Rumble in the Jungle (1997)

From the June 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

To get some idea of the misery endured by the average Zairean under the rule of President Mobutu Sese Seko since his CIA-backed coup of 1965. one has only to look at the support that has accrued to rebel leader Laurent Kabila and the alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Zaire-Congo (ADFL) since October 1996.

As Kabila’s forces have advanced westwards in pursuit of Mobutu’s undisciplined and self-seeking Zairean army, ‘‘liberating’’ village after village and town and after town, they have left behind a misplaced relief. Hospitals and schools have actually begun to function again and there are widespread reports of refuse being collected. Kabila has promised peace and stability and to form a government consisting of members of the ADFL and those non-members who nevertheless remained hostile to Mobutu. Many, though, are prophesying a totalitarian regime styled on the Chinese model— something resembling a ‘‘mixed’’ economy with a one-party, authoritarian state.

State capitalism may well be on the agenda. Back in 1967, having met Che Guevara—and unbeknown to him dismissed by Guevara as an alcoholic and whoremonger—Kabila formed the People’s Revolution Party, whose military wing, the musingile (dwarfs) held out against Mobutu for 18 years. The dispersal of this group when Mobutu’s forces captured their base led Kabila to form a supposedly ‘‘socialist mini-state’’ in eastern Zaire, complete with collective fields, schools and health care services, all subsidised by agriculture and gold production.

The catalyst for the Guevaran-styled re-emergence of Kabila, thirty years after his hero’s death, has been the spill-over of the conflict in Rwanda into eastern Zaire. For many years the eastern borders had been settled by Tutsis, escaping the ethnic unrest in Rwanda and Burundi. In 1994, Mobutu exacerbated tensions in what was already a volatile area by making bases available to the Interahamwe and Hutu and Tutsi refugees fleeing a new wave of unrest.

All that was needed was for Kabila to galvanise the unrest and refocus the Tutsi Banyamulenga’s anger westwards, coupling it to the ongoing unrest between Mobutu and forces loyal to former prime minister Etienne Tshisekidi, which now make up a section of the ADFL.

It has been a war that has involved many players and which can still impinge upon the politics of at least another seven countries.

Angolan troops were all too ready to come to Kabila’s aid. They after all had an old score to settle, Mobutu having supported UNITA for 20 years. The rebel army also consisted of Eritreans, and deserters from Mobutu’s army and glory-seekers form Zambia and Tanzania, with support coming from Uganda. Rwanda and Washington. Mobutu found help in the form of mercenaries from France. Belgium and Serbia, and reportedly former members of the British SAS.

Many have died in the war—most notably the refugees from another conflict. For the Western powers, however—perhaps the real fire stokers on the sidelines—this is a small price to pay for the rewards that lie ahead. Which Western power elite could not be interested in Zaire? For the average profit-crazy capitalist. Zaire is a potential treasure-trove, rich in oil. gas. gold, silver, diamonds, coal, cobalt, cadmium and germanium, not to mention uranium. These are just a few of the real reasons why the West awaits a propitious resolution to the crisis in Zaire.

The US, of course, has long awaited the chance to wrest influence from the French protégé Mobutu. A chief concern for the US at the moment is Sudan to the north-east. A pro-Washington Zaire, siding with similar US allies Ethiopia. Eritrea and Uganda may well be part of a wider US game-plan to frustrate the ambitions of Sudanese islamists (time-honoured enemies) and to consolidate US interests north and south of Zaire.

Socialists eagerly await news of stability in Zaire, but with no real expectation that it will bring much improvement to the lives of average Zaireans. In a country potentially as rich as any in Africa, they will continue to live every aspect of their lives subject, as before, to the worst exigencies of a profit-driven market system, controlled by men far away who hold their destiny in a flick of a pen. This the reality of stability under capitalism—a euphemism for exploitation.

We can only hope the Zairean working class can draw parallels between the outgoing and incoming incumbents and one day realise that it is folly to put trust in leaders and their control of the forces of repression.

John Bissett

Rear View: Rashford’s missed penalty (2020)

The Rear View Column from the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rashford’s missed penalty

Oliver Twist asked for more in 1838. Many more did in 1904: ‘We are told that over 100,000 school children in London alone go breakfastless to school. For them there is little hope for a sturdy manhood. Arrest the progress of physical deterioration amongst the children through the provision of meals by the State to all school children and you will do much to strengthen the physique and stamina of the race’ (Socialist Standard, September 1904). Fast forward 116 years: ‘… UK lawmakers voted against a motion that would have extended free school meals to children over school vacations, helping to offset a growing hunger crisis in the country that has left as many as a fifth of children in households regularly beset by hunger. The vote was a disappointment for Marcus Rashford, one of England’s brightest young soccer stars…’ (time.com, 23 October). We have been used to reformists scoring own goals for two centuries. Any reforms we could win for ourselves on the basis of the capitalist system will always be circumscribed by the need to keep the capitalist system functioning. Mendacious parasites will tell you otherwise. Blair, for example, stated in 1999: ‘Our historic aim will be for ours to be the first generation to end child poverty forever, and it will take a generation. It is a twenty-year mission, but I believe it can be done.’ Twenty years later, the Daily Mirror ran this headline: ‘DWP child poverty figures a ‘national scandal’ as 4.1 million kids are hit’ (mirror.co.uk, 28 March, 2019). ‘The Socialist objective is not a society where everything comes right in the end, because kind old gentlemen give away turkeys. What are we aiming at, if not a society in which ‘charity’ would be unnecessary? We want a world where Scrooge, with his dividends, and Tiny Tim, with his tuberculous leg, would both be unthinkable’ (George Orwell, Tribune, 20 December 1943, published under the name ‘John Freeman’).

Che? No way!

‘Twenty left publishers from around the world release a joint edition including two essential texts by Che Guevara on the fifty-third anniversary of his assassination by the CIA in Bolivia. These texts, with insight from Aijaz Ahmad and María del Carmen Ariet García, provide us with a clear and resolute summation of Che’s spirit of conviction, scientific insights, human compassion, and unrelenting will to achieve the victory of the oppressed over the oppressors’ (thetricobtinental.org, 8 October). Compassion? ‘These people [of Cuba] you see today tell you that even if they should disappear from the face of the earth because an atomic war is unleashed in their names … they would feel completely happy and fulfilled…. ’ (part of Che’s address to the First Latin American Youth Congress in July 1959, three years before the Cuban missile crisis). ‘What I wanted to stress is that the working class is not putting forth its full effort’ (televised speech, 1961). ‘By working on the proletariat’s sense of responsibility, we hope to greatly improve the quality as well as the presentation of industrial products’ (article in Cuba Socialista, 1962). ‘The perfect revolutionary, the member of the ruling party, must work every hour and every minute of his life, during these years of very hard struggle that lie ahead of us’ (speech to textile workers, 1963). In fact, for each of Guevara’s references to the future communist society, he made at least a dozen pleas urging the Cuban workers to increase production.

