The Political Theory of Che Guevara

by Renzo Tramer Llorente

  In any case, it is important to underscore that even as Guevara maintains that the currency of “socialist consciousness” has in some sense turned consciousness into an objective condition, he stresses, as we have just seen, that it is a matter of “forc[ing] the pace of events, but forcing it within what is objectively possible.” This remark attests to Guevara’s respect for the objective limitations on progress toward socialism while also belying the accusations of unbridled voluntarism: revolutionary zeal alone is not sufficient for Guevara.71 On the other hand, we should also bear in mind in this connection that Guevara assumed that the objective conditions for revolution, as more conventionally conceived, already existed in all of Latin America,72 such that “socialist consciousness” was, so to speak, an additional objective condition for radical social transformation, over and above the other conditions.

  Finally, it should be noted that Guevara maintains that, even assuming the utmost acceleration of the development of the productive forces, the building of socialism and communism will still be a highly protracted process. Indeed, in a December 1961 speech, Guevara tells administrators at the Ministry of Industries that many of them will not live to see communism, either because they will die a natural death before it has been achieved or because of the actions of “foreign invaders.”73 If building socialism (and communism) would require a lengthy period of time, it was not merely because it would take Cuba years to educate and train all of the technical personnel needed to run the socialist economy.74 An additional problem, and one that I have already discussed, had to do with the effects of capitalist socialization, which could hardly be overcome, or undone, overnight. For example, Guevara held, as already noted, that Cuba would have to continue using material incentives for some time for the simple reason that capitalism had offered this as the only motivation for people to work, and one had no choice but to start with Cubans as they were: as Guevara would say during one of his bimonthly meetings with colleagues from the Ministry of Industries, “who told you that the Revolution is made with angels or that kind of people[?]” The revolution “would not be necessary” if people were like that.75 In short, Guevara’s realism and sobriety regarding the timeframe for building socialism (and eventually communism) also make it difficult to sustain the accusation of voluntarism regarding his belief in the possibility of substantially accelerating socioeconomic development.

  As for the second way in which one might assume that Guevara’s thought embodies a kind of voluntarism—namely, his assumption that it is possible to establish a socialist ethos before the creation of those conditions of abundance that would spontaneously tend to engender and sustain such an ethos—it is well to recall a point made in the last chapter. There I noted that Guevara holds that the relations of production need not correspond to the forces of production during the period of transition. According to Guevara, it is a mistake to “mechanically” apply “the concept of necessary correspondence between relationships [i.e., relations] of production and development of the productive forces, which is of universal validity, into the ‘microcosm’ of the relationships of production in concrete aspects of a specific country during the period of transition.”76 In this regard, Guevara agrees with “the classic Marxist theorists,” who, Ernest Mandel reminds us, maintain that “there is no integral correlation among the mode of production, the relationships of production, the mode of exchange, and the mode of distribution” during the transition from capitalism to socialism.77 This local nonalignment or noncorrespondence between the forces and relations of production also implied more autonomy for the superstructure, since, just as the relations of production would be less subject to determination by the forces of production, so the superstructure would develop more independently of the relations of production. Thus, the ideas that, as just noted, could “react back” upon the development of the relations of production were also developing more independently of them, and Guevara assumes that it might be possible to accelerate this development of ideas, to accelerate the transformation of people’s “mentality,” too.78 Indeed, developments in Cuba appeared to confirm as much. As Guevara would claim in 1963, “a total change in the consciousness of the masses [has occurred] in a few years of revolutionary work.”79 It is fair to say, therefore, that Guevara rejects to a certain extent the orthodox Marxist view as formulated, for instance, by Trotsky, which holds that “socialism does not aim at creating a socialist psychology as a prerequisite to socialism but at creating socialist conditions of life as a prerequisite to socialist psychology.”80

