The Political Theory of Che Guevara
Page 15
Guevara often refers to both sets of factors, the political and the economic, in discussing the obstacles to social transformation in Cuba. As for the former, Guevara would remark, as early as mid-1961, in an interview with Polish-French journalist K. S. Karol, “In very quick succession, we have been taught the meaning of economic blockade, subversion, sabotage, and psychological warfare.”3 Two years later, during a seminar on planning held in Algiers in July 1963, Guevara sketches what this means in more concrete terms: “But the struggle continued. The imperialist blockade was at its apex, and we saw ourselves forced to fight day after day just to give our people enough to eat, to maintain our industry, develop our fields, our commerce, to defend ourselves against sabotage from outlaw groups, from direct foreign aggression, their aerial bombardments, their daily violation of our sovereignty, and in addition, we had to smash reactionary opposition at home, expose traitors, and expel them from government. Sometimes they fled into exile, sometimes they were jailed, sometimes they were shot.”4 And Guevara would also make use of his address to the United Nations in December 1964 to draw attention to the frequency and scale of the “provocations” against Cuba, claiming that they numbered 1,323 in 1964 (up to the date of his speech, that is), or “approximately four per day,” and citing one lethal incident from the previous summer.5
But while this unrelenting political hostility inevitably constrained the process of social transformation, the structure of the Cuban economy in 1959 also represented a major obstacle to development. In economic terms, Cuba was, in Guevara’s view, both semicolonial and underdeveloped—in his draft preface for a planned study of Marxist political economy and socialism Guevara declares that the book will be “a cry let out from underdevelopment”6—and one had to reckon with such circumstances in theorizing and preparing the path to socialism.7 These adverse circumstances included the fact that semi-illiteracy characterized the peasantry in its entirety and nearly all of the working class at the start of the revolution, or so Guevara claims in an August 1964 speech.8 The challenges posed by this state of affairs were merely exacerbated by the effects of US policy toward Cuba: prior to the revolution, 80 percent of Cuba’s trade was with the United States, and it imported all of its spare parts from the United States.9 Before the revolution, Cuba could import needed goods (food, spare parts, consumer products, etc.) within hours, or at most a couple of days; after the United States imposed its economic embargo of Cuba, it could take weeks to obtain comparable goods from the socialist countries, and up to two months in the case of goods imported from China.10 Guevara summarizes the resulting scenario well in his 1963 essay “Against Bureaucratism”: “We have begun the gigantic task of transforming society from top to bottom in the midst of imperialist aggression, of an increasingly tighter blockade, of a complete change in our technology, of drastic shortages of raw materials and foodstuffs, and of a massive exodus of the few qualified technicians we have.”11
These were the circumstances, then, in which Cuba would initiate the transition to socialism. They offered, in effect, a textbook illustration of the three major difficulties that, as C. B. Macpherson once pointed out, the twentieth-century’s socialist states had to confront. Nearly all of these states, Macpherson argued, (1) were established in underdeveloped societies, with a large peasant population among which illiteracy was widespread, (2) faced the Western powers’ hostility, including support for counterrevolution and “encirclement,” and (3) were born in revolution or civil war, with the inevitable result that deviations from the leadership’s line would tend to be viewed as treasonous.12
In any event, just as he would often draw attention to the obstacles and difficulties noted in the first three paragraphs of this section, Guevara often underscores the importance of bearing in mind that the process on which the Cuban revolutionaries had embarked was the transition to socialism rather than socialism as such.13 The revolutionaries therefore faced problems arising from an instance of what Georg Lukács refers to as “the nonclassical genesis of socialism in an underdeveloped country.”14 Lukács speaks of a “nonclassical genesis” because the standard Marxist model of historical evolution assumes that socialism will emerge from a highly advanced and fully developed capitalist society. The model does not posit any transitional phase between capitalism and socialism, the latter being the social arrangement that follows a successful proletarian revolution in a capitalist society; it is the “lower” stage of communism (and in this sense is itself a “transitional” phase). If Guevara often stresses the fact that the Cuban Revolution had embarked upon the transition to socialism rather than establishing socialism, it is because this transition poses problems that are very different from those that would arise in a socialist society that develops in accordance with the “classical” genesis of socialism. “How,” Guevara asks in “The Meaning of Socialist Planning,” “in a country colonized by imperialism, its basic industries underdeveloped, a monoproducer dependent on a single market, can the transition to socialism be made?”15 The central problem is to overcome underdevelopment and establish the economic foundations for socialism—and to accomplish this feat without much theoretical guidance. Marx and Engels, whose works focused on the operation of capitalism, had said very little about the structure and institutional mechanics of a socialist society; as noted in chapter 1, Marx declined to offer “recipes . . . for the cook-shops of the future,” an “unscientific” and futile enterprise in his view (How could we possibly foresee how truly free human beings in a radically different social and institutional environment would organize their society?). He and Engels said even less about a stage involving a transition to socialism, a stage in which, as Guevara himself points out in the essay just cited, the relations of production need not correspond to the forces of production, despite what one might expect from a superficial interpretation of Marxist theory.16 On the other hand, what the Soviet Union and China offered in terms of lessons regarding this transitional phase was of limited value, both because Cuba’s economic and political history had little in common with that of either of these nations and because the concrete aspects of this phase, whose main task consists of overcoming economic underdevelopment, had not been adequately analyzed and theorized by either the Soviets or the Chinese.
