The Political Theory of Che Guevara

by Llorente, Renzo Tramer

  What was at stake here? If—or rather to the extent that—the law of value still operated in Cuba, the capitalist market continued to function within the Cuban economy. As Guevara writes in his essay “On Production Costs and the Budgetary System,” “It is, in fact, impossible to consider the law of value outside the context of the market. By the same token, one could say that the expression of the law of value is, in fact, the capitalist market itself.”122 The basic problem, from Guevara’s perspective, was that the continued use of market mechanisms in enterprises that were not only state-owned but striving to lay the foundations for a socialist society represented a self-contradictory policy, as did, more generally, the continued existence of market transactions in accordance with exchange values. (Recall the passage from “Socialism and Man in Cuba” in which Guevara declares that it is a “pipe dream” to think that “socialism can be achieved with the help of the dull instruments left to us by capitalism.”) Indeed, as Guevara would put it in his last published interview, “[T]he definition of capitalism is: to give free rein to the law of value. Every time that we give more latitude to the law of value, we move closer to capitalism again.”123 Guevara’s reasoning would seem to be as follows: Where the law of value obtains and economic life consists in market transactions in terms of exchange values, one’s motivation to produce derives from the promise of receiving greater material rewards, and one strives to create more value only so as to be able to obtain more value through exchange. This motivation issues in competition to produce more than others so as to be able to obtain as much as possible from a finite supply of goods. The most appropriate incentive for production where the law of value obtains—that is, the incentive most consistent with producers’ aspirations—will be a material incentive, use of which will in turn reinforce this motivational disposition that responds to material incentives.

  As the quotation from Yaffe indicates, Guevara readily acknowledged that the law of value continued to operate in revolutionary Cuba, yet he also held that economic policy should be fashioned in such a way as to ensure that “the law of value will be reflected less and less in the plan.”124 The provision of some essential goods at very low prices, through the use of mechanisms like subsidies and price controls, would be one example of curtailing the operation or presence of the law of value.125 Forms of regulation such as these, which serve to undermine the relation between value and price, constitute a very direct interference with the law of value. Hence Guevara’s statement, in 1964, that “we do not deny the existence of the law of value” but “the possibility that price really represents value under the current conditions of socialism.”126

  As far as Guevara’s political and economic thought is concerned, the importance of the Great Debate lies not in the rather arcane analyses of the law of value and the other general theoretical issues addressed by the participants but rather in the fact that Guevara would, in the course of the exchanges, expound his own, distinctive ideas on economic management in a more or less systematic fashion. These ideas were the components of a novel form of economic management and organization devised by Guevara and generally known in English as the “budgetary finance system.”

  Guevara’s system of management starts from the assumption that once the state has assumed ownership of all industrial operations (factories, plants, etc.)—Guevara advocates nationalization of all industry, all the means of production127—it is both possible and desirable to view all of the different enterprises in an economy as constituent parts of a single production operation, of “one big factory.”128 Once production units have been organized in accordance with this conception, “there is no need for commodity relations between enterprises,” and “the transfer of a product from one enterprise to another, whether within one ministry or between ministries, should be construed as merely a part of the production process in which values are added to the product.”129 Within Guevara’s system, therefore, the product only becomes a commodity—understood as “that product which changes ownership through an act of exchange”130—when it leaves the state-owned industrial sector and is appropriated by some individual or group.131 Guevara’s system of management also includes centralized control of the operations and activities of individual enterprises, which is made possible by the unitary ownership already mentioned, and by using the most advanced methods and techniques of accounting and administration. A third distinctive feature of Guevara’s system is the fact that enterprises do not have their own funds. Rather, “at the bank there are separate accounts for withdrawals and for deposits. The enterprise may withdraw funds in accordance with the plan from the general expense account and the special wage account. But its deposits automatically pass into the hands of the state.”132 Banks thus become little more than allocation mechanisms, and money “functions only as money of account, as a reflection, in prices, of an enterprise’s performance that can be analyzed by the central bodies in order to control its functioning.”133 Finally, and not least important, Guevara’s system prioritizes moral incentives (of the sort discussed in chapter 2) as a means of maintaining and increasing productivity, including the lowering of costs.134 By relying primarily but not exclusively on moral incentives, the budgetary finance system begets a “deepening” and development of consciousness, as Guevara underscores in a March 1964 speech,135 and it is for this reason that Guevara deems the use of moral incentives an absolutely crucial element of his system, and the system as a whole “part of a general conception of the development of the building of socialism”136 (moral transformation being, as we have seen, central to Guevara’s own conception of this development).

