REVIEWS
Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution: Writings and Speeches of Ernesto Che Guevara.
by David Lethbridge
Che Guevara and the Cuhan Revolution: Writings and Speeches of Ernesto Che Guevara, edited by David Deutschmann. Sydney, Australia: Pathfinder/Pacific and Asia, 1987. 413 pp. $11.95.
Any selection of the voluminous writings of Ernesto Che Guevara is always welcome, particularly since so little has ever been published in English and what has been translated is now largely out of print. Che was many things to many people, and the diversity of his personality is reflected in the diversity of the selections in this volume. He is often remembered as a selfless, devoted revolutionary. Perhaps it is the force of his personality that is best remembered-the engaging smile, the shining eyes. Hundreds of thousands of workers and students around the world carried simple placards bearing only his portrait and the phrase "Che Lives!" after his assassination in Bolivia twenty years ago. This volume was published to mark the anniversary.
What is the relevance of Che's work to us now? Had he been simply the chronicler of the Cuban Revolution, his writing might serve a mainly inspirational value or historical purpose. Selections from The Cuhan Revolutionary War and Guerrilla Warfare are included in Deutschmann's edition, and there are important lessons to be learned from these works. But Castro, in his introductory remarks, refers to "Che's enduring contributions to revolutionary thought," and suggests that these flow neither from his personality per se, nor from his experiences as a revolutionary, but are essentially theoretical and political.
In my view, the central theoretical concern of Che's work is the development of socialist consciousness in the absence of material incentives: the production of th"new socialist man and woman." Che's writings are infused with a profound sense of thc dialectic of consciousness and material production. His work in Cuba was to produce the consciousness of socialism-the social consciousness of the individual-in the transition period between the victory of the revolution and the elaboration of a socialist society. That this transition period would be characterized by an inevitable lack of goods and money and a minimal production basis did not strike Che as a necessarily bad thing. If socialist consciousness could be built among the people in the absence of incentives, would it not flourish and blossom in the period of advanced production relations? In short, Che was taking up in practical terms the issue of the relation and primacy of social being and social consciousness.
The importance of Che's practical work in Cuba, and its theoretical reflection in these texts, is that revolutions in the Americas, in Asia, and in Africa will occur increasingly in the context of poverty. If it is true that the revolutions in the Soviet Union and in China took place under backward and largely feudal economies, they nevertheless took place in large countries with enormous potential material wealth. The revolutions of the recent past and near future were and will be revolutions in small nations with limited resources and rapidly spiralling impoverishment. Grenada, Nicaragua, and Ethiopia are key examples.
The problem, then, for the world revolutionary movement is two-fold. How is it possible for small underdeveloped countries to protect themselves from massive economic warfare in the wake of a successful revolutionary insurrection? How is it possible to build a socialist economy and an advanced production capacity on the basis of poverty? These were questions Guevara faced both in practice and theory in his years in Cuba.
Certainly Marx, in Capital, the Grundrisse, and the Resultate foresaw a far different movement toward socialism and communism. Repeatedly Marx stresses that it is the advanced and universalizing production relations of capitalism that constitute the material and concrete preconditions of a socialist economy. The social relations of private appropriation must be overthrown in favor of collective ownership. It is on this basis that the full development of human individuality-the appearance of the "new socialist man and woman"-is made possible.
Now it is certainly possible to argue that this movement that Marx describes refers to the unfolding of contradictions within capitalist societies themselves. With the emergence of powerful transitionary semi-socialist, semi-communist societies in one part of the world, one can argue, advanced production capacities can be exported to recently-liberated nations, directly instituting the material basis for the development of socialism. The obvious problem with such an argument is, however, that none of the actually existing socialist countries has the economic power to make this a real possibility, especially in the presence of economic warfare and the draining of massive amounts of the world's wealth into high-technology weapons systems. So, at least in the foreseeable future, socialist revolutions must come to grips with the problem of the construction of socialism on a highly deficient economic foundation.
The central, and largest, section of Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution consists of a selection of articles and speeches devoted to the problems of economic war, economic development, and the construction of socialism. The context of these selections, however, whether explicit or implicit, is the development of the new socialist person.
What is the goal of socialism? In Guevara's view, "it is a liberation of man's individual capacity." (p. 127) The full development of the human personality has always been the project of communism. We can read this every where in Marx, in Lenin, in Mao, in Guevara. On the other hand, of course, Marxists have always recognized that human development is not a matter of innate potentials, "gifts" or talents, or individual self-transformation. Full human development, full human self-actualization, requires an advanced production basis. The development of the socialist personality implies access to a complex social, cultural, and material potential.
