The Political Theory of Che Guevara
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So, the new men and women of the communist society will be, and will have to be, thoroughly debourgeosified individuals. This becomes evident when we reconsider the two features of the new human being discussed above. Consider, first, Guevara’s advocacy of radical egalitarianism. Any equality that goes beyond the formal equalities typical of capitalist societies is a nonbourgeois value, for, whether or not a market economy can be designed in such a way as to achieve something approximating equality of condition, the fact is that actually existing capitalist societies have always been based on, or contained, profound social inequalities. But of course Guevara not only advocates a classless society along more or less conventionally Marxist lines68 but also insists on nurturing an egalitarian ethos on a daily basis; that is, he emphasized the practice, so to speak, of equality.
Consider, next, his defense of a broad conception of social duty. The enormous expansion of moral concern that Guevara proposes represents the very antithesis, or negation, of the values fostered by capitalism, which, Guevara observes, lead to a “dog-eat-dog mentality, where each one struggles on his own, elbowing each other, kicking each other, knocking heads; each person trying to get ahead of everyone else.”69 As we shall see in chapter 2, Guevara maintains that the most effective means for producing the requisite, debourgeosified notion of social duty consists in the development of a new, debourgeosified culture of work, which will include the promotion of voluntary labor and the use of moral incentives, among other things.
In any case, Guevara acknowledges, as we have seen, that a debourgeosified consciousness cannot be produced instantaneously. All who were socialized under capitalism will need to undergo a debourgeoisification, including the Revolution’s leaders, most of whom, like Guevara himself, were originally of petty-bourgeois or bourgeois extraction (but who had already evolved politically thanks to the Revolutionary War and experience of the revolution70). At the same time, on various occasions Guevara expresses his hope and conviction that future technicians, and administrators will come from the working classes and peasantry and that for this reason they will not only display a complete identification with the revolution but also a thoroughly egalitarian outlook71 and presumably a greater disposition to assume an expanded view of social duty (coming as they do from a less individualistic milieu). In a word, debourgeoisification will cease to be necessary in the future.
Challenges to Guevara’s Concept of a New Human Being
Guevara’s conception of the new human being or “new man,” which represents an original contribution to Marxism,72 has been widely misunderstood. It has also met with a great deal of skepticism and criticism, even from commentators who otherwise sympathize, to one degree or another, with Guevara’s broad political aims. I already noted above, and sought to dispel, one of the most common misunderstandings with regard to Guevara’s notion of the new person or new human being—namely, the assumption that Guevara believes that this type of individual can be brought into being during the period of transition to socialism, or even within socialism. To the contrary, and as we have seen, the new person is the communist human being—that is, a man or woman who typifies, and can only truly exist within, a communist society. In the present section, I would like to examine some of the criticisms that Marxist and left-wing commentators either have advanced, or might be inclined to advance (given their political perspective), against Guevara’s conception of the new human being.
One possible source of reservations or criticisms regarding the new human being may derive from the premise that it makes no sense to discuss the determinate attributes and qualities of this person for the simple reason that it makes no sense to speculate about the nature of a future communist society generally, including the nature of the women and men who would make up this society. The ultimate inspiration for this view derives from Marx and Engels’s own rejection of attempts to specify in advance the institutions, policies, practices, and so on that would characterize a social arrangement so radically different from our own. It is a view encapsulated in Marx’s well-known dismissal, in the afterword to the second German edition of Capital, volume 1, of the activity that consists in “writing recipes . . . for the cook-shops of the future.”73 (Some of Marx and Engels’s strictures against the “utopian socialists” express the same view.) In short, it would seem that from a Marxist perspective all that one can safely say, as Trotsky once put it, is that the communist human being will have a psychology “very different from ours.”74 Yet many subsequent Marxists, including Trotsky himself, effectively disregard Marx and Engels’s conviction in this regard and do indeed make attempts to anticipate some features of the emancipated human being.75 So, it is hard to see why Guevara’s decision to do so should necessarily appear objectionable from a more or less conventional Marxist standpoint. What is more, Marx and Engels may have been mistaken in contending that we should refrain from any speculation of this sort: we may indeed be able to infer, as Guevara’s work implies, the kind of human qualities that a viable communist social order requires, and identification of these qualities may well facilitate the creation of such a society (e.g., by furnishing guidance in the design of certain policies).
