Article from JLO # 22 (September/97)

1. On an October 8, 1967, Ernesto "Che" Guevara was murdered by the bloody dictatorship of Barrientos in Bolivia. The lackeys of imperialism disappeared his body, cut his hands, and try to erase him from the face of the earth. The cruelty of the exploiters was useless: the memory of the oppressed was stronger. The example set by a man who left behind positions and honors and set forth to another country to give his life for the extension of the revolution, aside from the mistakes he may have made, grows as capitalism pushes the masses onto misery and puts the struggle for socialism on the order of the day.

2. In the final years of his life, Che maintained the necessity of extending the revolution and imposing socialism in Latin America. And he stood by his convictions with his life. Such a consistence must be the ferment of the future revolutionary layers for the workers’ parties we need.

Yet we who defend the fight for socialist revolution through proletarian dictatorship, while recognizing the subjectively revolutionary disposition of Che Guevara, must not fail to point out the error of his politics at the same time.

While defending in Che Guevara the anti-imperialist attitude, we simultaneously point out that the path he defended for revolution in Latin America collided objectively, that is, beyond his conscious thought, with the socialist perspective he claimed to defend.

3. We agree with Che that we have to fight imperialism in the whole planet: "we have to consider that imperialism is a world-wide system, the final stage of capitalism, and that we have to vanquish it in a great world conflagration" (Che Guevara, in "Create one, two, many Vietnams").

We agree with Che that "the local bourgeoisies have exhausted all their power to oppose imperialism —if they ever had any— and now constitute only a tail-end wagon. There are no more changes to do; it’s either socialist revolution or a caricature of a revolution" (ibid.).

We also agree with Che that "all the countries of this continent are mature for a fight such that, if triumphant, cannot be contented with less than the creation of a socialist type of government"(ibid.).

No serious revolutionist can disagree with the three general points made by Che: the necessity of overthrowing capitalism internationally, the incapacity of the "national" bourgeoisie’s to play any revolutionary role, and the maturity of the conditions to impose governments which fight for socialism. All of this had already been defined by Lenin in Imperialism, the Higher Stage of Capitalism and confirmed by Trotsky in his Theses on Permanent Revolution —the two most important leaders of the October 1917 revolution.

4. But the Russian Bolsheviks tirelessly fought for several decades in the most important factories of Russia to raise the industrial working class to its historical tasks. They were by their side during the revolution of 1905 and also after its defeat and through the new rise opened in 1910. Through all the tides and ebbs, they tenaciously and patiently fought in order that the most advanced proletarian detachments mobilized their class toward imposing proletarian dictatorship and toward the fight to extend the revolution internationally. When the workers’, poor peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets of 1917 recognized in the Bolshevik program and leadership their own program and party, the bourgeoisie was overthrown. Thus was born the first victorious workers’ revolution that showed the road to overthrowing capitalism in the whole world.

5. This was not the road chosen by Che, who defended the thesis of the insurrectional focus the example of which would awaken the oppressed masses.

Che tells us that "there are fundamental arguments which, in our opinion, determine the necessity of guerrilla action in the Americas as the axis of the fight" ("Guerrilla War, a Method").

In another writing, Che specifies some of these "arguments": "these combats will not be mere street fights with stones against teargas, or peaceful general strikes; nor will it be the fight of an enraged people destroying in two or three days the repressive apparatus of the ruling oligarchy; it will be a long and crude fight, the front line of which will be in the anti-guerrilla shelters, in the cities, in the fighters’ houses" ("Create One, Two...").

The opposition drawn by Che between "peaceful general strikes" on the one hand and "guerrilla war" on the other is a sham contradiction, for history had already shown in Russia, and also negatively in Bolivia 1952, that general strikes could also have an insurrectional character and that the proletariat in arms could overthrow the armed detachments of the bourgeoisie and even advance in the construction of a workers’ states. If, for Lenin, the work in the factories and soviets was the basic condition to stand by the proletariat in a revolutionary manner and to fight to raise it to its historical tasks, for Che, instead, there could be a shortcut through the decided action of a handful of guerrillas.

