Che Guevara on Stalin

[Akshay!]

Wow, I never knew Che became a Communist because of Stalin. Your thoughts?


“In the so called mistakes of Stalin lies the difference between a revolutionary attitude and a revisionist attitude. You have to look at Stalin in the historical context in which he moves, you don’t have to look at him as some kind of brute, but in that particular historical context . . . I have come to communism because of daddy Stalin and nobody must come and tell me that I mustn’t read Stalin. I read him when it was very bad to read him. That was another time. And because I’m not very bright, and a hard-headed person, I keep on reading him. Especially in this new period, now that it is worse to read him. Then, as well as now, I still find a series of things that are very good.”
– Ernesto Che Guevara

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Moved thread from Politics to Che Guevara forum.

[tuwix]

Wow, I never knew Che became a Communist because of Stalin. Your thoughts?

Due to such his expressions many anarchists hate him.

[Skyhilist]

Becoming a communist due to a state capitalist? Seems legit

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

I think people neglect Che when they just put him in the standard "ideal leftist hero" category like Joe Hill. Che Guvera contributed significantly to Marxist political economy in his critique of Soviet economics and Che deserves to be respected as a theoritican rather than as a symbol, because Marxists have more to learn from his work than from his life.

(A link for those who are curious)
http://angrymarxists.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/che-guevaras-final-verdict-on-the-soviet-economy/

One of the most important developments in Cuban Marxism in recent years has been increased attention to the writings of Ernesto Che Guevara on the economics and politics of the transition to socialism.
A milestone in this process was the publication in 2006 by Ocean Press and Cuba’s Centro de Estudios Che Guevara of Apuntes criticos a la economía política [Critical Notes on Political Economy], a collection of Che’s writings from the years 1962 to 1965, many of them previously unpublished. The book includes a lengthy excerpt from a letter to Fidel Castro, entitled “Some Thoughts on the Transition to Socialism.” In it, in extremely condensed comments, Che presented his views on economic development in the Soviet Union.[1]


In 1965, the Soviet economy stood at the end of a period of rapid growth that had brought improvements to the still very low living standards of working people. Soviet prestige had been enhanced by engineering successes in defense production and space exploration. Most Western observers then considered that it showed more dynamism than its U.S. counterpart.

At that time, almost the entire Soviet productive economy was owned by the state. It was managed by a privileged bureaucracy that consolidated its control in the 1920s under the leadership of Joseph Stalin. Managers were rewarded on the basis of fulfilling production norms laid down from above; workers were commonly paid by the piece.

Political economy of the transition

Che’s analysis was more pessimistic than most Western commentators, pointing to problems rooted in the Soviet economy’s fundamental nature. Far from being socialist in character, he said, this economy actually yoked together incompatible elements, both capitalist and non-capitalist. He also pointed out that the “political economy” — that is, the political and economic laws of motion — of societies in transition to socialism “has not yet been formulated, let alone studied.”[2]

His diagnosis, unique in its time, identified key weaknesses that contributed to the Soviet economy’s stagnation, decline, and finally, only 25 years later, its total collapse.

In “Thoughts on the Transition,” Che traces the troubles of the Soviet economy back to the introduction in 1921, under Lenin’s leadership, of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which “opened the door to the old capitalist production relationships.” Che notes that “Lenin called these relationships state capitalism.”[3]

In the final period of his life, Lenin questioned the “presumed usefulness” of NEP categories such as “profits” in relations among state enterprises, Che says. Further, Lenin was disturbed by ominous divisions inside the Communist Party, to which he drew attention in his final writings. “If [Lenin] had lived, he would have quickly altered the relationships established under the NEP.” But in fact, “the economic and legal framework of Soviet society today is based on the NEP, and incorporates the old capitalist relationships.”

Incompatible elements

Che says that the capitalist features of Soviet society may be termed “pre-monopolist” because they lack the dynamism of competition and cooperation that produced capitalist trusts like General Motors and Ford. “The current system restricts development through capitalist competition but does not abolish its categories or establish new categories on a higher level,” he says. Individual material interest has supposedly become the lever for development, but is robbed of its effectiveness by the fact that Soviet society “does not exhibit exploitation,” Che says.[4] Given the presence of these capitalist features in Soviet societies, he states, “humanity does not develop its spectacular productive potential and does not emerge as the conscious architect of the new society.”

Capitalist competition and exploitation having been abolished, what can serve as the driving force of economic development?, Che asks. The USSR relies on material incentives, but these reproduce the social irresponsibility characteristic of capitalism.

Moreover, material incentives are extended to “non-productive economic sectors” and applied also to the “leaders,” thus “opening the door to corruption” — a phenomenon that was to become pervasive in the Soviet bureaucracy.

It follows logically that such a privileged officialdom will develop distinct political interests and goals antagonistic to those of working people in the Soviet Union and worldwide. Che’s well-documented criticisms of Soviet foreign policy — for example its failure to lend effective assistance to Vietnam, point to such a conclusion.[5] Forty years earlier, Leon Trotsky, leader of the Bolshevik opposition to the rise of Stalinism, held that the Russian revolution had been undermined by a self-interested and privileged bureaucratic caste. Che, however, did not say that bureaucratism in the Soviet Union had proceeded to that point.

Law of value

Economic management through material and profit-based incentives cannot bring the desired results, Che says, because in the Soviet context “the law of value does not have free play.” (The law of value is a principle of Marxist economics that holds, broadly speaking, that the prices of commodities are proportional to the amount of socially necessary labour time required to produce them.)

In the Soviet Union there is no competitive free market to reward the efficient producers and remove the inefficient, Che says. Instead, in the Soviet economy, in the last analysis, social needs take priority over market forces. The Soviet “must guarantee that the population receives a range of products at set prices,” and these prices thus “lose their link with capitalist value.”

Che offers no explanation of why Soviet authorities must subsidize the production of such consumer necessities. Among Cuban Communist leaders of the time, this fact required no explanation. They considered that, whatever the distortions of the Soviet state of the time, the working class remained in power, and had sufficient leverage to prevent the triumph of capitalist exploitation.

Soviet claims to be surging ahead of the United States economically, Che says, are based on references to higher Soviet production of steel and other basic industrial products. But this is misleading. “Steel is no longer a basic factor in measuring a country’s efficiency, because we now have chemistry, automation, non-ferrous metals — and besides, there’s the question of the steel’s quality. The U.S. produces less steel, but a great deal of it is of superior quality.”

Technological stagnation

Technical innovation in the U.S. reflected “a giddy advance” of capitalism based on “a range of totally new technologies far removed from the old productive techniques.” However, in the Soviet Union, “in most economic sectors, technology has remained relatively blocked.”

Che writes that “new societies achieve brilliant successes thanks to the revolutionary spirit of their first moments. But after that, progress is less swift, because “technology no longer operates as the driving force of society.”

There is, however, one area where Soviet technology has scored great successes, and that is precisely in the sector where social priorities hold unquestioned sway: defense production. “This is because it is not held to the standard of profitability.” Rather everything is structured to serve the new society by assuring its survival.

“But at this point the mechanism breaks down,” Che cautions. “The capitalists keep their defense apparatus closely united to their productive apparatus [as a whole].”

“All the great advances of the science of war pass over immediately to civilian technology, producing gigantic leaps forward in the quality of consumer goods. None of this takes place in the Soviet Union: the two compartments are walled off from each other.”

These weaknesses of the Soviet economy have been transplanted to the more economically developed societies of Eastern Europe, where they have sparked a reaction against “the plague of bureaucracy and of excessive centralization.” But the result is to give the enterprises “more and more independence in the struggle for a free market.” Meanwhile the state in these countries “begins to be transformed into a guardian of capitalist relationships.”

Factories are closed, and “Yugoslav — and now Polish — workers emigrate” to Western Europe. “They are slaves,” Che remarks acidly, “offered by the socialist countries [to serve] the technological development of the European Common Market.”

Two principles

As an alternative to this course, Che counterposes two principles for which he had argued in Cuba’s debate on economic management during the previous three years.[6]

First, “communism is a phenomenon of consciousness” that cannot be captured by “quantitative economic measures.” There is no identification between communist society and high income per capita, and such income calculations are in any case an abstraction.

The second principle concerns technological innovation, the basis for expanded production of material goods. The “technological seeds of socialism are found much more in developed capitalism than in the old system of so-called economic calculation” which then prevailed in the Soviet Union. This system was “taken over from a capitalism that has now been superseded but that is nonetheless taken as a model for socialist development.”

Guevara is probably thinking here of the emphasis in Lenin’s post-1917 writings on the need to adopt the most modern techniques and organizational principles of the Western capitalist world of that time. In his view, these principles then became inalterable principles of the Soviet economy.

Resistance to automation

The Soviet economy’s weakness is evident in its “backwardness … in adopting automation, compared to its truly startling progress in the capitalist countries.”

Che poses a hypothetical example: an oil refinery that needs to close down for a year for a complete technical overhaul. “What happens in the Soviet Union? Hundreds and perhaps thousands of such automation projects are piled up in the Academy of Science, but are not implemented because the factory directors cannot afford the luxury of not fulfilling their plan during a year.” What is more, “if the factory is automated, they will be ordered to get more production.”

Soviet factory managers were rewarded in terms of fulfillment of production norms set down in their ministry’s plan. In Che’s example, the manager of the automated factory gets penalized for the year of downtime and receives no compensating reward. “For them, achieving higher productivity is fundamentally of no concern.” Applying capitalist incentives to socialized enterprises thus obstructs technological advances while bringing none of the benefits of a true capitalist market.

The way forward is to “eliminate capitalist categories: commercial transactions among enterprises, bank interest, use of direct material incentives as a lever, etc., while adopting capitalism’s latest administrative and technological advances.”

Administration and technology

Che sees an example of such advanced administrative techniques in dominant capitalist corporations like General Motors, which, he points out, employs more workers than the entire Cuban nationalized economy. In such enterprises, administration is tightly linked to technology, and both are constantly in flux, adjusting to the development of capitalism as a whole. In socialism, by contrast, administration and technology “have been separated off as two different aspects of the problem, and one of them has remained totally static.”[7]

Referring ironically to the destructive effect of material stimulants, Che concludes that the challenge is “how to integrate people into their work in such a fashion that what we call ‘material disincentives’ will be unnecessary, that every worker will feel the urgent need to support the revolution and will thus experience work as a pleasure.”

Worker management

Che concedes that this is far from the case in Cuba. His critics, he says, are correct in pointing out that “workers do not participate in drawing up plans, in administration of state enterprises, and so on.” But the critics see the remedy for this in material incentives.

“This is the nub of the question. In our opinion it is an error to propose that the workers manage the enterprises … as representatives of the enterprise in an antagonistic relationship to the state.” Each worker should manage the enterprise “as one among many, as a representative of all the others [in society].”

Che’s concept of worker management based on revolutionary consciousness rather than material incentives is a decisive advance. It contrasts strikingly with all the models of economic management then current in the USSR and its allies, including both the top-down administrative centralization identified with the Stalin era and the profit-seeking self-managed enterprises of Yugoslavia.

Yet Che leaves his suggestion tantalizingly undeveloped. His text concludes on a note of puzzlement at the unresolved nature of the issues he is addressing — a tone reminiscent in some ways of Lenin’s final writings.[8]

Che endorses the widely held view that a centralized plan must utilize each element of production in a rational fashion, “and this cannot depend on [decisions of] a workers’ assembly or the outlook of a worker.” Still, he concedes, “when the central apparatus and intermediary levels have little knowledge, action by the workers is more useful, from a practical point of view.” One suspects that Che, in his practical experience, must often have found rank-and-file workers to have had more knowledge and better judgment than administrative cadres.

A note of uncertainty

Che’s text ends by emphasizing the unresolved nature of the problem. “Our experience has taught us two things that have become axiomatic: a well-place technical cadre can achieve much more than all the workers of a factory, and a leadership cadre assigned to a factory can transform it, for better or worse.” But why is it that a new factory manager can change everything? “We have not yet found any answer [to this question],” Che admits. The answer must be closely related, he concludes, to the still unformulated political economy of societies in transition to socialism.

The collection of Che’s writings in Apuntos critiquos makes available much of Che’s work devoted to laying foundations for such a political economy. It includes his trenchant critique of the official Soviet Manual of Political Economy and extensive minutes of Che’s meetings with collaborators in Cuba’s Ministry of Industry from 1962 to 1964. (Ocean Press has announced a forthcoming English-language edition.)

Yet when Che sent Fidel Castro these “Reflexiones,” he was not retiring to a period of study but advancing to the fields of revolutionary battle in Africa and Latin America. He evidently believed that the economic challenge he highlighted would be resolved above all through new revolutionary advances internationally.

‘21st Century Socialism’

More than 40 years ago after Che fell in battle in Bolivia, his spirit is triumphant in the rise of revolutionary struggles in Latin America. The publication of Apuntes críticos is evidence of new attention in Cuba to Che’s theoretical writings, as the country searches for ways to continue its socialist experiment. Meanwhile, Venezuelan revolutionists have initiated a discussion of “21st Century Socialism” that builds on Che’s thought, while going beyond it in significant ways.

Like Che, Venezuela’s revolutionary Bolivarians reject the model of the Stalinist Soviet Union and aim instead to build a socialism founded on the initiative of the ranks. Like Che, they recoil from the danger of a bureaucratic layer of privileged officials. But where Che writes of “communist consciousness,” the Venezuelans talk of “protagonism.” This shifts the emphasis from individual awareness to agency, that is, to initiative, responsibility, and decision at the base. And the great campaigns of the Venezuelan revolutionary process — the “missions” — have implemented vast centralized projects for health care, education, housing, etc., by devolving authority downwards to rank-and-file committees and councils.

To be sure, Venezuela is still a capitalist society, in which the challenges of conquering the foundations of capitalist power and instituting workers’ management in the factories remain unresolved.

When capitalism has been overthrown and the main elements of the economy socialized, the political economy of the transitional society must resolve more than the challenge of properly balancing national planning with rank-and-file initiative. Economic problems must be solved: among them, how investment funds will be allocated; how the efficiency of investment will be measured; how raw materials will be allocated and their supply assured; and how prices will be set, as a basis both for accounting in the nationalized economy and for exchange in consumer markets.

A full answer to these questions, which would provide us with the “political economy of transition” that Che called for, has not yet been elaborated, and can be developed only through struggle and experience. Che’s insights, however, help pose these questions in a framework in which a solution can be formulated.

