The Political Theory of Che Guevara
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How, then, is society to produce this new attitude toward work? Guevara is well aware that this new attitude will take time to materialize and that coercive policies would be required to ensure workers’ fulfillment of their “social duty” in the early stages of the transition to socialism. This was in fact one way of conceiving of the “work norm” benchmarks that served as the basis for a salary scale introduced in 1964: “Nonfulfillment of a norm means nonfulfillment of a social duty . . . . The norm is more than a mere measuring stick marking a realizable or customary amount of labor; it is the expression of the workers’ moral obligation, it is his social duty.”27 But in addition to this measure adopted for the short term, Guevara developed two important (noncoercive) practical proposals for transforming the status of work: voluntary labor and the systematic use of moral incentives.
Voluntary Labor
Guevara’s commitment to “voluntary labor” or “voluntary work”—the Spanish word trabajo can be translated as either “work” or “labor”—is perhaps his best-known practical proposal for building socialism, as well as being a practice that he steadfastly advocated and one to which he frequently refers. To be sure, Guevara was not the first Marxist thinker to defend and insist on the importance of voluntary labor. Four decades before the Cuban Revolution, Lenin had defended the practice of voluntary labor in a fairly well-known article.28 However, in contrast to Lenin, Guevara developed, as Helen Yaffe rightly observes,29 a relatively systematic conception of this practice. Moreover, Guevara was, without a doubt, a more steadfast and ardent proponent of voluntary labor than Lenin, or, for that matter, any other major Marxist theoretician.
What, exactly, is Guevara’s notion of voluntary labor? As the term suggests, voluntary labor is unpaid labor that one performs in addition to the labor that constitutes one’s paid occupation; it is, accordingly, labor that must be performed outside the regular workday and/or on the weekend (in a word, during one’s “free time”). The labor in question must constitute useful, productive activity, and while it need not necessarily consist of manual labor, the most estimable form of voluntary labor is indeed manual labor of some sort.30 In fact, the only voluntary labor that counted as such for a member of Guevara’s Red Brigade within the Ministry of Industries, a group of “vanguard” workers committed to performing 240 hours of voluntary labor—the highest category—in one semester, was manual labor.31 The rationale for this had less to do with the goal of raising productivity in certain sectors of the economy than with the value of manual labor as an example that would mobilize workers,32 who would not only see other people performing voluntary manual labor but people who would normally be engaged in work that was a form of “mental” labor and who were, therefore, in a position to do voluntary labor that had nothing to do with manual labor.
This last point brings us to the main question: What, exactly, is the purpose of voluntary labor? According to Guevara, the true importance of voluntary labor does not lie in its contribution to production or the economic benefit that it yields, which in some cases may well be negligible, as Guevara himself acknowledges.33 Rather, the importance of this activity derives from its “educational” value34—namely, its tendency to foster the development of a new “consciousness,” by which he means the new attitude toward work discussed above, or “the consciousness of the social duty to produce.”35 The practice of voluntary labor produces this new attitude, Guevara maintains, by accustoming us to working for the sake of society without any concern with remuneration; this habit, which enables those who engage in voluntary labor to liberate themselves from the attitude that regards work as an instance of compulsion, eventually turns work into a need.36 While Guevara does not explain the mechanics of this process, we may surmise that he thought that work could thereby become a need much in the way that exercise becomes a need for those who have habituated themselves to regular sessions of physical activity. In any event, to the extent that labor thus becomes a need, it constitutes nonalienated labor, and to the extent that one gives one’s labor freely, it is decommodified labor.37 In short, labor becomes, as Marx famously puts it in his “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” “not only a means of life but life’s prime want.”38
This effect of voluntary labor is but one of its benefits, though the most important one. Voluntary (manual) labor also serves, for example, to familiarize administrative personnel with the array of problems faced by workers while at the same time forging bonds between these administrators and workers.39 In addition, voluntary labor can promote solidarity and cross-class unity while furthering cooperation between town and country insofar as it brings together the working class, peasants, and intellectuals.40 Given all of these putative benefits of voluntary labor, it is not surprising that Guevara should claim that it yields new attitudes toward “the [Cuban] Revolution, toward life, and above all toward the [working] class” or that he should have insisted that it was essential to promote and develop voluntary labor as much as possible.41 As a matter of fact, voluntary labor is, for Guevara, one key component—or perhaps one should say “criterion”—of “socialist emulation,” which also included the reduction of absenteeism, increasing savings, and improving quality.42 Guevara conceives of “emulation” as consisting in a kind of “fraternal competition” that serves “to raise production and . . . deepen the consciousness of the masses”; it is, in other words, a “competition to see who . . . is the one who best, most rapidly builds socialism,” where “socialism” is understood as referring to both a major increase in productivity and the development of the kind of “consciousness” befitting a socialist society.43 Voluntary labor constitutes the form of emulation that most contributes to the latter, and for this very reason is also that which most decisively contributes to one’s own self-transformation.