  Guevara implemented this system of economic management in the Ministry of Industries at the same time as another system—whose name has been variously translated as the financial self-management system, economic calculus, the system of self-finance, the auto-financing system, or the economic accounting system—was being used in the agricultural sector and in foreign trade. This other system embodied, in crucial respects, the very antithesis of Guevara’s position. Under the financial self-management system, each enterprise has its own juridical identity and, as terms like “self-management” or “self-finance” suggest, is responsible for managing its own finances; the enterprise’s performance is measured by its profitability. Under this more decentralized system, “the production unit’s relations with the bank are similar to those a private producer maintains with capitalist banks” (control over accounts, use of credit, interest on loans, etc.),137 and market (commodity) relations regulate trade between different enterprises. Finally, and not least important, the financial self-management system uses material incentives to reward worker performance and enhance productivity.138

  Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly in light of the foregoing summary, Guevara remarks on a number of occasions that his system of management, the budgetary finance system, actually involves procedures and techniques borrowed from capitalism, or, rather, from monopoly capitalism, and during his December 1964 lecture at the University of Oriente he even goes so far as to say that this system is “a form of capitalist administration with a revolutionary Marxist content.”139 What Guevara means, quite simply, is that the budgetary finance system incorporated the most advanced administrative and accounting techniques of monopolistic and quasimonopolistic enterprises within contemporary capitalism.140 One way in which Guevara’s system plainly differs from a capitalist system of economic management, however, is in its emphasis on moral incentives, and this is likewise one of the salient differences between the budgetary finance system and the financial self-management system. In fact, what most troubled Guevara about the alternative to his system of economic management was precisely its reliance on material incentives. For Guevara, a system that rests on such incentives does not serve to foster a truly socialist/communist outlook, and for this reason he views the budgetary finance system as “a more efficient way of reaching communism.”141 While Guevara insists that his rejection of th
e financial self-management system by no means represents a dogmatic dismissal of this approach and that he does not regard that system as inherently “antisocialist,”142 its unqualified acceptance of material incentives was, in his view, a major, decisive drawback, given that use of such incentives does not promote the outlook that ought to characterize, and probably constitutes a necessary condition of the success of, socialist and communist societies. Guevara’s view of the pernicious effects of material incentives was in fact the central element in his explanation, both during his last years in Cuba and after he left the island in 1965, for the Soviet Union’s failure to realize the promise of socialism. For Guevara, the New Economic Policy (NEP), adopted under Lenin in 1921, was the climacteric in this regard, for this policy, which was intended to revive and stimulate an economy devastated by civil war and social unrest, introduced market mechanisms, and hence material incentives, in some sectors of Soviet economic life. Accordingly, Guevara would claim in the introduction to the book on political economy and socialism that he began to prepare in 1965 and 1966 that the NEP fundamentally shaped the subsequent, extremely disappointing, evolution of Soviet society.143 The NEP was responsible for introducing nothing less than “the great Trojan Horse of socialism, direct material interest as an economic lever.”144 Guevara acknowledged Lenin’s responsibility in establishing the NEP—he was the “culprit”—and in failing to adequately explain that it represented a tactical retreat,145 but he was also certain that Lenin would have rectified this decision and radically modifed the NEP had he lived longer.146

  Guevara’s attitude toward Lenin in this connection was, then, complex. John Gerassi, a journalist and academic who had some conversations with Guevara in the summer of 1964, later recalled, “In our discussion of Lenin, Che made me feel that he looked upon that great revolutionary as almost tragic, as a man who knew that a society built on material incentives was doomed to fail morally, and yet the man who instituted the New Economic Policy. That policy, as successful as it was, brought back material incentives at the expense of moral incentives.”147 But whatever the extent of Lenin’s responsibility for the economic path taken by the Soviet Union, Guevara was openly declaring as early as 1963 that the Soviet model required a major, urgent overhaul and that one of the principal problems besetting that model arose from its use of material incentives.148 Indeed, Guevara not only drew attention to this problem with the model but also was already claiming in 1965 and 1966 that the Soviet Union and socialist nations in general were returning to capitalism.149 While we cannot know to what extent Guevara’s explanation for the developments that eventually led the socialist countries back to capitalism was correct, his conclusion proved, as we now know, remarkably prescient.150