[First published in Socialist Voice, June 8, 2008]

Footnotes

[1]. Ernesto Che Guevara, “Algunas reflexiones sobre la transición socialista,” inApuntes críticos a la economía política, Ocean Books: Melbourne, 2006, pp. 9-20.

[2]. Che and other Cuban communist leaders of the time considered the Soviet Union and Communist-led states in Eastern Europe, North Korea, North Vietnam, China, and Cuba to be states that had overthrown capitalism and established the foundations for a transition to socialism. Some Marxists term such societies “workers’ states.” The Cuban view was contested in the workers’ movement at the time, above all by the Maoist leadership in China, which argued that the Soviet Union and its allies had by the 1960s returned to capitalism.

[3]. For Lenin’s final comments on this topic, see Lenin, Collected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965, vol. 33, pp. 419-421 (“Fourth Congress of the Communist International” and 472-473 (“On Cooperation”). These and other writings by Lenin are also available at http://www.marxists.org.

[4]. The common, dictionary meaning of “exploitation” is mistreatment of people for the benefit of others. By that definition, the social privilege Che describes in the USSR would qualify as “exploitation.” But he was using the word in its Marxist sense, which refers to an inherent characteristic of wage labour under capitalism. Marxism holds that a portion of the value produced by a worker, the “surplus value,” is appropriated as profit by the employer, the owner of the means of production. Many Marxist opponents of Stalinism, including both Leon Trotsky and Che Guevara, denied that exploitation in this sense of the word took place in the USSR. This is disputed by those who claim that the USSR had by Che’s time returned to capitalism.

[5]. In “Message to the Tricontinental,” published in 1967, Che wrote “Vietnam, a nation representing the aspirations and hopes for victory of the disinherited of the world, is tragically alone. This people must endure the pounding of U.S. technology — in the south almost without defenses, in the north with some possibilities of defense — but always alone. The solidarity of the progressive world with the Vietnamese peoples has something of the bitter irony of the plebians cheering on the gladiators in the Roman Circus. To wish the victim success is not enough; one must share his or her fate. One must join that victim in death or in victory.” Che Guevara Reader, Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2003, p. 352.

[6]. Seventeen contributions to this debate are collected in Bertram Silverman, Man and Socialism in Cuba: The Great Debate, New York: Atheneum, 1971. Che’s concluding article in this discussion, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” is posted at http://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1965/03/man-socialism.htm. A similar collection is available in Spanish from Ocean Press under the title El Gran Debate. For an incisive discussion of Che’s economic thought, see Carlos Tablada, Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1989.

[7]. The decline of General Motors since the 1960s suggests that its internal regime may have been less optimal than Che suggests and may have suffered from some ills analogous to those of the Stalinist Soviet economy.

[8]. See volumes 33, 36, 42, and 45 of the edition of Lenin’s Collected Works published by Progress Publishers in Moscow in the 1960s or go to http://www.marxists.org. These writings are collected in Lenin’s Final Fight, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1995

But of course, at the same time, if we are to respect him as a theorist we should acknowledge that his faults in theory were also just as significant as his contributions to theory. Particularly his foco strategy. As Hoxha said:


Che Guevara was killed. Such a thing is liable to happen, because a revolutionary may get killed. Che Guevara, however, was a victim of his own non-Marxist-Leninist views. Who was Che Guevara? When we speak of Che Guevara, we also mean somebody else who poses as a Marxist, in comparison to whom, in our opinion, Che Guevara was a man of fewer words. He was a rebel, a revolutionary, but not a Marxist-Leninist as they try to present him. I may be mistaken—you Latin-Americans are better acquainted with Che Guevara, but I think that he was a leftist fighter. His is a bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leftism, combined with some ideas that were progressive, but also anarchist which, in the final analysis, lead to adventurism.

The views of Che Guevara and anyone else who poses as a Marxist and claims "paternity" of these ideas have never been or had anything to do with Marxism-Leninism. Che Guevara also had some "exclairicies" in his adoption of certain Marxist-Leninist principles, but they still did not become a full philosophical world-outlook which could impel him to genuinely revolutionary actions.

We cannot say that Che Guevara and his comrades were cowards. No, by no means! On the contrary, they were brave people. There are also bourgeois who are brave men. But the only truly great heroes and really brave proletarian revolutionaries are those who proceed from the Marxist-Leninist philosophical principles and put all their physical and mental energies at the service of the world proletariat for the liberation of the peoples from the yolk of the imperialists, feudal lords and others.

We have defended the Cuban revolution because it was against US imperialism. As Marxist-Leninists let us study it a bit and the ideas which guided it in this struggle. The Cuban revolution did not begin on the basis of Marxism-Leninism and was not carried out on the basis of the laws of the proletarian revolution of a Marxist-Leninist party. After the liberation of the country, Castro did not set out on the Marxist-Leninist course, either, but on the contrary, continued on the course of his liberal ideas. It is a fact, which nobody can deny, that the participants in this revolution took up arms and went to the mountains, but it is an undeniable fact also that they did not fight as Marxist-Leninists. They were liberation fighters against the Battista clique and triumphed over it precisely because that clique was a weak link of capitalism. Battista was an obedient flunky of imperialism, who rode roughshod over the Cuban people. The Cuban people, however, fought and triumphed over this clique and over American imperialism at the same time...

In our opinion, the theory that the revolution is carried out by a few "heroes" constitutes a danger to Marxism-Leninism, especially in the Latin-American countries. Your South-American continent has great revolutionary traditions, but, as we said above, it also has some other traditions which may seem revolutionary but which, in fact, are not genuinely on the road of the revolution. Any putsch carried out there is called a revolution! But a putsch can never be a revolution, because one overthrown clique is replaced by another, in a word, things remain as they were. In addition to all the nuclei of anti-Marxist trends which still exist in the ranks of the old parties that have placed themselves in the service of the counterrevolution, there is now another trend which we call left adventurism.

This trend, and that other offspring of the bourgeoisie, modern revisionism, constitute great dangers to the people, including those of the Latin-American countries. Carefully disguised, modern revisionism is a great deceiver of the peoples and revolutionaries. In different countries it puts on different disguises. In Latin America, Castroism, disguised as Marxism-Leninism, is leading people, even revolutionaries, into left adventurism. This trend appears to be in contradiction with modern revisionism. Those who are ideologically immature think thus, but it is not so. The Castroites are not opposed to the modern revisionists. On the contrary, they are in their service. The separate courses each of them follows lead them to the same point.

The question whenever the Soviet revisionists fail to prevent the masses of the working class and the people from carrying out the revolution, this trend steps in and, by means of a putsch, destroys what the revisionists are unable to destroy by means of evolution. The Soviet revisionists and all the traitor cliques which led the revisionist parties preach evolution, coexistence and all those other anti-Marxist theories we know. From the terms it employs, left adventurism seems more revolutionary, because it advocates armed struggle! But what does it mean by armed struggle? Clearly—putsches. Marxism-Leninism teaches us that only by proceeding with prudent and sure steps, only by basing ourselves firmly on the principles of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine, only by making the masses conscious can victory be ensured in the preparation and launching of the armed uprising, and only in this way will we never fall into adventurism.

The authors of the theory that the "starter motor" sets the "big motor" in motion pose as if they are for the armed struggle, but in fact they are opposed to it and work to discredit it. The example and tragic end of Che Guevara, the following and prorogation of this theory also by other self-styled Marxists, who are opposed to the great struggles by the masses of people, are publicly known facts which refute their claims: We must guard against the people lest they betray us, lest they hand us over to the police; we must set up "wild" isolated detachments, so that the enemy does not get wind of them and does not retaliate with terror against the population! They publicize these and many other confusing theories, which you know only too well. What sort of Marxism-Leninism is this which advocates attacking the enemy, fighting it with these "wild" detachments, etc. without having a Marxist-Leninist party to lead the fight? There is nothing Marxist-Leninist about it. Such anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist theories can bring nothing but defeat for Marxism-Leninism and the revolution, as Che Guevara's undertaking in Bolivia did.

This trend brings the theses of the armed uprising into disrepute. What great damage it causes the revolution! With the killing of Guevara, the masses of common people, contaminated by the influences of these anarchist views, will think: "Now there is no one else to lead us, to liberate us!" Or perhaps a group of people with another Guevara will be set up again to take to the mountains to make the "revolution," and the masses, who expect a great deal from these individuals and are burning to fight the bourgeoisie, may be deceived into following them. And what will happen? Something that is clear to us. Since these people are not the vanguard of the working class, since they are not guided by the enlightening principles of Marxism-Leninism, they will encounter misunderstanding among the broad masses and sooner or later they will fail, but at the same time the genuine struggle will be discredited, because the masses will regard armed struggle with distrust. We must prepare the masses politically and ideologically, and convince them through their own practical experience. That is why we say that this inhibiting, reactionary theory about the revolution that is being spread in Latin America is the offspring of modern revisionism and must be unmasked by the Marxist-Leninists.

As for his fondness for Stalin, it is worth noting that supporting Stalin is a mark of principle in the Sino-Soviet split period as it could get you killed since the Soviet Union rejected "Stalinism" for market reform and "peaceful coexistence" with western imperialism, just as supporting Trotsky was a mark of principle during the 30's debates (even though I am no trot, even I can acknowledge and respect this fact). Che was not fond of Kruschev's bastardization of Lenin's slogan of peaceful coexistance, that is the right of small nations to exist along side imperialist countries without being invaded. To quote Che:


As Marxists we have maintained that peaceful coexistence among nations does not encompass coexistence between the exploiters and the exploited, between the oppressors and the oppressed.

[Goblin]

"daddy Stalin"? WTF?

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

"daddy Stalin"? WTF?
Yeah, that's a strange thing to say, unless maybe there was a mistranslation.

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

Yeah, that's a strange thing to say, unless maybe there was a mistranslation.

There are other quotes where Che displays a slightly overzealous devotion to Stalin, but alas, if he were to say these things about Lenin then they would not be as, odd. Then again Stalin was a different man than Lenin in many respects.


Along the way, I had the opportunity to pass through the dominions of the United Fruit, convincing me once again of just how terrible these capitalist octopuses are. I have sworn before a picture of the dear and bemourned comrade Stalin that I won't rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated.

[Akshay!]

Due to such his expressions many anarchists hate him.

So? Who cares?

[Brutus]

So? Who cares?

Anarchists, evidently.

Che wasn't a Stalinist, we can safely say that. He grew disillusioned with the soviet system and it's nomenklatura, critisised Raul for expressing support for Stalin, etc. This happened around '65.

Although, he still admired the man, but that doesn't make one a stalinist- I admire Stalin in some aspects.

[RedSonRising]

I think people neglect Che when they just put him in the standard "ideal leftist hero" category like Joe Hill. Che Guvera contributed significantly to Marxist political economy in his critique of Soviet economics and Che deserves to be respected as a theoritican rather than as a symbol, because Marxists have more to learn from his work than from his life.

(A link for those who are curious)
http://angrymarxists.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/che-guevaras-final-verdict-on-the-soviet-economy/

One of the most important developments in Cuban Marxism in recent years has been increased attention to the writings of Ernesto Che Guevara on the economics and politics of the transition to socialism.
A milestone in this process was the publication in 2006 by Ocean Press and Cuba’s Centro de Estudios Che Guevara of Apuntes criticos a la economía política [Critical Notes on Political Economy], a collection of Che’s writings from the years 1962 to 1965, many of them previously unpublished. The book includes a lengthy excerpt from a letter to Fidel Castro, entitled “Some Thoughts on the Transition to Socialism.” In it, in extremely condensed comments, Che presented his views on economic development in the Soviet Union.[1]


In 1965, the Soviet economy stood at the end of a period of rapid growth that had brought improvements to the still very low living standards of working people. Soviet prestige had been enhanced by engineering successes in defense production and space exploration. Most Western observers then considered that it showed more dynamism than its U.S. counterpart.

At that time, almost the entire Soviet productive economy was owned by the state. It was managed by a privileged bureaucracy that consolidated its control in the 1920s under the leadership of Joseph Stalin. Managers were rewarded on the basis of fulfilling production norms laid down from above; workers were commonly paid by the piece.

Political economy of the transition

Che’s analysis was more pessimistic than most Western commentators, pointing to problems rooted in the Soviet economy’s fundamental nature. Far from being socialist in character, he said, this economy actually yoked together incompatible elements, both capitalist and non-capitalist. He also pointed out that the “political economy” — that is, the political and economic laws of motion — of societies in transition to socialism “has not yet been formulated, let alone studied.”[2]

His diagnosis, unique in its time, identified key weaknesses that contributed to the Soviet economy’s stagnation, decline, and finally, only 25 years later, its total collapse.

In “Thoughts on the Transition,” Che traces the troubles of the Soviet economy back to the introduction in 1921, under Lenin’s leadership, of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which “opened the door to the old capitalist production relationships.” Che notes that “Lenin called these relationships state capitalism.”[3]

In the final period of his life, Lenin questioned the “presumed usefulness” of NEP categories such as “profits” in relations among state enterprises, Che says. Further, Lenin was disturbed by ominous divisions inside the Communist Party, to which he drew attention in his final writings. “If [Lenin] had lived, he would have quickly altered the relationships established under the NEP.” But in fact, “the economic and legal framework of Soviet society today is based on the NEP, and incorporates the old capitalist relationships.”

Incompatible elements

Che says that the capitalist features of Soviet society may be termed “pre-monopolist” because they lack the dynamism of competition and cooperation that produced capitalist trusts like General Motors and Ford. “The current system restricts development through capitalist competition but does not abolish its categories or establish new categories on a higher level,” he says. Individual material interest has supposedly become the lever for development, but is robbed of its effectiveness by the fact that Soviet society “does not exhibit exploitation,” Che says.[4] Given the presence of these capitalist features in Soviet societies, he states, “humanity does not develop its spectacular productive potential and does not emerge as the conscious architect of the new society.”

Capitalist competition and exploitation having been abolished, what can serve as the driving force of economic development?, Che asks. The USSR relies on material incentives, but these reproduce the social irresponsibility characteristic of capitalism.

Moreover, material incentives are extended to “non-productive economic sectors” and applied also to the “leaders,” thus “opening the door to corruption” — a phenomenon that was to become pervasive in the Soviet bureaucracy.

