The Political Theory of Che Guevara

by Llorente, Renzo Tramer

  We have already seen, of course, many of the ways in which moral considerations are of the utmost importance to Guevara’s political outlook and that a central component of his particular political project consists in the creation of a genuinely communist ethos. The “consciousness” that Guevara frequently invokes in some sense corresponds to the preparation of this ethos, and that is why, as noted earlier, when Guevara uses the term “consciousness” he normally has in mind a cluster of moral attitudes or a set of moral commitments, including those that define the new human being. Guevara considers moral transformation essential to the transition to socialism—as well as the eventual transition from socialism to communism—and, accordingly, he prioritizes moral transformation in his everyday praxis, which aims at, among other things, individual self-transformation. (We should also recall that Guevara embraces a largely moral notion of self-realization.) To a certain degree, Guevara’s comment in an interview cited earlier, “Economic socialism without a communist morality does not interest me,” encapsulates this viewpoint. In short, socialist and communist societies are, for Guevara, radically different, morally speaking, from capitalist societies, and the requisite moral transformation must begin during the transition to socialism.

  Guevara’s concern with moral transformation is noteworthy for a number of reasons. To begin with, we should note that Guevara’s emphasis on the moral dimensions of socialism and communism, and the ways in which the political culture of these social arrangements essentially consists in a new moral culture, results in a moral radicalization of the Marxist project. Indeed, among Marxist thinkers and theorists, Guevara plainly ranks among those who attach the most importance to these dimensions: while the young Lukács, for example, may have underscored the Marxist thesis that “the power of morality cannot become effective . . . as long as there are still classes in society,”46 Guevara not only describes the contours of the postclass morality but also actually devotes many of his efforts to nurturing this morality and, as we have seen, has few reservations about explicitly invoking moral considerations, or even appealing to the conventional language of morality, in order to do so.47 Particularly revealing in this regard are Guevara’s remarks at the end of a talk at the University of Havana in May 1959, remarks in which he asks his audience to consider whether “there is not something beautiful about lending all of their efforts to a government that represents the majority of the people; if it is not better to have a bit less money, but to know that a great mass of peasants is benefitting [from this], and to know that they cannot liberate themselves until these measures are taken.”48 Also revealing in this regard is a comment that Guevara made to Tirso Sáenz, a senior administrator within the Ministry of Industries, after Sáenz’s 1963 trip to Poland. Upon hearing Saénz describe his political disappointment (the Polish officials with whom he had interacted were interested in doing business rather than solidarity and mutual aid), Guevara replied, “They’re screwed. A country in which moral principles do not prevail . . . cannot be called a socialist country.”49 Yet not only does Guevara emphasize moral considerations more insistently and explicitly than other major Marxist theorists, he also displays a degree of personal consistency in practicing what he preaches—as regards moral issues—that is surely unsurpassed among Marxist thinkers; and this commitment can also fairly be described as a moral radicalization of Marxism to the extent that it requires near perfect consonance between one’s political and personal morality, near perfect integration of the personal and the political. As Juan Valdés Paz has observed, both in his theory and practice Guevara “propounds an uncompromising fusion of ethics and politics,” and this was reflected on a personal level in “an absolute need for consistency.”50

  Guevara’s theorization and foregrounding of the moral dimension of the transition to socialism and communism, his “moralization” of Marxism, is also noteworthy because, apart from the fact that few other Marxists attached such importance to moral considerations at the time,51 it anticipates to a certain extent the “ethical turn” in later twentieth-century Marxist theory. Indeed, a moralization of socialism in general, and Marxism in particular, remains one of the principal legacies of the body of thought known as “analytical Marxism,” a theoretical movement developed by numerous, mainly Anglo-American philosophers and social scientists in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of the thinkers associated with this “school” devoted at least part of their efforts to an analysis—and frequently defense—of the normative moral dimensions of Marxist doctrine even as they criticized and rejected many of Marx’s basic claims and theses. A good reflection of this position can be found in Jon Elster’s conclusion to Making Sense of Marx: “It is not possible today, morally or intellectually, to be a Marxist in the traditional sense. . . . But . . . I believe it is still possible to be a Marxist in a rather different sense of the term. I find that most of the views that I hold to be true and important, I can trace back to Marx. This includes methodology, substantive theories, and, above all, values. The critique of exploitation and alienation remains central.”52

  In any case, whatever the similarities and differences between Guevara’s views and the conclusions reached by the analytical Marxists, we may note that in emphasizing the moral dimensions of Marxism, and in presenting socialism and communism as resting centrally on a set of moral commitments, Guevara’s thinking represents an important departure from the mainstream of the Marxist tradition. Largely inspired by Marx’s own example, most Marxists have stressed the “scientific” character of Marxism’s denunciation and rejection of capitalism (i.e., the view that it is no longer defensible in light of certain laws of social development) and/or argued that appeals to morality are unnecessary and misguided, since the material interests of the oppressed will suffice to generate the motivation to undertake a revolutionary transformation of society. As a result, explicit appeals to moral principles or considerations were anathema to most Marxist thinkers, who typically viewed such appeals with disdain. Guevara’s robust, unapologetic appeals to morality in the early 1960s represented, therefore, a significant departure from mainstream Marxist theory; it would be a long time before Marxist thinkers would acknowledge without hesitation that the Marxist condemnation of capitalism rests on moral considerations (among other things).

