Originally posted by EL
[email protected] 7 2005, 05:08 PM
I found this interesting article of Che Guevara, how his politicis were supposebly towards Stalinism.
http://www.workersliberty.org/node/view/3076
Was he aware what Stalinism was about, does the time period have anything to do with it ?
The only thing I can conclude is that the things that were written on Che's politics in this article didn't seem very lucritive.
Yeah, that article's not even factually accurate. Repeats the nonsense about Che wanting a nuclear war. You name it. Slanders Che but the Stalinists of course take these slanders for compliments. Detailed response at the end of this post.
About the issues: Stalinism does not refer solely to the individual Stalin. Nor to the Soviet Union.
It refers to the rule of a privileged bureaucratic caste over a workers' state - the people Russians call apparatchiks or nomenklatura. To the political "ideology" of that caste - in reality just a set of excuses and rationalizations for its interests. And to the parties around the world it franchised as pawns and bargaining chips to further its diplomatic deals with the capitalist states. Although the feuding fragments of this caste are no longer interested in sponsoring such parties, or in most cases even pretending to be communist, the term Stalinist is still used to refer to the declining remnants of the franchised official "Communist" parties.
Che's politics, and the politics that led the Cuban Revolution, were the opposite of Stalinist politics. If this were not true, the Cuban Revolution would never have even happened. Witness the contrast between the course of the revolutionary July 26 Movement, and of Cuba's official Moscow-franchised party, the Popular Socialist Party. This party's course had remained fundamentally the same under both Khrushev and Stalin.
The PSP, like other "Communist Parties", held that since Latin American countries weren't ready for socialism, the thing to do was support some supposedly progressive or "national" bourgeoisie. This course led the PSP to even join Batista's cabinet during his first dictatorship in the 1940s - for those who want to blame all of this opportunism on "Khrushevite revisionists", note that the worst betrayal actually occurred on Stalin's watch. Later they distanced themselves from this open support to the regime, but joined the revolution only shortly before its victory.
(This wasn't just in Latin America either. It was a worldwide policy, perhaps best symbolized by the fact Chiang Kai-Shek was once an honored guest at a Congress of the Communist International.)
The Cuban Revolution both practiced and preached an opposite policy: "In the actual historical conditions of Latin America, the national bourgeoisie cannot lead the antifeudal and anti-imperialist struggle. Experience shows that in our nations that class, even when its interests are in contradiction to those of Yankee imperialism, has been incapable of confronting it, for the national bourgeoisie is paralyzed by fear of social revolution and frightened by the cry of the exploited masses." Second Declaration of Havana (http://www.themilitant.com/2002/6607/660750.html)
The projected this across Latin America with their sponsorhip of guerilla attempts, in open opposition to the official Moscow-franchised Communist Parties. One of which betrayed Che in Bolivia by refusing to provide the support it had promised him.
The July 26 Movement merged with the PSP, and with a group called the Revolutionary Directorate. The principal leader of the PSP, Anibal Escalante, became the organization secretary of the merged organization. He used this post in basically the same way Stalin used his comparable post in the Russian Communist Party: to become the head of an emerging bureaucratic caste, to promote his cronies from the PSP while sidelining revolutionaries who'd fought in the Sierra and blocking revolutionary-minded rank-and-file workers from joining the party.
But unlike in the USSR, the bureaucratic counterrevolution was defeated; Escalante was fired from his post and expelled from the party in 1962 and went into exile in Prague. His organizational policies were reversed. The only former PSPer in the central leadership of the current Cuban Communist Party is Carlos Rafael Rodriguez. Who, IMO, is no longer a Stalinist.
Che briefly mentions the Escalante affair in "Socialism and Man in Cuba", (http://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1965/03/man-socialism.htm) an article which clearly shows his divergence from the Stalinist approach on questions of freedom and consciousness in the transition to socialism...he makes the contrast explicitly on the question of artistic freedom.
To focus on some positive comments Che made about Stalin personally, while ignoring all the real political issues....is to obscure rather than clarify things.
****
OK, back to the article linked at the beginning of the thread. First, it relies mainly on books by Castaneda, a rabid anticommunist with no regard for truth or facts, and Anderson, who while usually factually accurate, spins everything to put Che in the most negative possible light. For example, while Anderson acknowledges Che refused to accept and special material benefit from his government posts, he spins this as a fanatical rejection of life and joy.
I'm just going to point out some of the more glaring untruths; to cover every error of reasoning would take too much time and space.
Whether or not he was a member, we know Guevara played a central role in integrating PSP cadres into the July 26 Movement. In summer 1957 the PSP sent a young militant Pablo Ribalta to work with Guevara, and he was soon given responsibility for organising political education classes among the guerrillas (Anderson pp.296-297).
So? The July 26 Movement sought to bring every possible group into the struggle to bring down Batista. This was absolutely correct, and its the mark of a sectarian to complain that the PSP was not excluded.