It follows logically that such a privileged officialdom will develop distinct political interests and goals antagonistic to those of working people in the Soviet Union and worldwide. Che’s well-documented criticisms of Soviet foreign policy — for example its failure to lend effective assistance to Vietnam, point to such a conclusion.[5] Forty years earlier, Leon Trotsky, leader of the Bolshevik opposition to the rise of Stalinism, held that the Russian revolution had been undermined by a self-interested and privileged bureaucratic caste. Che, however, did not say that bureaucratism in the Soviet Union had proceeded to that point.

Law of value

Economic management through material and profit-based incentives cannot bring the desired results, Che says, because in the Soviet context “the law of value does not have free play.” (The law of value is a principle of Marxist economics that holds, broadly speaking, that the prices of commodities are proportional to the amount of socially necessary labour time required to produce them.)

In the Soviet Union there is no competitive free market to reward the efficient producers and remove the inefficient, Che says. Instead, in the Soviet economy, in the last analysis, social needs take priority over market forces. The Soviet “must guarantee that the population receives a range of products at set prices,” and these prices thus “lose their link with capitalist value.”

Che offers no explanation of why Soviet authorities must subsidize the production of such consumer necessities. Among Cuban Communist leaders of the time, this fact required no explanation. They considered that, whatever the distortions of the Soviet state of the time, the working class remained in power, and had sufficient leverage to prevent the triumph of capitalist exploitation.

Soviet claims to be surging ahead of the United States economically, Che says, are based on references to higher Soviet production of steel and other basic industrial products. But this is misleading. “Steel is no longer a basic factor in measuring a country’s efficiency, because we now have chemistry, automation, non-ferrous metals — and besides, there’s the question of the steel’s quality. The U.S. produces less steel, but a great deal of it is of superior quality.”

Technological stagnation

Technical innovation in the U.S. reflected “a giddy advance” of capitalism based on “a range of totally new technologies far removed from the old productive techniques.” However, in the Soviet Union, “in most economic sectors, technology has remained relatively blocked.”

Che writes that “new societies achieve brilliant successes thanks to the revolutionary spirit of their first moments. But after that, progress is less swift, because “technology no longer operates as the driving force of society.”

There is, however, one area where Soviet technology has scored great successes, and that is precisely in the sector where social priorities hold unquestioned sway: defense production. “This is because it is not held to the standard of profitability.” Rather everything is structured to serve the new society by assuring its survival.

“But at this point the mechanism breaks down,” Che cautions. “The capitalists keep their defense apparatus closely united to their productive apparatus [as a whole].”

“All the great advances of the science of war pass over immediately to civilian technology, producing gigantic leaps forward in the quality of consumer goods. None of this takes place in the Soviet Union: the two compartments are walled off from each other.”

These weaknesses of the Soviet economy have been transplanted to the more economically developed societies of Eastern Europe, where they have sparked a reaction against “the plague of bureaucracy and of excessive centralization.” But the result is to give the enterprises “more and more independence in the struggle for a free market.” Meanwhile the state in these countries “begins to be transformed into a guardian of capitalist relationships.”

Factories are closed, and “Yugoslav — and now Polish — workers emigrate” to Western Europe. “They are slaves,” Che remarks acidly, “offered by the socialist countries [to serve] the technological development of the European Common Market.”

Two principles

As an alternative to this course, Che counterposes two principles for which he had argued in Cuba’s debate on economic management during the previous three years.[6]

First, “communism is a phenomenon of consciousness” that cannot be captured by “quantitative economic measures.” There is no identification between communist society and high income per capita, and such income calculations are in any case an abstraction.

The second principle concerns technological innovation, the basis for expanded production of material goods. The “technological seeds of socialism are found much more in developed capitalism than in the old system of so-called economic calculation” which then prevailed in the Soviet Union. This system was “taken over from a capitalism that has now been superseded but that is nonetheless taken as a model for socialist development.”

Guevara is probably thinking here of the emphasis in Lenin’s post-1917 writings on the need to adopt the most modern techniques and organizational principles of the Western capitalist world of that time. In his view, these principles then became inalterable principles of the Soviet economy.

Resistance to automation

The Soviet economy’s weakness is evident in its “backwardness … in adopting automation, compared to its truly startling progress in the capitalist countries.”

Che poses a hypothetical example: an oil refinery that needs to close down for a year for a complete technical overhaul. “What happens in the Soviet Union? Hundreds and perhaps thousands of such automation projects are piled up in the Academy of Science, but are not implemented because the factory directors cannot afford the luxury of not fulfilling their plan during a year.” What is more, “if the factory is automated, they will be ordered to get more production.”

Soviet factory managers were rewarded in terms of fulfillment of production norms set down in their ministry’s plan. In Che’s example, the manager of the automated factory gets penalized for the year of downtime and receives no compensating reward. “For them, achieving higher productivity is fundamentally of no concern.” Applying capitalist incentives to socialized enterprises thus obstructs technological advances while bringing none of the benefits of a true capitalist market.

The way forward is to “eliminate capitalist categories: commercial transactions among enterprises, bank interest, use of direct material incentives as a lever, etc., while adopting capitalism’s latest administrative and technological advances.”

Administration and technology

Che sees an example of such advanced administrative techniques in dominant capitalist corporations like General Motors, which, he points out, employs more workers than the entire Cuban nationalized economy. In such enterprises, administration is tightly linked to technology, and both are constantly in flux, adjusting to the development of capitalism as a whole. In socialism, by contrast, administration and technology “have been separated off as two different aspects of the problem, and one of them has remained totally static.”[7]

Referring ironically to the destructive effect of material stimulants, Che concludes that the challenge is “how to integrate people into their work in such a fashion that what we call ‘material disincentives’ will be unnecessary, that every worker will feel the urgent need to support the revolution and will thus experience work as a pleasure.”

Worker management

Che concedes that this is far from the case in Cuba. His critics, he says, are correct in pointing out that “workers do not participate in drawing up plans, in administration of state enterprises, and so on.” But the critics see the remedy for this in material incentives.

“This is the nub of the question. In our opinion it is an error to propose that the workers manage the enterprises … as representatives of the enterprise in an antagonistic relationship to the state.” Each worker should manage the enterprise “as one among many, as a representative of all the others [in society].”

Che’s concept of worker management based on revolutionary consciousness rather than material incentives is a decisive advance. It contrasts strikingly with all the models of economic management then current in the USSR and its allies, including both the top-down administrative centralization identified with the Stalin era and the profit-seeking self-managed enterprises of Yugoslavia.

Yet Che leaves his suggestion tantalizingly undeveloped. His text concludes on a note of puzzlement at the unresolved nature of the issues he is addressing — a tone reminiscent in some ways of Lenin’s final writings.[8]

Che endorses the widely held view that a centralized plan must utilize each element of production in a rational fashion, “and this cannot depend on [decisions of] a workers’ assembly or the outlook of a worker.” Still, he concedes, “when the central apparatus and intermediary levels have little knowledge, action by the workers is more useful, from a practical point of view.” One suspects that Che, in his practical experience, must often have found rank-and-file workers to have had more knowledge and better judgment than administrative cadres.

A note of uncertainty

Che’s text ends by emphasizing the unresolved nature of the problem. “Our experience has taught us two things that have become axiomatic: a well-place technical cadre can achieve much more than all the workers of a factory, and a leadership cadre assigned to a factory can transform it, for better or worse.” But why is it that a new factory manager can change everything? “We have not yet found any answer [to this question],” Che admits. The answer must be closely related, he concludes, to the still unformulated political economy of societies in transition to socialism.

The collection of Che’s writings in Apuntos critiquos makes available much of Che’s work devoted to laying foundations for such a political economy. It includes his trenchant critique of the official Soviet Manual of Political Economy and extensive minutes of Che’s meetings with collaborators in Cuba’s Ministry of Industry from 1962 to 1964. (Ocean Press has announced a forthcoming English-language edition.)

Yet when Che sent Fidel Castro these “Reflexiones,” he was not retiring to a period of study but advancing to the fields of revolutionary battle in Africa and Latin America. He evidently believed that the economic challenge he highlighted would be resolved above all through new revolutionary advances internationally.

‘21st Century Socialism’

More than 40 years ago after Che fell in battle in Bolivia, his spirit is triumphant in the rise of revolutionary struggles in Latin America. The publication of Apuntes críticos is evidence of new attention in Cuba to Che’s theoretical writings, as the country searches for ways to continue its socialist experiment. Meanwhile, Venezuelan revolutionists have initiated a discussion of “21st Century Socialism” that builds on Che’s thought, while going beyond it in significant ways.

Like Che, Venezuela’s revolutionary Bolivarians reject the model of the Stalinist Soviet Union and aim instead to build a socialism founded on the initiative of the ranks. Like Che, they recoil from the danger of a bureaucratic layer of privileged officials. But where Che writes of “communist consciousness,” the Venezuelans talk of “protagonism.” This shifts the emphasis from individual awareness to agency, that is, to initiative, responsibility, and decision at the base. And the great campaigns of the Venezuelan revolutionary process — the “missions” — have implemented vast centralized projects for health care, education, housing, etc., by devolving authority downwards to rank-and-file committees and councils.

To be sure, Venezuela is still a capitalist society, in which the challenges of conquering the foundations of capitalist power and instituting workers’ management in the factories remain unresolved.

When capitalism has been overthrown and the main elements of the economy socialized, the political economy of the transitional society must resolve more than the challenge of properly balancing national planning with rank-and-file initiative. Economic problems must be solved: among them, how investment funds will be allocated; how the efficiency of investment will be measured; how raw materials will be allocated and their supply assured; and how prices will be set, as a basis both for accounting in the nationalized economy and for exchange in consumer markets.

A full answer to these questions, which would provide us with the “political economy of transition” that Che called for, has not yet been elaborated, and can be developed only through struggle and experience. Che’s insights, however, help pose these questions in a framework in which a solution can be formulated.

[First published in Socialist Voice, June 8, 2008]

Footnotes

[1]. Ernesto Che Guevara, “Algunas reflexiones sobre la transición socialista,” inApuntes críticos a la economía política, Ocean Books: Melbourne, 2006, pp. 9-20.

[2]. Che and other Cuban communist leaders of the time considered the Soviet Union and Communist-led states in Eastern Europe, North Korea, North Vietnam, China, and Cuba to be states that had overthrown capitalism and established the foundations for a transition to socialism. Some Marxists term such societies “workers’ states.” The Cuban view was contested in the workers’ movement at the time, above all by the Maoist leadership in China, which argued that the Soviet Union and its allies had by the 1960s returned to capitalism.

[3]. For Lenin’s final comments on this topic, see Lenin, Collected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965, vol. 33, pp. 419-421 (“Fourth Congress of the Communist International” and 472-473 (“On Cooperation”). These and other writings by Lenin are also available at http://www.marxists.org.

[4]. The common, dictionary meaning of “exploitation” is mistreatment of people for the benefit of others. By that definition, the social privilege Che describes in the USSR would qualify as “exploitation.” But he was using the word in its Marxist sense, which refers to an inherent characteristic of wage labour under capitalism. Marxism holds that a portion of the value produced by a worker, the “surplus value,” is appropriated as profit by the employer, the owner of the means of production. Many Marxist opponents of Stalinism, including both Leon Trotsky and Che Guevara, denied that exploitation in this sense of the word took place in the USSR. This is disputed by those who claim that the USSR had by Che’s time returned to capitalism.

[5]. In “Message to the Tricontinental,” published in 1967, Che wrote “Vietnam, a nation representing the aspirations and hopes for victory of the disinherited of the world, is tragically alone. This people must endure the pounding of U.S. technology — in the south almost without defenses, in the north with some possibilities of defense — but always alone. The solidarity of the progressive world with the Vietnamese peoples has something of the bitter irony of the plebians cheering on the gladiators in the Roman Circus. To wish the victim success is not enough; one must share his or her fate. One must join that victim in death or in victory.” Che Guevara Reader, Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2003, p. 352.

[6]. Seventeen contributions to this debate are collected in Bertram Silverman, Man and Socialism in Cuba: The Great Debate, New York: Atheneum, 1971. Che’s concluding article in this discussion, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” is posted at http://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1965/03/man-socialism.htm. A similar collection is available in Spanish from Ocean Press under the title El Gran Debate. For an incisive discussion of Che’s economic thought, see Carlos Tablada, Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1989.

[7]. The decline of General Motors since the 1960s suggests that its internal regime may have been less optimal than Che suggests and may have suffered from some ills analogous to those of the Stalinist Soviet economy.

[8]. See volumes 33, 36, 42, and 45 of the edition of Lenin’s Collected Works published by Progress Publishers in Moscow in the 1960s or go to http://www.marxists.org. These writings are collected in Lenin’s Final Fight, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1995

But of course, at the same time, if we are to respect him as a theorist we should acknowledge that his faults in theory were also just as significant as his contributions to theory. Particularly his foco strategy. As Hoxha said:



As for his fondness for Stalin, it is worth noting that supporting Stalin is a mark of principle in the Sino-Soviet split period as it could get you killed since the Soviet Union rejected "Stalinism" for market reform and "peaceful coexistence" with western imperialism, just as supporting Trotsky was a mark of principle during the 30's debates (even though I am no trot, even I can acknowledge and respect this fact). Che was not fond of Kruschev's bastardization of Lenin's slogan of peaceful coexistance, that is the right of small nations to exist along side imperialist countries without being invaded. To quote Che:

I can sympathize with the critique on the theory of focoism, but I find it odd that Hoxha would so ardently refer to Guevara as bourgeois and anarchist and adventurist. Guevara failed to replicate the success of the Cuban revolution elsewhere, but the foundations for guerrilla warfare as a vehicle for transforming society were definitely there in Cuba. The July 26th movement worked in coordination with urban worker unions and mobilized peasants and workers against United States imperialism, and more specifically, against the forces of US capital.

[Bostana]

Che is probably rolling around in his grave right now because people are trying to label him....

If we call Che anything he was a Marxist. He fought against exploitation at the hands of a U.S. backed dictator. If we are to associate Che with any "tendency" it would be a 'non-doctrine' Communist. As we see in his writings, he had no solid political admiration of a certain person or tendency, except Marx and Communism. He seems to admire Trotsky, and at the same time respect Mao.

Che was a Communist. Plain and Simple, Comrades

[RedSonRising]

Che is probably rolling around in his grave right now because people are trying to label him....

If we call Che anything he was a Marxist. He fought against exploitation at the hands of a U.S. backed dictator. If we are to associate Che with any "tendency" it would be a 'non-doctrine' Communist. As we see in his writings, he had no solid political admiration of a certain person or tendency, except Marx and Communism. He seems to admire Trotsky, and at the same time respect Mao.

