The Political Theory of Che Guevara

by Llorente, Renzo Tramer

  Partly as a result of this absence of dogmatism in Guevara’s thought, Guevara’s Marxism has been interpreted, and either embraced or dismissed, under the most disparate and contradictory labels. For example, Guevara has been thought to be something of a Maoist by some and a Trotskyist of sorts by others, while the Soviets actually believed that Guevara was both things at one and the same time.7 Others have suggested that he was to a large degree a Stalinist or a kind of libertarian Marxist or even an anarchist.8 Still others include Guevara’s thought under the rubric “Castroism.”9

  There is, without question, a bit of truth in all of these characterizations, and others that have been or could be made. (One might even make the case, for example, that Guevara had syndicalist leanings, given his statement that “one could think of the work center as the basis of the future society’s political nucleus.”10) Let us briefly consider a couple of the more interesting—either because of their plausibility or implications—classifications of Guevara’s thought, starting with the label “Trotskyist.” It is undoubtedly true, as Donald C. Hodges has written, that “politically, Che came to recognize some of the same revolutionary priorities as Trotsky,” including the “objective of internationalizing the revolution,” just as it is true that “like Trotsky, Che deemed it necessary to combine revolutionary stages through a simultaneous struggle for national liberation and socialism” (as we saw in chapter 4), or that “Che had more in common with Latin American Trotskyism than with the established Communist parties. In fact few Trotskyists have spoken as persistently and as articulately for continuing revolution as Che Guevara.”11 These affinities help to explain the sympathy for Guevara’s political thought found among some figures and organizations rooted in the tradition of classical Trotskyism, including Ernest Mandel, Michael Löwy, and the US Socialist Workers Party. At the same time, Hodges rightly notes that insofar as Guevara’s foco theory dispenses with the need for a “vanguard party,” or implies that the guerrilla force can in some sense assume the same role, his thought “marks a decisive break with classical Bolshevism” and thus Trotskyism.12

  What about Maoism? Significantly, in the very same December 1964 meeting in which he criticizes Trotsky and the Trotskyists, Guevara observes that many of his “opinions” are close to those of the Chinese, and he specifically mentions four questions: guerrilla warfare, “people’s war,” voluntary labor, and opposition to the use of material incentives.13 Guevara was certainly correct in finding many fundamental similarities between his positions and Maoist doctrine—the Chinese positions that he mentions are Maoist positions—and I touched on some of these similarities earlier, most notably Guevara’s emphasis on the centrality of the peasantry in revolutionary struggle—that is, his thesis that “the peasant class of Latin America . . . will provide the great liberating army of the future” and that in the “dependent countries” in general the peasants are, in a word, “the revolutionary force.”14 Moreover, whereas Guevara seems never to have had a positive attitude toward Trotsky himself,15 he was already an admirer of Mao prior to the start of the Cuban Revolutionary War—after the birth of his daughter in Mexico, Guevara wrote to his mother, “My communist soul expands plethorically: she has come out exactly like Mao Tse-tung”16—and in April 1959, not long after the triumph of the revolution and two years before Fidel Castro officially declared it “socialist,” Guevara told Chinese interviewers, “We have always looked up to Comrade Mao Tse-tung.”17 If, as Jon Lee Anderson writes in his biography of Guevara, the Soviets suspected that Guevara’s ideological sympathies lay more with Beijing than with Moscow,18 one can hardly ascribe this perception to the Soviets’ lack of sound information. At the same time, Anderson cites a Soviet official to whom Guevara explained, in the course of a protracted conversation, “‘why’ he wasn’t a Maoist.”19 It would be fascinating to know the reasons that Guevara cited on that occasion, in early 1964, for rejecting the Maoist label (the official did not recount Guevara’s reasons, unless Anderson chose to omit them from his narrative), but there are, in any case, plainly important differences between Guevara’s political thought and Maoist doctrine. To begin with, one might cite Guevara’s views on economic development: Mao’s Great Leap Forward, for example, involved a practice and degree of decentralization wholly at odds with Guevara’s thinking on planning under socialism. Guevara would also surely reject Maoism’s approach to ideological struggles, the problem of bureaucracy, and the evil of inequality, at least to the extent that the principles and practices of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution exemplify this approach.

