Vol. 72/No. 26      June 30, 2008

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
The enduring political value of Guevara’s ideas and example was discussed by [Fidel] Castro at some length at the October 1987 ceremony marking the twentieth anniversary of Guevara’s murder at the hands of U.S.-trained troops in Bolivia. Guevara had left Cuba in April 1965 to carry out internationalist missions abroad, with the aim of extending the socialist revolution.

“What I ask for modestly at this twentieth anniversary,” Castro said in the 1987 talk, “is that Che’s economic thought be made known; that it be known here, in Latin America, in the world; in the developed capitalist world, in the Third World, and in the socialist world.” It is with the aim of helping in this task that Pathfinder Press in 1989 published an English translation of Carlos Tablada’s book and is now publishing this first French edition. Fidel Castro’s October 1987 speech, which provides one of the best possible introductions to the place of Che’s contributions as part of the living political continuity of the Cuban revolution, serves as the prologue.

The long emancipation struggle of Cuban working people dates back to the first war of independence against Spanish colonialism, which began in 1868. From the crucible of these and subsequent battles emerged leaders such as Antonio Maceo, Máximo Gómez, and José Martí, whose words and revolutionary deeds left a heritage of anti-imperialist intransigence, internationalism, political integrity, selflessness, and courage. The leadership that left Mexico on the Granma in 1956 drew strength from this rich revolutionary continuity in uncompromisingly leading the transition from Cuba’s national democratic revolution that brought a workers’ and farmers’ government to power in the fall of 1959 to the socialist revolution that accelerated in late 1960 and early 1961 in response to the hostile actions of domestic and foreign reaction, above all U.S. imperialism.

The socialist road that Cuban working people set out on at the beginning of the 1960s had been opened some four decades earlier by the October 1917 revolution in Russia. The Bolshevik Party leadership headed by V.I. Lenin went through the world’s first experiences in organizing workers and peasants to begin the building of socialism in the course of fighting to advance the world revolution. These efforts, from late 1917 through the end of Lenin’s active political life in March 1923, left an invaluable legacy to revolutionists such as Guevara and Castro who later sought to continue Lenin’s course. The record of the Soviet government, Communist Party, and Communist International in Lenin’s time is rich in lessons in the economics and politics of the transition from capitalism to socialism.

The socialist revolution, as Guevara explains repeatedly in the works cited by Tablada, marks the first time in history that expanding political participation and revolutionary consciousness of the toiling majority becomes necessary to the economic organization of society. The door is opened for working people to cease being the objects of blind economic laws that determine their living and working conditions and social relations, and instead to begin placing society’s productive forces under their own conscious control.

This is not optional, not just one way among others following a successful popular revolution to advance the transition to socialism. The most committed and self-sacrificing vanguard of the working people, organized in a communist party, must lead growing layers of their class in taking more and more control over the political direction and administration of the state and economy. This is the only way workers can transform themselves as they collectively transform the social relations under which they work, produce, and live. It is the only way they can make these social relations among human beings more and more open and direct—tearing away the veils and fetishes behind which the capitalist system hides the brutal consequences of its exploitation of toilers and obscures the unique contribution of labor to all social and cultural progress. Along any other road, society will not advance toward socialism and communism, but will instead—mired in bureaucratic planning and management—regress toward capitalism.

“Our revolution nationalized the domestic economy; it nationalized basic industry, including mining,” Guevara explained in an August 1961 speech to a conference of Latin American government officials in Punta del Este, Uruguay. “It nationalized all foreign trade, which is now in the hands of the state, and which we proceeded to diversify by trading with the whole world. It nationalized the banking system in order to have in its hands the efficient instrument with which to exercise the function of credit in accordance with the country’s needs. It provides for the participation of the workers in the management of the planned national economy.”

The fundamentally political character of economic questions and decisions during the transition to socialism is central to Guevara’s writings and speeches. His contributions in this regard, like those of Lenin, extend well beyond what is normally, and narrowly, thought of as “economics.” Che constantly stressed the inseparable interrelationship between the transformation of the social relations of production and the transformation of the political and social consciousness of the working people carrying out this revolutionary process. “To build communism it is necessary, simultaneously with the new material foundations, to build the new man,” as he put it in his 1965 article, “Socialism and Man in Cuba.”  
 
 
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