The Political Theory of Che Guevara

by Renzo Tramer Llorente

  Finally, while not taking issue with Guevara’s emphasis on fostering a new consciousness, one might argue that he conceives of this new consciousness in excessively moral terms, that is, that he reduces this new outlook or orientation to a certain moral sensibility; in a word, that Guevara places too much emphasis on the moral transformation of human beings in the transition to socialism.99 In short, even granting that it is important to promote this moral transformation, it is a mistake, one might claim, to reduce the new consciousness to such a transformation, and for this reason Guevara’s approach to the new person is flawed. The problem with this sort of criticism is that it is hard to imagine what else a change in “consciousness” could mean in this connection if not a new moral sensibility or perspective, a new social ethos. In other words, producing a new consciousness will always be essentially a matter of moral reform.

  Was Guevara the New Human Being?

  Referring to Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “I believe that the man was not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age.”100 Many people seem to agree with something like Sartre’s view, in that they suggest that Guevara himself embodied a robust anticipation of, or approximation to, the new human being.101 Indeed, some have gone so far as to claim that Guevara was an example of the new human being—that is, have not hesitated to identify Guevara with this type of person.102

  This identification of Guevara with the new human being is both understandable and plausible. After all, Guevara embodied a radically egalitarian outlook and a keen sense of social duty—the basic hallmarks of the new person—and without question displayed the attitude to work that follows from the combination of these two commitments (and that is, as we shall see in the next chapter, its most important and visible practical consequence, or manifestation). Nonetheless, it is a mistake to identify Guevara with the new person, as opposed to viewing him as a singular harbinger of this type of human being. Guevara was not an instance of the new human being because this person can only truly appear, as was emphasized earlier, with the advent of communism. This is hardly a trivial, dogmatic assertion. The Cuba in which Guevara was living and working in the early 1960s was an underdeveloped society emerging from capitalism and undergoing a transition to socialism. In these circumstances, anyone who sought to prefigure the new person actually had to accept even more self-sacrifice, and practice even greater austerity, than would be required of the new person, who will live in a society of abundance, in which all “do their share.” There is, indeed, more than a little truth in Spanish philosopher Francisco Fernández Buey’s comment that Guevara “wanted to be a ‘new man’ in a world that was still old.”103 Yet one must add the following: precisely because he sought to be a new person in a noncommunist society Guevara actually went beyond what would be required of, or rather exhibited by, the new person in a communist society. To take but one example, achieving ethical and political “consistency” in a society that makes such consistency well-nigh impossible, or at the very least systematically discourages the values and principles (equality, social justice, etc.) to which one strives to be faithful, typically requires a superhuman effort. Consequently, avoiding compromises in such a society requires that we become not the new human beings of a communist society but human beings who would be exceptional even in that society.

  It is important to underscore this idea for a fairly obvious reason. If, or to the extent that, people equate Guevara’s lifestyle and practice with that of the new person, they will almost certainly find the new person—which is, let us not forget, the communist human being, or typical representative of a communist society—an unattractive ideal or goal for humanity: it simply requires too much sacrifice, is too demanding, too onerous. In this connection, it is enough to recall Guevara’s grueling workdays (six days a week), which, when combined with voluntary labor on Sundays, added up to more than double a normal workweek: he was not exaggerating when, in response to a Uruguayan journalist’s questions about his lifestyle and habits, he replied, “I work maybe sixteen, maybe eighteen hours a day.”104 One might also think about his self-imposed burden of constant reeducation, as he sought to master all of the relevant knowledge in assuming his responsibilities as president of the National Bank of Cuba or Minister of Industries, a commitment to reeducation that far surpasses what we expect of any official on taking up a new post.105 More generally, while one might readily agree with Guevara when he states that “we must work for our internal improvement almost as an obsession, as a constant impulse,”106 we should not forget that to strive for self-improvement or self-perfection in a society that is still building socialism, and hence still includes formidable institutional and attitudinal obstacles to these goals, is very different from pursuing them in a society free of such obstacles, and one that has eliminated, among other things, the exploitation of one human being by another, this being one of the ways that Guevara defines socialism,107 and an aim that, as already noted, he underscores on countless occasions.

  In light of the preceding considerations, it is probably best not to identify Guevara with the new human being but rather to think of him as a most exemplary communist in a noncommunist society, or perhaps in one of the ways that Fidel Castro characterizes Guevara in his October 8, 1987, speech commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Guevara’s death: as the “model of a revolutionary man.”108 If, furthermore, revolutionaries are, as Guevara remarked in his Bolivian Diary a mere two months before his death, “the highest form of the human species,”109 this is hardly an unflattering characterization, and one that would surely please Guevara.

