SOURCE: "Che Guevara," in The New Left: Six Critical Essays, edited by Maurice Cranston, The Bodley Head, 1970, pp. 17-48.

[Born in New Zealand, Minogue is an educator and critic who writes and lectures on issues related to political science. In the following excerpt, he articulates the principal tenets of Guevara's "concrete and practical" Marxism.]

Che was a Marxist in both his actions and his theories. His fame in his respect is such as to place him alongside Bernstein, Kautsky, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Tito, Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-tung. Most of these leaders combined action with theory, but the theory is mostly subordinate to the action. Such was the case with Che.

What did his Marxism amount to? Here we need to observe the way in which Marxism itself has developed in the first century of its existence. Marxism in the nineteenth century claimed its following because it stood at the opposite pole from the attitudes of a professional revolutionary like Louis Blanqui, or a romantic anarchist like Mikhail Bakunin. Marxism recognised the fact that a man cannot simply 'make a revolution'. It recognised this fact by asserting that a great deal of preparatory work must go into building up the proletarian organisation that will make the revolution. But it developed these 'practicalities' of the activity of making revolutions vastly further, till they had become elaborated into the celebrated philosophy of history known as historical materialism. Every society was seen as a ferment of 'contradictions' working themselves out by a steady process of which the human participants were often quite unaware.

Marx developed this line of thought so far that he reached the conclusion that no society would be transformed by revolution until its potentialities had all been developed. Capitalism, for example, would have to go through a number of stages until everything inherent in it had been worked out. And when that point had been reached, then revolution would come about as part of the natural process. The Protestant reformers and the merchants of northern Europe, for example, had overthrown feudal society quite effectively, in spite of the fact that they had no theory of revolutionary social transformation and their conscious thoughts had been focused on quite different preoccupations. Now this version of Marxism evidently leaves very little room for the conscious making of revolutions. Up to the point at which potentialities had been exhausted, revolution could only fail or generate a monstrosity; and beyond that point, the resistance to revolution was so feeble that it would in all probability be a quick and relatively painless affair.

Now this is the version of Marxism which made it the most important brand of socialism of its time. On the basis of it, nineteenth-century Marxists expected the revolution to come first in the most advanced industrial countries. It took a man as strong minded as Lenin to overthrow this theory. He had already significantly revised Marxism by developing a theory of imperialism to explain why capitalism was lasting longer than had been expected, and a theory of the party as the vanguard of the proletariat in order to build up the revolutionary organisation he thought was needed in Czarist Russia. In 1917 at the Finland Station, he instructed his followers to work directly for an immediate proletarian revolution, in spite of the fact that capitalism was very little developed in the Russia of the early twentieth century.

Lenin was the first really talented revisionist of Marxism, and after his time the history of Marxism is the history of men who showed the theory who was boss. Mao Tse-tung defied Stalin's orthodox advice and built a successful revolution amongst the peasants. And Fidel Castro, along with Che, made a revolution in Cuba which was so much based upon a practical sense of local conditions that it was only some years later, and under the pressure of economic need, that the revolution came to be approximately squared with Marxist theory.

By the 1960s, even Marxists themselves, long immured as they were in Stalinist scholasticism about 'correct' lines of thought, had come to recognise this. Marxism, they began to proclaim, was not a dogma but a method, and for its elucidation they turned to the romantic strain which is prominent in the very early writings and which also appears in some of the very late pieces. Here we find a Marx who is the moral critic of contemporary capitalist society, and who develops the notion of alienation to explain why it is that human life as we moderns know it is so impoverished. The new Marxism of the mid-twentieth century has thrown off the fashionable positivism that Marx had absorbed a century before; it no longer advances Marxism as superior because it is 'scientific' socialism. On the contrary, it throws to the fore the elements of Marxism which appeal to hope, and which inflame the will to make revolutions and bring the long awaited terminus to the horrors of capitalism. What remains of the old Marx is the idea that all the evils of the world compose a single system and that each man must fight for the revolution in whatever circumstances he may find himself. The Marxism of Che belongs to this latter kind.

Yet Che does seek to restore the original unity between the romantic and the 'scientific' elements of Marxism, and he does so with a simplicity that can only be regarded as savage, and impatient:

There are truths so evident, so much a part of people's knowledge, that it is now useless to discuss them. One ought to be "marxist" with the same naturalness with which one is "newtonian" in physics or "pasteurian" in biology, considering that if facts determine new concepts, these new concepts will never divest themselves of that portion of truth possessed by the older concepts they have outdated…. The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interprets history, understands its dynamics, predicts the future, but in addition [my italics] to predicting it (which would satisfy his scientific obligation), he expresses a revolutionary concept: the world must not only be interpreted, it must be transformed. Man ceases to be the slave and tool of his environment and converts himself into the architect of his own destiny…. We, practical revolutionaries, initiating our own struggle, simply fulfil laws foreseen by Marx the scientist.