Che was a Communist. Plain and Simple, Comrades

Very well put. He always seemed like he was looking for the right answer, the right formula, in an objective way. His outlook was a bit too scientific and modernist at times, but his search for the best possible model is one quality I always admired and tried to adopt myself. One man philosophizing won't ever replace the conscious will of an emancipated class, but an idea can correct and prevent many of the failed components of past attempts at socialist societies. His example as someone in pursuit of that ideal alone resonates loudly today, especially in a time where a culture of sectarianism and petty tendency wars have fragmented the left (I know, I know, the old sectarian diatribe, but it's really very true).

[Akshay!]

He seems to admire Trotsky

WTF???


"I never heard him talk about Trotsky...He was a Leninist and, to a degree, he even recognized some merits in Stalin."
- Fidel Castro on Che ("My Life: A Spoken Autobiography") Page 181.

[DDR]

Yeah, that's a strange thing to say, unless maybe there was a mistranslation.

In spanish, specially in South America Stalin is known as "el padrecito de los pueblos" Daddy of the peoples, so is common to say daddy Stalin, just like North Americans call him uncle Joe.


I can sympathize with the critique on the theory of focoism, but I find it odd that Hoxha would so ardently refer to Guevara as bourgeois and anarchist and adventurist. Guevara failed to replicate the success of the Cuban revolution elsewhere, but the foundations for guerrilla warfare as a vehicle for transforming society were definitely there in Cuba. The July 26th movement worked in coordination with urban worker unions and mobilized peasants and workers against United States imperialism, and more specifically, against the forces of US capital.

Che didn't take guerrilla warfare theory to another level, nor lay the foundations for it, Mao's writtings in the subject are way better Che's warfare theory is good to know to better understand Marighela's manual on urban guerrilla, but pretty much that's it.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

"daddy Stalin"? WTF?

That was probably a term of respect, similar to the Ukrainian "batko" used by the Makhnovtsy.


If we call Che anything he was a Marxist. He fought against exploitation at the hands of a U.S. backed dictator. If we are to associate Che with any "tendency" it would be a 'non-doctrine' Communist. As we see in his writings, he had no solid political admiration of a certain person or tendency, except Marx and Communism. He seems to admire Trotsky, and at the same time respect Mao.

Personal admiration does not always translate into a political programme, though, nor does being influenced by, for example, Mao, make one a Maoist. Guevara seems to have accepted the theories of socialism in one country and stagism throughout his political career - making him a Marxist-Leninist.

As for Guevara's relation to Trotskyism, it was a complex one. He seems to have viewed the Trotskyist group in Cuba with more sympathy than Castro, but thought they objectively undermined the revolution. He called Trotsky a "great revisionist", as I recall, but also arranged for certain Trotskyist who were working in the Ministry of Industry to be released, and allegedly personally encouraged them and so on. Posadas seems to have been fond of him, even claiming that Castro had Guevara killed.

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

WTF???


"I never heard him talk about Trotsky...He was a Leninist and, to a degree, he even recognized some merits in Stalin."
- Fidel Castro on Che ("My Life: A Spoken Autobiography") Page 181.

Fidel Castro is not the authority on Che though, nor much of a historical proof.

[Bostana]

m talk about Trotsky...He was a Leninist and, to a degree, he even recognized some merits in Stalin."
- Fidel Castro on Che ("My Life: A Spoken Autobiography") Page 181.

Right, and since when is Fidel an authority on Che?

And honestly dude, sorry to break this to yeah, Che wasn't a Stalinist. He was a Commie

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

In spanish, specially in South America Stalin is known as "el padrecito de los pueblos" Daddy of the peoples, so is common to say daddy Stalin, just like North Americans call him uncle Joe.
Okay, it makes more sense now that I know there's a context for it.

[Akshay!]

Fidel Castro is not the authority on Che though, nor much of a historical proof.


Right, and since when is Fidel an authority on Che?

And honestly dude, sorry to break this to yeah, Che wasn't a Stalinist. He was a Commie

YOU said that Che admired Trotsky. Now do you expect Me to prove a negative? Why don't you quote Che saying that he loves Trotsky? :)

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

YOU said that Che admired Trotsky. Now do you expect Me to prove a negative? Why don't you quote Che saying that he loves Trotsky? :)

I didn't expect you to do anything.
Admire does not mean love.

[Bostana]

YOU said that Che admired Trotsky. Now do you expect Me to prove a negative? Why don't you quote Che saying that he loves Trotsky? :)
I assume you're expecting me to have a quote from Che in which he says he was a die hard Trotskyist or that he embraced Trotskyism. But that's not the case....because that's not what I said.

Read this Link Here (http://socialistalternative.org/literature/che/)

. It appeared to confirm his own analysis. However, he also began to explore the ideas of Leon Trotsky. In Moscow he was attacked as being "pro-Chinese" and a "Trotskyist". Aware of these denunciations Che referred to them in a meeting in the Cuban Embassy with Cuban students. The incident is recounted in Paco Ignacio Taibo's biography.

Che commented: "...I have expressed opinions which could be closer to the Chinese side...and also those mixed up with Trotskyism have come up. They say that the Chinese are fractionalists, also the Trotskyists and me as well." He continued: "Opinion which must be destroyed with batons is opinion which brings us an advantage. It is not possible to destroy opinions with batons and it is precisely this that is the root of intelligence...it is clear that you can get a series of things from Trotsky's thought."

[Akshay!]

And how does any of that mean that he "admires" Trotsky?

[Red Commissar]

A lot of communists living in the third world (Latin America, Asia, Africa, etc.) during the 40s and 50s came to communism through Stalin as they saw him as the torchbearer of the movement. It wasn't uncommon (and to some extent even into the 80s) for communists there to have a positive impression of Stalin, more so than what you would have encountered in other communist circles.

The problem is this stalinist or anti-rev (what ever perspective you may come from) wasn't frequently invoked by Che as he got more involved in struggles around the world, or at least from my readings. I remember similar discussions here where antirevs would claim he had become too distant from orthodox MLism, accusing him of everything ranging from adventurism, romantic revolutionary, or having drifted into a mish-mash of his own thoughts in Focoism.

[ind_com]

Why don't you quote Che saying that he loves Trotsky? :)
Easy. :)

“Trotsky, along with Khrushchev, belongs to the category of the great revisionists." - Che Guevara, 1965.

[MarxArchist]

Becoming a communist due to a state capitalist? Seems legit
To be fair a lot of communists in those times toted the Stalinist line. Mao as well.

[Brutus]

Easy. :)

“Trotsky, along with Khrushchev, belongs to the category of the great revisionists." - Che Guevara, 1965.

Because Marx and Lenin advocated the slaughtering of communists.
Ah, 'anti-revisionism' is incredibly ironic.

[Per Levy]

Ah, 'anti-revisionism' is incredibly ironic.

the most ironic thing about "anti-revisionism" is that it is inherently revisionst.

[Bostana]

And how does any of that mean that he "admires" Trotsky?

Did you read the link I had in there? If you read it it would answer all your question, I just provided a paragraph. However I intended for you to read the whole thing in the link I sent you.



“Trotsky, along with Khrushchev, belongs to the category of the great revisionists." - Che Guevara, 1965.

For some reason I doubt he said this

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Why? I mean, surely Guevara could have considered Trotsky a revisionist (a notion I obviously disagree with, but we are discussing what Guevara's attitude was, not whether it was correct) and still critically read his work, and even find himself in agreement with Trotsky on certain points? Why do people act as if the only options are agreeing with a figure and declaring a fatwa against everything they did, wrote and joined?

As I said, nothing I have read about the man would indicate that Guevara rejected the theory of socialism in one country - so I think he is best described as an open-minded ML, but an ML still. Besides, what would "claiming" Guevara for Trotskyism really accomplish? I think certain Trotskyists have a bad habit of seeing "unconscious Trotskyists" everywhere - looking for Lev in all the wrong places, so to say - but thus far none of their unconscious Trotskyists has implemented even a fraction of the Trotskyist programme.

[Brutus]

“Trotsky, along with Khrushchev, belongs to the category of the great revisionists." - Che Guevara, 1965.
He did say it. I'm pretty sure Khrushchev and Trotsky were 'revisionist'- Trotsky with his transitional program and Khrushchev with his...well, Stalinism.

[RedSonRising]

Che didn't take guerrilla warfare theory to another level, nor lay the foundations for it, Mao's writtings in the subject are way better Che's warfare theory is good to know to better understand Marighela's manual on urban guerrilla, but pretty much that's it.

I never said he took guerrilla warfare to another level or even commented on his theoretical contributions. I'm talking about the material conditions and mobilization in Cuba which made the July 26th movement an authentically revolutionary movement, as a response to the critique that his brand of focoism was purely adventurist.

[G4b3n]

I would argue that Che can best be described as either non doctrine communist or Marxist-Leninist, depending on how broadly you define Marxism-Leninism.

I didn't know that he admired Stalin though, that is a shame.
What is even more shameful, is that he referred to him as "daddy", if that is an accurate translation.

[Akshay!]

For some reason I doubt he said this

Even after the comrade has given you a quote which can easily be confirmed, "for some reason" you "doubt he said this" - why? Because how can Che possibly disagree with Bostana - the Great Communist who created a revolution in 23 and a half countries. So if Bostana admires Trotsky, and Bostana doesn't want Che not to admire Trotsky, it logically follows that Che admires Trotsky too - doesn't it? :lol:

[Fourth Internationalist]

Why do people care about what Che thought about Stalin?

[Geiseric]

Che was arguably against Stalinism due to his inherit internationalism (he like trotsky was killed as exiled revolutionary.) I don't think he ever told the working class to stand down like stalinists are famous for in cases such as the weeks before october (directly Stalin did this with kamenev and zinoviev), paris 1968, and post bellum greece. He also never did giant purges of the international working class (important!)

Stalin divided eastern Europe with Churchill, che did nothing like that ever. Che also ordered many imprisoned trots to be freed post seizure of power, in a well documented example. I don't know what he was thinking with Bolivia though, why he mostly stayed out of the cities.

[Akshay!]

Ok, so Stalin was a Georgian, Che wasn't so Che hated Stalin.
But since Trotsky liked cats, and Che liked cats, clearly Che loved Trotsky.

Is that your materialist analysis? "Che didn't divide Europe" - Yeah, since Che was the head of state of the USSR. Right? But wait, he wasn't, and Trotsky wasn't either - this is a clear proof that Che was a Trotskyist! :lol:

I will keep doing this until people STOP lying about Che's views. This is NOT about your opinions. It's about Che. If you want to talk about your views create a thread called "xyz on Stalin".

[Fourth Internationalist]

Ok, so Stalin was a Georgian, Che wasn't so Che hated Stalin.
But since Trotsky liked cats, and Che liked cats, clearly Che loved Trotsky.

Is that your materialist analysis? "Che didn't divide Europe" - Yeah, since Che was the head of state of the USSR. Right? But wait, he wasn't, and Trotsky wasn't either - this is a clear proof that Che was a Trotskyist! :lol:

I will keep doing this until people STOP lying about Che's views. This is NOT about your opinions. It's about Che. If you want to talk about your views create a thread called "xyz on Stalin".
He didn't claim he was a Trotskyist, just that he was not a Stalinist. Those two are most certainly not synonmpus. Take your own advice and stop lying.

[Bostana]

Even after the comrade has given you a quote which can easily be confirmed, "for some reason" you "doubt he said this" - why? Because how can Che possibly disagree with Bostana - the Great Communist who created a revolution in 23 and a half countries. So if Bostana admires Trotsky, and Bostana doesn't want Che not to admire Trotsky, it logically follows that Che admires Trotsky too - doesn't it? :lol:
I never said I admire Trotsky. You came up with that yourself. And I also presume that you made up that the quote is supposedly 'so easy to confirm' as well because if it was you probably would have confirmed it instead of ranting on about how I am a Trotskyist. (Which I'm not) Also even if I did admire Trotsky (which, I'll admit he has some of my respect) I don't think I would care whether Che was a trot or not, which I never claimed. And, I'm going to have to put an emphasis on this again, read the damned link I sent you!
Ergh!!

[Akshay!]

He didn't claim he was a Trotskyist, just that he was not a Stalinist. Those two are most certainly not synonmpus. Take your own advice and stop lying.

Have you even read the first post of this thread? :confused:

[Akshay!]

And I also presume that you made up that the quote is supposedly 'so easy to confirm' as well because if it was you probably would have confirmed it
Ergh!!

Sure, that's easy.

“Trotsky, along with Khrushchev, belongs to the category of the great revisionists.”

- Che Guevara (December 4, 1965: Letter to Armando Mart)

“Trotsky was fundamentally wrong… Trotskyites ultimately failed because their methods are bad.”

- Che Guevara (Apuntes criticos a la Economia Politica, 1964)

Both are mentioned in his famous Jon Lee Anderson biography.

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

Che was arguably against Stalinism due to his inherit internationalism


Socialism in One Country is a part of an internationalist strategy, but of course, even if I start quoting the works of Stalin to prove that you will reject that because Trotsky did no think so and if Trotsky did not think so then heavens forbid we read a word of that dastardly Stalin!


I don't think he ever told the working class to stand down like stalinists are famous for in cases such as the weeks before october (directly Stalin did this with kamenev and zinoviev), paris 1968, and post bellum greece.


The 68 events have nothing do do with Stalin. By that time, the French Communist Party was taking the lead from the USSR which if you remember from the billion times you've been reminded, was rejected by "Stalinists" as a capitalist power, while Khrushchev spent every other minute denouncing "Stalinism" while enacting market reforms and cuddling up with imperialism, all while threatening China with the atomic bomb and Albania with an embargo. And what does the "weeks before october" have to do with anything? Before October Trotsky was a menshevik and Lenin can be quoted denouncing Trotskyism.

[Bostana]

Sure, that's easy.

“Trotsky, along with Khrushchev, belongs to the category of the great revisionists.”

- Che Guevara (December 4, 1965: Letter to Armando Mart)

“Trotsky was fundamentally wrong… Trotskyites ultimately failed because their methods are bad.”

- Che Guevara (Apuntes criticos a la Economia Politica, 1964).