Let us assume that the attempt to delineate the features of the new human being is a legitimate undertaking. Perhaps the problem with Guevara’s notion of the new human being is that it is simply chimerical or, even if roughly attainable, undesirable. In considering the first objection, it may be well to begin by noting that Guevara’s conception does not appear much less “realistic,” or any more chimerical, than that of other highly respected Marxist thinkers. I have already quoted Rosa Luxemburg’s vision of liberated humanity, compared with which Guevara’s conception of the new human being hardly seems extravagant. On the other hand, this conception seems quite sober and positively modest as compared with Leon Trotsky’s vision of “communist man.” According to Trotsky, “Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voices more musical. . . . The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.”76
But to say that Guevara’s conception seems no more extravagant than other classic Marxist thinkers’ ideas is hardly the same thing as to say that it is attainable or within reach. I myself do not find Guevara’s conception of the new person particularly “utopian.” That is, I do not find it hard to believe that in a well-ordered society of material abundance the immense majority of human beings could embrace an ethos that combines radical egalitarianism with a far more comprehensive notion of social duty. Furthermore, even if one deems it unattainable in practice, one might still consider it a reasonable ideal, which human beings can closely approximate under the right conditions but never fully embody. In a word, one might regard the new human being as a normative philosophical anthropology—roughly, the human nature that people ought to have, or ought to aspire to have—and one that follows from a commitment to establishing a communist society. To be sure, when Guevara speaks of the new human being, it seems clear that he does not consider this being a mere ideal. Indeed, in an October 1962 speech Guevara exclaims, “If someone says we are just romantics, inveterate idealists, thinking the impossible, that the masses of people cannot be turned into almost perfect human beings, we will have to answer a thousand and one times: Yes, it can be done; we are right.”77 Moreover, according to Guevara’s friend and collaborator Orlando Borrego, Guevara believed that human beings’ “definitive liberation” could be attained in a not-so-distant future.78 At the same time, we also find warrant in Guevara’s works for interpreting the new human being as a normative ideal to the extent that he sometimes characterizes communism as the “perfect society.”79 If we construe “perfect” as “ideal” or “entirely without fault or defect” (two senses of the word given in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary), then we can justifiably conceive of communism as an ideal social order and the members of this society as, acco
rdingly, ideal human beings. In short, so construed, Guevara’s new human being, qua communist human being, is an ideal and should be analyzed and assessed as such.
But whether or not we interpret Guevara’s new human being as a human type attainable or realizable under communism, or as an ideal that human beings can approximate yet never fully embody (even if a communist society is attainable), one might still pose the question: Does it constitute an attractive model or vision of human life? At least one recent critic of Guevara, Samuel Farber, suggests that it does not. According to Farber, Guevara’s thought leaves little room for “individual identity” and “individual self-fulfillment, expression,” and his “egalitarianism left little room for individual differences or individual rights.”80 This is, in fact, hardly a new criticism: Not a few commentators appear to assume—without providing any argument—that an enlargement of one’s sense of social duty, with its correlative commitment to working for the benefit of society as a whole, necessarily entails a diminution, contraction, or even nullification of one’s individuality.81 Guevara actually begins “Socialism and Man in Cuba” by acknowledging this very concern, observing, “A common argument from the mouths of capitalist spokespeople . . . is that socialism, or the period of building socialism into which we have entered, is characterized by the abolition of the individual for the sake of the state.” His response in this essay consists of the claim that “the individual under socialism, despite apparent standardization, is more complete [than under capitalism],” for “the opportunities for self-expression and making oneself felt in the social organism are infinitely greater,” and the individual is also free of alienation.82 To be sure, when Guevara refers to “making oneself felt in the social organism,” he has in mind mainly the fulfillment of one’s social duty—that is, a type of moral self-fulfillment; and Guevara clearly subscribes to Marx and Engels’s view that heightened social connections will actually enhance one’s individuality, a strong integration into community life being, on their view, a precondition both for personal freedom (in the sense of free self-development) and for much of the individual’s “intellectual wealth.”83 To be sure, many people today may neither embrace this particular form of self-fulfillment nor agree with Marx and Engels’s view on the preconditions of freedom and individuality, and this consideration is presumably what leads Farber to conclude that Guevara’s thought leaves little room for self-fulfillment as such. But if this is the case, it makes far more sense, and is much fairer to Guevara, to criticize him for insisting on a form of self-fulfillment that one finds unappealing and to show how it undermines “individuality” than to contend that his thought effectively ignores human beings’ need for self-fulfillment. By the same token, it is misleading to suggest that Guevara’s project involves, as another commentator puts it, “constructing a new man whose defining quality was his community-centeredness and readiness to sacrifice private interests.”84 For Guevara, the opposition between social and personal interests should and will disappear to a large degree, as was the case for Marx and Engels as well: “man’s private interest,” they wrote, “must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity.”85
In any case, to say that Guevara privileges this form of self-fulfillment hardly implies that he cannot conceive of, or does not acknowledge, other sources of self-fulfillment, as is evident in the following passage from a 1963 essay: “The various branches of production will become automated, and labor productivity will rise enormously. The worker’s free time will be devoted to athletic, cultural, and scientific endeavors of the highest order. Work will become a social need.”86 This passage, which recalls some well-known remarks from Marx in the Grundrisse,87 is noteworthy in that it both states that in the future work will become “a social need”88 and thereby a source of self-fulfillment and that men and women will dedicate their “free time” to more familiar or conventionally acknowledged sources of self-fulfillment. What is more, since Guevara, like Marx and just about every Marxist after him, assumes that socialism and communism will produce a major expansion of free time,89 the time available for these other forms of self-fulfillment, as well as the cultivation of “individual identity” and “individual differences,” will not be inconsiderable. Furthermore, since all, and not merely a privileged sector of society, will enjoy ample free time, far more individuals will have opportunities for self-fulfillment and self-expression, and the possibility of self-realization generally, than was ever the case in the past; in a word, the material preconditions for individual development and flourishing will be distributed far more extensively than ever before. In short, and as Marx and Engels remind us in the Communist Manifesto, it is a mistake to equate “the abolition of bourgeois individuality” with the “abolition of individuality” as such.90
There is, however, one sense in which the charge of diminished individual differences, or standardization, not only rings true but is true, or so I would argue: Guevara plainly does assume that there will be a greater moral uniformity, or less moral differentiation, under socialism and communism. But in this regard Guevara’s view is perfectly consistent with Marxist orthodoxy. For to the extent that (1) different moral outlooks derive from and correspond to different social classes,91 (2) many moral differences represent a response to social antagonisms, which will be absent from a classless society,92 and (3) Guevara embraces, as we have seen, Marx’s view that “man’s private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity,” we should indeed expect less moral pluralism and differentiation in a classless society. In short, the “really human morality which stands above class antagonisms” that Engels evokes in Anti-Dühring93 will be a universally shared and simpler morality, and in this sense there will be fewer individual differences. That is the Marxist view, which Guevara implicitly accepts. I believe that it is one that we can endorse, too.