Leaders get lost!

‘Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel highlighted the imprint left on the Latin American progressive forces by the victory of the Popular Unity of Chile, which brought socialist Salvador Allende to power in 1970…. The revolutionary process of the 1970s remained in Latin American history with its painful but unavoidable lessons for future revolutionary processes in our region, he assured. He also said that during his visit to the Palacio de La Moneda during his stay in Santiago de Chile, in 2013, the historical leader of the Revolution, Fidel Castro, told him that there was a spirit in that place and invited him to find it. That invitation, coming from a Marxist like Fidel Castro, was totally devoid of mysticism. He was, without a doubt, calling us to review a history that still has much to teach us’ (cadenagramonte.cu, 16 October). Yes, we should learn the lessons of history. Regarding Chile, in her book Democracy and Revolution: Latin America and Socialism Today, D. L. Raby writes ‘with a president voted in by only 36 per cent of the electorate and a coalition which only briefly achieved a little more than 50 per cent (in April 1971), there was no real mandate for revolutionary change.’ And this is what Fidel said when urging Mexican businesspeople to invest in Cuba, in 1988:’We are capitalists, but state capitalists. We are not private capitalists’ (Walter Daum, 1990, The Life and Death of Stalinism). The job of revolutionary socialists, wherever they are, is to make the world socialist revolution and this boils down now to the immediate task everywhere of spreading socialist ideas among the working class.

Nuclear winter or a socialist summer?

‘The weapons, known as intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, are intended as part of a near-total replacement of the American nuclear force over the next few decades at a total cost of more than $1.2 trillion…. The nuclear modernization program was launched by the Obama administration and has been continued by President Donald Trump’ (apnews.com, 20 October).

Che Guevara (1996)

From the April 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The name of Che Guevara was recently in the news again as an ex-officer of the Bolivian military claimed to know where the dead guerrilla's grave is. Guevara was a heroic revolutionary icon throughout the 1960s and 1970s. A famous poster of him wearing a jaunty beret adorned many radical walls and protest tee-shirts. The popular perception of Guevara is as the idealist or utopian dreamer of the Cuban revolution compared with the more tough-minded and pragmatic figure of Castro. But behind the mythology, who was the man, what did he stand for and what is the socialist view of his life and work?

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was born in Argentina in 1928. Graduating with a degree in medicine from Buenos Aires in 1953 he commenced an extensive tour of Latin America, ending up in Guatemala in 1954. He was there when the leftist, reform-minded Arbenz regime was overthrown in a CIA-organised coup. At this period of the cold war the agrarian programme of Arbenz, which threatened extensive American land-holdings, was viewed as a prelude to "communism” by the suspicious Eisenhower administration. Forced to leave Guatemala from the vindictive new authorities. Guevara moved to Mexico City and continued mixing in radical political circles. Anti-American sentiment was commonplace amongst Argentinean intellectuals at the time and the Guatemala episode must have accentuated it with Guevara. He considered himself a revolutionary Marxist but more accurately could be described as being in the Leninist tradition. While in Mexico he met the exiled Fidel Castro who was organising a rebellion against the Batista dictatorship in Cuba. Che quickly agreed to join Castro’s “army of liberation" known as the July 26th Movement.

Cuban Revolution
The rebellion began in 1956 and was based amongst the peasants in the Sierra Maestra. Guevara’s reputation as a heroic fighter dates from this era of mountain struggle where he was a leading military commander in Castro's forces. The historical context to the conflict was that Cuba did not achieve independence from Spain until 1902 and from then until the eventual success of the rebellion in 1959, it was in effect a US protectorate. American business interests dominated the economy and the US government retained the legal right to intervene in Cuban affairs. This was a major irritant to patriotically-minded Cubans and it meant that amongst left-wing nationalists, capitalism was always erroneously identified as being synonymous with American imperialism. The Cuban Communist Party—with the Soviet Union—regarded the 26th July Movement as radical populists fighting against political dictatorship and excessive American interference, being in favour of vague goals to promote social justice. Castro's regime eventually aligned itself with the Soviet Union more as a reaction to Washington’s paranoia rather than out of intrinsic ideological commitment.

Upon the overthrow of Batista, Guevara became Director of the National Bank and than a de facto Minister for Industry. He was prominent in the nationalisation of the foreign controlled sugar production, oil refining, banking and mining industries. He combined these roles with a roving ambassadorship to developing countries seeking to gain international support for Cuba and investigating opportunities to propagate the Cuban revolution. Gradually however his influence waned in Havana and by 1965 he had become almost irrelevant. He criticised the Soviet Union’s treatment of its allies in the developing world saying that in extracting hard-headed trade concessions, they were acting little better than “capitalist” countries. This outspokenness embarrassed Castro. Furthermore he advocated the paying of an equal wage to all Cubans and the use of "moral incentives" to encourage productivity, as a path that would eventually lead to a moneyless society. These arguments were dismissed by the regime in favour of wage differentials and bonuses. Feeling that his talents as a theorist of guerrilla warfare could be put to better use elsewhere, he left Cuba and by 1967 ended up in Bolivia. There with a tiny band of fighters he tried to emulate the Cuban revolution. Despite his initial optimism, the Bolivian peasantry proved to be indifferent and support was unforthcoming. The Bolivian army tracked down the insurgents and in October 1967, Che Guevara was captured, shot and immediately passed from history into myth.

Dictatorial measures
On one level socialists can sympathise with the life of Guevara; from his travels he became aware of the poverty and oppression of the majority of the people in Latin America. This made him a social critic and he was determined to do his part to change society. Undoubtedly the Cuban revolution in which Guevara played a major role brought some initial benefits to the people of the island. The worst forms of worker exploitation (widespread prostitution, the plight of landless labourers) were ended and advances in health and education were tremendous by comparable standards. But side-by-side with this went political oppression; the independent press was closed down, trade unions became an adjunct to the state, there was imprisonment and sometimes execution of political dissidents. Workers were expected to put in long hours in dangerous conditions to satisfy Castro's various industrialisation schemes. In a further parallel with Stalin these dictatorial measures were always justified by reference to an external threat. More recently over the past ten years with the ending of Soviet aid, the fate of the Cuban workers has worsened considerably under the Beijing-like gerontocracy of the Havana leadership. In the popular mind Che Guevara is never linked with this repressive state apparatus though he was an important element in its construction. Ironically too, while Guevara has always in the west been associated with the libertarian “student counter-culture", the regime of which he was a member carried out a severe and ultimately fruitless campaign against western pop music, “decadence" and homosexuality. In fact gay people have been treated particularly harshly in Cuba.

Confusion about the basis on which society is organised meant that Guevara was destined to become part of a doomed experiment in social change. That this same process has repeatedly happened to so many reformers is of immense frustration to socialists. We have a number of reasons for opposing the politics espoused by Che Guevara. We would point to the mistaken Leninist equating of capitalism with imperialism which as in so many other cases inevitably led down the blind alley of nationalism. A good illustration of this is that for the past thirty years in Cuba the 19th century patriotic figure of Marti has been invoked by the establishment as often as Marx.