  2

  The Problem of Work

  Guevara refers to the topic of work, or problems relating to work, such as the need to raise productivity, time and again over the course of his speeches and writings. This comes as no surprise, considering Guevara’s belief that the “new person” will view work in a way that is strikingly different from the prevailing view of work in capitalist society and that this new conception of work will be one of the hallmarks of the communist society of the future. As he writes in “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” “In order to develop a new culture, work must acquire a new status,” and he even goes so far as to claim that “there is . . . a need to undergo a complete spiritual rebirth in one’s attitude toward one’s own work, freed from the direct pressure of the social environment, though linked to it by new habits. That will be communism.”1 For Guevara, the new men and women will have, in addition to—and, as we shall see, as a result of—the features discussed in chapter 1, a fundamentally new relationship to work. It is precisely because Guevara’s proposals for the transformation of work are, on the one hand, the centerpiece of his vision of social renewal and, on the other, one of his most original contributions to radical social theory that the topic of work and its place in his thought merits a chapter-length treatment.

  Work as a Problem

  In order to grasp what is distinctive about Guevara’s notion of work, it will be necessary to say a few words about both the topic of work as a problem for political theory generally and conventional Marxist thinking on this topic in particular. Work constitutes an important topic for political theory, whatever the theoretical tradition or school of thought, for the simple reason that work is, as Robert Dahl has written, “central to the lives of most people. For most people, it occupies more time than any other activity. Work affects . . . their income, consumption, savings, status, friendships, leisure, health, security, family life, old age, self-esteem, sense of fulfillment and well-being, personal freedom, self-determination, self-development, and innumerable other crucial interests and values.”2 Dahl’s observation is no overstatement,3 and it is precisely because of the decisive role of work in shaping people’s lives and in contributing to the functioning of society that the topic has always attracted the attention of political philosophers and social theorists, not least of all those of a reformist bent. The fundamental question in this reg
ard has always been the following: How should society distribute the burdens of work? (The question is actually one element of a much broader question for social and political thought—namely, How are we to distribute the benefits and burdens of society?) A related problem arises from the need to render work, or at least various aspects of many different jobs, less onerous and more enjoyable. This is the challenge that John Stuart Mill, one of the major figures of classical political liberalism, characterizes, in his Principles of Political Economy, as “the great and fundamental problem of rendering labour attractive.”4

  If the different traditions in social and political theory have always considered work an important problem, Marxism has certainly been no exception; indeed, it probably attaches more importance to work than any rival theoretical tradition or school of thought.5 With regard to the first question that I mentioned, Marxism has always sought to draw attention to the question of the exploitation of laborers while at the same time stressing the link between control over production and the method of allocating labor, on the one hand, and the organization of society as a whole, on the other. Marxists have also paid a great deal of attention to the second question, namely, the task of rendering work less onerous and more enjoyable, or what is sometimes called “the humanization of work.” Indeed, their philosophical belief that labor is the quintessential human activity and materialist assumptions concerning the role of a worker’s labor in shaping his or her psychology and personality6 typically lead Marxists to emphasize, and to a far greater extent than non-Marxist commentators, the ways in which jobs as presently structured and organized severely constrain workers’ prospects for self-realization. This is merely another way of saying that it severely limits their opportunities for attaining many of the things mentioned by Dahl in the passage cited above, such as self-esteem, a sense of fulfillment and well-being, personal freedom, self-determination, and self-development. It is precisely because work as organized under capitalism frustrates workers’ attainment of these ends and subjects workers to exploitation that Marx would declare, in a speech delivered after the fateful 1872 congress of the First International in The Hague, “One day the worker will have to seize political supremacy to establish the new organisation of labour.”7