  Let me say, finally, something about Guevara’s relationship to Stalin and Stalinism, if only because some commentators fault Guevara for failing to fully grasp the evil of Stalinism or even accuse him of strongly sympathizing with Stalin and Stalinism. In considering Guevara’s relationship to Stalin and Stalinism, it is important to begin by acknowledging that Stalin’s writings did in fact shape Guevara’s early interpretation and assimilation of Marxism, socialism, and communism. Indeed, in his December 1964 lecture at the University of Oriente, Guevara himself states that he “got involved in” communism through Stalin.20 But it is equally important to point out that it was by no means unusual in the early and mid-1950s for a young person of a leftist, anti-imperialist political orientation to hold a highly favorable opinion of both the Soviet Union and Stalin.21 However, while Guevara initially held the figure of Stalin in very high regard, and even in his last years continued to maintain that Stalin’s writings should form a part of the education of Marxists and others,22 it hardly follows that we are justified in speaking, as does one of Guevara’s critics, of an enduring “identification with Stalin.”23 Admittedly, Guevara’s works contain little direct criticism of Stalin himself. The most notable exception is to be found in Guevara’s posthumously published notes on the Soviet manual of political economy, where he writes that Stalin’s “tremendous historical crime” was “to have scorned communist education and instituted the unrestricted cult of authority.”24 Yet there are two fairly obvious explanations for the absence of any significant critical assessment of Stalin, and Stalin’s crimes, in Guevara’s works. First of all, Guevara believed, as odd as it may seem, that the Soviet Union’s most fundamental problems ultimately derived from the adoption of the NEP, which occurred under Lenin. Second, Guevara also held the belief, likewise expressed during his appearance at the University of Oriente, that one must judge Stalin within the historical context in which he lived and acted25—a belief probably strengthened by the knowledge that the Cuban revolutionaries’ failings were not being properly contextualized by their critics—and providing the necessary contextualization was no simple undertaking.

  But even if it is false to say that Guevara was a Stalinist, might it not still be correct to claim, as do some writers sympathetic to Guevara, that he had an extremely inadequate grasp of Stalinism as a political phenomenon? One encounters this criticism in texts by, for example, Manuel Monereo and by Oliver Besancenot and Michael Löwy.26 Unfortunately, these authors neglect to provide clear explanations as to what it was that, in their view, Guevara failed to understand about Stalinism. This is not to say that these authors are necessarily wrong, and it is true, without question, that Guevara’s essays, articles, speeches, and other communications contain virtually no real analysis of Stalinism, just as they contain almost no criticisms of Stalin. On the other hand, on the couple of occasions on which Guevara does refer to “Stalinism,” he tends to identify it with repression in defense of the revolution. As he told K. S. Karol, “Every revolution, like it or not, inevitably has its share of Stalinism, simply because every revolution faces capitalist encirclement. . . . We have had to defend ourselves against the imperialist threat, and the [Bay of Pigs] Invasion of April 17 reminded us that no measure, no sacrifice, is too great as far as this is concerned.”27 Guevara used an almost identical formulation in a conversation with John Gerassi: when Gerassi asked Guevara about, among other th
ings, executions in Cuba, Guevara replied, “Every social revolution has to have its Stalinist phase.”28 Needless to say, if this is more or less all that “Stalinism” means, then not only is Stalinism inevitable in the course of a real social revolution, but those who favor such revolutions can hardly have grounds for condemning it. In short, it may be fair to say that Guevara’s understanding of the phenomenon of Stalinism was indeed inadequate, but it seems somewhat unfair to criticize Guevara for not failing to make more of an effort to analyze Stalinism: as we have seen, Guevara’s diverse activities and responsibilities barely left him time for intellectual pursuits, and, on the other hand, the unremitting counterrevolutionary violence that Cuba endured in the early years of the revolution (including an insurgency in the Escambray Mountains) no doubt reinforced his acceptance of his own understanding of Stalinism, and this would hardly prompt him to devote more thought to the nature of this problem.

  In any event, my main point is that it is incorrect to describe Guevara as a Trotskyist or Maoist (or Stalinist). Guevara borrowed from many different currents within the Marxist tradition and sometimes arrived independently at ideas that bore a strong resemblance to views developed by other Marxist theorists. His fundamentally antidogmatic, nonsectarian orientation enabled him to use ideas deriving from different currents within Marxism, along with contributions from other intellectual traditions (such as dependency theory and anticolonial thought), to forge a distinctive political project.

  Guevara’s Marxist Humanism

  While commentators may disagree about the nature and extent of the affinities between Guevara’s thought and other currents and tendencies in the Marxist tradition, there is widespread agreement among those who have studied Guevara that his political outlook plainly constitutes (whatever else it may or may not involve) a distinctive variety of Marxist humanism.29 To be sure, some writers prefer to use the term “revolutionary humanism” or “socialist humanism” in this connection,30 but it is clear that, whichever label is used, the point is that Guevara’s thought involves, in Juan Valdés Paz’s words, a “recovery of the humanist tradition of Marxism.”31 The origins of this tradition can be found in Marx’s early writings, in which Marx actually identifies communism with humanism, with the latter consisting, as T. B. Bottomore writes, in “the ideal of a community of men who are able to develop freely, and in harmony with each other, all their personal qualities.”32 While Marx develops his defense of this ideal in rather general terms, he does emphasize that the ideal entails an end to all forms of alienation and dehumanization (whether due to oppressive work conditions or competitive social relations), fostering the all-around development of individuals and individual autonomy, the defense of human well-being and the satisfaction of human needs, and the opportunity for true self-expression. In a word, it entails, as Marx puts it in a well-known phrase from a text published in 1844, “the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being.”33