Another disagreement lies in seeing military action by the self-chosen few as the force to change society. Socialists are not pacifists and have genuine sympathy for those fighting political dictatorship but we recognise that the only meaningful transformation that can occur in society is when the majority of the people on a world-wide basis make a conscious voluntary decision to re-organise their lives and change the system that they live under. At the heart of our difference with Guevara was his belief that an equal wages society would be the spring to a socialist summer. The essence of socialism is a moneyless society; the break with using a means of exchange must be distinct and irrevocable. Equal wages and labour vouchers must inevitably lead back rather than forward as they are based on, and assume, capitalist consciousness continuing.

Denouncing Che Guevara with the easy benefit of hindsight would be facile. Socialists are keen to analyse and discuss such people's lives for the lessons to be learnt. We understand that historical figures like Guevara, Lenin, Garabaldi and Connolly cannot be wholly held responsible for the societies that arose in their wake. Such an approach overestimates the role of the individual as opposed to the political/economic/cultural factors prevailing at the time. Hindsight does show us though that without a proper understanding of the material basis of society any attempts at social change, no matter how initially laudable they may be, will certainly fail.

Kevin Cronin

Che and Violence (2012)

Theatre Review from the October 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dirty Market are a theatre collective based in South-east London who have adopted bricolage techniques for their productions, and their most recent Be Good Revolutionaries took place at the Oval House Theatre in Kennington, London. The sources for Be Good Revolutionaries are the last letter of Che Guevara to his children, Crime on Goat Island by Ugo Betti, and  Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children.

Be Good Revolutionaries is set in the claustrophobic world of a jungle hideaway in Latin America in 1967 where a rebel leader's wife Anna (a formidable performance by Juliet Prague), and her two daughters and one son live. Into this world comes a stranger who appears to know the long-lost leader. The stranger is a ‘Martin Guerre’ character who intrudes like in the Betti novel, but his presence is disastrous like in a Roman Polanski film.

Be Good Revolutionaries is reminiscent of Brecht’s Mother Courage where the devastating effects of war are portrayed, and Brecht points out the utter blindness and futility of those hoping to profit by it. Dirty Market have adopted Brechtian techniques for this production, demonstrating the ‘estrangement’ effect by using singing and music to interrupt or comment on the action. This is memorably performed by musician-singer Rebecca Thorn.

The production is noteworthy for the design by Susan Sowerby of the Mexican ‘los dias de los muertos’ artwork, ‘ofrenda’ shrines, skeletons and ‘calavera catrinas’ which give the performance the necessary ‘latin’ American ambience. This is augmented by the choreographed movements of the children, a soundtrack of flutes, Rebecca Thorn’s accordion, gunfire and helicopter rotors which bring to mind Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Christopher Bruce’s modern ballet Ghost Dances which featured the Chilean folk of Inti Illimani. Be Good Revolutionaries is evocative of the music of songs like the Cuban ‘Guantanamera’ and Victor Jara’s Chilean anthem ‘Venceremos’.

Che Guevara’s last letter to his children contained fatherly advice in the shape of “Grow up into good revolutionaries”, “Remember that it is the Revolution which is important” and a reminder that he was “a man who acted as he thought best and who has been absolutely faithful to his convictions”. Since the 1960’s, the famous Che image has been thoroughly ‘marketed’ and exploited by western capitalism. Che was captured and executed in 1967 in Bolivia where he was attempting to export the Cuban revolution, and conduct a Maoist “protracted peoples war”. This play includes the line “People have to die for change” and a glorification of “revolution”. Such romanticising of violent insurrection, and armed struggle is fundamental to Trotskyists and Leninists but all minority violent revolutions devour their own children.

Although Cuba is very popular with the Left, it is a one-party state, there are political prisoners, no freedom of the press,  no right to strike, price controls, goods rationing, a constitution based on the USSR,  a planned economy in the USSR ‘state capitalist’ mode, and essentially there  is ‘commodity nature of production’, and therefore is not a socialist society.

Steve Clayton

Cuba: No ‘New Man’ (2017)

From the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Seen in its most favourable light (and not just as a theory of political dictatorship that it is), Leninism can be seen as the view that the way to socialism is for a minority of socialists to seize power at the head of a discontented but non-socialist working class and then using this power to educate this majority into becoming socialists.

This accepts that socialism is a classless, stateless, wageless, moneyless society based on common ownership and with voluntary work and free access to goods and services, and also that such a society can only function with majority support and participation. (Leninists call it ‘communism’, confusingly reserving the word ‘socialism’ to describe the state-capitalist regimes they establish when they come to power.)

This view is based on the premise that, due to capitalist control of the idea-forming apparatus, a majority can never come to be socialists while capitalist rule lasts; only a minority can and therefore it is their duty to seize power to liberate the majority. Lenin did not invent this view; he merely followed a tradition that went back to Babeuf’s ‘Conspiracy of the Equals’ in the French Revolution.

One Leninist who took this seriously was Che Guevara who was a minister in the Cuban government in the early 1960s. He liked to quote from a review Lenin wrote in January 1923 of a chronicle of the Russian Revolution written by the non-Bolshevik Russian revolutionary Nikolai Sukhanov:

'You say that civilization is necessary for the building of socialism. Very good. But why could we not first create such prerequisites of civilization in our country by the expulsion of the landowners and the Russian capitalists, and then start moving toward socialism? Where, in what books, have you read that such variations of the customary historical sequence of events are impermissible or impossible? ' (MIA Link.)

Answer: in everything that Karl Marx wrote.

Guevara wanted Cuba to ‘start moving towards socialism’ straightaway by, among other things, creating ‘the new man’. This meant the 'revolutionary vanguard', as the government, educating people into becoming and behaving like socialists, in particular getting them to participate in the running and work of society on a voluntary basis because they realised this had to be done in the common interest. Hence he favoured ‘moral incentives’ over ‘material incentives’.

In Socialism and Man in Cuba Guevara said that creating 'the new man' had to involve moving away from commodity production (production for sale):

'The commodity is the economic cell of capitalist society. So long as it exists its effects will make themselves felt in the organization of production and, consequently, in consciousness.' (MIA Link). 

Castro took the same view, declaring in an interview with a French magazine in 1967:

‘I am against material incentives because I regard them as incompatible with socialism . . .  What we want is to demystify money, not rehabilitate it. We even intend to abolish it completely’ (Nouvel Observateur, 17 September 1967).

Quite apart from considerations of how voluntary for some workers’ ‘voluntary work’ really was, this was never going to succeed because people in Cuba were not living in socialist conditions. Socialism presupposes that plenty for all is being produced. People can’t be expected to behave in a socialist way in conditions of continuing scarcity, such as existed in Cuba. Marx and Engels pointed this out in a passage in The German Ideology which is the perfect answer to Lenin’s question (though Lenin was not aware of it since this work wasn’t published until 1932). Discussing ‘the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce’ when there is private property, they wrote:

'This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, ie. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced .'