Guevara was acutely aware of this dearth of reflection on the transition to socialism in underdeveloped or semicolonial countries. Significantly, Guevara’s planned study of Marxist political economy and socialism was to include, according to the tentative outline for the book, not only a section that dealt with “the transition period” but also one that would underscore the fact that even though both Marx and Lenin theorized two stages of communism (in the “Critique of the Gotha Programme” and The State and Revolution, respectively) Lenin in reality posited the existence of three stages; the explanation for this additional stage was to be found in underdevelopment.17 This outline reflects an idea that Guevara stresses in one of his last public lectures in Cuba, the late 1964 appearance at the University of Oriente in Santiago cited earlier, during which he also notes his great level of interest in the political economy of the transition period.18 Guevara’s interest in the nature of, and problems characterizing, this phenomenon is readily comprehensible: besides the fact that the transitional period, or building of socialism in underdeveloped and neocolonial countries, had not received the theoretical consideration that it deserved, the practical problems attending this phase of radical social transformation were the ones that Guevara had to confront on a daily basis during his years in Cuba. This dual motivation to make sense of the transition period explains both Guevara’s degree of concern with this aspect of socialism and communism and the enduring value of his analysis of it.
The Value of Unity
In chapter 3 I briefly discussed Guevara’s insistence on the importance of international unity in the anti-imperialist struggle. But this is not the only form of unity that Guevara espouses; the success of the transition to socialism, Guevara
argues, also requires maximum unity, albeit of an internal sort, within the country undergoing this transition, or even a nation merely carrying through the more limited type of revolution represented by the Cuban Revolution during its initial phase. In fact, Guevara was literally declaring the paramount importance of unity from the first day of the Cuban Revolution—in an article written at the end of 1958 and published on January 1, 1959, the date of the Rebel Army’s triumph.19 Less than a month later he would conclude his first major speech after the Rebels’ victory by warning that “we must be aware of all efforts to divide us and struggle against those who try to sow the seeds of discord among us.”20
The value and importance of unity would be a recurrent theme in Guevara’s speeches, talks, and writings throughout his years in Cuba, but the unity he advocates and appeals to is generally not the international or transnational unity required for the broad anti-imperialist struggle but rather either internal (national) unity or class unity. Internal or national unity, the kind of unity that Guevara envisions in both of the passages just mentioned, is crucial for both the defense of Cuba vis-à-vis external enemies and for the possibility of implementing a revolutionary program, especially when it takes a socialist turn, which necessitates greater social cohesion and solidarity, as well as uniformity of purpose. So, for example, in his 1959 May Day speech delivered in Santiago de Cuba, Guevara declares, “There must be nothing other than unity of all the people if we wish to win the great battle that is approaching.” He then goes on to explain that there is both a “great battle” that is peaceful—whose object is “the building of a prosperous, industrial country”—and “the great defensive battle against those who want to drown our Revolution in blood.”21 Significantly, Guevara also emphasizes the value of internal unity in his address to the United Nations in December 1964—he actually uses the word “cohesion” (cohesión), but two standard English versions of the address translate it, reasonably enough, as “unity”—although on this occasion he seems to have in mind primarily, if not exclusively, unity as a condition of national defense and survival.22 (It is also significant that Guevara refers to the general question of unity near the end of his final public appearance in Cuba in March 1965, but the context is a discussion of unity and disunity within national liberation movements.23)
While not as frequent as his calls for national unity, Guevara likewise upholds working-class unity from the early stages of the revolution on—that is, even during the period preceding Fidel Castro’s declaration of the Cuban Revolution’s socialist character in April 1961. So, for example, in an October 1959 speech Guevara would emphasize the fundamental importance of worker unity as a weapon through the ages, and uniting and unity therefore constituted a duty for workers, given that the “oppressive” capitalists always seek to foment division, on the basis of race, sex, and other kinds of differences. Similarly, in a televised lecture from June of the following year, Guevara stresses how “colonialist powers” and “large international enterprises” promote divisions within the working class and thus undermine solidarity among the workers.24
