CHE GUEVARA contribution (see box). The speech below was given at the meeting by Janette Habel, a member of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.
JANETTE HABEL mistakes. They say that it is not surprising that he has been forgotten, and that young people are more interested in Madonna. Reality has proven them wrong but, never mind, it's a convenient notion.
Neither Che Guevara himself nor his ideas can be taken over and used by imperialism, by Stalinism or its successors. What he said in 1960 in his tribute to José Marti, the hero of the Cuban independence struggle, applies to himself: Heroes are neither gods nor dead souls. "They should not be made into museum pieces, but their ideas incorporated into the struggle"
An anti-bureaucratic and internationalist fighter
This is why we are paying homage to Che. Homage to a revolutionary leader, a Marxist theoretician, an anti-bureaucratic and internationalist fighter. At the same time we do not overlook his mistakes and our criticism, because revolutionary leaders are not oracles.
We should discuss first Che's revolutionary strategy, which has been obscured by the circumstances of his death, and the caricature made of his military policy. In revolutions, victories often wipe out the memory of defeats. But when defeats have not yet been overcome, they are used to invalidate the strategy of those who were defeated. Rosa Luxembourg answered this when she said that the history of revolutions is full of "dress rehearsals" which make possible subsequent victories.
Che's guerrilla warfare in Bolivia was a failure. But we have to understand the reain se for hip. The image of Che preserved 23 in semi-religious imagery as an adventurist November 9, 1987 • International Viewpoint
CHE GUEVARA guerrilla fighter, a sort of martyr, stands counter to the whole meaning of his life. This view of him is propagated the better to bury his revolutionary thinking.
We think that it was not Che's strategy that was wrong. It is as valid today as it was then. This strategy was first of all a complete break with realpolitik, and with the fatalism of those who thought that because of the strength of US imperialism it was impossible to take power. Che reaffirmed the possibility of taking power by destroying the bourgeois state apparatus and resisting imperialist intervention through armed struggle. Victory could be ensured if the leadership of the struggle was kept out of the hands of the bourgeoisie and in those of a revolutionary vanguard, because in Latin America the choice was "either socialist revolution, or the caricature of revolution". For Che, the Cuban revolution was not an exception. Its example could be repeated by putting into operation a continent-wide strategy.
Tactic of rural guerrilla warfare
The balance sheet is most critical on the tactics and forms of struggle. Che believed that the struggle should take the form of rural guerrilla warfare for both social and military reasons. It should begin in the countryside in order to combine the advantages of guerrilla warfare and the possibility for the guerrilla fighters to be "social reformers" in the liberated zones. (This doesn't have much in common with a focoist strategy, a struggle isolated from the masses, which Che was later accused of advocating.)
What balance sheet should we make today? On the strategic questions, Che was right. No electoralist or peaceful road has led to socialism. Moreover, no alternative to the path proposed by Che has appeared. Five years after Che's death, Pinochet overthrew the Popular Unity government in Chile by a military coup. Twelve years later, the revolution triumphed in Nicaragua, and revolutionary struggle erupted in El Salvador. This is a posthumous victory for Che Guevara, and a blow against those who insisted on the exceptional nature of the Cuban revolution.
So what do we criticize? What were the mistakes? For us they were of two types. In the first place, an analytical weakness concerning the social base of the revolution. The guerrilla warfare tactic advocated by Che was based primarily on the peasantry at a time when urbanization and the beginning of industrialization were changing the social conditions of the revolution. Che did not understand this, or understood it only very partially.
Secondly, Che Guevara left Cuba for Bolivia with the Bolivian Communist Party as his support. A prop that would betray we can ask ourselves how could the autho International Viewpoint • November 9, 1987 of the Algiers speech (which denounced the complicity of the socialist camp with capitalism), or the message to the TriContinental (which waxed indignant about the tragic solitude of the Vietnamese) — how could this leader in open conflict with the Soviet leadership and its international policy involve himself in a continent-wide struggle in these conditions?
