The Militant - July 30, 2001 -- Che Guevara on the transition to socialism

Vol.65/No.29 July 30, 2001

Che Guevara on the transition to socialism
(Books of the Month column)

Reprinted below is an excerpt from Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism by Carlos Tablada. The French edition of this title is one of the "Books of the Month" featured in July (see ad below for special offer). The piece quoted appears in the chapter titled "The Marxist conception of politics as concentrated economics and its importance in economic management under socialism." Copyright © 1989 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.

BY CARLOS TABLADA
As a revolutionary economist, Che never lost sight of the fact that, under socialism, what is economically rational could not in itself serve as the barometer of what is socially rational. The formation of a new type of human relations would have to be the central objective of every effort; other factors would be positive or negative to the degree they helped accelerate or retard that process. Otherwise, a grave risk would be run that the need to overcome the poverty accumulated over centuries would lead the revolutionary vanguard to view success in production as the sole central goal, losing sight of the reason for making the revolution in the first place. Seeking purely economic gains could lead to the application of methods that, while producing economic successes in the short run, could mortgage the revolutionary future through gradual erosion of the process of raising consciousness. No one described this phenomenon better than Che:

A complete education for social labor has not yet taken place in these countries, and wealth is far from being within the reach of the masses through the simple process of appropriation. Underdevelopment, on the one hand, and the usual flight of capital to the "civilized" countries, on the other, make a rapid transition without sacrifices impossible. There remains a long way to go in constructing the economic base, and the temptation is very great to follow the beaten track of material interest as the lever with which to accelerate development.

There is the danger that the forest will not be seen for the trees. The pipe dream that socialism can be achieved with the help of the dull instruments left to us by capitalism (the commodity as the economic cell, profitability, individual material interest as a lever, etc.) can lead into a blind alley. And you wind up there after having traveled a long distance with many crossroads, and it is hard to figure out just where you took the wrong turn. Meanwhile, the economic foundation that has been laid has done its work of undermining the development of consciousness. To build communism it is necessary, simultaneous with the new material foundations, to build the new man.

And once again, he made the same point:

It is not a matter of how many kilograms of meat one has to eat, nor of how many times a year someone can go to the beach, nor how many pretty things from abroad you might be able to buy with present-day wages. It is a matter of making the individual feel more complete, with much more internal richness and much more responsibility.

Thus for Che economic rationality meant the best possible use of resources so as to enhance the multifaceted development of both society and communist education.

That does not mean that building communism can be compatible with economic bankruptcy. The point is that the efficiency of administrative management under socialism cannot be measured exclusively by the total amount of values created. It must also be gauged by the degree to which the economic structures help bring closer the new society, through the transformation of men. It must be gauged by how well man is developed socially in a communist direction, precisely on the basis of the new economic structures.

In building communism the relative weight of economic achievements, on the one hand, and achievements in raising consciousness, on the other, was clearly established by Che:

Socialism is not a welfare society, nor is it a utopian society based on the goodness of man as man. Socialism is a system that arises historically, and that has as its pillar the socialization of the basic means of production along with equitable distribution of all of society's wealth, in a framework of social production. In our view communism is a phenomenon of consciousness and not solely a phenomenon of production.

We cannot arrive at communism through the simple mechanical accumulation of quantities of goods made available to the people. By doing that we would get somewhere, to be sure, to some peculiar form of socialism. But what Marx defined as communism, what is aspired to in general as communism, cannot be attained if man is not conscious. That is, if he does not have a new consciousness toward society.

This conception was summed up in a few words by Che to a ceremony on August 21, 1962, honoring outstanding Cuban workers, as well as some visiting workers from the German Democratic Republic:

Productivity, more production, consciousness--these are the foundations upon which the new society can be built.

It is extremely important to clarify this question, since revisionist theories of the transition period are sometimes cloaked under technocratic formula used by bourgeois social theorists to argue that Marxism-Leninism is outmoded. These revisionist theories separate economic from political-ideological considerations. They assign primacy to economic models whose central aim is to maximize profits, frankly pushing off to the side the revolution's reason for being.

Their watchword is: "Let's concern ourselves with maximizing economic growth, the rest will follow." And that is how they seek to smuggle in the rotten fruit of capitalism. To understand that there is no automatic relationship between abundance and communist consciousness, it should be sufficient to analyze the motivations of the typical citizen of U.S. "consumer society."

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