I'll be honest.I looked of reference to these letters (http://letmebingthatforyou.com/?q=%E2%80%9CTrotsky%2C%20along%20with%20Khrushchev %2C%20belongs%20to%20the%20category%20of%20the%20g reat%20revisionists.%E2%80%9D%20%20-%20Che%20Guevara%20(December%204%2C%201965%3A%20Le tter%20to%20Armando%20Mart)) and I didn't come up with anything except the exact thing on this . This doesn't seem like a good website to get info comrade. Also I've never heard of the Bio and I'm sure as hell ain't going to read it all in one moment. But I did bother to check it out, and comrade that's not the bio you're looking for

[Akshay!]

Not my mistake that you haven't read the biography. http://www.amazon.com/Che-Guevara-A-Revolutionary-Life/dp/product-description/080214411X/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books

Look, this can go on indefinitely.

I can provide you with more sources but they would become bad sources by definition since they're quotes by Che Guevara and not by the imaginary Che who admired Trotsky.

I can provide you with more biographies too, but again you'll say that you haven't read them which by definition means they're not good, or inaccurate, etc.. etc..

So I'm out of this discussion. Feel free to have the last word. Say something like "As soon as Che was born he said "I love Trotsky!! :D I hate Stalin, that evil lunatic dictator who killed 100 billion people including everybody in USSR""

Wait, Che was born and Trotsky was also born - LOOK, another similarity!!!!! :O

Those quotes by Che are just fabrications that Che said because he was given some kind of mind control drug (which was mixed in his food by a Stalinist agent) through which Stalin (who was dead by then, but still) could control everything Che said.

:laugh:

Wait, I haven't read any anarchist say "no, che was really an anarchist. somehow didn't mention that in his lifetime because he feared that stalin would come alive and shoot him... "

and so on... and so on...

As I said, feel free to have the last word. And make it even more ridiculous and laughable than I can imagine.

[Bostana]

Not my mistake that you haven't read the biography.
Did you even read what I wrote? When I said that's not the bio you;re looking for I was refering to the fact that there is no mention of Trot in it!!



I can provide you with more sources but they would become bad sources by definition since they're quotes by Che Guevara and not by the imaginary Che who admired Trotsky.
You didn't give me any scources only quotes you got from a Stalinist website! Agh! Read the fucking link I sent you it show clear evidence of Che reading and having some admiration of Trotsky


I can provide you with more biographies too, but again you'll say that you haven't read them which by definition means they're not good, or inaccurate, etc.. etc..
You only provided me with one Biography that didn't have any mention of Trotsky in it! Ctrl+f. Trotsky. Nothing


"As soon as Che was born he said "I love Trotsky!! :D I hate Stalin, that evil lunatic dictator who killed 100 billion people including everybody in USSR""
That is completely irrelevant to what I am saying.


Wait, Che was born and Trotsky was also born - LOOK, another similarity!!!!! :O
I never made any comparisons through similarities.


Those quotes by Che are just fabrications that Che said because he was given some kind of mind control drug (which was mixed in his food by a Stalinist agent) through which Stalin (who was dead by then, but still) could control everything Che said.
Or because you haven't provided any reference to these quotes. Because when I tried to look up the references you gave me I only got the same two exact lines being quoted on some Stalinist website so yeah i'm kinda in disbelief



Wait, I haven't read any anarchist say "no, che was really an anarchist. somehow didn't mention that in his lifetime because he feared that stalin would come alive and shoot him... "
Where the fuck are you getting this shit?! You're taking what i said out of context and blowing it up!

BTW This has nothing to do with having the last laugh. It's about your pathetic attempt to try and fucking label Che as a Stalinist so that way you can take him and say "Look what are group has! We must be Right!" That's not fooling anyone except yourself and perhaps a few other Stalinists. And stop with the whole laughing face shit it only makes you look like an ass

[Old Bolshie]

It's pretty hard to associate Che with a single tendency due to the complexity of his political course but if there was a communist figure who had a lot of influence on Che was definitely Mao. Since most of Maoists were always sympathetic towards Stalin it's not hard too see why Che expressed his admiration for Stalin.

The trips he realized to China and USSR as Cuban diplomat helped him to reinforce his admiration for China and disillusion with Soviet Union.
His divergences with Castro were also related with the Sino - Soviet split since Che was favorably to a rapprochement of Cuba to China when Castro was closing ties with Moscow.

[Geiseric]

Socialism in One Country is a part of an internationalist strategy, but of course, even if I start quoting the works of Stalin to prove that you will reject that because Trotsky did no think so and if Trotsky did not think so then heavens forbid we read a word of that dastardly Stalin!



The 68 events have nothing do do with Stalin. By that time, the French Communist Party was taking the lead from the USSR which if you remember from the billion times you've been reminded, was rejected by "Stalinists" as a capitalist power, while Khrushchev spent every other minute denouncing "Stalinism" while enacting market reforms and cuddling up with imperialism, all while threatening China with the atomic bomb and Albania with an embargo. And what does the "weeks before october" have to do with anything? Before October Trotsky was a menshevik and Lenin can be quoted denouncing Trotskyism.

That's like saying Brutus would of been totally different than Caesar although they were part of the same patrician class, I'm Not sure if it's naivete since your young but that's not really how states work. Khrushchev was the second most important Stalinist which is why he inherited power and killed other rivals as he wished, through WW2 and the early cold war.

Sioc is an international plan, your right, the plan was to nueter the worKing class, internationally, so the imperials don't want to invade, which ultimately failed.

[Rafiq]

Brutus would have been totally different than Caesar as, despite their class origin, they both represented the interests of different classes. Caesar's being a coalition of plebs and others, Brutus being the senetorial land owning class.

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Tapatalk 2

[Fourth Internationalist]

Have you even read the first post of this thread? :confused:

Yes I have. What does that have to do with the fact that Geiseric didn't claim Che was a Trotskyist, but instead claimed he was an anti-Stalinist? Did you even read what I said? Because you are writing on this forum, I will assume you are not illiterate. So, please re-read my post. I didn't make any claim about Che. I don't care about him at all.

[Geiseric]

Brutus would have been totally different than Caesar as, despite their class origin, they both represented the interests of different classes. Caesar's being a coalition of plebs and others, Brutus being the senetorial land owning class.

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Tapatalk 2

Lol wat? Caesars family owned gaul, northern italy, and Britania, perhaps being the richest man in rome through his conquests. Or was he himself not a landowner who wanted more hegemony, whom coincidentally came from modest backgrounds and used that to his advantage?

Besides they were both responsible for things like crushing revolts and massacres of people they conquered. Just like stalin and Khrushchev, who were both in a position of undemocratic hegemony.

[Bostana]

Besides they were both responsible for things like crushing revolts and massacres of people they conquered. Just like stalin and Khrushchev, who were both in a position of undemocratic hegemony.

Didn't Brutus start a civil war with his co-emperor Mark Antony because Mark married Cleopatra or something?

[Rafiq]

Lol wat? Caesars family owned gaul, northern italy, and Britania, perhaps being the richest man in rome through his conquests. Or was he himself not a landowner who wanted more hegemony, whom coincidentally came from modest backgrounds and used that to his advantage?

Besides they were both responsible for things like crushing revolts and massacres of people they conquered. Just like stalin and Khrushchev, who were both in a position of undemocratic hegemony.

You don't have any adaquete conception of the class nature of different political factions during the late republic. The Populares and the Optimates represented different class interests. Caesar was a popular reformer and Brutus was a reactionary. This isn't a debate regarding the moral attributes or faults of Caesar. A class nature isn't defined in such a way. You're a Liberal, and a bourgeois idealist at that. By allowing the "commoners" more political power Caesar was effectively making the repiblic more democratic a la aristotle, whilst making himself a merciless dictator to the senetorial class by slowly revoking them of political power. This is an objective analysis of the events surrounding the late republic, as a Marxist, not a call for support or romanticism. Obviously you simply don't understand the historical context.

I suggest reading Parenti's The Assassionation of Julius Caesar.

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Tapatalk 2

[Geiseric]

Didn't Brutus start a civil war with his co-emperor Mark Antony because Mark married Cleopatra or something?

Brutus denounced, betrayed, and killed caesar, his best most trusted friend basically. He called him a tyrant to everybody in Rome which worked at first to gain support. Antony inherited Caesar's prestige since he was appointed tribune by Caesar, and played politics with other patricians who saw a power vaccu (not so much related).

My point was that Brutus like Khrushchev was an opportunist who denounced his former friend to garner public approval as the prospective new ruler after Caesar himself took down any possible opposition.

My point was that Brutus was most likely just as big an asshole as Caesar, since he would of had the same job. Just like how Obama is just as bad as Bush. Stalin and Khrushchev had THE SAME JOB AND WERE PART OF THE SAME CASTE. Khruschev worked for Stalin for years, and murdered many socialist people for socialism in one country while Stalin was in charge.

[Geiseric]

You don't have any adaquete conception of the class nature of different political factions during the late republic. The Populares and the Optimates represented different class interests. Caesar was a popular reformer and Brutus was a reactionary. This isn't a debate regarding the moral attributes or faults of Caesar. A class nature isn't defined in such a way. You're a Liberal, and a bourgeois idealist at that. By allowing the "commoners" more political power Caesar was effectively making the repiblic more democratic a la aristotle, whilst making himself a merciless dictator to the senetorial class by slowly revoking them of political power. This is an objective analysis of the events surrounding the late republic, as a Marxist, not a call for support or romanticism. Obviously you simply don't understand the historical context.

I suggest reading Parenti's The Assassionation of Julius Caesar.

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Tapatalk 2

Oh so I guess the Roman ruling class was capable of democratic reforms outside the realm of gladiator games and free bread in place to forestall revolution? Your the liberal who thinks there is such a thing as a good emperor, or better yet a pro proletariat faction of the landowning class whom deserves support over a different section of the ruling class in any civilization (as defined by engels).

[Rafiq]

Oh so I guess the Roman ruling class was capable of democratic reforms outside the realm of gladiator games and free bread in place to forestall revolution? Your the liberal who thinks there is such a thing as a good emperor, or better yet a pro proletariat faction of the landowning class whom deserves support over a different section of the ruling class in any civilization (as defined by engels).

Did you fucking read anything I said? Are you trolling me? Get the fuck out of here. I SPECIFICALLY mentioned that this is not a call for support. You're ridiculously an Idealist. You have absolutely no mediocre conception of history beyond "good guys and bad guys". Because you adhere to the notion of universal morality, to you history is made through whether your moral antagonist or protagonist is successful. Your head is up your ass and there's nothing I can do to pull it out.

Until the left recognizes that objective reality exists, that neither of our causes are 'just' and that is a war of power and dominance between two opposing classes, they will never get anywhere.

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Tapatalk 2

[Geiseric]

Umm yeah socialism is kind of about equity, and real liberty, which I'd consider "good".

[Fourth Internationalist]

Until the left recognizes that objective reality exists, that neither of our causes are 'just' and that is a war of power and dominance between two opposing classes, they will never get anywhere.

Our cause is just because it is for communism AND between the classes for the sake of communism, not power and dominance, which is what we which to abolish.

[Brutus]

It does not matter what is "good" or "morally right"; what matters is whether a certain thing is in our class interests.

[Fourth Internationalist]

It does not matter what is "good" or "morally right"; what matters is whether a certain thing is in our class interests.

So what should I do if I'm a bourgeoisie communist? (Yes they exist). Communism, aka the total liberation of all humanity, is good and morally right. And in the proletariat's class interest. Their interest is good because it will liberate everyone, not because self interest is life's goal (that's more of an Ayn Rand type thing)

[Brutus]

So what should I do if I'm a bourgeoisie communist? (Yes they exist). Communism, aka the total liberation of all humanity, is good and morally right. And in the proletariat's class interest. Their interest is good because it will liberate everyone, not because self interest is life's goal (that's more of an Ayn Rand type thing)

Then, if they are real communists, they will undoubtedly be class traitors.

[Fourth Internationalist]

Then, if they are real communists, they will undoubtedly be class traitors.

Therefore they should be communists because it is morally right and not because it's for their class interest.

[Brutus]

What if the recognise the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism, and do it to save their own skins? They're still happy exploiting the proletarians that work for them- where is your moralism now?

[Fred]

Anarchists, evidently.

Che wasn't a Stalinist, we can safely say that. He grew disillusioned with the soviet system and it's nomenklatura, critisised Raul for expressing support for Stalin, etc. This happened around '65.

Although, he still admired the man, but that doesn't make one a stalinist- I admire Stalin in some aspects.

Che is a revolutionary martyr. However, he was absolutely a Stalinist. His politics were always top down and I would argue he was a nationalist. The Cuban regime, in which he was a leader, suppressed any kind of free discussion on the left and jailed leftist opponents. His views on guerrilla warfare and his third world, non-proletarian focus were decidedly idealistic and impressionistic. It would surprise me if he had any fondness for Trotsky. To the extent that he did, it certainly seemed to have zero influence on his politics and political activity. There is a wing of US Trotskyism that has been infatuated with Castro and Cuba since 1961. They subsequently rejected Trotskyism entirely although it took twenty years or so to formally do so (The SWP US).

[Akshay!]

Communism, aka the total liberation of all humanity, is good and morally right. And in the proletariat's class interest. Their interest is good because it will liberate everyone, not because self interest is life's goal (that's more of an Ayn Rand type thing)

Communism is "just" therefore it's in the interest of the proletariat - No.

Communism is in the interest of the proletariat therefore it is just - Yes.

[Geiseric]

Che is a revolutionary martyr. However, he was absolutely a Stalinist. His politics were always top down and I would argue he was a nationalist. The Cuban regime, in which he was a leader, suppressed any kind of free discussion on the left and jailed leftist opponents. His views on guerrilla warfare and his third world, non-proletarian focus were decidedly idealistic and impressionistic. It would surprise me if he had any fondness for Trotsky. To the extent that he did, it certainly seemed to have zero influence on his politics and political activity. There is a wing of US Trotskyism that has been infatuated with Castro and Cuba since 1961. They subsequently rejected Trotskyism entirely although it took twenty years or so to formally do so (The SWP US).

Che was SUCH a nationalist he spent most of his life fighting revolutions in countries other than where he came from (argentinia). And a fraction of the SWP is who went castro crazy, not the historic party known as the SWP which included james cannon.

[Fred]

Che was SUCH a nationalist he spent most of his life fighting revolutions in countries other than where he came from (argentinia). And a fraction of the SWP is who went castro crazy, not the historic party known as the SWP which included james cannon.