Moral exhortations cannot overcome the economic reality of material scarcity. Scarcity means that people are obliged to try to get as much money as they can, not for its own sake but to get access to what they need to live. In other words, ‘material incentives’ will prevail.

There was a rather less appealing side to the attempt to create ‘the new man’ as it also involved the 'revolutionary vanguard' stopping people hearing further the capitalist-individualist ideas that had been inculcated in them before the revolution. In practice this meant suppressing these ideas and the parties and individuals (imprisoning some) deemed to be advocating them, including some of the original Cuban revolutionaries who thought that the revolution’s aim was political democracy rather than socialism (actually, this had been Castro’s view at the time too).

Castro and Guevara were of course well aware that socialism (or communism as they called it) was not possible in isolation on the island of Cuba, but they did believe that progress towards it could be made. Fifty years later, however, there is still production for sale, money still exists, and ‘material incentives’ prevail.

The fact is that Lenin could not have been more wrong in imagining that progress towards socialism could be made where its essential prerequisites did not exist, neither objective (a sufficient development of productive capacity) nor subjective (a working class with a sufficient degree of culture wanting and understanding socialism). All a socialist minority that seized power in the absence of these conditions could do would be to preside over the further development of capitalism in one form or another; which, granting that Castro and Guevara did want socialism, was what happened in Cuba. State capitalism was supposed to be a step on the way to socialism but that's where it stopped.

Adam Buick

Castro, Guevara and Revolution (1968)

From the October 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his study of the guerilla campaign in Cuba Régis Debray assessed its relevance for other theatres of activity, especially elsewhere in Latin America. What he emphasised was the impotence of the left-wing ideologues who argue that every national liberation struggle must conform to the Bolshevik tradition. How, he asked, can you impose a network of party cells and trade unions on a peasant economy or Indian community which dates back to Mayan or Incan times? Even the methods adopted by the Chinese and Vietnamese are of limited value in the South American context, suggested Debray. Thus, while Mao and Giap—the ’classical' exponents of guerilla warfare—are committed to 'democratic centralism'. [1] Castro's conclusions are quite different:

Who will make the revolution in Latin America? Who? The people, the revolutionaries, with or without a party.

Debray's thesis was that it is the guerillas who are the vital factor, who play the vanguard role. “The guerilla force is the party in embryo’’ and, more than that, it alone can guarantee the construction of a socialist system.

(In Cuba) the advance towards socialism was undertaken as quickly as it was after taking power because Fidel from the first day demanded, won and defended hegemony for the rural guerillas.

It was all this that led Régis Debray to choose his iconoclastic title—Revolution in the Revolution? For him, men like Castro and Che Guevara were revolutionary innovators, leaders who had devised a whole range of new techniques for advancing to socialism. Certainly, for anyone accustomed to thinking in Bolshevik patterns, this might be a reasonable conclusion to draw—but it is one which socialists do not accept.

The guerilla war in Cuba was launched towards the end of 1956 when Fidel Castro and his tiny army of 82 disembarked from the yacht ‘Granma’. They were immediately spotted and attacked by Batista’s forces, with the result that only twenty men got through to the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. [2] Then began the long process of building themselves up, of gradually extending their operations to the lowlands and finally of taking power at the end of 1958. What has been generally overlooked is that, far from representing a novel approach to socialist revolution, the guerilla campaign was fought in the classical style of Latin American insurrections. In Cuba itself the numerous unsuccessful uprisings against Spanish rule in the nineteenth century invariably started with a group of exiles on the American mainland plotting to liberate the island. Having collected arms and supporters they would cross to Cuba's eastern coast (the region farthest from Havana — Castro landed at Belie) and then take to the Sierra Maestra, which they would use as a base for their forays. It was in the last of these rebellions that José Martí, Cuba's national hero, was killed in 1895.

But, far more than the poet Martí, the man who really inspired the fight against the colonial powers in South America in the nineteenth century was Simon Bolivar. In many ways he epitomised everything that distinguishes the bourgeois revolutionary. He was outraged by the ignorance and poverty which he saw throughout the continent and identified this with Spanish oppression. In its place he hoped to establish independent republics which would be based on universal ideals of justice and liberty. As a member of the educated, land-owning class he looked to this minority to play the vanguard role in the rebellions. Known as the Liberator, he was idolised as the romantic man of action (Byron is said to have named his boat 'Bolivar' and to have considered emigrating to Venezuela). The similarities between Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and their nineteenth century forerunners are thus painfully obvious. Both Castro and Guevara came from land-owning families and, being isolated from the peasants and workers, both thought in terms of 'going to the people’ and emancipating them. Certainly this is why they have become heroes. Professor Gerassi, of the San Francisco State University, has written about Guevara:

  . . .  he was an idealist, a man who lived . . .  for other people, for people he had never met, for the poor, for the exploited, for the alienated, for those who feel, perhaps only instinctively, that they are merely tools in their society, tools of greedy and powerful men who do not really care about human beings.

But Cuba's apologists have more sophisticated arguments than those of Gerassi. Many of Castro’s defenders will concede that he started out with the mental equipment of a “middle-class reformer”, but then go on to suggest that objective conditions have forced him to take the first steps towards establishing a socialist system in Cuba. They maintain that, while Bolivar had no reason to go beyond the limits of his reformist ideas, Castro was brought into conflict with American imperialism and therefore by “basing himself on the workers and peasants, he was forced to carry through the expropriation of Cuban and foreign capital". In the same way, the fact that the guerilla bands in the Sierra Maestra had no understanding of Socialism and, come to that, not even a programme of state capitalism is dismissed by Régis Debray with the bland comment that any persons who raise such objections “are not yet liberated from the old obsession; they believe that revolutionary awareness and organisation must and can in every case precede revolutionary action." Socialism, he suggests, was being built in Cuba long before it was consciously recognised and long before the leaders formally adopted the term.

What lies behind these various lines of thinking is that in 1959, with Castro in power, a struggle with American interests in Cuba rapidly escalated. It started with the American government cutting its import quota of sugar and the new regime nationalising certain American enterprises in retaliation and ended with Russia stepping in and offering to take the cancelled sugar orders while Castro nationalised virtually all large-scale industry. All that this demonstrates, however, is that the erection of a state capitalist economy in Cuba had nothing to do with ideology and that it was only in retrospect that Castro and his supporters discovered that they had been 'communists’ all along. Far from the basis of Socialism having been constructed in Cuba, what has been achieved is merely that the means of production have been concentrated in the hands of the state. The workers continue to work for wages, as in any other capitalist country, while a new ruling class of party bosses and bureaucrats has consolidated its power.

