Legacy of a great revolutionary TWENTY YEARS AGO, on October 8, 1967, Ernesto "Che" Guevara was wounded in the Higuera area in Bolivia, captured and murdered by CIA-trained officers serving a brutal and corrupt military regime.
His life and his death made him into a worldwide symbol of revolutionary humanism, an example for the resistance and protest movements. More than anything else, he symbolized the example of the Cuban revolution and the first leadership since 1917 to lead a revolution without
CHE GUEVARA historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat."
To say that the fundamental problem of the world revolution is leadership implies a moral aspect. Stalinism and the Stalinist betrayal of revolutions and revolutionaries did not arise from scientific error, but from a deliberate decision to disregard Marxist principles and method because they did not fit in with the interests and ambitions of the Soviet bureaucracy and the leaderships dependent on it. Che opposed corruption by argument and example
At the level of political leadership the rise of Stalinism involved corruption. The reflection of this corruption on the ideological level was a pseudoscientific scholasticism, which Che opposed both by argument and example. In his Notes on the Study of the Ideology of the Cuban Revolution, for example, he denounced "the scholasticism that...has blocked the development of Marxist philosophy" and systematically obstructed study of the period after the "establishment of socialism."
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October 12, 1987 • International Viewpoint having been cast in the mould
GERRY FOLEY
FTER MORE than two decades
A of Stalinist domination of anti-capitalist struggles, Che revived on a mass scale the revolutionary Marxist concepts of revolutionary morality and honesty, without which creative thought and action
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RUSSIAN
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1917
Socialist Challenge of Stalinism. and therefore the liberation of humanity are impossible.
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CHE GUEVARA Thus, liquidation and excommunication of Trotskyists has been from the outset an integral part of Stalinism.
Consistent with his rejection of Stalinist scholasticism, Guevara also rejected the anathematization of Trotskyists. For example, the day after he attacked an ultra-left group of Trotskyist origin over Cuban TV, he apologized to "the Trotskyist comrades" for misinterpreting their views.!
This non-sectarian attitude marked a dramatic break from the decades-long Stalinist practice of simply using Trotskyists as a symbol of every conceivable evil, with whom no discussion - and still less any collaboration - was possible. Such practices, moreover, were by no means limited to the Communist parties, but were often imitated by other individuals and currents on the left who were impressed by the power of the Stalinist bureaucracy and shared its cynicism. In Che's time, it took considerable moral and political courage to reject them.
By rejecting Stalinist scholasticism and sectarianism, Guevara could break the bureaucratic mould encasing Marxism and restore it as an instrument of revolutionary thought. He showed that to be a Marxist, it was not necessary to defend or rationalize, like a high priest, everything that Marx and Engels ever wrote. He was prepared to differ with Marx and Engels, in particular over what he considered underdeveloped analyses of the role of national liberation struggles.
Guevara himself symbolized the union between a higher form of the consciousness of national liberation struggles that has played a key role in the revival of revolutionary struggles since the second world war and a revived Marxism. That came out of his own experience. He worked in Guatemala under the Arbenz regime, which in the early 1950s challenged US domination of Central America. He tried in vain to organize armed resistance to the US-backed coup that overthrew Arbenz in 1954. The most obvious aspect of that experience was that it was impossible to win freedom from imperialist domination in the Latin America countries without breaking up the bourgeois armies.
In the aftermath of the Guatemala coup, which established a brutal terror in that country that has never ended, Guevara became involved in launching 4 the guerrilla war for the liberation of • Cuba from the Batista dictatorship. He International Viewpoint • October 12, 1987 took part in the original landing, serving in the mountains first as a doctor and later as a commander.
In 1958, he led the rebel forces in the Battle of Santa Clara that opened the way for the triumphant entry of the rebels into Havana in January 1959.
Guevara predicted as early as 1959 that the revolution would continue in an "uninterrupted way," going on to destroy the economic and social bases of the dependent capitalist system.
The scholastic Stalinist argument was that socialist revolution had to be put off to an indefinite future, until national democratic development was completed. An influential theoretician of the Cuban revolution
Che became an influential theoretician of the Cuban revolution. In this, he was distinguished by the stress he put on the human factor in building socialism and by a courageous frankness in his analysis. For example, he did not hesitate to criticize the Stalinist regimes at the Algiers conference in 1965 for their failure to follow socialist principles in their economic relations with Cuba and other third world countries.
The revolutionary regime that Che was part of broke in a fundamental way with the practice of the leaderships of the previous postwar revolutions. It did not look to being accepted into the world status quo, to an accommodation with the imperialist and capitalist world. It linked its fate to extending the revolution against imperialism and capitalism. Che came to symbolize that choice most dramatically.
Whereas the first postwar generations had become used to seeing former partisettle into san leaders enjoying the spoils of power and become bloated and ruthless bureaucrats, Che turned his back on the highest offices of state in 1965.
Instead he went to risk his fragile health and his life in guerrilla bands fighting in
Bolivia against "counterinsurgency" forces trained and armed by the world's greatest power. In hindsight, it is clear that he never had a chance, among other things because of deficiencies in his understanding of political strategy.
However, pioneers seldom succeed entirely. Someone has to open the way. Guevara's heritage is by no means one of failure. It is essentially one of victories.
In the Cuban guerrilla war, he showed that a small group of courageous and dedicated revolutionists could lead a fight that could defeat the police and army of a brutal dictatorship. That lesson was confirmed 11 years after his death by the victory of the Nicaraguan revolution.
Che showed that successful revolutionists are not inevitably corrupted by power. He and his comrades showed that anti-imperialist revolutions could win lasting victories, despite the ultimate failure of the greatest previous struggles in Latin America. He pointed to the way to lasting victory in his
Message to the Peoples Through the
Tricontinental Congress shortly before his death. "Real liberation of the peoples...in Latin America will inevitably take the character of a socialist revolution...The national bourgeoisies are no longer capable of opposing imperialism, if they ever were....Either a socialist revolution or a caricature of a revolution."
Twenty years after Che's death, his ideas and example are still growing in power: in a Latin America sinking deeper in debt and corruption; in the so-called socialist countries where the bureaucracies who claim to speak in the name of revolution are crumbling into dust; and in the advanced countries where the likes of Reagan and Thatcher offer "intelligent selfishness" as the supreme ideal. We will be publishing more about Che Guevara's legacy in
* coming issues.
1. Joseph Hansen, Dynamics of the Cuban revolution:
the Trotskyist view, Pathfinder Press, New York,
1978, footnote on p. 161.
HAM