  In the end, Guevara’s emphasis on moral considerations suggests that he conceives of the commitment to building socialism as a kind of moral vanguardism: the political vanguard is, in the last analysis, a moral vanguard. If many who do not subscribe to Guevara’s specific political objectives nonetheless find him an attractive, even irresistible, figure, the explanation may well lie in Guevara’s concern with moral renewal.

  The Question of “Voluntarism”

  Just as a large number of commentators emphasize Guevara’s humanism and underscore the essentially moral orientation of his Marxism, so, too, many who have studied Guevara’s thought contend that it exemplifies a species of “voluntarism.” Thus it is that Francisco Fernández Buey, for example, refers, in the introduction to his short anthology of Guevara’s texts, to Guevara’s “voluntarist” proposals as head of the Ministry of Industries, while Rolando E. Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdés write, in the introduction of their anthology of Guevara’s works, that “the essential element in Guevarism” is “the great emphasis on voluntarism.”53 Samuel Farber, for his part, goes so far as to accuse Guevara of “extreme” voluntarism and even “hypervoluntarism.”54 And various other commentators likewise identify Guevara with voluntarism, or something very much resembling it, whether or not they use the term “voluntarism.”55 However, whereas people generally find Guevara’s humanism and espousal of a morally oriented Marxism praiseworthy,56 practically no one who concludes that Guevara’s Marxism amounts to a form of voluntarism defends it on these grounds—that is to say, defends it as voluntarist. This is as one would expect: “voluntarism” is a pejorative term within the Marxist theoretical tradition. But does Guevara’s approach to revolutionary soc
ial transformation really represent a form of what has conventionally been called voluntarism? Or, rather, is this a fair criticism of Guevara’s Marxism?

  Needless to say, in order to answer this question, we must first understand what is meant by the label “voluntarism.” In general, voluntarism refers to the tendency to emphasize human intentions, rather than material conditions or objective laws of social evolution, in explaining historical development. That is, it involves the claim that the human will, either that of an individual or the collective will of a group, is the decisive factor in sociohistorical development; it, and not objective conditions and processes, is the force that dictates the course of history. Accordingly, to characterize a position as “voluntarist” is to assert that the position in question assumes that human willpower suffices to overcome seemingly insurmountable objective, or “material,” impediments to achieving a given goal. In the more specific context of radical social theory, and Marxism in particular, voluntarism is often characterized as a tendency to give undue weight to “subjective” conditions—political commitment and motivation—at the expense of “objective” conditions, or as the belief that the former are of much greater import when it comes to effecting radical social change, so that people who are sufficiently motivated and properly guided can succeed in achieving their aims even in the face of highly adverse or “unripe” material conditions. This emphasis on the decisive importance of “subjective conditions” is precisely what Bonachea and Valdés have in mind in referring to Guevarism’s “great emphasis on voluntarism,” and this is likewise what Mike González has in mind in attributing to Guevara the thesis that “the will of the revolutionary can overcome objective conditions and substitute the individual for the movement of an entire class.”57

  So, does Guevara’s political thought amount to a voluntarist conception of Marxism? Careful analysis of Guevara’s works shows, I believe, that the accusation of voluntarism is far less justified than is widely believed, at least with respect to his approach to the building of socialism. (Whether or not we can justifiably speak of voluntarism in connection with Guevara’s approach to the theory of guerrilla warfare, or his actual military strategy in the Congo or Bolivia, is a separate question and one that I will not address.) In order to understand my grounds for saying this, it is important to realize that two different aspects of Guevara’s thought on the transition to socialism are targets of the charge of voluntarism. The first is Guevara’s thesis that, given sufficient motivation and resolve, revolutionaries can effect a very rapid acceleration in the development of the forces of production (i.e., far beyond their “normal” pace of development) and thus create the single most important condition for the establishment of socialism. The second is Guevara’s assumption that it is possible to make great progress in producing an ethos appropriate for socialism and communism—consisting mainly in the embrace of egalitarianism and new conception of social duty, as argued earlier—before the establishment of the material conditions of abundance and new relations of production, which, according to standard Marxist theory, would naturally yield this new ethos, and more or less spontaneously.

