In response to a recent SOYMB post where it was noted that Mao Zedong said that political power comes from the barrel of a gun, a reader commented that Che Guevara said the same thing. Agree with Guevara or not one wonders what he would have made of his exploitation of his image on a thousand capitalist commodities?
In 1968 the Hey Jude B side of The Beatles 45 rpm vinyl single (ask an older person or do an internet search) featured Revolution -a song that expressed doubt about the efficacy of direct action to bring about political change. What did Maoists of the period make of the lyric, ‘But if you go carryin’ pictures of Chairman Mao, You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow?’
The December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard contained a letter in which the writer asked if the SPGB considered Che Guevara ‘a true socialist, even though he was also a revolutionary?’
Below is the Socialist Standard’s Editors response:
‘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.
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2015/11/was-che-socialist-1998.html