Comrade, the leadership of the SWP -- and the party majority in 1961-3 held that position. Sections of the SWP were demoralized by the 50s and casting about for something. Castro was that thing. The "historic party" was in the throes of rejoining the Pabloite IS, and in the process expelled the people upholding a revolutionary program in the SWP, the Revolutionary Tendency. Cannon was alive, but was no longer the National Secretary. Given that he had fought against what became the IS in a split in 1953, it was sad that he couldn't go another round with the revisionists. The SWP moved rapidly to the right, barely having a "centrist" phase and moving helter skelter into reformism. I can still see that famous picture of Fred Halstead with a sign that reads "Bring Our Boys Home." A total embarrassment for a revolutionary because "our boys" were the viet cong and North Vietnamese not the troops of US imperialism.

But it wasn't just Jack Barnes that went "Castro Crazy" sometime in the late 70s. The SWP leaders in 1963 were calling Castro an "unconscious Troskyist."
The purges of any potentially revolutionary elements in the SWP continued unabated until the last notable group the Internationalist Tendency was purged in the early 70s. Sadly, the SWP did purge all long time members that had even the slightest commitment to anything "Trotskyist." George Breitman, whose own political writings were reformist twaddle, but who did the revolutionary movement a great service by compiling and publishing a large amount of Trotsky's writings was purged after decades in the party. This was true of a significant number of folks who did not want to give up "Trotskyism" as they understood it and did not want to blindly follow Barnes (the most unlikely cult figure since Bob Avakian).

As for Che, okay, he was an internationalist in that he wanted to spread revolution. He was ineffectual as an internationalist in part because he had no faith in the proletariat to overthrow capitalism and that his model was the Cuban Revolution. I would still put him in the Stalinist camp. But I guess I would agree that he was a contradictory figure.

[Fourth Internationalist]

What if the recognise the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism, and do it to save their own skins? They're still happy exploiting the proletarians that work for them- where is your moralism now?

Then they're doing it for that reason. I didn't say it is necessarily for moral reasons (however those bourgeois communists today are not in a revolutionary situation, thus it is not to save their skin). I'm merely pointing how it is not for class interest, at least not always. Even what you describe is against their own class interest as a whole.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

As for Che, okay, he was an internationalist in that he wanted to spread revolution. He was ineffectual as an internationalist in part because he had no faith in the proletariat to overthrow capitalism and that his model was the Cuban Revolution. I would still put him in the Stalinist camp. But I guess I would agree that he was a contradictory figure.

I think the key issue here is our understanding of Stalinist "nationalism" - I don't think this "nationalism" is always connected to chauvinism or patriotism. Rather, it is the strategy of building socialism one "base" at a time, so to speak. And everything I have read by Guevara indicates that this was the approach he adopted, placing him squarely in the Marxist-Leninist camp.

I don't understand what we, as Trotskyists, would gain if we managed to convince people that Guevara was a Trotskyist. Because his policies were obviously not Trotskyist - so either we have an open-minded Marxist-Leninist, perhaps unfairly romanticised as a fighter, leading to neglect of his theoretical works, or a rather poor Trotskyist.

Just to confuse matters further, though, there is, as I recall, a "Guevarist" faction in the Cuban CP, that is at least close to (somewhat inconsistent) Trotskyism, but it wasn't founded by Guevara.

[Fred]

I think the key issue here is our understanding of Stalinist "nationalism" - I don't think this "nationalism" is always connected to chauvinism or patriotism. Rather, it is the strategy of building socialism one "base" at a time, so to speak. And everything I have read by Guevara indicates that this was the approach he adopted, placing him squarely in the Marxist-Leninist camp.

I don't understand what we, as Trotskyists, would gain if we managed to convince people that Guevara was a Trotskyist. Because his policies were obviously not Trotskyist - so either we have an open-minded Marxist-Leninist, perhaps unfairly romanticised as a fighter, leading to neglect of his theoretical works, or a rather poor Trotskyist.

Just to confuse matters further, though, there is, as I recall, a "Guevarist" faction in the Cuban CP, that is at least close to (somewhat inconsistent) Trotskyism, but it wasn't founded by Guevara.
Agreed -- perhaps we could call Che a nationally-limited internationalist. And what about the Guevarist faction in the Cuban CP? Didn't know they actually allow factions. . .

[Geiseric]

He certainly didn't approach things from a proletarian outlook. He connected the seizure of power in Cuba to the campaign he and Castro fought which may of inspired batista to simply leave since he knew Cubans would side with Castroists and the communist party which raul was part of over himself. Regardless Bolivia was an entirely different story.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I don't know if it was a formal faction; I think it was led by Celia Hart. I don't know much about it.

[Fourth Internationalist]

Communism is "just" therefore it's in the interest of the proletariat - No.

Communism is in the interest of the proletariat therefore it is just - Yes.

No. Communism is just and in the interest of the proletariat. No "therefore"s necessary.

Edit: communism = just = interest of proletariat. Which ever order, it doesn't matter it is still the same. Just semantics.

[Rafiq]

Therefore they should be communists because it is morally right and not because it's for their class interest.

Their class is a doomed one, communism or no communism. Capitalism will not sustain itself indefinitely. They can pledge fealty to the red flag or be consumed by barbarism.

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Tapatalk 2

[Geiseric]

Their class is a doomed one, communism or no communism. Capitalism will not sustain itself indefinitely. They can pledge fealty to the red flag or be consumed by barbarism.

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Tapatalk 2

You can't use that as an excuse not to be a militant however, i'm not saying you do this but it would be possible to make that connection following your deterministic reasoning. If society is to function as civilization, we need socialism. Humans will live long after socialism or capitalism doesn't exist as it is, but as we've seen through history humans do descend into barbarism on occasion, and the mode of production actually be reversed, going from "civilization" a la the roman empire or Aztec empire, and descend into feudalism which could be considered worse than the former social organizations, however the means of producing the necessities for life were reversed once those civilizations collapsed due to outside forces, resulting in the dark ages or the spanish colonies, which were not positive progressions as socialism is meant to be.

[Forward Union]

And there I was thinking Che was an Anarchist.

[Ace High]

Yeah I mean that is a bummer to hear, to be honest. I did not know that. Nevertheless, Che's actions were far different than Stalin's so while he may have thought well of him in theory, he didn't actually do anything Stalin would do.

[ind_com]

Nevertheless, Che's actions were far different than Stalin's so while he may have thought well of him in theory, he didn't actually do anything Stalin would do.

What Stalin did or what Stalin would do are understood deduced by individuals using their own class line and revolutionary practice. Che must have held that Stalin would do things similar to what Che did if Stalin were to be placed in the objective environment that Che encountered.

[Ace High]

What Stalin did or what Stalin would do are understood deduced by individuals using their own class line and revolutionary practice. Che must have held that Stalin would do things similar to what Che did if Stalin were to be placed in the objective environment that Che encountered.

Well, my point is that Che was ridiculously more successful than Stalin. And he also actually upheld Marxist principles. Hell, he even refused to drive the car that was given to him by the newly formed workers' state in Cuba. He was too concerned with giving everyone food and housing. He then even left Cuba because overthrowing one corrupt government was not enough for Che. He was just too bad ass. Stalin, on the other hand, decided to create some kind of Slavic fascism and starve everyone to death. See the difference?

[ind_com]

Well, my point is that Che was ridiculously more successful than Stalin. And he also actually upheld Marxist principles. Hell, he even refused to drive the car that was given to him by the newly formed workers' state in Cuba. He was too concerned with giving everyone food and housing. He then even left Cuba because overthrowing one corrupt government was not enough for Che. He was just too bad ass. Stalin, on the other hand, decided to create some kind of Slavic fascism and starve everyone to death. See the difference?

And my point is that Che's opinion of what Marxist principles are, or what Stalin created, are most likely to be radically different from yours, which is why he admired Stalin and held him as an icon. I just see the difference between the political positions of Che's and yours, which are due to the fact that Che was a Marxist-Leninist which you're not.

[Ace High]

And my point is that Che's opinion of what Marxist principles are, or what Stalin created, are most likely to be radically different from yours, which is why he admired Stalin and held him as an icon. I just see the difference between the political positions of Che's and yours, which are due to the fact that Che was a Marxist-Leninist which you're not.

You're right I'm not, my tendencies are more towards collective anarchism. But based on his ACTIONS, I think he did well. Regardless of what his ideology was.

[emilianozapata]

Along the way, I had the opportunity to pass through the dominions of the United Fruit, convincing me once again of just how terrible these capitalist octopuses are. I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won't rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated.
Letter to his aunt Beatriz describing what he had seen while traveling through Guatemala (1953)

[Karlorax]

Che Guevara was a fan of Stalin. There is no way around the facts. He was also a fan of Maoist China. He saw the Maoists as more true than the Soviets.

Some Trotskyists try to appropriate Che even though he stood for a tradition that very much opposed them. It is sick to watch them drag Che through the mud.

__________________

Currently reading, dare to join me? I am no Leading Light Communist, but I am studying their work for my MA thesis

Leading Light on Conspiracy Theory is Intelligent Design (http://llco.org/leading-light-on-conspiracy-theory-is-intelligent-design/)
Was Lin Biao guilty plotting a coup? Part 1 of 2 (draft) (http://llco.org/draft-was-lin-biao-guilty-plotting-a-coup-part-1-of-2/)
Revisiting Value and Exploitation (http://llco.org/revisiting-value-and-exploitation/)
What about the Gulag? Mao’s errors? Stalin’s? (http://llco.org/revolutionary-history-initial-summations/)

[erupt]

I'm no official scholar, but it seems to me he became disillusioned with the Soviets and the Chinese. I remember reading in Jon Lee Anderson's Che: A Revolutionary Life, that Che became quite irritated at the Chinese for basically spying on him. He was also disillusioned with the Soviet Union for selling faulty industrial equipment. I do know his office in Cuba had a bronze relief of Lenin, but I don't remember hearing of one of Stalin's, or a painting or picture. This, of course, means nothing, but if he held Stalin in as much regard as when we was first introduced to Marxism, I think he'd have something along those lines.

Once again, this is just opinion in having read quite a bit about Che. However, if he retained his admiration for Stalin, it wouldn't be so surprising.

[sixdollarchampagne]

Easy. :)

“Trotsky, along with Khrushchev, belongs to the category of the great revisionists." - Che Guevara, 1965.

This does not surprise me because some years ago i read that Che was in favor of having Trotsky's writings published, because Che thought that Trotsky was a revisionist, and, I guess, publishing Trotsky's writings would demonstrate that.

It should be added that the Cuban Trotskyists faced relentless persecution from the Cuban government headed by Fidel (and including Che), after those same Trotskyists had fought on the side of Fidel's Rebel Army, against the Batista dictatorship in Cuba. After the revolutionary victory, the Cuban Trotskyists were imprisoned by Fidel's government, on account of their politics; however, the SWP (a Trotskyist party in the US) lionized Fidel in the 1960's.

So some of the confusion about Che's politics probably comes from the fact that Trotskyists like the SWP, (in the US) in the sixties, constructed a cult around Che, which included publishing the volume Che Guevara Speaks.

I can also remember being at the monster-sized anti Vietnam war rally in front of the Pentagon in October, 1967; by then, Che had gone to Bolivia and died in struggle against the Bolivian government. It was at that rally, at the Pentagon, that I bought a copy of Ramparts magazine, containing a translation of Che's diary from Bolivia, and, during that time, in our YSA group (subordinated to the SWP) in DC (where we were unaware of the persecution of the Cuban Trotskyists or of Che's estimation of Trotsky as a revisionist), we still admired Che and Fidel.

[Homo Songun]

After the revolutionary victory, the Cuban Trotskyists were imprisoned by Fidel's government, on account of their politics; however, the SWP (a Trotskyist party in the US) lionized Fidel in the 1960's. This is true, but in Fidel's government's defense the Cuban Trots in question were followers of the Argentinian ufologist J. Posadas. An "account of their politics" would include their notion that the socialist camp should initiate pre-emptive nuclear war on the imperialist countries, for the sake of the socialist order that would inevitably arise from the ashes thereafter. Towards those ends, they attempted to convince the campesinos in Guantanamo take over the United States' base by force. That is why the government decided to lock them up.

[MarxEngelsLeninStalinMao]

While that is true, I think he would have sided with Hoxha's Albania after the Sino-Albanian split.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

This is true, but in Fidel's government's defense the Cuban Trots in question were followers of the Argentinian ufologist J. Posadas. An "account of their politics" would include their notion that the socialist camp should initiate pre-emptive nuclear war on the imperialist countries, for the sake of the socialist order that would inevitably arise from the ashes thereafter. Towards those ends, they attempted to convince the campesinos in Guantanamo take over the United States' base by force. That is why the government decided to lock them up.

Calling Posadas an "Argentinian ufologist" is a bit unfair. His obsession with UFOs developed some time after his time in Cuban jails - most people credit this experience with his later crank tendencies. I think his profound demoralisation also played a role - I mean, Pablo had his official communist parties, Grant the Labour party, Posadas his time traveling UFOs. It might sound funny today, but there really isn't anything funny about a situation where a serious socialist, albeit a revisionist and opportunist, loses nerve to the extent that he can only find "salvation" in flying saucers.

Attacking the US base was a typical act of ultraleft posturing, but come on, Soviet-allied governments had gotten away with worse. Posadas never meant to trigger a nuclear war; he actually tried to do that once... by writing letters to Soviet and Chinese politicians begging them to nuke the United States. Posadas was anything but a mastermind conspirator.

The cowardice of the revisionist SWP would repeat itself in Nicaragua, where the SWP declared that no Trotskyist organisation was necessary. I think most of us are glad that Barnes finally decided to formally break with Trotskyism, so we can wash our hands of the "healthy workers' state in Cuba" nonsense. If only the ministerial Trotskyists like Pablo and police Trotskyists like Healy followed suit!


So some of the confusion about Che's politics probably comes from the fact that Trotskyists like the SWP, (in the US) in the sixties, constructed a cult around Che, which included publishing the volume Che Guevara Speaks.

Ha, didn't they go into hysterics some time later because one of their artists made Trotsky's head bigger than Castro's while painting a major mural? They were certainly an odd group then - but their actions are really just the extreme form of a Cubanophilia that was pervasive in the centrist "Trotskyist" groups. Didn't Mandel advise Castro and even chaired some regional organisation for him? I think Moreno was also enthusiastic about Cuba. In fact the one opportunist leader I can't really remember tailing Castro was - Pablo. Odd, that.

