The Political Theory of Che Guevara
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Internationalism and Anti-imperialism
If there are many factors responsible for Guevara’s impact on contemporary history, two major reasons for his profound and pervasive influence on radical activists and militants, in Latin America in particular, are his internationalism and anti-imperialism. These are, moreover, commitments that even people who are entirely unfamiliar with Guevara’s writings, speeches, interviews, and other works but who know something about his life as a revolutionary will intuitively ascribe to him, for the simple reason that the best-known facts of his life vividly embody internationalism and anti-imperialism, often at the same time. An Argentine by birth, Guevara fought for the liberation of Cubans and the Congolese and was killed in Bolivia in the course of what he hoped would be the first stage in the liberation of the whole of Latin America; and all of these struggles at least partly involved, according to Guevara, anti-imperialist struggles.1 (We know that Guevara was likewise prepared to fight on behalf of Guatemalans, among whom he was living when the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown in 1954.2) In short, Guevara’s own actions attest to the sincerity of his vow, made in an exchange with representatives of other Latin American nations following his December 1964 speech at the United Nations, that he would be willing “to give [his] life for the liberation of any of the countries of Latin America, without asking anyone for anything, without demanding anything,” as well as the sincerity of his conviction, expressed in his “farewell” letter to Fidel Castro, that “the most sacred of duties” is “to fight against imperialism wherever it may be.”3 But what do internationalism and anti-imperialism mean for Guevara? That is, what attitudes and actions do they entail, in Guevara’s view? These are the questions I address in the present chapter.
The Contours of Guevara’s Internationalism
Like many important concepts in social thought, “internationalism” has multiple meanings. For example, internationalism can be understood as referring to “a policy of cooperation among nations,”4 but the term can also mean “an attempted application of ethical considerations to international politics.”5 As we shall see, Guevara’s own notion of internationalism incorporates the principles reflected in both of these definitions (along with other principles), but he also brings a very distinctive perspective to the construal of such principles. The distinctiveness of Guevara’s internationalism is due in large part—as is the firmness of his commitment to this idea—to the fact that it has two different sources, or foundations, or rather arises from both moral and political convictions. (I do not mean to suggest that his political convictions do not have a moral component but only that it is possible to establish a separation of moral and political aspects for analytical purposes.) As for the moral convictions, it is clear that Guevara’s internationalism follows from the two commitments that he exemplified on a personal level and that, as we have seen, would characterize the new human being: an elevated sense of social duty and the assimilation of a through-going egalitarianism. Simply stated, if we embrace a far more expansive concept of social duty and espouse a belief in universal equality of condition, then national borders as such will have little bearing on the degree of concern that we show for the well-being of other people.
At the same time, Guevara’s internationalism also rests on a more narrowly political understanding of this concept that is rooted in his Marxism and involves the practice of international solidarity with all individuals and movements fighting for liberation from class oppression. In other words, Guevara’s internationalism is also an expression of his commitment to the Marxist principle of “proletarian internationalism,” a term that Guevara uses quite frequently. The Marxist principle of “proletarian internationalism” is encapsulated in the famous slogan “Proletarians of all countries, Unite!”—the phrase with which Marx concluded his “Inaugural Address” at the 1864 founding of the Working Men’s International Association (the “First International”), as well as being the final line of the Communist Manifesto.6 As these slogans suggest, “proletarian internationalism” lends “a class basis . . . to the idea of human brotherhood proclaimed by the French Revolution.”7 Lenin would subsequently spell out what this means in practice, remarking that proletarian internationalism entails “the fraternal union of the workers of all countries against the capitalists of all countries” and hence the duty of “supporting (by propaganda, sympathy, and material aid) this struggle [i.e., the revolutionary struggle], this, and only this, line, in every country without exception.”8 It entails, in addition, that “a nation which is achieving victory over the bourgeoisie should be able and willing to make the greatest national sacrifices for the overthrow of international capital.”9
It is precisely because both moral and political convictions inform Guevara’s outlook that his appeals to internationalism appeal to both kinds of conviction, as when, in a 1963 preface to a book on “the Marxist-Leninist party,” he characterizes “proletarian internationalism” as “feel[ing] as an affront to ourselves every aggression, every insult, every act against human dignity and against man’s happiness anywhere in the world” or when, on the other hand, he suggests, in a speech from the previous year, that the Cuban Revolution would cease to be Martiano (i.e., a reflection of the principles espoused by José Martí) if it were to display indifference “when anywhere in the world the forces of repression are massacring the people.”10
In any event, while Guevara’s proletarian internationalism is indeed a genuine internationalism, it manifests itself above all as a kind of Latin Americanism: when asked during a press conference in 1961 whether he continued to consider himself Argentine, Guevara responded, “I am able to feel within myself the hunger and sufferings of basically any of America’s peoples, but also [that] of any of the peoples of the world.”11 This reply echoes a view that Guevara had presented a year earlier before an assembly of tobacco workers, for whom he had evoked three levels, or one might say concentric circles, of duties: international solidarity with all countries who were suffering, solidarity with Latin American countries fighting for their freedom, and national solidarity with the men and women in Cuba worse off than themselves.12