Guevara’s enthusiasm for voluntary labor ultimately derives from his belief that it constitutes “the genuine expression of the communist attitude toward work in a society where the fundamental means of production belong to the society.”44 I shall return to this thesis below, after discussing Guevara’s views on moral incentives. But before leaving the topic of voluntary labor, I should point out that Guevara practiced what he preached, performing an immense amount of voluntary labor himself. As noted in this book’s introduction, the first day of voluntary labor was organized in November 1959, and Guevara devoted countless Sundays to voluntary labor until his departure from Cuba at the beginning of April 1965. Indeed, Ángel Arcos Bergnes, in his book of reminiscences of Guevara, lists nearly fifty plants, factories, and sugar mills where Guevara performed voluntary labor.45 Such was Guevara’s commitment to the practice that it was not uncommon for him to ask those who sought to meet with, interview, or photograph him during, or slightly before, a day of voluntary labor to join him and his colleagues in their work.46 It is no surprise, therefore, that he should conclude his last “public” appearance in Cuba, at a meeting with members of the Ministry of Industries on March 22, 1965, by mentioning voluntary labor and telling his colleagues that they would next see one another cutting sugarcane.47
Moral Incentives
Guevara’s second fundamental proposal for transforming the status of work consists in the generalized, systematic use of moral incentives as inducements to work. Guevara uses the concept of moral incentive (estímulo moral) to refer to both the worker’s motivation or desire to discharge his or her duty to contribute to society (or go beyond what this obligation entails) and the social recognition of this accomplishment. Moral incentives appeal to nonmaterial needs and aspirations, including self-respect, esteem, solidarity, and the satisfaction derived from socialist emulation. A policy emphasizing such incentives rests on the assumption that one cannot generate the values constitutive of a truly socialist ethos, in which moral concerns are motivationally primary, by relying mainly on material incentives, which of course foster a very different motivational structure, while at the same time giving rise to individualistic competition for material
rewards. As Guevara would say in his last published interview, “The development of the socialist consciousness is at odds with the development of direct material incentives and individual interests,”48 and he expresses the same idea in more general terms in a well-known passage of “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” observing that the notion “that socialism can be achieved with the help of the dull instruments left to us by capitalism,” including “individual material interest as a lever,” is a “pipe dream.”49
Yet, while Guevara insists on the importance of moral incentives, it is by no means the case that he rejects material incentives altogether. To the contrary, he recognizes that Cuba will have to continue to rely on material incentives to at least some degree during the transition to socialism, and even during part of the period of socialism,50 for the simple reason that people who have been socialized by capitalism will for some time tend to expect, and be most responsive to, such incentives.51 As Guevara acknowledges in a fascinating letter written in early 1964 to a man named José Medero Mestre, people continued to have, to some extent, urges characteristic of the old, competitive society despite Cuba’s elimination of “the exploitation of man by man,” and this was because “material interest” remained the “the arbiter of the well-being of the individual.”52 As this was the case, and since the objective of a society undergoing the transition to socialism must be not only to maintain the existing (i.e., prerevolutionary) level of production but to increase it—in order to meet the growing demand of those sectors of the population who emerge as “consumers” for the first time as well as to lay the foundations for a society of abundance—a revolutionary program can hardly dispense with material incentives altogether as it begins to undertake this transition.53 Guevara accepts, then, that both moral and material incentives will be necessary during the transition to, and consolidation of, socialism.54At the same time, he never loses sight of the fact that any use of (individualized) material incentives reflects a regrettable necessity, a concession to capitalist socialization, or the fact that the ultimate goal is to completely eliminate the need for material incentives, a “lever” that, he contends, “is destined to die under socialism.”55
How are we to move beyond material incentives? On the most general level, Guevara envisions a process whereby the weight and motivational efficacy of material incentives steadily declines and is superseded by moral incentives, whose weight and motivational efficacy steadily increase until they become the decisive factor in workers’ disposition to work.56 Guevara’s writings and speeches contain several complementary strategies for effecting this change. One obvious strategy consists in explicitly exhorting workers to act on moral incentives by, for example, emphasizing the importance of one’s social duty to work and appealing to the nonmaterial needs and aspirations mentioned above. Guevara’s texts abound in such exhortations (examples of which have already been cited above), and the ceremonies in which exemplary workers, including those who had performed the most voluntary labor during a given period of time, received certificates, diplomas, medals, and so on in recognition of their accomplishments were also intended to serve this purpose. A second strategy involves investing material incentives with what Guevara calls a qualitative character: for example, exceptional performance might be rewarded by allowing the worker in question to attend school with no loss of salary and to acquire thereby the education and skills that would qualify him or her for a better-paying position (in accordance with the newly established pay scales).57 The possibility of such a reward constitutes a material incentive—one improves one’s material condition, receiving the same pay for less work (the equivalent of a raise)—and receives the means (the provision of educational resources) to earn more money; but the benefit serves a nonmaterial, “qualitative” end: a process of self-improvement and self-transformation that will benefit both oneself and society, given that the latter was in need of more highly qualified personnel. Yet another strategy for reducing the importance of material incentives consists in conferring a collective character on these incentives, this being one way to underscore that industrial achievements always require and rest upon a group endeavor.58 One example of this approach would be to recognize the contributions of an outstanding worker by awarding a prize to his or her factory; this might be a new vehicle for the workers’ use or the provision of certain amenities, such as a new dining hall, within the workplace. In short, the first of these latter strategies modifies the material aspect of individual material incentives, while the latter modifies the individualistic aspect of these incentives. Both thus contribute to undermining, in different ways, the importance of material incentives that appeal to individual self-interest.
