Ernesto Che Guevara, one of the outstanding Marxists of the twentieth century, sought to chart a course that would allow working people to organize and to answer in practice the single biggest question of world politics: How can we rid the world of capitalism - with its exploitation, dog-eat-dog individualism, wars, racism, oppression of women, and economic and social crises - and effect a transition toward a communist society free of these horrors? Thus, his political contributions.. are important today not only for the workers and farmers of Cuba, with whom, correctly, his contributions are most closely identified; these contributions are also vital for the toiling majority of humanity and the revolutionists of action everywhere who are its vanguard.
The transition toward socialism was initiated more than seventy years ago with the victory of the October 1917 revolution in Russia. Under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, the workers and peasants overthrew the state apparatus of the previous landlord-capitalist regimes. The Bolsheviks then mobilized the toilers to work together with the newly formed workers' and peasants' republic to expropriate the landlords and capitalists. The Bolsheviks built a new toilers' army to defend their conquests; launched an international communist movement to aid fellow workers and farmers around the world in emulating their struggle; and initiated the enormous political effort to construct the economic and social foundations to begin the transition to socialism.
The Soviet workers' and peasants' government initiated a radical land reform; expropriated capitalist property in industry, banking, and wholesale trade; established a state monopoly of foreign trade; and led a campaign, to establish workers' control of industry and advance on that basis toward workers' management. These steps made it possible for the working class and its vanguard to begin economic planning and marked the accomplishment of a historic task - the establishment of a workers' state, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Such steps are necessary for the revolutionary toilers to begin building socialism. In and of themselves, however, they cannot guarantee a continued advance toward socialism.
In Cuba the social transformation in property relations and the establishment of a workers' state was carried out at the opening of the 1960s under a revolutionary leadership whose best-known central figure after Fidel Castro was Ernesto Che Guevara. Guevara was an Argentine who had originally trained as a physician and had joined the Castro-led July 26 Movement and the initial cadres of the Rebel Army in Mexico in the mid-1950s. At the time of the victory over the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in 1959, Guevara was thirty years old.
A workers' state presides over a transitional society. Having thrown off the domination of the capitalist mode of production, it initially inherits the social relations of production from that prior system of exploitation, oppression, and fierce competition among workers over jobs, promotions, and economic advantage. Depending on the caliber of its political leadership, on the size and experience of the working class, and on the pace of advances or setbacks in the world revolution, a workers' state can go forward toward socialism and in the process establish new social relations; or - as in the case of the horribly deformed workers' states in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China today - backward toward laying the social basis for the counterrevolutionary restoration of capitalism as it reinforces the values and norms of bourgeois social relations. In fact, as the history of the past six decades has illustrated, these transitional societies can sink well below the highest points of human culture reached under bourgeois democracy.
If the dictatorship of the proletariat is not based on new social relations of production, neither is it the "first stage of socialism." Humanity's socialist future will begin only with the completion of the world revolution, which will usher in the kind of international cooperation among working people that can qualitatively surpass the productivity of human labor achieved by the industrially advanced capitalist societies...
The course Guevara advocated and sought to implement as part of the leadership of the revolution in its early years cannot be reduced to what is usually thought of as "economics." Instead, he concentrated his energies on what might more accurately be called the politics of economics.
Guevara's aim was not to come up with ways to administer economic production and distribution, approaching the working class from the outside, as one "input" or "factor of production" (albeit the most important one, the "human factor," as Stalinist- trained economists often put it). The goal was to organize and raise the political consciousness of workers, enabling us to exercise growing control over the economic and social decisions that simultaneously shape production and our own lives. The aim was to increase workers' powers to, determine society's collective needs, as well as conscious command over the allocation of labor and resources to meet them. Through this effort, working people would transform their own values and attitudes; their creativity and imagination would begin to be freed from the stunting and alienating conditions of life and work under capitalist social relations.
Guevara placed the development of ever greater technical and administrative skills, voluntary labor, political consciousness and participation, and the self-transformation of working people at the center of revolutionizing the social relations of production and exchange. The course he advocated was the opposite of a policy that - in the name of "greater efficiency" - relies on a state planning bureaucracy to, administer the producers, while it `provides' them a broader social welfare net. Such a course, he was convinced, would only demobilize, depoliticize, and demoralize working people, thereby erecting the ultimate barrier to advances in the productivity of human labor.
The task of the revolutionary government and its communist leadership, Guevara held, is to create organizational forms that increasingly draw the working class into competent administration and management of economic enterprises and into informed decision-making on the social and political priorities of the workers' state. From this standpoint, for Guevara the acid test of any system of economic planning and management was whether it advanced or set back this line of march - the only road toward socialism and communism.