There were both autobiographical and strategic, sociopolitical considerations for this special concern with Latin America. As for the former, Guevara made his personal identification with Latin America as a whole clear on countless occasions. For example, he told Argentine journalist Jorge Masetti in early 1958 (i.e., prior to the victory of the Rebel Army) that he considered all of America his “patria,” and he made an almost identical remark three years later, during the press conference just cited.13 In short, on a personal level Guevara felt a pan-American identification with Latin America in toto,14 deriving in no small measure from his lengthy, youthful travels throughout South and Central America and his subsequent sojourns in Guatemala and Mexico, before eventually moving on to Cuba. These travels and experiences served to, as it were, deprovincialize and Latin Americanize Guevara, even transforming his accent and lexicon,15 and they also help to explain why he would find it easy to identify himself as a Cuban following the revolution’s triumph (shortly after which he became a Cuban citizen, thanks to a law conceived as a device for conferring citizenship on Guevara).16 But Guevara’s wanderings also acquainted him with the misery, oppression, and exploitation that defined life for a large percentage of Latin Americans, and exposure to this facet of Latin American reality, coupled with his more emotional identification with Latin America as a whole, is one of the factors that produced a certain partiality to the region in his thinking.
Yet, while this personal affinity with Latin America was undoubtedly important for Guevara’s outlook, still more important in geopolitical terms were the strategic conclusions resulting from his analysis of the region’s socioeconomic realities. To begin with, Guevara perceived a fundamental economic and cultural kinship among the countries of Latin America. As he observes in his “Messa
ge to the Tricontinental,” a text published a mere six months before his execution, “Language, customs, religion, a common master, unite them. The degree and forms of exploitation are similar in their effects for exploiters and exploited in a good number of countries of our America”; and Guevara uses a rather similar formulation in his December 1964 address at the United Nations.17 These common problems imply, Guevara believes, that radical transformation is necessary in all of the nations of Latin America: if these nations face the same problems, and revolution offers the solution to these problems, then revolution will be needed in all of these nations. The fact that these countries have, in addition to common socioeconomic interests, profound cultural similarities facilitates the linking of liberation movements in such a way as to make a more or less unified struggle for supranational revolution—that is, continental liberation—possible. While Guevara’s conclusions regarding the need for, and value of, a supranational Latin Americanism are hardly original, the consistency with which he saw Latin America as a single community or sociopolitical entity has few parallels, as several commentators have pointed out.18 Indeed, it may well be that case that, as Andrew Sinclair has claimed, “since Bolívar . . . there has been no man with so great an ideal of unity for that divided and unlucky continent.”19 And it was an ideal that Guevara proclaims and defends from the very start of the Cuban Revolution, as evidenced by his insistence, in one of his first public speeches after the triumph of the Revolution in January 1959, on the importance of receiving the support of the democratic peoples of Latin America.20
To the extent that it entailed actual participation in liberation struggles, Guevara’s proletarian internationalism also prioritized Latin America. Indeed, he made it very clear upon joining Fidel Castro’s group of Cuban revolutionaries in Mexico in 1955 that once they had achieved victory in Cuba, he would move on; and according to Manuel Piñeiro Losada, Cuba’s intelligence mastermind and liaison to revolutionary movements throughout Latin America, “from the first moments of the victory of the Cuban Revolution,” Guevara “was already thinking about carrying out what he considered his historic mission to participate in the liberation of other peoples in our continent [i.e., Latin America].”21 As a matter of fact, Guevara had conceived the ill-fated insurgency that he launched in Bolivia in late 1966 not as a means for securing the liberation of a single country but rather as the commencement of, and initial base camp for, a revolution that would eventually spread throughout the whole of South America. These were “the continental aims of the guerrilla movement” in Bolivia, to use Guevara’s phrase from his diary entry of July 10, 1967; the goal was to produce “the conditions for revoloution in the neighboring countries” or “create another Vietnam in the Americas with its center in Bolivia.”22 Within this strategy, Argentina was of central importance for Guevara.23
Yet, while Guevara plainly foregrounds Latin America in his global revolutionary strategy, his proletarian internationalism by no means ignores the rest of the world. As is now well known, Guevara spent some seven months fighting alongside Congolese insurgents in 1965. On a more general level, his commitment to the principle of proletarian internationalism informs his criticism of the then-socialist nations contained in what is, without question, the most controversial speech that he ever delivered—namely, his address to the Second Economic Seminar of Afro-Asian Solidarity in Algiers, in February 1965. In this address, Guevara takes the Soviet Bloc countries to task for their “tacit complicity with the exploiting countries of the West,” owing to their exploitative commercial relations with the developing nations (selling them goods at market prices, practicing “unequal exchange,” and so on); “the socialist countries,” Guevara argues, “must help pay for the development of countries now starting out on the road to liberation.”24 Guevara likewise upbraids the socialist countries for refusing to provide unconditional assistance—that is, armaments free of cost—to oppressed peoples engaged in armed struggle and in doing so explicitly appeals to the duties of proletarian internationalism:
The question of liberation by armed struggle from an oppressor political power should be dealt with in accordance with the rules of proletarian internationalism. In a socialist country at war, it would be absurd to conceive of a factory manager demanding guaranteed payment before shipping to the front the tanks produced by his factory. It ought to seem no less absurd to inquire of a people fighting for liberation, or needing arms to defend its freedom, whether or not they can guarantee payment.