  Guevara’s Ideas on Building Socialism

  In his writings and speeches, Guevara frequently emphasizes the importance of Cuba—that is, the Cuban Revolution—as an example for the peoples of the colonial and neocolonial nations, and for Latin Americans in particular. Cuba is, to use the metaphor favored by Guevara, a “beacon” (faro) for these nations,151 and Cuba enjoys this status because it represents, as he writes in the epilogue to Guerrilla Warfare, an example of “national and international dignity” (which is the very reason that it constitutes a bad example from the point of view of the North American monopolists).152 Cuba provides “the hope of redemption of all of the nations of America” and, indeed, “all countries that fight for their liberation.”153 But this status also entails, Guevara emphasizes, responsibility—namely, “the obligation to show the nations of America what can be done with a just social regime.”154 This is one reason that so much hinges on our assessment of the correctness of Guevara’s ideas, principles, and policies for building socialism.

  I began this chapter with a brief overview of the formidable obstacles and difficulties that Cuba faced in undertaking the transition to socialism in the early 1960s. One reason for drawing attention to these problems is that some familiarity with the context in which Guevara was attempting to “build socialism” is essential for understanding his insistence on, say, the value of unity or the importance of (and some initial impediments to) worker control. And, indeed, if we bear in mind this context, Guevara’s views on these issues hardly prove unreasonable. This is even true, in my view, of Guevara’s notion of the duties of revolutionaries, including his emphasis on sacrifice. Guevara had no illusions regarding the magnitude of the privations that Cuba would be forced to undergo during the transitional period. If even socialism might involve, as Engels would write in 1891, “a short transitional period involving some privation,”155 presumably owing to the effects of initial redistributive measures and the inefficiencies attending radical economic restructuring, it was hardly unreasonable for Guevara to assume that the transition to socialism in an underdeveloped country under siege would involve fairly severe privations and would therefore require a correspondingly greater disposition to endure sacrifices—the “heroic attitude in daily life” that Guevara evokes in “Socialism and Man in Cuba”—among those most committed to bringing socialism into being. In maintaining that revolutionaries would benefit both from the experience of privation and the development of a “heroic attitude” in response to it, Guevara articulates a view that, contrary to what some might assume, is consistent with Marxist orthodoxy: in the passage from his introduction to Marx’s Wage Labour and Capital just cited, Engels notes that the short transitional period (one “perhaps . . . involving some privation”) that he mentions would be “at any rate of great value morally.”156

  As for more narrowly economic questions, one could hardly take issue with Guevara’s views on the need for efficiency and high standards of quality in the presocialist and socialist economy. Guevara’s concern with efficiency and quality in production—two objectives that, needless to say, should be priorities in any economy—is especially noteworthy in light of the fact that inefficiency and poor quality in manufactured goods were problems that plagued the centrally planned economies of the Soviet Bloc countries throughout their history.

  Finally, how should we assess Guevara’s system of economic management? I have provided little more than a skeletal outline of this system in the present chapter, and for this reason alone I will not attempt to provide a detailed evaluation of this system here. Instead, I will offer two very general observations. First, at a time in which an alternative to capitalism is needed as urgently as ever yet many on the left despair of the possibility of developing an economically viable socialism, Guevara’s budgetary finance system offers, at the very least, some useful elements for the development of a practicable, noncapitalist form of economic management. One of the reasons that the general framework of Guevara’s system remains quite promising is that he consciously attempted to incorporate, as we have seen, the best administrative and management techniques from contemporary monopoly capitalism. Second, while giving due weight to bureaucratic and administrative efficiency, Guevara’s budgetary finance system also serves the “educational” end of moral transformation discussed in chapters 1 and 2. In short, Guevara’s arrangement combines operational efficiency and moral appeal, two essential elements of any minimally acceptable model of economic organization and management for socialism (and the transition to socialism). Of course, what makes the budgetary finance system most distinctive as an approach to managing a centrally planned economy is its emphasis on moral transformation, but this emphasis on moral transformation is also what is perhaps most distinctive of Guevara’s Marxism as a whole. This is one of the topics that I discuss in the next chapter.