For all that, the Cuban leaders came to power on a wave of popular discontent and—like any other ruling class—they now have to defend their privileged position with an ideology. Up to his death Guevara was prominent as one of their foremost 'theoreticians' and his skilful mixture of Marxist and nationalist ideas has found a ready audience in left-wing circles. He could be outspokenly critical of Russia and the East European countries, at times referring to “their tacit complicity with the exploiting nations of the West" and inferring that the industrialised, state capitalist countries were “in a way, accomplices of imperialist exploitation". What especially aroused him and Castro to fury were negotiations such as those between Russia and the right-wing Brazilian regime in 1966 when Russia signed a $100 million credit agreement, making Brazil the leading recipient of Soviet ‘aid' in Latin America after Cuba. Coupled with this was Guevara's emphasis on going forward to a new society, of creating a system where people would work voluntarily because they enjoyed it it (the so-called “moral incentive”) and would be able to take freely whatever they wanted, without any restrictions in the form of money or rationing. Echoing Lenin, he talked about “our sons who will live communism".

None of this ought to surprise anyone. Friction between “fraternal, socialist lands" is a commonplace these days, although Castro—because of his extremely vulnerable position and heavy dependence on Russia—is shrewd enough not to push his criticism of other state capitalist countries beyond acceptable limits. At the same time, Guevara’s idealistic yearning for a new social system is the sort of hangover from the revolution which one would expect. Bourgeois revolutions are normally characterised by a belief that a just society is being created and this is inevitably used to encourage the working class to greater efforts. In fact, for each of Guevara’s references to the future communist society, he made at least a dozen pleas urging the Cuban workers to increase production.

  . . .  what I wanted to stress is that the working class is not putting forth its full effort (Television speech, 1961).
  . . . by working on the proletariat’s sense of responsibility, we hope to greatly improve the quality as well as the presentation of industrial products. (Article in Cuba Socialista, 1962). The perfect revolutionary, the member of the ruling party, must work every hour and every minute of his life, during these years of very hard struggle that lie ahead of us. (Speech to textile workers, 1963).

This is not to imply that Guevara consciously set out to trick the working class. There is no reason to doubt that he honestly believed that, by a combination of hard work and sacrifice, Socialism could be constructed in Cuba. But the fact is that, within the framework of a state capitalist economy, his slogan of ‘work now—Socialism later’ functions as a cover for the accumulation of capital by (he ruling class. 

This is not to overlook the important and far-reaching reforms which the Castro regime in Cuba has introduced since 1959. Illiteracy has been virtually wiped out, for example (there were 1,250,000 illiterates under Batista) and at present something like 5.3 per cent of Cuba's national income is being diverted to education. It would be foolish to underestimate the value of this for the working class. Such a gain, however, will better equip the working class for understanding what Socialism entails. The battle for a socialist society has yet to be fought in Cuba, let alone won.

The problem remains, then, what can socialists do today under Latin American conditions? At present the tactics being adopted by those who claim to be interested in establishing Socialism vary from the guerillas—advocating a particular form of direct action—to the pro-Russian Communist parties at the other extreme. Typical of these latter is the Venezuelan C.P. which was legally recognised up till 1962. was then prohibited for its support of the local guerilla forces, but has now renounced guerilla activity. In the current presidential elections it has offered to throw its weight behind the candidate with the most attractive reform programme, the one who will “promise to put an end to repression". Both these strategies are useless for advancing to Socialism. The job of revolutionary socialists, wherever they are, is to make the world socialist revolution and this boils down now to the immediate task everywhere of spreading socialist ideas among the working class. The Socialist Party of Great Britain recognises that the difficulties of doing this in many countries, including the South American dictatorships, are extreme and that, until the working class in such areas have gained sufficient strength to capture the limited democracy which has been won in Western Europe and elsewhere, the efforts of socialists must be severely hampered. There is, however, no alternative.

This would be a more solid contribution to the building of a world socialist community than is agitating for a capitalist state such as Cuba. To try to dodge the issue by talk of a “revolution in the revolution’ ’is mere escapism.

John Crump

[1] “Politics directs the gun" (Mao). The first fundamental principle in the building of our army is the imperative necessity of placing the army under Party leadership, of constantly strengthening Party leadership." (Giap)

[2] The exploits of the guerillas have been surrounded by such a collection of myths that it is now difficult to check simple facts such as these. The number of men to reach the Sierra Maestra has been reported at various times as 7, 12, 13 and 20.

Guevarian Ideology (2005)

Book Review from the March 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Politics and Revolution. Edited by David Deutschmann. Ocean Press. £15.95  

The reader comprises speeches and articles that trace the development and implementation of Guevara’s theories from 1956 to a time shortly before his death in October 1967. The book falls into four sections covering the period prior to the Cuban Revolution, Guevara’s work in the Cuban government, international issues and selected letters.

Guevara’s ideology combined romanticism with elitism. He passionately believed that an enlightened conspiratorial minority could establish ‘socialism’ and use political power to free the ideas of the uneducated masses – a theory where mass political consciousness emerges after a revolution initiated by a small minority or vanguard. In this struggle, the vanguard is the “the catalysing agent that create[d] the subjective conditions necessary for victory” as well as the “generator of revolutionary consciousness.”

Guevara was essentially a guerrilla leader engaged in a war of national liberation. He believed that only violent revolution, waged in the countryside, could end colonial exploitation and introduce ‘socialism’ into Latin America. Urban areas were to remain essentially passive being vulnerable to betrayal and superior military force. The basis of this struggle was the peasantry, but his attitude is ambivalent, fearing that peasant ignorance, isolation and hunger for land makes them unreliable and in need of direction from “revolutionary intellectuals.”

In the second section on the ‘Cuba Years 1959-65’, we gain an insight into the difficulties of ‘Democratic Centralism’ and the organisation of the state-run capitalism that followed the Cuban insurrection. The economy is based on commodity production where imports are dependent on maximising exports at competitive market prices. As with the rest of Latin America the central problem is the “one crop economy,” with Cuba “slaves to sugarcane.” His speeches call for diversification and increased output prompting the introduction of ‘emulation,’ involving setting factory and individual output targets to maximise industrial output. His theories were greatly influenced by Lenin, who is quoted throughout his works. In the article entitled, ‘On the Budgetary Finance System’ Guevara uses a quotation from Lenin in an attempt to explain how state capitalism is a step towards an eventual ‘socialist’ society, necessitating the introduction of capitalist accounting methods, price setting, money, factory profit, bonuses and formal contracts with monetary penalties.

But increasing output means greater incentives and this conflicts with Guevara’s image of ‘socialist morality’ where work and achieving output targets is the workers moral obligation, his “social duty.” Cuba, he claims, is ‘on the road’ to ‘socialism’ while the transition to ‘communism’ a distant vision in the future. At the same time he is compelled to accept that trading with world capitalism necessarily imposed severe limitations on his action, in short acknowledging that the economic conditions dictate the country’s direction. National defence, nationalisation, industrialisation, agrarian reform and the development of foreign trade, particularly with Russia, are all urgent issues that have to be addressed if Cuba is to survive.