[Rafiq]

Che was a petite bourgeois romantic and was never uniquely worthy of praise from the eyes of any serious marxist. The che that most people do not know, that is, the hardcore Stalinist che, is much more stylish and agreeable than how he is popularised, though.

[Yuppie Grinder]

because I’m not very bright, and a hard-headed person, I keep on reading him.
Well at least he admits he only likes Stalin because he's dumb.

[Yuppie Grinder]

Che was a petite bourgeois romantic and was never uniquely worthy of praise from the eyes of any serious marxist. The che that most people do not know, that is, the hardcore Stalinist che, is much more stylish and agreeable than how he is popularised, though.

I see, the Stalinist Che is better than the t-shirt Che because he's not as popular, but he's still not edgy enough for you.

[Rafiq]

I see, the Stalinist Che is better than the t-shirt Che because he's not as popular, but he's still not edgy enough for you.

No. Don't go there. If only you knew how foolish it makes you sound. Stalinist Che was more stylish and was more radical, it has nothing to do with his popularity. I don't care how edgy che might have been, he was not a champion of the proletariat and this is not up for debate.

[blake 3:17]

This does not surprise me because some years ago i read that Che was in favor of having Trotsky's writings published, because Che thought that Trotsky was a revisionist, and, I guess, publishing Trotsky's writings would demonstrate that.

It should be added that the Cuban Trotskyists faced relentless persecution from the Cuban government headed by Fidel (and including Che), after those same Trotskyists had fought on the side of Fidel's Rebel Army, against the Batista dictatorship in Cuba. After the revolutionary victory, the Cuban Trotskyists were imprisoned by Fidel's government, on account of their politics; however, the SWP (a Trotskyist party in the US) lionized Fidel in the 1960's.

So some of the confusion about Che's politics probably comes from the fact that Trotskyists like the SWP, (in the US) in the sixties, constructed a cult around Che, which included publishing the volume Che Guevara Speaks.

I can also remember being at the monster-sized anti Vietnam war rally in front of the Pentagon in October, 1967; by then, Che had gone to Bolivia and died in struggle against the Bolivian government. It was at that rally, at the Pentagon, that I bought a copy of Ramparts magazine, containing a translation of Che's diary from Bolivia, and, during that time, in our YSA group (subordinated to the SWP) in DC (where we were unaware of the persecution of the Cuban Trotskyists or of Che's estimation of Trotsky as a revisionist), we still admired Che and Fidel.

Che actually read Trotsky sympathetically and made some criticism of the treatment of the Trotskyists in Cuba.

And to be fair, the group in Cuba were very strange, part of the Posadist current. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_International_Posadist

From the wiki:
Posadism as an ideology, supports the potential for Third World revolution, is enthusiastic about nuclear war and space exploration by the former USSR and the People's Republic of China, has an esoteric concern for "harmonisation" and "man's relationship to the earth, to nature and to the cosmos", It's pretty weird...

There were certain openings to Trotskyist thought in Cuba in the 60s and in the 2000s.

Celia Hart has been the most prominent Cuban Trotskyist.

Piece by her: http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article898

Interview with her: http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1052

[MarxEngelsLeninStalinMao]

"In Cuba there is nothing published, if one excludes the Soviet bricks, which bring the inconvenience that they do not let you think; the party did it for you and you should digest it. It would be necessary to publish the complete works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin [underlined by Che in the original] and other great Marxists. Here would come to the great revisionists (if you want you can add here Khrushchev), well analyzed, more profoundly than any others and also your friend Trotsky, who existed and apparently wrote something." -Che in a letter to Armando Hart

[Ismail]

While that is true, I think he would have sided with Hoxha's Albania after the Sino-Albanian split.He actually did sympathize with the Chinese and Albanian criticisms of Soviet revisionism and while in charge of industry opposed the efforts of the revisionists to exert economic pressure against Albania, which is one of the reasons they wanted him out of Cuba. The problem is that Che did not actually struggle for socialism in a Marxist-Leninist way, but in an anarchic way. It's why Che can be praised for his dedication, but also criticized sharply for the fact that he inspired virtually every militant Latin American group to follow his "foco" views which resulted in disaster. His socialism was definitely more romantic than scientific.

[MarxEngelsLeninStalinMao]

He actually did sympathize with the Chinese and Albanian criticisms of Soviet revisionism and while in charge of industry opposed the efforts of the revisionists to exert economic pressure against Albania, which is one of the reasons they wanted him out of Cuba. The problem is that Che did not actually struggle for socialism in a Marxist-Leninist way, but in an anarchic way. It's why Che can be praised for his dedication, but also criticized sharply for the fact that he inspired virtually every militant Latin American group to follow his "foco" views which resulted in disaster. His socialism was definitely more romantic than scientific.
Yes, I am aware that he was sympathetic towards the line of China and Albania. Didn't he also call Albanians "our brothers" or something like that at some point? While I personally admire Che, I must agree with you about foco.

[erupt]

It should be added that the Cuban Trotskyists faced relentless persecution from the Cuban government headed by Fidel (and including Che), after those same Trotskyists had fought on the side of Fidel's Rebel Army, against the Batista dictatorship in Cuba. After the revolutionary victory, the Cuban Trotskyists were imprisoned by Fidel's government, on account of their politics; however, the SWP (a Trotskyist party in the US) lionized Fidel in the 1960's.

Remember, most Trotskyist imprisonment occurred while Che was on diplomatic missions or attempted revolutions. I know, although being critical of Trotskyists, he still ordered the release of at least some of them.

Also worth mentioning is that Che was frustrated with both Latin American Communist Party tendencies. The parliamentarian, Soviet-backed Bolivian Communist Party and, I believe the Peruvian Communist Party (Maoist), both were mentioned by him, if I remember.

[MarxEngelsLeninStalinMao]

Remember, most Trotskyist imprisonment occurred while Che was on diplomatic missions or attempted revolutions. I know, although being critical of Trotskyists, he still ordered the release of at least some of them.

Also worth mentioning is that Che was frustrated with both Latin American Communist Party tendencies. The parliamentarian, Soviet-backed Bolivian Communist Party and, I believe the Peruvian Communist Party (Maoist), both were mentioned by him, if I remember.
While it is true that he helped to release some of the Trotskyist prisoners in Cuba, it was done on the condition that they cease all their political activity.

[Creative Destruction]

he was not a champion of the proletariat and this is not up for debate.

What? Can you provide any argument for why you think this is true, rather than presenting it as self-evident?

[Yuppie Grinder]

No. Don't go there. If only you knew how foolish it makes you sound. Stalinist Che was more stylish and was more radical, it has nothing to do with his popularity. I don't care how edgy che might have been, he was not a champion of the proletariat and this is not up for debate.

I don't like actual Che or hollywood t-shirt Che, but what does style have do with anything? Who gives a fuck about that sort of thing?

[erupt]

I'd also like to add, concerning Che's letters to his Aunt Beatriz, that she was a staunch conservative in Argentina concerning the nobility and the Church, and that they debated quite a bit, mostly in letters and over meals cooked by Beatriz.

According to Jon Lee Anderson, the two considered each other as "favorites."

In other words, although we all know Che was passionate about his beliefs, some things in their letters, for example Che signing a letter "Stalin II", could be explained in terms of shock value more than a declaration of upholding Stalinist policies.

He was just beginning to read socialist literature in depth, and personally I think he wanted his aunt to comprehend that her nephew of decent Spanish nobility was now a Marxist, and there were no two ways about it.

[Rafiq]

I don't like actual Che or hollywood t-shirt Che, but what does style have do with anything? Who gives a fuck about that sort of thing?

It's called charisma.

[erupt]

It's called charisma.

Charisma he had, "swagger" he had, style he did not have and did not give a shit about.

[RedGuevara]

Che wasn't about style. Agreed. He was lived more like a Spartan. He had a few military fatigues and had a book shelf or two. Also he opposed Stalin and the USSR. Che was in more support of the Chinese over the USSR and Castro was in favor of the USSR. May have been the one divisive thing about them. Read this is a biography by Paco Igancio III entitled Che.

[Ismail]

Also he opposed Stalin and the USSR. Che was in more support of the Chinese over the USSR and Castro was in favor of the USSR. May have been the one divisive thing about them. Read this is a biography by Paco Igancio III entitled Che.I don't know if you can put "and the" in the first sentence; the Chinese publicly praised Stalin and certainly didn't praise what came after him in the USSR. And again, I already noted that Che took a sympathetic view towards the Chinese and Albanians, refusing to participate in a Soviet-initiated scheme against the latter while he was in charge of Cuban industry.

From foreign coresspondent Henry Brandon's conversation with him in 1962 (cited in Griffith, Albania and the Sino-Soviet Rift, 1963, p. 161): "When I asked Che Guevara, for instance, how Marxist-Leninist he considered the Poles, he shook his head slowly as if he wanted to say 'only middling.' For the Jugoslavs, however, there is little sympathy, chiefly disdain; for the Albanians, on the other hand, there is a certain respect..." Considering that the Yugoslavs and Poles were to the right of Khrushchev, I think this is pretty telling.

The Chinese and Albanian view of Che declined as the years passed, though, since his "foco" strategy was captivating Latin Americans to the detriment of Marxism-Leninism, which is why in 1968 Kang Sheng told an Albanian counterpart that the revolutionary process in that part of the world was advancing and revisionism was being unmasked with the passing of Che. Unfortunately "focoism" didn't die that easily.

[erupt]

"When I asked Che Guevara, for instance, how Marxist-Leninist he considered the Poles, he shook his head slowly as if he wanted to say 'only middling.' For the Jugoslavs, however, there is little sympathy, chiefly disdain; for the Albanians, on the other hand, there is a certain respect..." Considering that the Yugoslavs and Poles were to the right of Khrushchev, I think this is pretty telling.

The Chinese and Albanian view of Che declined as the years passed, though, since his "foco" strategy was captivating Latin Americans to the detriment of Marxism-Leninism, which is why in 1968 Kang Sheng told an Albanian counterpart that the revolutionary process in that part of the world was advancing and revisionism was being unmasked with the passing of Che. Unfortunately "focoism" didn't die that easily.

It's interesting to hear Che's thoughts on Poland and Yugoslavia; however, concerning Yugoslavia, if I'm not mistaken some of the only working military/clandestine equipment the ELN had in Bolivia were Yugoslav weapons, especially in comparison to the faulty radio equipment supplied by Havana. Please do not quote me on this, however.

Also, even if Che disagreed with the Yugoslav's methods of attempting to implement socialism, he certainly would express solidarity (in my opinion) with them on the international scale, considering he showed solidarity with national liberation movements of a mostly nationalist character.

Does anyone else find it a little pathetic that once he died, the Albanians and Chinese said "revisionism died with the passing of Che," or am I interpreting that wrong?

[Ismail]

Does anyone else find it a little pathetic that once he died, the Albanians and Chinese said "revisionism died with the passing of Che," or am I interpreting that wrong?Kang Sheng was speaking in the context of Latin American revisionist trends, of which "focoism" was a leading one which led many leftists to take up arms in a way divorced from Marxist-Leninist practice. In talks with a delegation of the PCMLE that same year, Hoxha said the following:

Our parties should try to learn and profit from one another. But every party must bear in mind that some things from the experience of other parties are suitable only in the conditions of their respective countries, and many of them may not be suitable in the conditions of other countries. They must elaborate and adopt the experience of other parties when they find they need it and it suits their concrete conditions, otherwise they fall into stereotypism. As for our experience, we cannot tell you whether or not many of our tactics are appropriate for you. It is up to you to study it and choose what you want from it, but we think that you should bear in mind that Marxism-Leninism, the general laws of the proletarian revolution provide the compass which prevents us from erring on this question. Only these laws guard a genuine Marxist-Leninist party against mistakes.

We are clear about these laws and try to acquaint ourselves with them more and more each day, and that is why we have never slid into revisionism, or into Trotskyism, left adventurism, or other anti-Marxist trends.

With these theories, with the dangers and damage they cause, you are better acquainted than we. For instance, Che Guevara was killed. Such a thing is liable to happen, because a revolutionary may get killed. Che Guevara, however, was a victim of his own non-Marxist-Leninist views.

Who was Che Guevara? When we speak of Che Guevara, we also mean somebody else who poses as a Marxist, in comparison to whom, in our opinion, Che Guevara was a man of fewer words. He was a rebel, a revolutionary, but not a Marxist-Leninist as they try to present him. I may be mistaken—you Latin-Americans are better acquainted with Che Guevara, but I think that he was a leftist fighter. His is a bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leftism, combined with some ideas that were progressive, but also anarchist which, in the final analysis, lead to adventurism.

The views of Che Guevara and anyone else who poses as a Marxist and claims "paternity" of these ideas have never been or had anything to do with Marxism-Leninism. Che Guevara also had some "exclairicies" in his adoption of certain Marxist-Leninist principles, but they still did not become a full philosophical world-outlook which could impel him to genuinely revolutionary actions.

We cannot say that Che Guevara and his comrades were cowards. No, by no means! On the contrary, they were brave people. There are also bourgeois who are brave men. But the only truly great heroes and really brave proletarian revolutionaries are those who proceed from the Marxist-Leninist philosophical principles and put all their physical and mental energies at the service of the world proletariat for the liberation of the peoples from the yolk of the imperialists, feudal lords and others.

We have defended the Cuban revolution because it was against US imperialism. As Marxist-Leninists let us study it a bit and the ideas which guided it in this struggle. The Cuban revolution did not begin on the basis of Marxism-Leninism and was not carried out on the basis of the laws of the proletarian revolution of a Marxist-Leninist party. After the liberation of the country, Castro did not set out on the Marxist-Leninist course, either, but on the contrary, continued on the course of his liberal ideas. It is a fact, which nobody can deny, that the participants in this revolution took up arms and went to the mountains, but it is an undeniable fact also that they did not fight as Marxist-Leninists. They were liberation fighters against the Battista clique and triumphed over it precisely because that clique was a weak link of capitalism. Battista was an obedient flunky of imperialism, who rode roughshod over the Cuban people. The Cuban people, however, fought and triumphed over this clique and over American imperialism at the same time...

In our opinion, the theory that the revolution is carried out by a few "heroes" constitutes a danger to Marxism-Leninism, especially in the Latin-American countries. Your South-American continent has great revolutionary traditions, but, as we said above, it also has some other traditions which may seem revolutionary but which, in fact, are not genuinely on the road of the revolution. Any putsch carried out there is called a revolution! But a putsch can never be a revolution, because one overthrown clique is replaced by another, in a word, things remain as they were. In addition to all the nuclei of anti-Marxist trends which still exist in the ranks of the old parties that have placed themselves in the service of the counterrevolution, there is now another trend which we call left adventurism.