Consistently with this perceived road, Che undertook an isolated guerrilla action in Bolivia which was not able to drag after it any fringe of workers or peasants and soon ended into a tragedy. A predictable tragedy, for the Bolivian workers and peasants were still in the middle of an ebb and under the effect of the profound defeat of the 1952 revolution, in which they had been steps short of seizing power, having gone as far as destroying the bourgeois army and imposing the control by armed workers’ committees of all the country’s major mines and companies.

6. There is obviously a dialectic relation between the ends and the means, and Che Guevara’s thought does not escape that implacable logic. His general position for revolution and socialism clashes with his particular methods of onesidedly privileging guerrilla war based on the constitution of an isolated focus awakening the masses with its example. Here, the method distorts the goal.

Che calls for following the road of Vietnam, a people that was carrying forward the most ferocious and decided battle against imperialism. But Che does not mention that the Vietnamese leaders, headed by Ho Chi Minh, tried to reach agreements, including about coalition governments, with the "national" bourgeoisie that Che himself considered to be "exhausted" and counterrevolutionary. The same Vietnamese "national" bourgeoisie ended up actively cooperating with imperialism and mercilessly bombing its own people, in order to safeguard the holy private property of the means of production. It is in such conditions that Ho Chi Minh finds himself forced to fight imperialism out and impose a workers’ state —aside from his initial intentions, which did not go beyond a coalition government with assumedly "progressive" bourgeois sectors.

7. Che himself, who had as of 1967 reached the conclusion that all confidence in any sector of the native bourgeoisie was useless, was a leader of the 1959 Cuban revolution, the protagonists of which included sectors of the Cuban bourgeoisie.

In the Sierra Maestra call of January 9 of 1958, the Movement 26 of July maintains: "Does anybody think that we, the Sierra Maestra rebels, are not for free elections, a democratic regime, and a constitutional government?" (quoted by Mario Llerena in La revolución insospechada).

Fidel Castro himself admitted, in the crucial days of the Cuban guerrilla war, that "our Cuban support comes from all social classes. We even have rich supporters" (interview in Look, 2/4/58, quoted ibid.).

It happens that the discredited Batista dictatorship was not only profoundly despised by the masses, but also by most of the capitalists, who regarded it as an obstacle to the march of their business, given the state of permanent social commotion engendered by the regime.

The M26, which Che joined in 1954, was the left wing of the Partido Ortodoxo or "orthodox party," a bourgeois liberal force whose goal was to reestablish a "constitutional democracy" without importantly affecting the ownership of the means of production. That is why the first Cuban president after the 1959 revolution was the bourgeois judge Manuel Urrutia, and he enjoyed Castroist support.

One year after Batista’s overthrow, Che still defended the support of the M26 by a sector of the national bourgeoisie: "It happens that this national revolution, fundamentally agrarian, but with the enthusiastic participation of workers and middle-class people and even the support of some industrials, has acquired a continent- and world-wide trascendence" (Che Guevara, "Análisis de la situación cubana, su presente y su futuro").

The development of the fight in itself, and the presence of exceptional conditions, led the Movement 26 of July farther than what it wanted, and finally, by 1961, toward the construction of a workers’ state. During the very course of the fight, the major landowners were expropriated and public services were brought under state control. But American imperialism demanded that the new rulers reverted the measures affecting the capitalists’ property, and even promoted a military invasion and an economic blockade in that order. This imperialist pressure collided with the masses’ revolutionary aspirations. The clashes between the monopolies’ interest and the masses’ aspirations had an impact on the M26, making it more radical and causing a purge of bourgeois leaders from its ranks. Only in 1961 did Castro officially defend socialism as the road of the revolution.

Che himself admits that the radicalization of the revolution was rather a product of imperalist pressure than of its leaders’ social convictions: "What is to come depends largely on the United States. With the exception of our agrarian reform, which the Cuban people desired and started by itself, all our radical measures have been a direct response to the aggression by the powerful monopolies of which our country is the main exponent. The US pressure on Cuba made necessary the "radicalization" of the revolution. The answer to the question of how far Cuba is going can be deduced from how far the US are going" (Argentinian newspaper La Nación, 6/9/91).