The answer to this question is still not clear; we can only put forward some hypotheses. Che may have underestimated the degeneration of the Bolivian CP, or — but this comes down to the same thing — overestimated his own capacities to isolate the leadership and win over the rank-and-file to his cause, as he was able to do among the Communist youth along with Inti and Coco Peredo.
Difficulties for the Cuban leadership
Perhaps he had no other choice. The Algiers speech had shown clearly the contradictions and difficulties of the Cuban leadership, caught on the one hand between its realism and state policy and, on the other, its policy of support to the Latin American revolutions; caught between the need to negotiate with governments and the need to support revolutionary organizations; and the difficulty of criticizing Soviet policy while depending for one's survival on Soviet aid, with all that that implies in terms of "good relations" with the CPSU's sister parties. Che left Cuba caught in the grip of these contradictions, and thus it is in this framework that we have to look for the origin of his political mistakes.
But leaving aside these political and tactical aspects, the fatalism and passivity which Che denounced have re-emerged in different forms. Once again the world seems divided between the USSR and the USA, and the full weight of "realism" has re-emerged. Once again, the idea that the revolution is impossible — or not even desirable — is spreading.
Che's response primarily political, not military
Some say that the revolution in Grenada was crushed because the island is so small. That in Nicaragua the price exacted by the counter-revolution is too high. That we shouldn't even talk about Vietnam, which has been turned into a gulag. But that in Poland, on the other hand, people are more reasonable.
What is considered reasonable is to steer a middle course between the pitfalls, to take account of world reality, to be responsible when one is small — in other words, to self-limit the revolution. This sort of talk has not really changed in 20 years, and Che's response is just as relevant now as then. Because, contrary to what he is reputed to have said, his response was primarily political, not military.
He understood that 50 years after the Russian revolution there had to be a twofold answer to the problems encountered in the building of socialism since the October revolution. First, to extend the revolution, because one cannot have socialism on a single island. Second, to analyze and find answers to the problem of bureaucratization of post-capitalist societies.
The first answer was internationalist. Che understood that the fate of the Cuban revolution depended on the weakening of imperialism by other revolutions. This is the
political content of the formula "Create two, three, many Vietnams". This has nothing to do with adventurism or irresponsibility. Once the conditions for taking power have been defined, one has to defend this power, both internally and externally.
As a materialist, Che approached internationalism as a practical necessity — not as a moral imperative, not as an international Red Cross, but as a realistic solution. His insistence on Vietnam appears in retrospect as prophetic, because we ourselves underestimated the terrible consequences of the almost total isolation of the Vietnamese after they took power. It is not to hide or to minimize the criticisms that should be made of the Vietnamese leadership to say how much these dramatic conditions of isolation weighed, and still weigh, on Vietnamese society.
For the first time since the Russian revolution, a communist leader sketched out an international revolutionary strategy, one was not shaped by the interests of the Cuban state, but which was conceived in class terms in the interests of all those struggling against imperialism.
Link with traditions of
Communist International
In this sense, Che linked up with the revolutionary traditions of the Communist International. He broke with the illusions of those who thought it was possible to build socialism in one country, or in its other more or less Maoist variant - those who, under the pretext of relying on their own forces, mask a conception distorted by
It was inspired by these principles that Che, a consistent Marxist who said what he thought and did what he said, went first of all to Africa and then to Bolivia.
This internationalist understanding cannot be separated from his conception of the transition to socialism. As he said in 1961: •The Cuban revolution is a humanist revolution, and is in solidarity with all the oppressed people." His last political fight in Cuba, which is perhaps the most relevant today, took place from 1963-65. A number of Cuba's revolutionary leaders were involved and took different positions. This discussion was not simply about economic problems, but about the conception and the
This debate is summarized in one of Che's most remarkable writings, Man and socialism in Cuba, and is surprisingly moder. It is relevant in today's world where it is fashionable to associate socialism with the gulag, and Marxism with totalitarian ideology. Where it is the thing to present socialism and humanism as contradictory, and the fiction of the "state based on law" masks the class character of the state, the position of Che restored the dimension of revolutionary humanism to socialism, of a struggle for a society free of exploitation and alienation.