As will be fairly obvious, Guevara’s defense of moral incentives is consistent with the two features that fundamentally characterize the new human being—namely, a radical egalitarianism and a markedly heightened sense of social duty. For, to the extent that human beings come to acquire these two features, they will prove more responsive to moral incentives: a sufficiently developed sense of social duty will prompt one to work for society in the absence of any material incentive, while the assimilation of radical egalitarian values will lead one to view with disfavor any incentive scheme involving a competition for rewards that generates inequalities. (Needless to say, the more advanced the development of these features, the more effective moral incentives will be.59) The use of moral incentives will, at the same time, tend to reinforce this commitment to social duty and egalitarianism to the extent that it rewards—either in the form of “qualitative” benefits or collective material goods—those who act on the basis of this commitment.
One of the reasons that it is particularly important to underscore Guevara’s commitment to a system of moral incentives is that Guevara himself regards the development of this system, together with the “accelerated development of the worker’s consciousness as a producer” generated by it, as his “small contribution to the practice of Marxism-Leninism,” as he puts it in a text cited earlier.60 It is perhaps above all a contribution to the Marxist-Leninist theorization of the transition to socialism in that adoption of such a system will, Guevara insists, serve to accelerate development of the “subjective conditions” necessary for moving through this transition as quickly as possible.61 But we should also note Guevara’s insistence on the importance of developing a system of moral incentives because it is highly relevant to his diagnosis of the problems besetting the socialist countries in the Soviet Bloc. For example, in his notes on political economy from 1965 to 1966, first published nearly four decades after his death, Guevara emphasizes that the failure to use, or properly use, moral incentives had been one of the major sources of the deficiencies and gross inadequacies of the Soviet system.62 Thus the very same convictions that yielded what Guevara considers his modest contribution to Marxism-Leninism also furnish the inspiration for his criticism of a political system that claimed to be the supreme embodiment of Marxism-Leninism.63
Guevara on Work: An Assessment
Without question, Guevara’s ideas on the status and role of work in the transition to socialism (and within socialism and communism) lend his theorization of this transition, and his development of Marxist theory generally, a very distinctive quality, for, while all Marxist theorists of any significance have, to be sure, addressed the topic of work, Guevara may be unique in terms of the relative importance that the topic assumes in his particular conception of revolutionary social transformation. (This may be due to the fact that Guevara was, as Roberto Massari has observed, one of the exceedingly few Marxist theoreticians to have spent a substantial amount of time actually working in, and touring, factories.64) In my view, we should commend Guevara for placing the problem of work at the center of his strategy for the transition to socialism and communism: if our aim is to build a society in which unalienated interpersonal relations prevail and a genuine sense of community exists on a collective level, we shall need to reorganize work, and this task will have to
be an absolute priority. I think Guevara is also correct not only in attaching such great importance to the moral dimensions of socialist development but also in believing that giving work a new status will be both the cause and effect of moral progress (including debourgeoisification). In this connection, we can certainly subscribe to his goal of turning work into a social duty that all can embrace, an idea that constitutes a valuable contribution to radical social theory not because it is an original idea—some earlier revolutionary thinkers, including Lenin, advocated somewhat similar ideas65—but because Guevara’s commitment to this transformation, on both a practical and theoretical level, seems unique among major radical thinkers.
But what about the two practical measures discussed in the present chapter—namely, the program of voluntary labor and the use of moral incentives? Should we endorse both of these measures as appropriate means for generating the desired transformation in the status of work, the “spiritual rebirth in one’s attitude toward one’s own work” to which Guevara refers? With respect to the use of incentives, I think the answer is yes. It would indeed seem to be the case, as Guevara holds, that an increasing use of moral incentives, coupled with ever less dependence on material incentives (and a modification of the character of the material incentives that are used), is more likely to bring into being a society in which moral incentives serve as the principal, and more or less exclusive, motivation to perform that labor that one does not seek out as a form of (nonmoral) self-realization. In short, habituation of this sort would seem to play an essential role in bringing into being the new outlook that Guevara defends. This consideration seems especially important, moreover, given that attaining true abundance—a condition in which material incentives could serve no purpose (society will be able to satisfy the needs of all) and moral incentives furnish the only rational motivation66—may take decades, yet it is desirable to begin reducing the role of material incentives as early as possible.