This trend, and that other offspring of the bourgeoisie, modern revisionism, constitute great dangers to the people, including those of the Latin-American countries. Carefully disguised, modern revisionism is a great deceiver of the peoples and revolutionaries. In different countries it puts on different disguises. In Latin America, Castroism, disguised as Marxism-Leninism, is leading people, even revolutionaries, into left adventurism. This trend appears to be in contradiction with modern revisionism. Those who are ideologically immature think thus, but it is not so. The Castroites are not opposed to the modern revisionists. On the contrary, they are in their service. The separate courses each of them follows lead them to the same point.

The question whenever the Soviet revisionists fail to prevent the masses of the working class and the people from carrying out the revolution, this trend steps in and, by means of a putsch, destroys what the revisionists are unable to destroy by means of evolution. The Soviet revisionists and all the traitor cliques which led the revisionist parties preach evolution, coexistence and all those other anti-Marxist theories we know. From the terms it employs, left adventurism seems more revolutionary, because it advocates armed struggle! But what does it mean by armed struggle? Clearly—putsches. Marxism-Leninism teaches us that only by proceeding with prudent and sure steps, only by basing ourselves firmly on the principles of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine, only by making the masses conscious can victory be ensured in the preparation and launching of the armed uprising, and only in this way will we never fall into adventurism.

The authors of the theory that the "starter motor" sets the "big motor" in motion pose as if they are for the armed struggle, but in fact they are opposed to it and work to discredit it. The example and tragic end of Che Guevara, the following and prorogation of this theory also by other self-styled Marxists, who are opposed to the great struggles by the masses of people, are publicly known facts which refute their claims: We must guard against the people lest they betray us, lest they hand us over to the police; we must set up "wild" isolated detachments, so that the enemy does not get wind of them and does not retaliate with terror against the population! They publicize these and many other confusing theories, which you know only too well. What sort of Marxism-Leninism is this which advocates attacking the enemy, fighting it with these "wild" detachments, etc. without having a Marxist-Leninist party to lead the fight? There is nothing Marxist-Leninist about it. Such anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist theories can bring nothing but defeat for Marxism-Leninism and the revolution, as Che Guevara's undertaking in Bolivia did.

This trend brings the theses of the armed uprising into disrepute. What great damage it causes the revolution! With the killing of Guevara, the masses of common people, contaminated by the influences of these anarchist views, will think: "Now there is no one else to lead us, to liberate us!" Or perhaps a group of people with another Guevara will be set up again to take to the mountains to make the "revolution," and the masses, who expect a great deal from these individuals and are burning to fight the bourgeoisie, may be deceived into following them. And what will happen? Something that is clear to us. Since these people are not the vanguard of the working class, since they are not guided by the enlightening principles of Marxism-Leninism, they will encounter misunderstanding among the broad masses and sooner or later they will fail, but at the same time the genuine struggle will be discredited, because the masses will regard armed struggle with distrust. We must prepare the masses politically and ideologically, and convince them through their own practical experience. That is why we say that this inhibiting, reactionary theory about the revolution that is being spread in Latin America is the offspring of modern revisionism and must be unmasked by the Marxist-Leninists.

[juljd]

I highly doubt Che was a stalinist. One of his primary concerns was spreading the revolution (it was what he demanded from Fidel when he joined the July 26th Movement). I wouldn't label him as a pure trotskyist either though. I think he admired some things about both Trotsky and Stalin, and read both of them, but so did many communists at the time. I have read several biographies about Che (including the one by Jon Lee Anderson), and I remember it said somewhere that the letter in which he wrote that he had "sworn in front of a picture of old comrade Stalin not to stop until the capitalist octopuses had been anihilated", was written to his liberal relatives, and was mostly meant to be provocative and frighten them. As far as I know and remember, it was the CIA coup in Guatemala that radicalized him. In the end of his life he apparently became more interested in trotskyism, he had a copy of Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution in his backpack when he was killed.

Since it's hard to place him in a category, I'd just call Che a marxist, who took theoretical influences from several people (among them Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, and probably Stalin too. Not sure why you'd be influenced by Stalin though, I just think his actions have given communism a bad name...)

[erupt]

Kang Sheng was speaking in the context of Latin American revisionist trends, of which "focoism" was a leading one which led many leftists to take up arms in a way divorced from Marxist-Leninist practice. In talks with a delegation of the PCMLE that same year, Hoxha said the followig:

Hoxha's address to the Ecuadorians reeks of sectarianism to me; I admire his criticism of Soviet revisionism, but where is the critical analysis concerning China?

I'm of the opinion that a popular front against the bourgeoisie and/or fascists would always be better than in-fighting between tendencies, and, even if focoism was only successful once, it' still something to express solidarity with rather than to "smash left adventurism."

Thanks for the reply and I do not want you to think I'm starting trouble with your or any tendency.

[Ismail]

I admire his criticism of Soviet revisionism, but where is the critical analysis concerning China?At the time the Albanians and Chinese were allied against Soviet and other forms of revisionism. Hoxha did express reservations in private at this time (e.g. sending a letter to the Central Committee of the CPC in the early 60's critiquing China's fixation on insignificant border disputes with the Soviets, which played into the latter's hands), but at the time the Chinese did adopt positions to the left of the USSR in international affairs. It wasn't until the visits of Kissinger and Nixon to China that the Chinese began "critically supporting" NATO as a "defensive" alliance against Soviet social-imperialism, upholding the likes of Pinochet, Mobutu and the Shah of Iran as figures opposed to "hegemonism" (i.e. Soviet influence), etc., which Hoxha likewise criticized in a letter to the CPC and on a number of occasions. Hoxha then concluded after studying the history of the CPC and of China that it never had a proletarian revolution and that Maoism was a bourgeois-nationalist deviation from Marxism-Leninism, but even then he continued to hold that Albania had been correct in defending the Chinese against Soviet revisionist slander.


I highly doubt Che was a stalinist.Che had no consistent ideology, similar to Castro. He doubtlessly thought of himself as a Marxist, but in practice he was a bourgeois leftist who, for all his good intentions, both harmed (in practical terms) and helped (in inspirational terms) the struggle for Latin American liberation.

[Paul Pott]

Che had a positive view of Stalin his whole life as a revolutionary, he consistently saw himself as a Marxist-Leninist, and he also denounced revisionism in the Soviet Union and resisted its influence in Cuba. However, his theory of revolution in Latin America (focoism) was a revisionist deviation from what Marxism had long known about the revolution and how and why it comes about. Personally, for me and every other anti-revisionist in the world, Che is an inspirational figure, but we understand why he failed.

Some people would like to believe Che had turned into some kind of Trot. That didn't happen.

What more is there to say?

[erupt]

I'd like to opine that it appears Che's theoretical ideas on communism come from many different authors, leaders, theoreticians, et al.

Let's face it...if he was as much a Stalinist as is claimed in this thread, why didn't he advocate Socialism in One Country; why didn't he willingly create a cult-of-personality around Fidel, Raul, even Urrutia or himself; why didn't he have complete contempt for Trotskyites rather than be willing to fight alongside them (regardless of what happened with the Trotskyites in Cuba); why didn't he advocate more strong-arm tactics than he actually did (during and after revolution); why didn't he make concessions to the counter-revolutionaries for temporary benefit like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?

Also, why did he advocate solidarity with national liberation movements of non-Stalinist or even pseudo-socialist tendency, why did he advocate focoism instead of the standard route of attaining Marxist-Leninist dictatorship of the proletariat as Stalinism does, and why did he not institute, or attempt to institute, complete abolition of religion through violence and destruction?

In short, why didn't he follow more of the Stalinist methodology if he was an ardent Stalinist? He may have "admired" Stalin, especially after first becoming a socialist, but that is a whole different beast from following Stalinism as a tendency or road to socialism. Is there any evidence, other than laying a wreath at Stalin's mausoleum while visiting the USSR (which could be argued as diplomatic, showing his contempt for Soviet revisionism, the Sino-Soviet Split, and Trotskyism as a tendency all at once, non-verbally) of advocating Stalin's methods of achieving socialism, or even power?

[MarxEngelsLeninStalinMao]

I'd like to opine that it appears Che's theoretical ideas on communism come from many different authors, leaders, theoreticians, et al.

Let's face it...if he was as much a Stalinist as is claimed in this thread, why didn't he advocate Socialism in One Country; why didn't he willingly create a cult-of-personality around Fidel, Raul, even Urrutia or himself; why didn't he have complete contempt for Trotskyites rather than be willing to fight alongside them (regardless of what happened with the Trotskyites in Cuba); why didn't he advocate more strong-arm tactics than he actually did (during and after revolution); why didn't he make concessions to the counter-revolutionaries for temporary benefit like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?

Also, why did he advocate solidarity with national liberation movements of non-Stalinist or even pseudo-socialist tendency, why did he advocate focoism instead of the standard route of attaining Marxist-Leninist dictatorship of the proletariat as Stalinism does, and why did he not institute, or attempt to institute, complete abolition of religion through violence and destruction?

In short, why didn't he follow more of the Stalinist methodology if he was an ardent Stalinist? He may have "admired" Stalin, especially after first becoming a socialist, but that is a whole different beast from following Stalinism as a tendency or road to socialism. Is there any evidence, other than laying a wreath at Stalin's mausoleum while visiting the USSR (which could be argued as diplomatic, showing his contempt for Soviet revisionism, the Sino-Soviet Split, and Trotskyism as a tendency all at once, non-verbally) of advocating Stalin's methods of achieving socialism, or even power?
I think it would be wrong to say that he didn't support socialism in one country. He did support an international revolution, but so did Stalin, Mao, Hoxha and every other "Stalinist". Stalin didn't create his own cult of personality, Mao was partly responsible for his own, but he didn't like it. Kim Il Sung had a cult of personality before the formation of the DPRK, Kim Jong Il's cult of personality developed before he got power. And other examples exist to show that "Stalinists" don't usually advocate a cult of personality.

[Ismail]

Let's face it...if he was as much a Stalinist as is claimed in this thread, why didn't he advocate Socialism in One Country; why didn't he willingly create a cult-of-personality around Fidel, Raul, even Urrutia or himself; why didn't he have complete contempt for Trotskyites rather than be willing to fight alongside them (regardless of what happened with the Trotskyites in Cuba); why didn't he advocate more strong-arm tactics than he actually did (during and after revolution); why didn't he make concessions to the counter-revolutionaries for temporary benefit like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?Your conception of "Stalinism" is based on a caricature. It's true he wasn't a "Stalinist," but that's because he wasn't really a Marxist to begin with.

[erupt]

Stalin was alive when the practice of carrying a giant portrait of him during various parades/celebrations in the USSR occurred. If he didn't want a cult-of-personality surrounding himself, maybe he shouldn't of applauded it (literally) and said or done something about it. I correct myself in saying Stalinists created their own cult-of-personalities, but they certainly didn't do anything to combat it historically.

Ismail, would you please explain how Guevara wasn't a Marxist? It's obvious people will argue over what tendency he was and if focoism is in fact revisionism, but I don't know how he couldn't be considered a Marxist.

[Ismail]

Ismail, would you please explain how Guevara wasn't a Marxist? It's obvious people will argue over what tendency he was and if focoism is in fact revisionism, but I don't know how he couldn't be considered a Marxist.His "Marxism" was eclectic, like Mao's. There's nothing that indicates he seriously studied Marxism or that his desire for human liberation was based particularly on Marxist analysis rather than a general understanding that capitalist society (as he saw it) was exploitative.

[erupt]

His "Marxism" was eclectic, like Mao's. There's nothing that indicates he seriously studied Marxism or that his desire for human liberation was based particularly on Marxist analysis rather than a general understanding that capitalist society (as he saw it) was exploitative.

Thank you for replying without being condescending. It's a rare occurrence, especially on RevLeft,and it's about differing tendencies and opinions, no less.

Concerning Che's reading of Marxism, he was an avid reader in general, a habit stemming from being asthma ridden since childhood. I don't know what works of Marx or Engels he read, but I'd imagine he read everything he could get his hands on by Marx and Engels; he read everything he could get his hands on, period.. Judging someone by how in depth they discuss something they've read while they write about a specific topic does not illustrate what they have read; this is particularly pertinent when it concerns Che's writings because almost all of them are meant to be read by intellectuals and politicians, workers and peasants, comrades and enemies, educated and uneducated.

Also, concerning what is claimed to be Che's elementary understanding of Marxism, in the last few years of his life (not his work for the Cuban government), he studied economics in depth and vigorously, learning from and criticizing free, mixed, and planned markets. If it hadn't been for him takng part in his own focoism and, therefore, his death, he most likely would've went on to learn it in much more detail and there's even certain works that illustrate this. If I remember correctly, he gave copies of Das Kapital away as going away tokens, but this, of course doesn't mean he was familiar with, or even read, the volumes (although I opine he did).

[Ismail]

For what it's worth there is an analysis of Che's economic writings on socialism here: http://revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv11n1/che.htm

[Homo Songun]

Calling Posadas an "Argentinian ufologist" is a bit unfair. His obsession with UFOs developed some time after his time in Cuban jails

Really? source please.

[EverythingNothing]

Che was not really involved in politics,rather he was the muscle,and organizer behind the revolution,If we really want to box him in,he would be purely communist / marxist..
He was rather "just" a guerilla..He made the revolution happen,and correct me if I'm wrong,the few years that he lived after the Cuban revolution,he was not really involved in the nomenclatura.. (As I remembered he was given a quite high rank in the military and the role of a diplomat)

(In the film Che by Steven Soderbergh someone accuses him of beign a stalinist and he simply laughs it of,but this has no significanse whatsoever )

[erupt]

He was rather "just" a guerilla..He made the revolution happen,and correct me if I'm wrong,the few years that he lived after the Cuban revolution,he was not really involved in the nomenclatura.. (As I remembered he was given a quite high rank in the military and the role of a diplomat)

Actually, he was the head of INRA (National Institute of Agricultural Reform), and he was president of Cuba's state-run bank. This is when he signed the paper currency simply "Che". You're right, he also traveled to socialist countries and Bandung Pact, or Non-Aligned Movement countries diplomatically, as well as retaining his military rank and training many troops.