  Let us begin with the first thesis. As a matter of fact, Guevara does assume that a “deepening of consciousness” can serve as a “method” for “developing production”58 and explicitly links the two phenomena on many occasions.59 We have already seen a specific reflection of this in Guevara’s contention that it was possible to “skip stages” (quemar etapas) of economic development thanks to an enhancement of workers’ political consciousness and, consequently, heightened psychic investment in the revolutionary process. Guevara’s most detailed and explicit statements of this thesis appear in his contributions to the Great Debate on economic policy in Cuba. In “The Meaning of Socialist Planning,” perhaps the essay in which Guevara states this idea most emphatically, Guevara writes that the aim of the budgetary finance system is “a more accelerated growth of consciousness and, through consciousness, of the productive forces.”60 Indeed, Guevara goes so far as to claim, in the article that details the mechanics of this system, that “in a relatively short time . . . the development of consciousness does more for the development of production than material incentives do.”61 While in this passage Guevara is clearly referring to the growth of “consciousness”—which in this context seems to mean roughly “revolutionary commitment”—among all members of society, in “The Meaning of Socialist Planning” he focuses on the role of “the vanguard of the revolutionary movement,” which, “increasingly influenced by Marxist-Leninist ideology, is capable of consciously anticipating the steps to be taken in order to force the pace of events, but forcing it within what is objectively possible.”62

  For many people of a conventional Marxist cast of mind (and others), these passages furnish proof of Guevara’s fundamental “voluntarism” to the exent that they assert that sheer willpower suffices to bring about a certain form of economic development in the absence of the objective conditions supposedly required for such development. Guevara’s use of the expression “force the pace of events” proves especially significant, or rather damning, from this point of view, as does his contention, also found in “The Meaning of Socialist Planning,” that the “consciousness” of those who make up the vanguard “can perceive the proper paths by which to lead a socialist revolution to victory in that country, even though, at their level, the contradictions between the development of the productive forces and the relationships [i.e., “relations”] of production that would make a revolution imperative or posible . . . might not exist objectively.”63 However, if we bear in mind other considerations and qualifications stated by Guevara in these essays and elsewhere, Guevara’s claims cease to appear voluntarist, or, if one prefers, “unduly” voluntarist.

  To begin with, Guevara does not make a sweeping claim to the effect that “consciousness” always enjoys the efficacy that he attributes to it in these and other texts. Rather, Guevara’s claim is that consciousness—in the general sense of commitment, motivation, and resolve—can play this role during the period in which he was writing. As we have already seen, Guevara believed that the early 1960s offered a unique historical juncture, one reason being the widespread sympathy and support for socialist ideas and goals. In “On the Budgetary Finance System,” Guevara writes, “Socialist ideas have touched the consciousness of all the world’s peoples,” while in “The Meaning of Socialist Planning” he remarks, “in today’s age of imperialism, consciousness acquires world dimensions.”64 In a word, the world was “turning toward socialism” as a result, at least in part, of the effect of “the development of all the world’s productive forces,” together with “the steady advance” of “a world socialist system,” which “influences the consciousness of peoples at all levels.”65 To the extent that this was the case, socialist ideas had assumed considerable power to influence economic development—the power to mobilize people to devote themselves to maximizing productivity—which they lack in normal times and circumstances. Which is to say, the unusual prevalence of socialist consciousness was, if Guevara’s assessment was correct, an objective condition favoring the accelerated development of the productive forces. Yet, if this was the case, then the appeal to consciousness was in fact an appeal an objective conditions and hence not a form of voluntarism at all. (One finds an analogous idea in the young Marx’s well-known statement that “material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.”66) So, in claiming that the dominance or currency of “socialist ideas”—that is, a socialist consciousness—made it possible to “advance ahead of the particular state of the productive forces in any given country,”67 Guevara is merely saying that the power and importance of subjective factors has become an objective condition that favors the efforts of those trying to establish socialism.68

  It is worth noting that in other texts, Guevara supplements these considerations with some reflections def
ending the somewhat controversial notion that it is possible for ideas to steer and shape the development of the forces of production. According to the classical Marxist model of social causation and change, in a given social formation the “forces of production” (machinery, tools, land, labor-power, etc.) shape the “relations of prodution” (property relations, structures regulating control over the forces of production), which in turn determine a society’s “superstructure” (its political institutions, legal notions, and philosphical, moral, and aesthetic ideas, etc.). Developing, in effect, a line of thought first expressed by Engels in letters from the 1890s, Guevara emphasizes, in the draft introduction for his planned book on Marxist political economy, that it is possible for elements of the superstructure to “react back” upon—that is, exert an influence on—the relations of production.69 And the relations of production can, in turn, shape, or react back upon, the forces of production and should be modified so as to do so: it had been necessary, Guevara writes in 1962, to “confront the complex task of developing the new model of social relations of production in industry, so as to make these relations serve as an accelerator in the planned expansion of the productive forces.”70