  While some might regard Guevara’s perspective on this question as representing a somewhat voluntaristic position, it would seem more reasonable to view it as a reaction against, and deliberate modification of, an excessively mechanistic version of Marxism, which Engels himself had already warned against in the letters to which I just alluded. Indeed, as Mandel has suggested, what Guevara propounds is best understood as an intermediate position between voluntarism and a rather crudely mechanistic Marxism.81 In other words, one need not assume that the repudiation of a mechanistic Marxism necessarily entails the embrace of voluntarism. There may be a third alternative, and one can plausibly argue that this is precisely the position that Guevara defends. (Given the very widespread unpopularity, and scant intellectual appeal, of highly mechanistic conceptions of Marxism, one would expect Guevara’s critics to welcome his rejection of a mechanistic interpretation of Marxist theory.) To be sure, it may be the case that Guevara’s position tends toward voluntarism rather than establishing a simple intermediate position between the two poles of voluntarism and a mechanistic Marxism. Yet, even if that turns out to be the case, his position as regards the creation of a socialist ethos hardly amounts to an instance of extreme voluntarism.

  It is my contention, then, that accusations of voluntarism are largely unwarranted in Guevara’s case. If I am right, one might reasonably wonder why this accusation against Guevara or, to use a more neutral term, “description” of his thought is as common as it is. There are, I believe, several factors that lead some commentators to substantially overstate the voluntarist tendencies in Guevara’s thought. I have already mentioned a couple of relevant factors, such as a tendency to conclude that, in rejecting a rigidly mechanistic understanding of Marxist theory, Guevara must inevitably opt for a variety of voluntarism, or the failure to bear in mind that Guevara believed, rightly or wrongly, that the early 1960s constituted a unique historical juncture with regard to the objective possibilities for revolution. Another factor is the very selective reading of Guevara’s works—that is, the tendency to ascribe certain views or positions to Guevara on the basis of a very limited sample of his articles, speeches, and other communications. Even assuming that it is true that, as one commentator argues, “Socialism and Man in Cuba” “emphasises the subjective over the objective,” it does not necessarily follow that this is true of Guevara’s work as a whole, let alone that we should classify Guevara’s Marxism as voluntarist.82 (It is, incidentally, especially odd to suggest that “Socialism and Man in Cuba” represents a voluntarist outlook, considering that Guevara states explicitly in this essay that “what we must create is the human being of the twenty-first century.” Guevara wrote this work in 1965 and was therefore thinking in terms of a social transformation that would take decades—not the sort of timeframe one normally associates with voluntarism.) Yet another factor that leads many to mistakenly conclude that Guevara defends a robust voluntarism has to do with Guevara’s insistence on the importance of the moral dimension of social transformation, for to emphasize a “subjective” element such as this will smack of “voluntarism” to many. Finally, we must not overlook the fact that when referring to “revolution” in the sense of “conquest of power” Guevara sometimes uses language that lends itself to a voluntarist interpretation and that this, too, may mislead some readers. In one of his final interviews, for example, Guevara remarks, “But what is most important is not the ‘objective conditions’ but
the subjective conditions—that is, in the final analysis, the determination of the revolutionary movement. The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe! You have to make it fall, and it was precisely this that was our historic role, especially Fidel Castro’s.”83 Whether or not this emphasis on the “subjective conditions” amounts to a form of voluntarism in conceptualizing the means of taking power—and Guevara holds, once again, that his view merely represents a rejection of the mechanistic conception of social transformation that, for example, led Latin American Communist Parties to eschew revolutionary actions84—it is a mistake to conclude that Guevara holds exactly the same view with regard to the building of socialism following a revolutionary seizure of power.

  Guevara’s Continuing Relevance

  The late Fernando Martínez Heredia once described two ways of defending Guevara that in reality render him utterly irrelevant. The first defense consists in maintaining that Guevara was a very good, most selfless, heroic, generous man, and well-nigh inimitable, but one who was a man of the 1960s, and hence of no relevance to history after that period. The other defense holds that Guevara was quite beyond his time—so far beyond it, in fact, that he belongs to a time that has yet to arrive, and indeed will never arrive (the advent of a utopia of solidarity and freedom, the millennium). In short, according to one “defense” it is impossible to detach Guevara from the 1960s, while according to the other Guevara belongs to a time that has no point of contact with our own. Both defenses, or interpretations, of Guevara thus turn him into a figure who is altogether irrelevant to our time.85