In the years following the Cuban Revolution his speeches impart increasing frustration as the vanguard attempts to impose ‘socialism’ on the ignorant masses that neither understood nor wanted it. In passionate speeches to students, cadres and trade unionists he repeatedly stresses the need for education to strive for the ‘socialist ideal’ and eradicate the bad habits from the “previous epoch.”

The third part of the book is a collection of Guevara’s speeches and articles on international issues. Not unexpectedly, the rhetoric is anti-Americanism and anti-colonialist and the message to the people of Latin America is to follow Cuba’s example and create “many Vietnams” to expel US imperialism and achieve economic independence. Other speeches demand fairness in trade and an end to dumping, price fixing, foreign debt and foreign bases – in fact all the things you might expect from a leader struggling to administer capitalism in an underdeveloped country surrounded by a hostile world.

A book of limited historical interest carrying a bankrupt anachronistic prescription for violent revolution to be orchestrated by a vanguard and leading inevitably to state-controlled capitalism.

Steve Trott

Castro: Latin American Nationalist (2017)

From the January 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 26 November Fidel Castro, one of the oldest dictators in Latin America, died. The announcement of his death was made by his brother Raul Castro on state television. His death was celebrated by the opponents of the government of Cuba in Miami in Florida, and it was also taken as sad news by many of the Latin America Leftists and supporters of the Cuban regime.

In 1959 Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, and Che Guevara were part of an armed rebellion which provoked the overthrow of the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, a government backed by the US for several years. Then, part of the ruling elite of Cuba shifted toward the support of the guerrillas who were fighting in the Sierra Maestra against the Cuban military forces.

After their victory, Fidel Castro and the Communist Party of Cuba initiated the nationalization of all the US holdings and assets, and all private land was taken over by the state. The US declared an embargo on the island.

Castro declared himself a ‘Marxist-Leninist’ and entered a relationship with the Soviet Union, and established a form of state capitalism like the one established by the Bolsheviks, and called it socialism. In a country where agriculture prevailed over industrial production, sugar was the main production that existed in the whole country, and most of the workers were peasants and did not have any socialist consciousness. The level of illiteracy was high in the rural areas of the country. The economic backwardness was as in most of the countries of Latin America

After the defeat of the invasion of the Bay of Pigs which was financed by the US and backed by the CIA, and, at the peak of the Cold War period after the 1962 missile crisis during the government of John F Kennedy in the USA, and Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union, an accord of no intervention was signed between the US and the Soviet Union.

Several social and economic reform programmes were implemented such as state-run medical services, public transportation, and public education. A large programme of education was initiated throughout the country,  

A long period of stagnation, poverty, and scarcity began. While the government blamed this on the embargo imposed by the US, they never recognized that so-called socialism in one country was an impossibility and that despite collaboration with the Soviet Union, which also proclaimed itself a socialist country, the economic laws of capitalism prevailed in the country. Most of the followers of Cuban ‘socialism’ in Latin America blamed Cuba’s problems simply on the US embargo, and never recognized the class character of the ruling elite, and the economical exploitation of the Cuban workers.

For many years, the Latin American left proclaimed Fidel Castro as the leader and commander in chief of the Cuban revolution, and a bastion of socialism in that region where many guerrilla groups were financed by Cuba on behalf of the Soviet Union during the period of the Cold War. Most of those groups were defeated by the military forces of several Latin American countries.

The whole region of Latin America is a clear indication that socialism cannot be established by a small group of armed individuals. The great majority of the class-conscious-less workers never gave support to any of these groups, including the guerrillas of Manolo Tavarez Justo, and the invasion of Francisco Caamano in the Dominican Republic, who at the end did not obtain the support of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Government. In the same manner Che Guevara did not receive any support from the Communist Party of Bolivia.

Che Guevara was assassinated in Bolivia trying to obtain the support of the peasants to carry out the same revolt that took place in Cuba in 1959, and the guerrillas that accompanied him were killed or imprisoned. Within the Cuban leadership he was the only one who verbally advocated a moneyless society but after the Fidelista guerrillas took power he became the Minister of Commerce, and he was in charge of the Central Bank of Cuba, which contradicted his aspiration for a socialist society without money.

Despite their socialist and Marxist rhetoric and phraseology none of the leaders of the Cuban revolution including Fidel Castro ever had a real conception of what a socialist society should be. Most of the speeches and writings of Fidel Castro show that he was an apologist of Latin American Nationalism and later representative of the struggle of the Latin American capitalist class to liberate themselves from the influence of the US capitalist, like Domingo Peron in Argentina, and Ernesto Cardenas in Mexico, and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

The case of Cuba is a living example of what the Socialist Party and the companion parties of the World Socialist Movement have indicated for many years, which is that socialism cannot be established in one single country, and that it must be established in a world scale by the vast socialistically conscious majority of the workers, and that socialism cannot be established in an economical backward society to be a free access society. That is the reason why the Cuban regime had to initiate a rationing programme with the excuse to create equality among the workers, while the ruling elite enjoyed all kinds of privileges and benefits.

Marcos.

Letter: Was Che a Socialist? (1998)

Letters to the Editors from the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

I've been taking the Socialist Standard for some years now and generally find myself in broad agreement with your analysis of capitalism and the fact that it can't be reformed into true socialism.

I also work and campaign against the US economic blockade of Cuba and all of the ongoing aggression that the World's only superpower makes against this small island that tries so hard to aspire to socialist values. I was somewhat taken aback to find myself and others who try to put a brake on the advances of extreme right wing ideology and global neo-liberalisation, blasted as "Trotskyist" and "anti-working class" in the editorial of your August issue.

I too despise patriotism and nationalism. The reason that I campaign is not for the greater glory of Cuba or of a single personality like Fidel Castro. I also wouldn’t argue for one moment that Cuba and the current Cuban system is perfect or that it represents true socialism. I think we are again in agreement that socialism isn't possible on a single country basis. The point is that the Cuban government and (I believe) a great majority of Cuban people through 40 years of revolutionary education understand and want true socialism on a World-wide basis. The system that they operate has many socialist values and in its achievements gives the world a glimpse of what mankind could aspire to if we could move on from capitalism.

Che Guevara when Cuban Minister of Finance wanted a completely moneyless Cuban society and it is a matter of speculation whether the Cuban Revolution could have survived and prospered if this had been implemented. I think probably not, imports of vital items such as oil have to be paid for on the world markets. Without global socialism and accepting the evil of currency, Cuba has still managed to achieve a huge amount both within the country and in the rest of the world. I think that the fact that Cuba didn’t collapse when the Soviet Union folded is because its system has always represented something different and far closer to true socialism than the state capitalism of the USSR.