Arms cannot be commodities in our world. They must be delivered to the peoples asking for them to use against the common enemy, with no charge and in the quantities needed and available. . . .
The reply to the ominous attacks by US imperialism against Vietnam or the Congo should be to supply those sister countries with all the defense equipment they need, and to offer them our full solidarity without any conditions whatsoever.25
While this would prove to be Guevara’s most controversial speech, given the fact that Cuba benefitted from the assistance and support of the socialist nations at the time, Guevara had in fact briefly sketched some of these ideas in a question-and-answer session following a lecture at the University of Oriente, in Santiago de Cuba, less than three months earlier.26 And during the same exchange he mentions that he had raised these issues with representatives of the socialist nations in attendance at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development held in Geneva about a year before the speech in Algiers. (In light of Guevara’s statements in Algeria, some parts of his address at the earlier conference seem aimed at the socialist countries as much as the capitalist countries.27)
But however critical Guevara was of some of the practices and policies of the socialist countries, the Algiers speech also leaves no doubt that the principal impediment to the establishment of a just economic system is, in Guevara’s view, imperialism: “The struggle against imperialism, for liberation from colonial or neocolonial shackles . . . is not separate from the struggle against backwardness and poverty. Both are stages on the same road leading toward the creation of a new society of justice and plenty.”28 There can be, then, no development and progress toward social justice, let alone abundance and socialism, without the elimination of imperialism; and while the latter is not an end in itself—Guevara would surely agree with Peruvian thinker José Carlos Mariátegui, who had stressed a few decades earlier that anti-imperialism as such does not remove class antagonisms or conflicting class interests29—it is an indispensable condition for any possibility of success in achieving a definitive liberation—that is, abundance and socialism.30 This is the conviction that inspires Guevara’s passionate anti-imperialism, which is also the logical corollary of his internationalism: if imperialism causes the oppression of peoples in other lands and one embraces internationalism for either of the reasons inspiring Guevara’s internationalism, one will favor and support anti-imperialist struggle in those lands. Considering the importance of militant anti-imperialist struggle in Guevara’s thought—the historic Soviet statesman Anastas Mikoyan once said of Guevara that “he had a very specific enemy, and it is called imperialism”31—it is worth discussing this topic in some detail, starting with Guevara’s conception of imperialism.
Guevara’s Conception of Imperialism
In his “Message to the Tricontinental,” his fiercest and best-known denunciation of imperialism’s crimes, Guevara characterizes imperialism as “a world system, the final stage of capitalism,”32 a description that immediately evokes the title of Lenin’s classic work on imperialism: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Guevara’s formulation is hardly surprising, for his speeches and writings attest to his indebtedness to Lenin’s theorization of imperialism for his basic conception of, and approach to, this phenomenon.33 (Significantly, during the question-and-answer session after his lecture at the University of Oriente, one of the books that Guevara urged students to read was precisely Lenin’s Imperialism.34) For Lenin, as for Marx, imperial
ism in the most general sense “refers to the economic domination of one country over another as dictated by the needs of a capitalist economy,” to use David McLellan’s helpful characterization.35 But Lenin identifies imperialism more narrowly with the “highest stage of capitalism,” since contemporary imperialism, the most far-reaching and robust form of imperialism, is, in his opinion, a reflection or corollary of a number of fundamental economic developments that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These developments include the predominance of monopoly capitalism, as a result of the concentration of production and capital and in contrast to the competition that characterized earlier stages of capitalism; the merging of industrial capital with finance capital; the export of capital (rather than goods) to underdeveloped countries, accompanied by colonialism; the emergence of monopolistic capitalist associations that divide the world among themselves, in tandem with a division of the world among the leading powers in defense of their nations’ monopolies; and intermonopolist rivalries and interimperialist competition resulting from these divisions of the world.36 Guevara certainly subscribes to Lenin’s analysis of this stage of capitalism and appropriates it for his own purposes, but we can also identify at least three factors that give Guevara’s understanding of imperialism a distinctive character.