Guevara also was one of the key figures pushing for the Stalinisation of the Cuban economy from 1959 onwards. He advocated the collectivisation of agriculture and the nationalisation of industry, in his capacity as head of the industrial development in the agrarian reform institute (INRA) and as governor of the National Bank.
In fact, Cuba has never carried out a forced collectivization policy, in contrast to every Stalinist-led state AFAIK. Horrors, Guevara nationalized industry, and converted some land to state farms while distributing other land to the peasants. Shows he was a communist, not a Stalinist.
He was also head of the Ministry of Industry from 1961 to 1965, responsible for Cuba’s bureaucratic planning based on Eastern European methods (Anderson p.462).
In fact, Che had his own ideas about economic planning different from the Soviet system. He favored reducing the role of market mechanisms as much as practical, and adopting policies which would encourage the growth of communist consciousness. See Carlos Tablada's book about Che's economic ideas, plus articles by Che reprinted in New International magazine issue #8 and the collection "Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution."
The only true substance in this point, as the last, is that Che helped set up a planned economy.
However he still told Russian delegates that he was “a true friend of the Soviet Union” as late as January 1964 (Anderson p.625, p.585).
Which should balance out his compliments to Stalin and Mao, for the diehard admirers of those two.
Guevara came to be regarded as pro-Chinese from 1963 – calling Mao a “wise man” (Castañeda p.253).
Oy. "Came to be regarded" - the last refuge of those fleeing objective reality. I don't know who "regarded" him this way, or why, but they were wrong. See my last post.
In the early 1960s he repeated the old Stalinist lies about Trotskyism, despite the Cuban Trotskyists’ rather uncritical “defence of the revolution”.
Misleading in the first and hilariously wrong in the second part.
The "Trotskyist" group in Cuba was part of Juan Posadas' "Latin American Bureau" a downright insane group disavowed by everyone else considering themselves Trotskyist.
In reality: The Posadist group took an ultra-left, provocative position arguing, in 1961, that the Cuban government should forcibly expel the American military base at Guantanamo Bay and going to the extent of trying to organise workers in the town of Guantanamo to march on the nearby military base. This alarmed the Cuban government which looked the other way when, in April 1961, a small Stalinist group, the Partido Socialista Popular, raided the headquarters of the Posadas group and smashed their printing press which was in the process of printing an edition of Trotsky's The Permanent Revolution.
Guevara, when asked in an interview about this event, commented:
"That did happen. It was an error. It was an error committed by a functionary of second rank. They smashed the plates. It should not have been done. However, we consider the Trotskyist party to be acting against the revolution. For example, they were taking the line that the Revolutionary Government is petty bourgeois, and were calling on the proletariat to exert pressure on the government and even to carry out another revolution in which the proletariat would come to power. This was prejudicing the discipline necessary at this stage."
source (http://encycl.opentopia.com/term/J._Posadas#Cuba)
Among Posadas' amusingly insane positions, was the belief that Mao was taking his line from Posadas' publications.
Yet Guevara’s response to Sam Russell of the British Communist Party was that if the missiles had been under the control of the Cubans, they would have fired them against the US – in particular New York (Castañeda p.231, Anderson p.545).
Anybody ever play the game "telephone"? Guevara tells Russell tells Castaneda and Anderson....even if the British Kremlin-stooge Russell was honest, there's plenty of room for misunderstanding. And his honesty is questionable: the Kremlin, seeking to fend off Cuban criticism of its decision to make a deal in which Cuba was not consulted nor its interests protected, has long sought to portray the Cuban revolutionary leaders as madmen seeking nuclear war. The capitalists are of course not averse to this.
The cables between Fidel and Khrushev, and the public statements by Castro, Guevara, and others, tell a different story.
During the crisis, Cuba did advocate firing antiaircraft missiles to bring down U.S. spy planes overflying Cuba...those missiles were under Soviet control, so they were not fired except for one occasion when a U-2 was brought down by an officer acting without orders from Moscow. Probably this is what Guevara actually told Russell.
One should always be wary of some guy claiming based on alleged private comments that somebody's real policy was different from what all his actions and public statements say.
Guevara’s peasant guerrilla strategy was far from the Marxist conception of socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class.
He never focussed on the working class as the crucial agent of change:
In Cuba 1933 soviets had been set up in the sugar mills;
Bolivia - militant history of struggle – miners 1952 ;
Argentina also had a vibrant workers’ movement e.g. Cordoba.
All ignored
What is actually ignored - by these notes - is the active participation of the working class in the Cuban Revolution. From the agricultural wage-workers who joined the Rebel Army, to the general strike which dealt the final blow to the regime, specifically to the attempt to set up a military junta to replace Batista.
Also, a number of those joining the guerilla and the support network in Bolivia were in fact miners. See Fertile Ground by Rodolfo Saldana - a former miner who headed the underground support network, and details miners' efforts to aid the guerillas. See also the ELN's communique to the miners, included in any decent edition of the Bolivian Diary.