Elsewhere in the August issue, you list facts and figures about poverty and starvation in the rest of the world. The terrible statistics that you give occur in countries that are forced to operate ever harder capitalist systems by organisations like the IMF and the World Bank. You report that 12 million children under 5 years of age die each year of whom the majority could be saved. In Cuba, the infant mortality rate is 7.2 per 1000 births. That’s lower than Sweden and many poorer areas in the UK. There is one doctor for every 75 persons, which is the highest ratio in the world. This is despite the blockade of the US, which means that drugs, medicines and technology controlled by the US dominated pharmaceutical trade can't be bought at any price. You relay that 110 million children don’t attend primary school and 275 million don’t go to a secondary school. Not one of them is Cuban! Literacy rates are almost 100 percent. When it comes to life expectancy, you report that there is a variance of 20 to 35 years between "rich" and "poor" countries. You don’t mention the one exception of Cuba where the life expectancy is now over 76 years. I don’t think it would fall into your definition of a rich country would it? I could go on listing the achievements of the Cuban revolution in many other fields, such as sport, art and music. I could also mention the tremendous spirit of internationalism that Cuba has always displayed. In Angola, hundreds of thousands of Cubans volunteered and many died defeating the nuclear-armed apartheid forces of South Africa. Cuban doctors are currently working free of charge in many third world countries in gestures of solidarity. More causalities from the Chernobyl disaster where treated by Cuban doctors than any other nationality. Thousands of Africans and Latin Americans have been educated in Cuban schools and universities.

All of this has been achieved despite the continual attacks of the US. They have tried everything from full-scale invasion, to biological weapons and spreading disease, to numerous well-documented assassination attempts on Fidel Castro. There have been 40 years of a steadily increasing trade and economic blockade and much more besides. What capitalist country would be able to stand such pressures?

I believe that the reason the US, the power base of the capitalists, expends so much effort in trying to snuff out the Cuban revolution is simply because they are terrified of the Socialist example that it sets. Why else would they prevent their own citizens from travelling there? If Cuba can make and retain such remarkable gains for their people from their own limited version of socialism, then what could be achieved on a World-wide scale? I think that Cuba gives a tiny taste of the potential of socialism. The Cuban message that the US and world capitalists are trying so hard to silence should be amplified by socialists across the world to help explain why socialism is a superior system to capitalism.

Perhaps in view of these points you could answer the following questions for me:

1. Do you think that Che Guevara was a true socialist, even though he was also a revolutionary?

2. What do you think of Castro's prediction that a global economic crisis is inevitable and that this will provide the trigger for a new era of World-socialism?

Martin Lawson-Smith, 

Bampton, Oxon

Reply: 

What do you mean "a true socialist, even though he was also a revolutionary"? A "true socialist" has to be a revolutionary in the sense of wanting a rapid change from minority class ownership to common ownership by all the people as the basis of society. Such a social revolution doesn't have to involve violence, insurrection, civil war, street battles, and executions as in the mistaken, popular conception of "revolution". The criterion for judging whether someone is a revolutionary or not is whether they want a rapid and decisive change in the basis of society, not the means they advocate to bring this about.

So what about Guevara? To have wanted to carry out an experiment in organising production without money, as was in fact done on a small island off the Cuban mainland for a while, shows that he must have had some notion of what socialism involves. But his approach was elitist: that an enlightened minority could seize power and then liberate the masses from above by educating them in socialist ideas.

Although he probably developed this approach independently, it was also that of Lenin who had himself inherited it from various 19th century revolutionaries. These despaired of the down-trodden and uneducated masses they could see around them ever being able to come to want socialism under the capitalist conditions that had degraded them. The conclusion they drew was that, if socialism was to be established, the enlightened minority who did want socialism would have to seize power and establish their own rule, their own dictatorship in fact, and use it to free the unenlightened masses from the grip of capitalist ideas.

It was a theory that socialism could only be established by, if you like, a benevolent dictatorship. Guevara was in this tradition. But, as Marx had already pointed out to his fellow 19th century revolutionaries, it was a flawed theory. Socialism by its very nature required popular participation; the working class could not be liberated from above by some self-appointed enlightened minority but only by its own actions.

This is our approach too. But it wasn't Guevara's. He still believed in what Engels criticised as "revolutions carried through by small minorities at the head of unconscious masses". But what happens when such a small minority does succeed in winning and holding on to power? Because the "unconscious masses" don't want or understand socialism a key condition for its establishment is missing, so whatever happens socialism can't be the outcome. Not being able to establish socialism the new rulers find themselves obliged to govern what is inevitably still essentially a capitalist economy based on wage-labour, money-commodity relations and trading—which is why we say that Cuba, just like Leninist Russia used to, has a state-run capitalist economy.

The enlightened minority may try to do this more or less "benevolently"—and we are prepared to recognise that this is what Castro, Guevara and the others genuinely tried to do—but this doesn't make much difference as what can be done, and what happens, is determined not by political will but by economic conditions. You yourself recognise this when you say that in Cuba "imports of vital items such as oil have to be paid for on the world markets". But to pay for them goods have to be exported and sold on world markets too and, in Cuba's case, this has largely meant sugar. To maximise sugar sales on the world market—so as to maximise the money needed to pay for vital imports and develop the country—the price has to be competitive, so production costs have to be kept down. But production costs include the wages of those working in the sugar industry.

Castro, Guevara and the others were in an impossible position: they wanted to improve the living standards of the "unconscious masses" but were severely limited as to what they could do by world market conditions and in fact, as the government of a state-run capitalist economy in the context of global capitalism, were in a sense obliged to impose the restrictions on consumption that world market conditions imposed. Conditions are certainly better in Cuba than there were under Batista before 1956 but we are not sure that workers in Cuba would agree that conditions there are as rosy as you paint them.

Another problem with the view that an enlightened minority should seize power with a view to liberating the unenlightened masses is that the minority can come to justify, as part of its programme of uprooting capitalist ideas, coercion against so-called "backward" elements within the working class who are accused of clinging to capitalist ideas to the detriment of the common good—and in Cuba as well as in Russia one idea that has been classified as backward is pressure for a higher individual wage or salary, denounced as selfish "economism". Similarly, those who advocate free speech can also be seen as dangerous on the grounds that this would allow free rein to the capitalist ideas which hold the unenlightened masses in their grip. So it is not just people in the pay of the CIA or of Cuban gangster businessmen in Miami who end up in jail but also genuine trade unionists and advocates of free speech. Socialists like ourselves probably would too.

As to Castro's prediction, we certainly think that, since capitalism is subject to periodic slumps and is a global system, global economic crises are inevitable from time to time. In fact the world seems to be heading for a new one before even fully getting out of the last one. We would like to think that this would trigger off a world-wide movement for global socialism but experience has unfortunately shown that there is not necessarily a fixed one-to-one relationship between economic crises and the growth of socialist ideas. Other factors too are involved and only time will tell how the socialist movement will fare as capitalism lurches into its next crisis—Editors.