Above and beyond the discussion on the survival of market forces in a transitional society, which we cannot get into here, Che Guevara once again linked up with the communist tradition and broke with Stalinist and economistic tendencies. He stated that socialism cannot be measured in terms of how many million tons of coal are produced - that communism cannot be simply a "goulash communism".
Obviously, in order to construct communism, the economic basis has to be changed. But "man has to be changed at the same time". Socialism cannot have as its final outcome the building of a superconsumer society. Its objective is to build a new society, a new humanity, a new citizen - the "citizen of the 21st century"
The "scale of values" has to be changed. In other words, simply the development of the productive forces is not enough. There is no spontaneous or mechanical link between economic development and the birth of a new society, communist society.
This explains the emphasis on the role of consciousness and on the education of the masses in building socialism. Here Che sometimes repeated word for word Lenin who declared to the Communist youth in 1920 "that it was necessary to create a society that does not resemble the old one" by struggling against an education which says "my well-being is everything, couldn't give a damn about the rest".
The difficulties for Lenin were "the fact that our starting point is materials which have been bequeathed to us by the old society". Che confirms this in Man and socialism in Cuba: "The new society in formation has to fight very hard against the past, which still has its effects not only in individual consciousness, but in the character of this period of transition where market relations continue. Commodities are the economic cells of capitalist society, and while they exist there effects will be felt in production and thus in consciousness....This is why it is so important to make a correct choice of the instrument for mass mobilization. That instrument must be fundamentally of a moral character, without forgetting the correct use of material incentives, especially those of a social nature."
He asks the question, can we build socialism using the rotten instruments left by capitalism: money, profit and individual interest? In fact, this question is at the heart of today's discussions on the meaning of the economic reforms in the USSR and
Che's conception of socialist democracy
The timeliness of Che Guevara's thought is equally reflected in the concerns of Orlando Nuñez, the Nicaraguan leader, when he states that the economic resources of the transitional society should allow "a synthesis between what is individual and what is social. The lack of consciousness,
CHE GUEVARA or the non-existence of a subjective project in the revolution, ends up undermining the revolution itself'. [Cuadernos de Sociologia, 1987]
The degeneration of the Eastern European countries has only confirmed this forecast. Market economy reforms have not until now brought any remedy, as is shown by the Yugoslav experience.
But it would not be right to finish without pointing out the weak point in Che's thinking — the lack of an organized, institutional conception of socialist democracy. Che Guevara had not formalized a conception of the management of the transitional society, and his vision of the organization of power was still based more on example than on the producers themselves taking charge of production. The underdevelopment of Cuba and its economic and cultural backwardness undoubtedly count for a lot. But this weakness was compensated for to some extent because he did have an acute understanding of the bureaucracy and the need to struggle against privilege. He wanted to build an egalitarian society centred on solidarity, not on competition and individualism. This is not very fashionable today, but is still surprisingly relevant.
His personal intransigence and his rejection of any privileges was legendary. When he was ill with tuberculosis after the Cuban victory he was sent for a short time to convalesce in a rest-home belonging to a former friend of the dictator Batista. He made a public apology for this, considering it an insult to popular feeling. As minister of industry, he refused his salary, and only kept the equivalent of that of a commander in the rebel army.
In his life, as in his death, Che Guevara opposed all that Lenin characterized as "the most shocking feature of the former bourgeois society, the gap between theory and practice".
A parenthesis in revolutionary history
In Wester Europe, the period we are now in seems to be a parenthesis in revolutionary history, and so some believe that Che has fallen into oblivion. Because the present situation consists of temporary retreats and defensive struggles, Che's ideas — like those of all the great revolutionaries - are subject to doubt and questions which seem without answer. But wherever people are struggling, wherever the revolutionary spirit is being reborn, his name is reappearing. In Haiti, in Nicaragua as in El Salvador, in New Caledonia, and even — on a very small scale — in the Soviet Union, where a socialist club has taken his name.
History will again confirm, as it has for Lenin, Luxembourg and Trotsky, that the people will always pay the due tribute to those who died as they lived, in the service of the revolution. These great revolutionar- 25 ies will never die. * November 9, 1987 • International Viewpoint