Guevara explicitly counterposed this Marxist approach to the views presented in contemporary economic manuals produced in the Soviet Union, all of which took as their starting point Stalin's 1952 booklet Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R. There Stalin argued that the key to the transition to socialism was to "get to know" the laws of motion of capitalism (such as the law of value) in order to "master them, learn to apply them with full understanding, utilize them in the interests of society, and thus subjugate them, secure mastery over them."
Stalin's heirs took this negation of the foundations of Marxism for a "theoretical breakthrough" and pushed it a step further, frequently elevating the law of value to the status of a universal law of social development. This conveniently provided a scientific-sounding rationalization for the increasing social inequality between the privileged caste dominating the state and party apparatus in the Soviet Union and the vast majority of workers and peasants, as well as for the increasing social differentiation within the working class itself.
Guevara explicitly polemicized against this view that building socialism is a task of administrators adept in manipulating laws and mechanisms inherited from capitalism. Instead, he insisted, it is a revolutionary task based on advancing the political consciousness and collective experience of the working class, as the blind laws of capitalism wither away.
The 1963-64 debate in Cuba
In 1963-64 Guevara took a prominent part in a
public debate in several Cuban journals on alternative
perspectives on the organization of the Cuban economy.
The discussion focused on contrasting evaluations of
two approaches to economic planning and management
being implemented simultaneously in Cuba in those
years.
Guevara advocated what was called the budgetary system for financing state enterprises ("budgetary finance system" for short). Under the budgetary finance system, these enterprises were financed centrally by the state bank from funds budgeted in accordance with the national economic plan and state planning agencies. Enterprises had no funds of their own to use at their individual discretion. Money relations between the enterprise and state bank, and among state enterprises themselves, were simply accounting procedures to monitor implementation of the state plan and establish indexes to reflect the relative costs of goods produced by various enterprises (and trace their trends up or down).
"In a budgetary system, with properly functioning systems of controls and supervision," Guevara wrote, "there is no need for the bank to be involved in investment decisions. These are political decisions concerning economic policy that are in the purview of the state's Central Planning Board... The bank should concern itself with scrutinizing fund withdrawals according to, proper procedure, which is its specific function."
The alternative "economic accounting system" was in use in enterprises organized by the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, then headed by Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, as well as in those accountable to the Ministry of Foreign Trade, directed by Alberto Mora. This was a method of planning and management, adopted from the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries, that relied substantially on use of capitalist market mechanisms, profit criteria, and material incentives. Under that system, state enterprises retained their own funds, out of which they financed expenditures and investments in line with broad targets set out in the state economic plan. (This system was thus also referred to as "financial self-management.") Transactions among state enterprises were organized on the basis of money payments, and enterprises took loans at interest from the state bank to, carry on their operations and expand. As a result, the money "profits" of an individual enterprise, and credit and interest policies of the state bank, played a substantial role in determining economic priorities...
Guevara recognized that the laws of motion of capitalism - to the degree they persist during the transition to socialism - will by their very nature tend to reinforce capitalist social relations and bourgeois values that lead away from rather than toward socialism and communism. Thus, the operation of these capitalist laws and methods needs to be restricted and counteracted from the outset by conscious social planning and voluntary collective activity by working people.
The communist leadership must promote methods consistent with the revolution's historic goal: the social transformation of the individual human beings carrying out the reorganization of economic and social relations. To rely on methods inconsistent with these ends will reproduce the capitalist social relations and divisions that the revolution was made to combat and replace in the first place. It will not only block the advance toward socialism but will guarantee inefficiency, waste, corruption, class polarization, and depoliticization.
The accuracy of Guevara's judgment can be seen in trends that increasingly developed in Cuba following the turn in the early 1970s toward reliance on political rationalizations and economic methods borrowed from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In October 1987 Castro remarked that were Guevara "to have seen a group of enterprises teeming with two-bit capitalists - as we call them - playing at capitalism beginning to think and act like capitalists, forgetting about the country, the people, and high standards .. he would have been appalled." And this corrosion reached beyond administrative and managerial layers to growing sections of the working class itself, resulting in demoralization, absenteeism, routinism, lack of concern about quality - even profiteering - and the breakdown of class solidarity.
The pace of the transition to socialism was not the key issue for Guevara. Nor did he anywhere suggest that the consciousness, attitudes, and values that will characterize human beings in a communist society could be rapidly achieved in Cuba, or in any other single workers' state.
"We understand that the capitalist categories are retained for a time and that the length of this time cannot be determined beforehand," Guevara explained. "But the characteristics of the transition period are those of a society throwing off its old bonds in order to arrive quickly at the new stage. The tendency must be, in our opinion, to eliminate as vigorously as possible the old categories, including the market, money, and, therefore, the lever of material interest - or, to put it better, to eliminate the conditions for their existence."