  As should be quite obvious from my remarks throughout this book, I do not subscribe to either of these views of Guevara. I do not believe that Guevara was a utopian thinker whose ideas have no relevance for our world, and neither do I think that Guevara’s ideas were only applicable in the 1960s or lack sense when divorced from the framework of that decade. To say that many of Guevara’s theses and commitments remain valuable and relevant today, however, is hardly to claim that we can ignore subsequent historical developments in approaching, and attempting to appropriate, Guevara’s ideas. The world has changed a great deal since Guevara’s death half a century ago, needless to say. The political changes have been immense—for example, the Soviet Union and Soviet Bloc no longer exist, and we associate the great anticolonial movements with an increasingly distant past—and social and cultural transformations have been no less far-reaching: computers and the Internet have revolutionized everyday life, while the “new social movements” (such as the environmental movement, the feminist movement, and the LGBTQ movement) thoroughly reshaped cultural sensibilities. Cuba has of course also undergone momentous changes since Guevara’s death. As Pedro Vuskovic and Belarmino Elgueta remind us, Guevara’s years in Cuba, from 1959 to 1966, coincided with the revolution’s infancy86; those years radically transformed the country, but subsequent policy choices and political developments (e.g., 1968’s Revolutionary Offensive in Cuba, an increasing dependence on the Soviet Union, the emergence of new national liberation struggles in Africa and Latin America, and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc countries) also led to thoroughgoing transformations of Cuban society.

  However, despite the profound changes that have taken place in the world, it is not difficult to find many striking similarities between Guevara’s time and our own. Poverty, oppression, domination, social exclusion, exploitation, and massive social inequalities are still commonplace throughout the world. Underdevelopment still exists, as does imperialism. This is, ultimately, the reason why, in spite of the dramatic changes that have occurred in our world and despite the fact that Guevara developed his theories and policies in the midst of a very specific historical process (the title of the first edition of his “collected works,” El Che en la Revolución cubana, or Che in the Cuban Revolution, was quite apt), many of Guevara’s ideas remain relevant today. In short, we continue to face most of the problems that Guevara confronted more than fifty years ago, and many of the basic positions and commitments that he advocated in addressing these problems seem eminently sensible today. These positions and commitments include egalitarianism, social solidarity, internationalism, Latin Americanism, anti-imperialism, dedication to education, and support for an alternative framework for international economic relations. And, not least important, if perhaps less obvious, anticapitalism and revolution. As for anticapitalism, Guevara both warns us against attempts “to build socialism with capitalist motivations,” as he puts it in his last published interview,87 and urges us to be bolder, more ambitious, and more imaginative in thinking about alternatives to capitalism. As for revolution, the fact that Guevara’s own theory of guerrilla warfare would oblige him to reject this strategy for contemporary Latin America, as we saw in chapter 3, by no means implies that radical social transformations—in a word, revolutions—are no longer necessary. As Juan Valdés Paz has written in making the case for Guevara’s continuing relevance, “in our [Latin] American societies making the revolution tends to be necessary in order to carry out reforms—that is, for the really existing order to be reformed. Hence the premises of mobilizing the masses by means of struggle, supplanting the power of dominant sectors, and confronting American hegemony seem to continue being the conditions of a minimal program for transformation in Latin America.”88 In sum, Guevara’s thought is a valuable resource for the theorization of what has come to be called “twenty-first-century socialism.”