  Commentators are right to describe Guevara’s thought as a variety of Marxist humanism, for many of the objectives and themes from Marx’s works just noted, and more generally the concepts and terminology properly associated with Marxist humanism, also abound in Guevara’s writings, speeches, lectures, and talks. Indeed, when Guevara proclaims during an August 1961 speech that “the fundamental goals of our Revolution . . . are the dignification of man, to secure for the citizen all of the advantages of culture, social assistance of every sort, and all of the material goods necessary for a happy life,”34 he is in effect declaring his adherence to the tradition of Marxist humanism. In this same speech, Guevara declares, with a phrase that likewise evokes Marxist humanism, that the aim of “socialist development” is none other than “the happiness of man.”35 In another speech, Guevara refers to the goal of producing a country in which “the people will really become the creator and leader of their history,” and, in his essay “Notes for the Study of the Ideology of the Cuban Revolution,” he approvingly cites Marx’s “revolutionary concept” that the world must be transformed so that “man ceases to be the slave and instrument of his environment and becomes an architect of his own destiny.”36 We may also note that at his very last bimonthly meeting of administrative personnel in the Ministry of Industries, Guevara says that Cuba’s new “Marxist, socialist system” is one in which “man is placed at the center, one speaks of the individual, one speaks of man and the importance that he has as an essential factor in the Revolution” (and Guevara had earlier lamented the fact that this was sometimes forgotten during the transition to socialism).37 Quite apart from such passages as these, many of the themes discussed earlier are of course also quite relevant to Marxist humanism, starting with Guevara’s frequent references to the need to end the exploitation of one human being by another, his concern with alienation, and, of course, the creation of a new human being. In short, as in the case of the young Marx, Guevara tends to identify, albeit less explicitly, communism with humanism. Yet, just as Marx insists that we must “overthrow all relations” preventing human beings from living dignified lives and achieving self-realization, Guevara takes it for granted that “it is necessary to eliminate [liquidar] the layer of exploiters the world over”38 in order to establish a true humanism. It is an idea that Guevara in effect restates in his “Message to the Tricontinental,” where he maintains that in Africa “the impoverished masses of a country” will have “to conquer their right to a decent life.”39

  Like the young Marx’s humanism, Guevara’s humanism does not by any means consist of a systematically articulated theory, and, accordingly, it does not lend itself to extensive analysis. Still, it is undeniable that Guevara—whose conception of humanism may have been shaped in part by Aníbal Ponce’s concept of “proletarian humanism”40—furnishes some elements for developing such a theory. It is worth noting, moreover, that Guevara was fashioning a variety of Marxist humanism just as a number of prominent philosophers and social theorists were beginning to analyze the topic of socialist humanism in general, and Marxist humanism in particular. For example, Erich Fromm’s landmark collection of essays on the subject of “socialist humanism”—which does not contain any contribution by Guevara—would appear in 1967.41 In any event, and as Michael Löwy has observed, Guevara’s commitment to a form of socialist humanism is surely part of what makes him one of the revolutionary figures from the Third World who has best stood the test of time.42 In elaborating on this claim, Löwy seems to include Guevara’s emphasis on moral questions within his “humanism.”43 While I think it important to separate at least some of Guevara’s moral concerns from his humanism, Löwy is certainly right to underscore the importance of moral concerns to Guevara’s Marxism. Indeed, I think they are perhaps even more important than Löwy believes, and it is both because I think we should separate Guevara’s moral concerns from his humanism and because I think they are central to his thought that I will deal with them in a separate section.

  Marxism as a Moral Outlook

  Just as there is widespread agreement among commentators as regards Guevara’s nondogmatic outlook and his humanism, so, too, a great many who have studied Guevara’s works agree on the importance of moral considerations and moral transformation in Guevara’s political thought. For example, in his October 18, 1967, speech in memory of Guevara, Fidel Castro would note that “moral resources” were, for Guevara, “the fundamental lever in the construction of communism in human society,” while just two years later philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre would astutely point out, in a review of books on and by Guevara, that “the word ‘moral’ recurs throughout Che’s writings.”44 Since these early observations regarding the importance of morality and moral considerations in Guevara’s thought, numerous other commentators have also emphasized this aspect of Guevarism.45