8. Unlike the Russian Bolsheviks, who fought since the beginning for proletarian dictatorship and for socialism, seeking support in the Soviets built by the masses, Castroism turned to the left empirically, as a result of the antagonic pressures from imperialism and from the masses, which caused it to radicalize to the point of starting the construction of a workers’ state.

But the Cuban workers’ state, supported on the expropriation of the factories, lands, and banking, only saw the light two years after Batista’s overthrow, since what there was in the first months was attempts at conciliating with the bourgeoisie, as shown by the fact that the first president was Manuel Urrutia, a bourgeois who enjoyed American sympathy.

The Cuban workers’ state, unlike the Soviet state of 1917, was born deformed due to the exceptional circumstances that engendered it and to the fact that its leadership had drastically turned from meek bourgeois-democratic goals to profound anti-capitalist measures.

While in the Soviet Union, during Lenin’s lifetime, the workers’ state had its support in the Soviets, from which the masses exercised direct democracy, and was oriented toward fighting for the international extension of the revolution, the same kind of state in Cuba was born without Soviets and even without a fight to extend beyond its frontiers the revolution whence it had arisen.

In the 1960’s, Castroism promoted the Tricontinental Committee, a Latin American grouping of left organizations which characterized that it was feasible to attain "revolutionary" agreements with "progressive" sectors of the national bourgeoisie, thus repeating the strategy originally used by the M26 in the Sierra Maestra.

By the same time, the Cuban government closed ranks with the USSR bureaucracy, which defended the reactionary strategy of peaceful coexistence with capitalism and refused to support revolutionary processes in the oppressed countries.

The government of the Cuban workers’ state, which enjoyed enormous confidence from the exploited masses, neither found support in nor promoted soviets. On the contrary, they defended the dictatorship on the masses. Che himself admitted that "the vanguard group is ideologically more advanced than the mass. This latter knows new values, but to an insufficient degree. While, in the former, a qualitative change takes place that allows them to go to a sacrifice in their more advanced function, the latter are only partially able to see and must be submitted to stimuli and pressure of a certain intensity: that is proletarian dictatorship exercised not only upon the defeated class, but also individually on the triumphant class" ("El Socialismo y el Hombre en Cuba").

Yet, as we have seen, the "vanguard group" in 1958 aspired to no more than restoring the bourgeois constitution of 1940 without affecting the interest of the great capitalists. The masses, instead, had advanced to the expropriation of lands without hesitation, were mobilizing against the monopolies’ demands, and felt no doubts about responding to the call of arms when imperialism attempted at defeating the new government at Playa Girón. History had proven that the "vanguard group" had only become radical under the crossfire of imperialist pressure and the masses’ aspirations, instead of showing them the path beforehand, as the Russian Bolsheviks did indeed.

9. The radicalization of the government arisen from the 1959 revolution stopped at the local-scale expropriation of the capitalists and did not advance toward the fight to extend the revolution internationally. Castro gradually subordinated himself to the Kremlin’s dictates and also deployed a strategy of peaceful coexistence. In Chile, he supported Allende’s effectively suicidal illusion of reaching "socialism" without destroying the bourgeois state. In Nicaragua, he supported the policy of conciliation with the bourgeoisie and mixed economy promoted by the Sandinistas, who finally succumbed to the Chamorros. In El Salvador, he defended the negotiation of a mass-influence guerrilla with the genocidal Cristiani government. And even today, through the Forum of Sao Paulo, he issues calls for peace and for a "humanitarian" capitalism.

Che was the exception within that process, for he continued to grow empirically more radical and going farther than his comrades in arms in the Sierra Maestra.

When he was still part of the Cuban government, Che strongly ciritized the USSR leadership in a seminary in Algeria on February 24 of 1965, accusing them of not supporting the revolutionary processes in Asia and Africa. From then on, his days in the government were counted. Rather than calling himself to silence and subordinating himself to the Soviet bureaucracy and its "peaceful coexistence," he preferred to march to the Bolivian wilderness after the goal of extending the revolution.

