate Guevara’s command of data on production and the Cuban economy generally, not to mention the countless reports—on visits to factories, on the state of the “consolidated enterprises,” on his ministry’s goals—contained in volume 6 of El Che en la Revolución cubana, which also illustrate just how seriously Guevara took his managerial and bureaucratic responsibilities.101
Guevara was, then, hardly a starry-eyed radical bent on imposing his blueprint for a new social order on a socioeconomic situation about which he understood little. In fact, it was precisely this respect for economic realities that would eventually lead Guevara to concede, as he does in a speech delivered in Algeria in July 1963, that his early hopes and projections for Cuba’s growth rate had been grossly unrealistic.102 Similarly, Guevara did not hesitate to admit, in a meeting with Latin American visitors the following month, that his initial strategy for industrialization had been misguided (for instance, the raw materials for certain goods that were going to be produced cost nearly as much as what it would cost Cuba to purchase the finished goods themselves) or that it had been a mistake to neglect the sugar industry in the drive for agricultural diversification, a topic that he returns to in his 1964 article “The Cuban Economy: Its Past and Its Present Importance.”103 Incidentally, Guevara’s public acknowledgment of these errors testifies not only to his determination to fashion policy in accordance with actual socioeconomic conditions and possibilities but also to his sense of obligation to tell the truth, which, as he tells us in a note that prefaces his account of his guerrilla campaign in the Congo, was a rule—tell the truth—that he had always followed.104 And, indeed, according to Alfredo Muñoz-Unsain, an Argentine journalist who spent most of his working life in Cuba, it was this quality—he was “the sort who took the microphone and spoke the truth”105—that endeared Guevara to the Cuban people.
Another aspect of Guevara’s economic outlook worth mentioning—since it, too, diverges from the image of Guevara as a revolutionary dreamer—is his insistence on efficiency. This concern with efficiency is evident, for example, in Guevara’s remarks in the August 1963 bimonthly meeting with administrators from the Ministry of Industries, during which he discusses the need for financial discipline, reliable statistics, employee qualifications, management control mechanisms, and staffing strategies, among other things.106 Besides these topics, Guevara also discusses such questions as salaries, individual productivity norms, the indispensability of good accounting, and the importance of sound investment practices on the numerous occasions in which he stresses the need to strive for maximum economic efficiency.107 Of course, Guevara’s concern with efficiency was not merely the response of a dedicated Minister of Industries to some of the obvious economic problems in Cuba’s plants and factories. It was also the result of his desire to accelerate economic development to the greatest possible extent so as to shorten the transition to socialism; improved efficiency would contribute to this accelerated development by helping to dramatically raise productivity. The latter objective was, as Manuel Monereo has observed, something of an obsession for Guevara.108 “The slogan of the moment,” declares Guevara at a ceremony recognizing outstanding workers in the Ministry of Industries, “must be produce and produce and produce, every day and with more enthusiasm!”109 While Guevara normally favors less dramatic forms of expression in underscoring the urgent need to substantially increase productivity, the idea that raising productivity (including the creation of surpluses for export) is an absolute priority is a recurrent theme in his speeches and writings.110 In fact, even in his speech of April 15, 1961, to militia members, delivered after the bombing raids preceding the Bay of Pigs Invasion that would begin less than two days later, Guevara insists that “the people’s task is more and more important, in the sense of holding the rifle in one hand and to be working beside their machine, or with their pick or machete, producing every day, disciplining themselves to produce more, disciplining themselves to produce better.”111 Guevara links this idea to his other “obsession”—namely, the deepening of consciousness—these being the two paths that must be followed in order to hasten the transition to socialism.112
If Guevara’s commitment to economic efficiency would come as a revelation to many, his concern with quality would likely also prove quite surprising, if only because Guevara’s personal austerity and indifference to material possessions might lead one to assume that he would take no interest in whether products were well made. The fact is, however, that Guevara took the quality of goods being produced in Cuba very seriously and urged workers and administrators to improve their quality —“our workers and administrators” should “offer the finest quality of goods possible to the people”113—starting with those goods that were “for popular consumption.”114 Indeed, Guevara claims that a commitment to quality is a—or rather forms part of one’s—social duty, and he attributed the decline in quality of many goods produced in Cuba in the early years after the revolution to a lack of “revolutionary consciousness.”115 For Guevara, in short, quality should be a socialist value, and it was therefore a mistake to regard it as a capitalist vice and identify it with the counterrevolution, as did some compañeros.116 As he would put it in August 1962, “by no means is quality at odds with this stage in the construction of socialism”; or, as he says a year earlier and in a less prosaic register, “Beauty is not something that is incompatible with the Revolution.”117
An Alternative Approach to Socialist Economic Management
During 1963 and 1964, Guevara took part in a series of lively theoretical exchanges, whose participants included other Cuban officials with expertise in industry or the economy as well as two foreign Marxist economists.118 Now commonly referred to as “the Great Debate,” a name first used by Ernest Mandel (one of the two foreign economists),119 the exchanges ranged over a variety of questions bearing, on the one hand, on Marxist economic theory and, on the other, on the correct system for the management and administration of industry, and the economy as a whole, as Cuba initiated the transition to socialism. Perhaps the most salient theoretical question concerned the status of the so-called “law of value” during the transition to socialism. Though often used rather loosely, the law of value refers primarily to the thesis, posited by Marx, that the socially necessary labor time required to produce a commodity determines its exchange value and thereby regulates the way in which producers exchange the products of their labor in capitalist societies.120 One of the central questi
ons addressed by the participants in the Great Debate concerned the persistence of the law of value in a society already undergoing the transition to socialism. Helen Yaffe provides a lucid summary of this aspect of the debate: “All the participants in the Great Debate agreed that the law of value continued to operate because commodity production and exchange through a market mechanism continued to exist after the Revolution. The social product continued to be distributed on the basis of socially necessary labour time. However, they disagreed about the conditions explaining the law’s survival, its sphere of operation, the extent to which it regulated production, how it related to the ‘plan’ and, finally, whether the law of value should be utilised or undermined, and if so, how.”121