It is important to point out, in discussing Guevara’s defense of workers’ unity, that with the increasingly socialistic orientation of the Cuban Revolution Guevara’s conception of such unity would undergo a significant modification. After all, the elimination of capitalism meant the elimination of capitalists and hence the disappearance of the old antagonism between the owners and their representatives, on the one hand, and the workers, on the other. In a word, the traditional class antagonism no longer existed: “When the domination of one class over another disappears, when the means of production belong to everyone, contradictions do not exist.”25 This means that workers’ “unity” takes on a new meaning in a society building socialism, for the simple reason that in a society that is not characterized by class domination it no longer makes sense to speak of unity against the adversary of one’s class. This idea decisively shapes Guevara’s perspective on trade unions and unionism. As he explains in the same December 1964 meeting with his collaborators at the Ministry of Industries from which the preceding quotation is taken, “The union is the association of workers to be against the employer.” Since this employer has ceased to exist and the workers who assume administrative roles can hardly be regarded as enemies of the working class, unions lose their principal reason for being and, indeed, are no longer needed.26 Guevara holds, then, that the union as an institution will eventually disappear because the progress toward socialism will gradually render them superfluous, much in the way that the state will eventually fade away, and he points out that Lenin, too, had prophesied that unions would not exist in the future.27 In the short term (i.e., so long as it continues to exist as an institution), the union’s function should be, according to Guevara, to promote a new conception of work among the masses and raise production levels, defending the other interests of the workers only until such bodies as the Workplace Justice Councils (Consejos de Justicial Laboral), established in 1963, had completely taken over that role.28
So, revolutionary unity—which is nothing other than a certain form of political unity—is plainly a fundamental concern for Guevara and should be understood as a composite of the unity achieved among the workers, internal or national unity, and international anti-imperialist unity. The latter would include unity not only among the peoples of colonial and neocolonial nations but also within the international Communist movement: it was in the name of unity, in fact, that Guevara criticized the Sino-Soviet split.29
In considering Guevara’s insistence on unity, it is important to realize how this view is related to two other aspects of Guevara’s thought. First of all, notice that “unity” and “social duty” are complementary notions. If members of a given society act in accordance with a notion of social duty, some sense of social unity will inevitably emerge from their efforts, as their actions will create bonds with others and greater social cohesion. On the other hand, to the extent that people feel that all of the members of their society constitute a unified whole, they are more likely to embrace a strong notion of social duty, for in attending to the needs of others they will be benefitting the whole of which they themselves form one part, effectively serving their own interests. Second, maintaining unity inevitably entails sacrifice among those who are united: the acceptance of policies and practices whether or not one agrees with them, forgoing certain benefits or renunciation of some ambitions, limitations on one’s scope of action (including, in some cases, expression of criticism or dissent), and so on. But for Guevara, sacrifice for the sake of unity is but one of the multiple varieties of sacrifice assumed by a revolutionary as one of his or her duties, a topic that merits a separate discussion.
The Duties of Revolutionaries
Guevara never precisely defines what he means by “revolutionary,” although it is clear that the “revolution” in question is one whose goal is human emancipation as understood from a communist perspective. However, Guevara’s writings, speeches, and talks do contain plenty of references to the dispositions, qualities, and ethos that define true revolutionaries during the process of building socialism. (While it is true that he also discussed revolutionaries’ duties before the leaders of the Cuban Revolution stated that their aim was socialism, Guevara’s comments on the revolutionaries’ duties from that period are consistent with his comments during the openly socialist phase of the revolution.) I have already discussed the two most important components of the revolutionary’s ethos in chapter 1—namely, one’s embrace of a radical egalitarianism and a far more comprehensive notion of one’s social duty. To be sure, these attributes are, as noted in that chapter, actually the two most important attributes of the new, communist human being. But the true revolutionary is the person who in important respects anticipates or prefigures the new person envisioned by Guevara. “Important” respects does not mean most or all respects, which would be false: the members of a communist society will lead lives very different
from those of the members of a society that is building socialism, as the former will have undergone a very different socialization process, live within very different institutional arrangements, enjoy the benefits of abundance, and so on. In any case, these two values or qualities are doubtless the true revolutionary’s two most important substantive commitments. The elements of the revolutionary’s ethos that I wish to discuss in the present section, by contrast, are the more general qualities and dispositions that, according to Guevara, characterize a revolutionary during the phase of building socialism, and presumably also during the initial phase of socialism itself.
In considering the qualities that distinguish the revolutionary, one might well begin with Guevara’s “farewell” letter to his children. In this letter, dating from 1965, Guevara writes, “Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.”30 Yet this quality would seem to be, in essence, little more than a corollary of the enlarged sense of social duty just mentioned. Furthermore, the “most beautiful” quality in a revolutionary need not be one of the most important ones, at least during the period of building socialism. For these reasons, we need not consider this quality at any length.