Guevara's writing, in these central selections, is an elaboration of the dialectic between the development of economic foundations and the building of socialist consciou"Socialism is a social system based on equal distribution of society's wealth. But this requires that society has wealth to distribute." (p. 162) But Cuban society immediately after the revolution had no such wealth. "Socialism takes root in a technologically developed society. It cannot exist under feudal conditions, under agrarian conditions." (p. 162) And yet thesewere precisely the conditions under which the Cuban peasantry had lived.
To develop socialism, Guevara argues, work productivity must be increased. Work develops socialist consciousness"not even social labor, community labor, collective labor, is sufficient to create that new Consciousness." (p. 162) There is no immediate path to the consciousness of the fully-developed personality of communist society. The consciousness of the working masses 'in the transition to full socialism necessarily involves a spirit of self-sacrifice, of devotion to a future which always seems only a possibility. Enthusiasm for hard productive work, long hours, and a relative lack of goods can only be produced by political education. Financial incentives-scarcely possible in an underdeveloped society no matter how revolutionaryonly serve to reinforce the old attitude to work, of work as oppression, and divide tbe people from their revolution.
For Guevara, as a theoretician, economic backwardness and, therefore, the impossibility of financial incentives for labor is, to use a phrase from Mao, "a bad thing that can become a good thing." In his 1964 article, "Planning and Consciousness in the Transition to Socialism," Che emphasizes the importance of the development of consciousness. Without denying thc "objective need for material incentives," lie maintains that the use of such incentives as a lever to promote production "takes on an existence of its own and then imposes its strength on the relations among men. It should not be forgotten that it comes from capitalism and is destined to die under socialism." (p. 213) But how to make it "die"? In Che's view, "direct material incentives and consciousness are contradictory terms," and it is necessary to struggle against the dominance of material incentives since to do otherwise would delay the emergence of "socialist morality."
The body of the 1964 article-perbaps the most important in the collection-is a discussion of the relative merits of two types of accounting and management systems possible in the transition to a full socialist economy: that of the Soviet system and that then being developed in Cuba. Guevara argues that the Soviet management system is inadequate to the development of full socialism since it retains and even develops certain capitalist categories such as commodity production, the market, money, and the "lever of material interest." Guevara proposes instead that such tendencies within the economy be eliminated as soon and as vigorously as possible since they only promote an individualistic consciousness and retard the emergence of socialist relations. Guevara suggests that maintaining and developing these seemingly capitalist categories within a transitional economy is a particular form of the dominance of the law of value. Indeed he considers it to be in direct contradiction to central planning, which "Is the mode of existence of socialist society, its defining characteristic, and the point at which man's consciousness finally succeeds in synthesizing and directing the economy toward its goal: the full liberation of the human being within the framework of communist society." (p. 240)
This is hardly thc place to analyze the value of Che's argument or to take sides in the dispute on management technique. It must be said, however, that Che does not oppose the production of material goods or even the occasional and conscious use of material incentives by the state. His claim that "socialist duty" and general, technical, and political education are the primary levers for increased social production suggests the primacy of the development of consciousness over the development of material production, particularly under conditions of transition from a pre-revolutionary underdeveloped economy.
To the extent, then, that socialist revolutions are likely in the short run to occur with increasing frequency in the midst of a declining global economy and within the context of increased immiseration and virtual starvation within many nations, Guevara's essays on the dialectics of economic production and the production of consciousness constitute rich materials for elaboration and application. It cannot be said that his work has in any sense solved these problems. Cuba's prerevolutionary economy was not, for example, anywhere near as underdeveloped as that of Ethiopia, The global economy today, as Castro has made clear, is far worse than it was in the 1950s and 1960s. The contemporary problem of the relation between production and consciousness is not the same as when he wrote.
The Cuban Revolution has succeeded. The hope for success in future revolutions fighting both poverty and the economic warfare generated by capitalist imperialism lies certainly in the development of socialist consciousness and solidarity, but these will be worked out, as always, under their own specific conditions, Che's enduring contribution was that he foresaw thc problems of the revolutions of the future and began to open up the road to victory, both practically and theoretically (Monthly Review , Oct, 1988 )
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