His criticism of the USSR bureaucracy continued through his last writing, "Make One, Two, Many Vietnams," where he accused them of not consistently supporting the anti-imperialist crusade of the Vietnamese people.

Such criticism earned him the retaliation of the bureaucracy, which not only made pressure in order that Che leave the Cuban government, but also refused to support him in Bolivia. Widely known is his confrontation with Mario Monje, then-head of the Bolivian Communist Party, which defended in that country the policy of a popular front with sectors of the local bourgeoisie, as Che’s journals attest.

10. The empirical evolution of Che, who, as soon as 1967, already theoretically understood that agreements with the national bourgeoisies were impossible and that the only path was the fight for socialism, was interrupted by the fierce military persecution through the Bolivian wilderness promoted by the Barrientos dictatorship and by imperialism, putting an end to his life.

Despite that his thought was empirically evolving to the left, he was not able to break with a vanguardist conception overestimating the masses’ state of consciousness during the revolutionary process and then underestimating them once in power. The theory that the "advanced group" awakens the masses through the "insurrectional focus" and that, once in power, it exercises an "individual dictatorship on the triumphant class" are the two greatest mistakes of Che, for which he even paid with his life. His handful of fighters, imprisoned and assassinated in Bolivia, tragically showed once again that only under completely exceptional circumstances, as in Cuba, is the fusion possible between an advanced group and the masses. And even in Cuba the exception was double, for that "advanced group" did not at first intend to do a social revolution, but only to restore the bourgeois constitution of 1940. The pressure of the Soviet bureaucracy to exclude him from Cuban government once again showed that proletarian dictatorship, when not supported in soviet democracy, is left at the mercy of a parasitic caste alien to proletarian interest. Had the workers’ state been based on direct democracy, not Che isolately, but the whole state would have fought to extend the revolution, as did the early Soviet Russia, encouraging the formation of the Third International and actively supporting revolutionary processes in the whole world, but always stressing the masses’ direct action. Because, in Lenin’s thought, guerrilla war is not the central fighting method, but only a complementary aspect, subordinated to the general insurrection of the oppressed masses: "the party of the proletariat cannot consider guerrilla war as the only, or even the principal fighting method. This procedure must be subordinating to the others" (Vladimir Ilich Lenin, "On Guerrilla War.")

11. The figure of Che has grown gigantic for, in spite of his mistakes, he fought to extend the revolution to other countries, and he understood in his unexpectedly final years that socialism, and not an alliance with the national bourgeoisie, was the goal that the masses had to fight for. Che paid his convictions with his life and refused to retire as a servile Kremlin official. It is this attitude that we value and defend, aside from our differences with him.

Meanwhile, the strategy of peaceful coexistence of capitalism reigning today in Cuba is, in every respect, the opposite of what Che dreamt of. When Castro says that "the Pope can solve the world’s problems better than we" (Argentinian newspaper Clarín, 11/20/96), he leaves in the bourgeoisie’s hands the solution to the barbarism and hunger to which capitalism drags millions of humans, and against which Che fought.

Far from fighting for the extension of the revolution, Castroism is now forced to allow the peaceful coexistence with the bourgeoisie into the workers’ state itself, through the multiplication of capitalist investment and seriously endangering the conquests of the revolution. The worst of the case is that he still defends the possibility of building "socialism" isolately and in peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world market, which has already proven to be a reactionary utopy that leads to the collapse of the workers’ state, as it already happened in the USSR and Eastern Europe, now mastered by social counterrevolution.

We Trotskyists, in spite of our total difference with the strategy promoted by Castroism, unconditionally defend the Cuban workers’ state against the external or internal counterrevolution, and maintain the necessity of instoring Soviet democracy and of fighting to extend the revolution internationally, through a political revolution led by a party defending the program of Lenin and Trotsky; as Che said in "Make One, Two, Many Vietnams," "for the development of a true proletarian internationalism, with proletarian armies whose flag and reason to fight is the sacred cause of the redemption of humankind."