Che in power (2009)

Book Review from the November 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Che Guevara and the Economic Debate in Cuba. By Luiz Bernardo Pericás. Atropos. New York, 2009

Guevara’s cult status rests on the fact that he was a martyr to his cause, fighting to free the poor in the Third World from oppression and exploitation (by US imperialism). Pericás probably thinks he is enhancing Guevara’s image in describing what he did when he was a member of the Cuban government from 1959 to 1965, two years before he met his death in Bolivia. In fact he reveals what would have happened in the event of the guerrilla-led peasant insurrections that Guevara championed triumphing.

In Cuba Guevara was successively head of the National Bank and Minister of Industry. As such he played a key role in the construction of state capitalism in Cuba, even though he thought he was constructing “socialism” as a step towards the moneyless “communist” society that he seems to have genuinely wanted. According to Andrew Sinclair in Guevara, “he dreamed of the single wage-scale in which everybody would earn the same wage or would earn according to needs until money could be abolished altogether”. This may have been his longer-term dream but equal wages was not what he introduced when he was Minister of Industry.

The policy the Cuban government pursued (made all the more necessary by the US embargo) was to industrialise the country on the same sort of lines as Russia had done, putting in place the same structures: a one-party state, state enterprises, integration of the trade unions into the state. a harsh labour discipline banning strikes, imposing labour passbooks and severely punishing absenteeism. As can be seen from this book, Guevara implemented and justified all these things. Hardly freedom from oppression and exploitation. The same thing happened in Vietnam.

Pericás’s book details the discussions that went on while Guevara was a member of the Cuban government and amounts to an economic history of Cuba during this period. The translation (from Portuguese, as the author is from Brazil) is not perfect. If the author had proof-read himself he would surely have changed “mercantile production” to the more familiar “commodity production” and “good” to “commodity”.

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: Cuba’s wage system (2008)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Earlier this year, when in June the Cuban government, now under Fidel Castro’s brother Raul, announced a new system of wage payments, the Guardian (13 June) wrote that Cuba had “abandoned its egalitarian wages system”. This brought a response (20 June) from Helen Yaffe, author of Ermesto Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution:

“In reality, there has never been an ‘egalitarian wage system’ (i.e. one where every worker was paid the same): Che Guevara himself devised a new salary scale, introduced in 1964, with 24 different basic wage levels, plus a 15% bonus for over-completion”.

In other words, Cuba never had practised wage equality, not even when Guevara was Minister of Industry. Not that socialists favour equal wages. As long as the wages system – the sale of people’s working skills for money – exists there will be a different price for the different types of skill. We want the abolition of the whole wage system, an end to the buying and selling of people’s working abilities, and the application of the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”.

Yaffe made a claim about this too:

“Like Marx himself, Che recognised the socialist principle: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his work’ – which your article associates exclusively with Raul. Cuba has never claimed to be communist and therefore never embraced the principle ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’, which expresses the attainment of communist society”.

While it is true that Marx thought that it would not have been possible to implement “to each according to needs” immediately had a “co-operative society based on the common ownership of the means of production” been established in his day, he never drew a distinction between a socialist society (where this principle couldn’t yet be applied) and a communist society (where it would be). He actually spoke of two “phases” of the same society, which he called “communist society”. Engels and the later socialist movement adopted the term “socialist society”, but both terms referred to the same type of society; they are interchangeable.

In any event, the temporary measure until distribution according to needs became possible which Marx mentioned in the private notes he wrote in 1875 known as The Critique of the Gotha Programme was a system of “labour-time vouchers”. This would probably have proved unworkable but it was not the same as “to each according to their work”. It would have been “to each according to their working time”, with people being given a consumption voucher based on the time spent at work not for the particular kind of work they did. There wouldn’t be 24 different levels, just one. An engineer and a cleaner who put in the same number of hours would get the get the same number of consumption vouchers. In this sense it would have been “egalitarian”.

But what Lenin, Stalin, Castro and Guevara called “socialism” did not even correspond to Marx’s “first phase of communist society” since it was based on the state, not the common, ownership and control of the means of production, the majority remaining propertyless and having to sell their working skills to live. As the state was controlled by the leaders of a minority vanguard party, these leaders became in effect the employers of the excluded majority. As employers they had to devise some system of pricing the different kinds and qualities of labour-power they purchased. Hence schemes such as Guevara’s and the one just introduced in Cuba. This was state capitalism, not socialism/communism.

On The Revolutionary Road (2005)

Film Review from the March 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Motorcycle Diaries

It's become a common practice to give directors grammatical ownership of a film regardless of how much input they have. So we have Hitchcock's The Birds, Anderson's If, and Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, as well as Polanski's Macbeth and Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet. Directors, like managers, are important to some extent, but most people know that when the boss is off the firm runs just as well, if not better. The practice of elevating the director to a position of supreme importance relegates to inconsequential roles the hundreds of other workers involved in a production. To make a film without a director would be difficult; to make one without engineers, musicians, caterers and cleaners would be impossible.

Such hierarchical structures have dominated society for so long that they appear natural and permanent, and revolutionary action has succeeded only to replace one hierarchy with another. Struggles for communism become struggles for fairer capitalism, as the experience of Latin America shows. Its turbulent recent history has produced a gallery of memorable radicals, but in terms of cult status there are few to compare with Ernesto Che Guevara. The Motorcycle Diaries, of which the director Walter Salles was one of the many workers involved in its making, concerns the early life of one of the 20th century's most charismatic rebels and whose image has become one of its most enduring icons.

Set in 1952, Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado take off on a 1939 Norton for a tour of South America intending to bring medical relief (they are both doctors) to the needy, and sexual relief to their own needy libidos. But the exuberance and exhilaration of single young men high-tailing it around foreign countries is balanced by the need to do good beyond the remit of the Hippocratic oath which we see developing in the 23-year-old Guevara as the journey progresses. As the real Che explained in On Revolutionary Medicine: 'I came into close contact with poverty, hunger and disease I began to realise that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming famous I wanted to help those people.'

Where medicine cannot help, Guevara offers money, moral support and brutal honesty. On behalf of dispossessed peasants he throws stones and hurls abuse. For the sick of the leper colony where he briefly works, he swims the river that separates them from the healthy whilst battling against currents and his own asthma. This is Che the champion of the downtrodden, the challenger of injustice, the idol in the making. Consequently, the film itself is fertilised with the concerns of its hero and a message begins to form. This becomes clear at the end when a montage of South Americas working and peasant class is displayed in a vividness only monochrome can achieve. These people are still with us, the film seems to say. There is still work to be done.

Fortunately the film has no anachronisms which refer to Guevara's later status or appearance; no scenes with him in a department store plumping for the beret or trying on a pair of Cuban heels. Joy and misery are lucidly brought to life in a film that can be enjoyed even if you are one of the few people who has never heard of Che Guevara.

There are as few things to say about the cult of Guevara as there are about the cult of the director. Both reinforce the notion that socio-cultural events are made only by powerful individuals rather than by the thousands of workers who truly make history. Perhaps it is time we donned our berets, put on our army boots and proclaimed in sonorous tones: Workers of the film industry unite!

Neil Windle