  When it comes to the subject of work, Guevara is in many respects a rather orthodox adherent of Marxism, in that his ideas constitute a faithful, straightforward continuation of Marx’s thinking on this subject. To begin with, he shares Marx’s assumptions about the centrality of labor in human experience—he calls work “the center of human activity” in an important speech from August 19628—and Marx’s view that labor, far from constituting an unavoidable “disutility,” as much conventional economic thought maintains,9 is a vital human need. Consequently, he also shares Marx’s insistence on the need to organize work in such a way as to ensure that it serves as a means of self-realization—indeed, the primary means of self-realization—rather than crippling the worker.10 Furthermore, like Marx and other Marxist thinkers, Guevara believes that the alienation that characterizes human beings (and human relations) in capitalist societies derives in large part from the organization and experience of work under capitalism and that the essential problem with this organization lies in the commodification of labor: under capitalism “a person dies every day during the eight or more hours in which he or she functions as a commodity.”11 Accordingly, and as is again the case with Marx and other Marxist thinkers, the need to transform work from an alienating experience into a purposive activity that allows for and promotes human flourishing occupies a central place in Guevara’s thought (“the ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration” is “to see human beings liberated from their alienation”12), and the goal of achieving a definitive decommodification of labor informs his attempts to theorize the transformation that work must undergo in the transition to socialism and communism. Guevara also assumes, as do Marx and all Marxists, that work will have to be organized in a different way for the simple reason that the purpose of work will have changed, as the satisfaction of the needs of all and the collective welfare, rather than the maximization of profit for private individuals, will dictate society’s handling of work.13 Guevara also underscores, as does the Marxist tradition as a whole, the importance of technological progress in making liberating work possible.14 Finally, we may note that Guevara emphasizes, like most Marxists before him, that all will bear the obligation to work in the socialist and communist societies of the future.15

  Thus in many respects Guevara’s thought on the problem of work scarcely departs from the predominant Marxist views on this topic. At the same time, Guevara’s approach to work, including his views on fostering a properly socialist conception of work during the period of transition to socialism, involves a distinctive development of Marxism, as we shall see in the rest of this chapter.

  Reconceiving Work

  Guevara takes for granted that the status of work within a socialist and (eventually) communist society will bear little resemblance to that which it has in capitalist societies. In emphasizing what is distinctive about work in an emancipated society, Guevara emphasizes one aspect of the new work experience above all: all members of society will view work as a social duty. Guevara would say this explicitly in a televised discussion in late December 1963: “In socialist society or in the construction of socialism the worker works because it is his social duty.”16 Guevara makes the same point in “On the Budgetary Finance System,” an essay published shortly after this television appearance and the text that constitutes his most detailed statement of the system of economic organization he devised and implemented in the Ministry of Industries. In this essay he writes, “We must make social duty the fundamental point of all the worker’s efforts.”17 That is to say, all must come to regard work, as Guevara states elsewhere, as “the fundamental duty.”18 If, as Guevara notes in a 1961 speech to a national conference of workers, the view of work as a social duty was what distinguished the vanguard of workers in the early years of the Cuban Revolution,19 this conviction will characterize all members of a communist society.

  As Guevara repeatedly employs the term “duty” (deber) in evoking the distinctively socialist/communist conception of work, one might naturally assume that what he has in mind is an obligation that one assumes but may well dislike and resent. In reality, Guevara assumes that all will eventually come to embrace this duty, for he believes that all should, and eventually will, develop a moral need for work.20 This is what Guevara means in saying, in a speech delivered at the University of Montevideo in 1961, that “what matters [now] is the moral satisfaction that comes from putting a bit of oneself into that collective task and seeing how, thanks to his or her work, thanks to that little individual part . . . a harmonious collective job is performed”21—or, as he puts it at the end of the Budgetary Finance System essay, the workplace must become “a place where their [the workers’] desire to serve society will take shape.”22

  This view of work as a social duty, but one perceived as a moral need, is, then, the essence of what Guevara calls the “new spirit of work” or “new attitude toward work.”23 It is a spirit or attitude that Guevara on one occasion likens to a “communion with work,”24 a description he thinks justified owing to the fact that, as he would put it in an address to the Union of Young Communists, work will become “a pleasant social duty, done joyfully to the rhythm of revolutionary songs, amid the most fraternal camaraderie and human relationships that are mutually invigorating and uplifting.”25

  Before considering Guevara’s ideas on how to achieve this new attitude, or relationship, to work, it is important to note two points. First of all, Guevara’s conception of humans’ new attitude to work is a corollary of one of the two basic features of the new person—namely, a vastly expanded notion of one’s social duty. Or, rather, as Guevara often uses the phrase “social duty” in characterizing this new attitude, it may be more helpful to say that it is one practical manifestatio
n—and to Guevara’s mind, the most important one—of this new notion.

  The second point to notice is that Guevara tends to maintain a thoroughly moralized conception of self-realization insofar as he identifies self-realization at (and through) work in large part with the satisfaction of a moral need—the strong desire to discharge one’s social duty. In other words, to the extent that work “becomes an expression of oneself,” it is because it involves “a contribution to the common life in which one is reflected, the fulfillment of one’s social duty.”26 This is the sense in which people will come to identify themselves with their work: a moral identification reflected in the satisfaction of having fulfilled their obligation to a collective project that they embrace and that will lead them to willingly perform work in the absence of any material incentive. We shall return to this aspect of Guevara’s view in the following sections.