  6

  The Guevarist Legacy

  The previous chapters of this book have examined and assessed what are, in my view, the most important facets of Guevara’s political thought. In this final chapter, I will present some general considerations on Guevara’s legacy as a political thinker. Specifically, I will be focusing on the difficulties attending commentators’ attempts to situate Guevara, or cla
ssify him, within the history of Marxist political thought, difficulties that arise in large part from the eclectic, nondogmatic quality of his interpretation of Marxist doctrine. I will also discuss two of the more salient features of Guevara’s Marxism—namely, its humanism and its strongly moral cast, as well as Guevara’s putative “voluntarism,” this being one of the most frequent criticisms of Guevara from commentators on the left. In the penultimate section of this chapter I restate some of the reasons for holding that Guevarism remains relevant to the contemporary left while also briefly discussing a few of the questions that the left will not find addressed in Guevara’s works. I conclude with some very brief reflections on the familiar slogan in Revolutionary Cuba, “Be like Che.”

  An Eclectic Marxism

  The term “Guevarism” is often associated primarily with Guevara’s theory of guerilla warfare,1 yet, as I have sought to show in the previous chapters of this book, Guevarism is, as a theoretical orientation and concrete political project, first and foremost a variety of, or current within, Marxism. While most informed commentators would doubtless agree with this characterization, there is considerable disagreement as to where, exactly, to situate Guevara within Marxism, as his main ideological affinities seem to defy any simple classification. This uncertainty as regards Guevara’s basic theoretical and political affinities is surely due, at least in part, to the lack of dogmatism in Guevara’s thought. Indeed, countless commentators have drawn attention to the nondogmatic, or rather antidogmatic, quality of Guevara’s thought,2 and it is hardly insignificant in this connection that Guevara himself mentions the danger of dogmatism in his most emblematic essay, “Socialism and Man in Cuba.”3 In fact Guevara’s works contain many examples of his aversion to dogmatism, the most notable being his highly critical notes on the Soviet manual of political economy from 1965 to 1966. But Guevara’s antidogmatic attitude is also evident in his acceptance of the use of the two rival systems of economic management discussed in the last chapter, the budgetary finance system and the financial self-management system, until one or the other had proven its superiority.4 One might also mention here Guevara’s interest in reading Trotsky when, around 1960, a Peruvian revolutionary named Ricardo Napurí expressed surprise at Guevara’s refusal to accept the collaboration of a distinguished intellectual because the man was supposedly a Trotskyist. After subsequently acknowledging that he had not read any Trotskyist literature, Guevara asked Napurí to bring him a book by Trotsky, which he did (The Permanent Revolution) and which Guevara subsequently read and discussed with Napurí.5 Considering that Cuba was at this time just beginning to consolidate its relationship with the Soviet Union, for which everything smacking of “Trotskyism” was anathema, Guevara’s response to Napurí amounts, in effect, to a rejection of dogmatism. This very same antidogmatic, somewhat heretical outlook can also be seen, and likewise in regard to the question of Trotsky and Trotskyism, in Guevara’s proposal, mentioned in chapter 4, that Trotsky’s works be included in a publication program for the popularization of Marxist thought in Cuba. In 1965 the Marxism studied and promoted in Cuba was the official Soviet version, which vilified Trotsky and viewed all things connected with Trotskyism with extreme disdain, and thus this gesture likewise attests to Guevara’s eschewal of dogmatism. What is more, Guevara displayed the same support for those who wished to familiarize themselves with Chinese Communist literature at a time when Cuban Communists, who sided with the Soviets in the Sino-Soviet dispute, condemned the reading of political literature from China.6 This freedom from dogmatism is, in any case, surely one source of Guevara’s appeal to many Marxists.