Finally, as for the question of whether or not Guevara’s thought leaves room for “individual rights,” since Guevara very seldom addresses rights and his positions and views on other issues by no means have any specific implications with regard to this topic, there are no grounds for Farber’s claim—unless, of course, he simply means that Guevara does not recognize all of the standard liberal rights, which is obviously and trivially true: Marxists do of course reject liberal property rights, for example, just as liberals typically reject some of the “positive” rights defended by Marxists. (Since Farber defines himself as a Marxist, one assumes that he certainly does not equate “individual rights” with “liberal rights.”)
Let me now turn to a rather different source of reservations regarding Guevara’s conception of the new person or new human being, namely, that Guevara errs in placing so much emphasis on deliberate attempts to create new human beings. In other words, Guevara errs, it might be claimed, in believing that by sheer dint of willpower and revolutionary determination it will be possible to bring into being, or at least hasten the advent of, the new person when in fact this new human being can and will only emerge when objective developments in the forces of production makes this possible. In a word, Guevara’s views on the creation of the new person, so it might be argued, entail a certain measure of “voluntarism” insofar as they assign a major role, and the supreme causal efficacy, to individual wills in bringing the new person into being. I will discuss the question of voluntarism at some length in the final chapter, where I also cite commentators who criticize Guevara on these grounds. For now, I will limit myself to noticing some obvious replies available to Guevara.
First of all, Guevara might well point out that critics who raise this charge effectively presuppose a rather mechanistic conception, or even a certain “automatism,” regarding the change of human nature that accompanies the establishment of socialism. Yet this mechanistic view of the change, which Guevara himself disavows,94 is difficult to maintain from a Marxist standpoint, as Ernest Mandel, for one, has pointed out. Commenting on Guevara’s economic ideas, Mandel has observed that it is just as wronghe
aded to insist that a major development of the forces of production must occur before there can be an expansion of socialist consciousness (the mechanistic outlook) as it is to think that education, agitation, and so on alone can immediately bring this consciousness into being. Rather, there is, according to Marxism, a constant interaction between the creation of the material conditions for the enlargement of socialist consciousness and the development of this consciousness.95 In short, there exists a dialectical interplay, or reciprocal determination, between the material conditions and the new consciousness. One reason that pursuing a policy of deliberately promoting a socialist consciousness proves so important is that, as Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács observed near the end of his life, “Socialism is the first economic formation in history which does not spontaneously produce the ‘economic man’ to fit it.” According to Lukács, this is because socialism constitutes a mere transitional form, or stage, between capitalism and communism.96 As the phase that consists in the transition from capitalism to socialism, the phase within which Guevara found himself working and whose obstacles and possibilities he sought to understand,97 is, as it were, an even more transitional form than socialism and no distinctive economic formation at all, it is not surprising, assuming that Lukács’s explanation is correct, that it would not spontaneously produce a corresponding economic type. As a matter of fact, Guevara sometimes comments that ideological development can be out of sync with economic development, and that the expected correspondence did not in fact exist during the transition to socialism taking place in Cuba.98 In any case, the “economic type” needed to reach socialism will include, among other things, a commitment to substantially raising productivity as rapidly as possible, which in turn requires human beings with an expanded sense of social duty, one that motivates them to work harder and achieve the productivity gains that will benefit society as a whole. Bringing such a type into being (rapidly) may require a more direct engagement with people’s mindset, even if changes in the relations of production proceed rather quickly, not least of all because one is still dealing with people thoroughly socialized by capitalism.