  Of course, to claim that Guevara’s thought remains highly relevant to radical social theory today is not to claim that there are no significant omissions in Guevara’s works. Like many other important Latin American Marxist thinkers (e.g., José Carlos Mariátegui, Aníbal Ponce, or Ludovico Silva), Guevara died quite young, and during his relatively short life as a major political actor—little more than a decade—he had to devote his time and energy to many different tasks. Consequently, he lacked the time to develop many of his ideas in a systematic manner, and this is one reason that Guevara’s writings may appear somewhat inadequate to those who take an interest in contemporary socialist theory. Another reason has to do with the fact that Guevara scarcely addresses a few of the themes that have become the focus of much radical social theory today, and that seem central to the future development of such theory. For example, Guevara says very little about the topic of race. Guevara was, without a doubt, staunchly antiracist; there are several passages in his works, and anecdotes from his life that attest to his concern with racism and adherence to antiracism.89 (Interestingly, Guevara crossed out the line corresponding to “race” on the form that he filled out for the Cuban armed forces, as though this information were superfluous.90) Moreover, as Luis Vitale has observed, Guevara’s extensive travels throughout Latin America prior to joining the Cuban revolutionaries probably afforded him an understanding of the interconnections between class and ethnicity that was missing among much of the Latin American left after Mariátegui,91 and Guevara’s own reading of Mariátegui was probably decisive in this regard as well. On the other hand, Guevara praises the great analyst of racism and colonialism Frantz Fanon in his Apuntes filosóficos,92 and Fanon’s classic The Wretched of the Earth was published in Cuba at Guevara’s request.93 Furthermore, Guevara may have even held some ideas on racism similar to those of Fanon.94 Still, Guevara’s works offer no extended treatment of the theme of race and racism. One finds even less in Guevara on another question central to contemporary radical social theory—namely the question of patriarchy. To be sure, Guevara defends the complete equality of men and women—“women still have to learn that they are just as good [valen exactamente igual] as a man in everything”95—and expresses the belief that mechanization will eventually eliminate men’s physical advantages for some physically demanding jobs.96 In addition, his conception of the new human being is, despite Guevara’s preference for the term “new man”—which is, in any case, quite unremarkable, given the era in which he lived—hardly a distinctively “masculine” ideal: re
call that Guevara emphasizes the values of equality and social duty. Yet one finds almost nothing in Guevara’s works that deals more directly with the basic questions raised by feminism.

  Yet, while these lacunae are certainly significant, what left-wing commentators have most emphasized in considering the “omissions” in Guevara’s works is Guevara’s lack of interest in the question of democracy, and the mechanisms of “socialist democracy” in particular. We find a typical statement of this concern in Oliver Besancenot and Michael Löwy’s Che Guevara: His Revolutionary Legacy. “Che Guevara,” they write, “never worked out a theory of the role of democracy in the transition to socialism. Perhaps this is the greatest lacuna in his work.” They continute, “The main limit of his thought in this area is an inadequate analysis of the relation between democracy and planning.”97 Löwy has faulted Guevara on similar grounds—that is, for not addressing questions about who does the planning and sets priorities, and so on, elsewhere98—and others have likewise criticized Guevara for failing to reflect on issues relating to democracy.99

  It is certainly true that Guevara never offers us more or less systematic statements on the questions mentioned by Besancenot and Löwy, and to this extent one may fairly say that Guevara neglects the question of democracy, and in particular the procedural aspects of a healthy democratic socialism. At the same time, many of Guevara’s comments, a few of which were cited in chapter 5, indicate that he was indeed concerned with fostering democractic participation in decision making; “a plan that lacks the participation of the masses,” says Guevara in 1961, “is a plan that is always threatened with defeat.”100 Indeed, Besancenot and Löwy themselves, just a few pages after underscoring Guevara’s failure to develop the necessary theory of democracy during the transition period, suggest that toward the end of his life Guevara was in fact concerned with the problem of “socialist democracy” and “democratic socialist planning.”101 Furthermore, it seems clear that Guevara was committed to political democracy as he understood it (i.e., in fairly conventional Marxist terms), and he plainly identified socialism with democracy.102 Perhaps Guevara could have devoted more time and thought to the question of democracy. But given the fact that his very considerable political responsibilities and commitments scarcely left him time to write on other topics he considered of great importance (such as revolutionary strategy, political economy, or guerrilla warfare), and the fact that he died before reaching the age of forty, one could reasonably wonder whether it is entirely fair to take Guevara to task for failing to reflect on questions pertaining to democracy.