Marxism is, then, taken entirely for granted. A fully conscious revolutionary, as Che understands him, has the same sort of awareness that he lives in a world full of exploitation as the average man has that stones fall down, not up. Revolutionary struggle is as natural to him as walking and speaking; and as he walks and speaks he makes discoveries about the world which happen to correspond to the 'laws' of Marxian ideology. It is here—in the area where theory is related to practice—that the Cuban revolution has made its major contribution to Marxism; it is here that a kind of individualist renaissance has followed the frozen middle ages of Stalinism. This is the contribution of Che, of Fidel, and it was brought to its fullest maturity in the writings of Regis Debray. It amounts to a new version of the supremacy of practice over theory. Latin America had long been equipped with orthodox Marxists, but they had not succeeded in making revolutions. On the other hand, people who did succeed in making revolutions did in the end turn into orthodox Marxists. Such, at least, was the official view of the Cuban movement, a view which (it has been plausibly suggested) has allowed Castro to support guerrilla movements in Latin America and to by-pass the existing communist parties whilst yet claiming, for the benefit of his patron the Soviet Union, to be unimpeachably correct in his line.

Che's Marxism, like everything else about him, is concrete and practical. We hear little about historical epochs, and very little analysis of class relations. We do hear a great deal about the guerrilla. Developed into a theory, the guerrilla generates the idea of the foco the process of revolutionary detonation by which a small band of guerrillas set up a centre of attraction in the sierras and bring the capitalist or neo-colonialist regime to its knees. It is essential to this theory, certainly as developed by Debray, that the foco be regarded as simultaneously military and political. No longer does the commissar fight beside the soldier and guard the purity of his doctrine; for the two figures are fused together by practice, and the guerrilla will learn in the fires of experience what the urban communist has abstractly acquired from his books.

This development of Marxism runs very quickly into a problem which cannot but have struck anyone who has considered the history of Marxism. Marxism, we have seen, has largely been developed by its heretics—the men who knew when to throw aside the book and act on their own political judgment. Further, this has now happened so often that (as we have seen) it has received official recognition in the way in which Marxism is now conceived. The whole notion of orthodoxy, with its apparatus of 'correct' lines, has weakened in the poly-centric communist world of the mid-twentieth century. For those many, however, who wish to repair the fractured unity of theory and practice every break induces a desire to restore the unity. Consequently each change has been followed by a development of theory which purports to learn the lessons of the new experience.

The Russians, the Chinese, the Yugoslavs and the Cubans have all indulged in this exercise. Its logic is of course, inductive. It consists in transposing the most striking facts of the successful experience into abstract terms and generating theory from them. In this way, the successful landing of Castro and his guerrillas in Eastern Cuba, their difficult but successful struggle to survive, and their final overthrow of the Batista regime, turn into the theory of the foco; the fact that these men were revolutionaries whose acquaintance with Marxist theory was slim, and that they became increasingly sweeping in their ambition to remodel the social order, turns into the thesis that under guerrilla conditions the military and political struggles fuse together.

This kind of argument is, we have noted, inductive, and inductive argument has been subject to devastating criticism. Why, the critics ask, does the inductive reasoner select this set of facts, and out of this set of facts generate this set of general principles? For since logically all experiences are very complex, and capable of generating very large numbers of facts and principles, the inductive reasoner must have left out of his account of what he was doing the crucial principle which led him to select (rather than to discover) what he has found. The attempt to learn lessons from practice very frequently gets shipwrecked on this difficulty, and political and military history, no less than that of ideologies, is full of people learning the wrong lessons and being surprised by the reality they encounter.

The Cuban experience, then, began by rejecting a good deal of Marxism as being inappropriate to the special conditions of Latin America. There was good warrant in Marxism itself—indeed in Marx himself—for such cavalier treatment of established principles. But the ideological passion to realign theory with practice led to the production of a revised ideology which would be appropriate to Latin American conditions. Such a production is immediately subject to the same criticism as that on which it is itself based: Need we assume that Latin America is homogeneous enough to be covered by such a general theory? Might it not be true that each region of Latin America, or even perhaps each separate country, might have its own particular conditions; might, in other words, require its own special theory? It would seem that Che, who worked hard to develop a Marxism appropriate to Latin America, did not carry his reasoning this far. But his fate has certainly provoked other Marxists to do so.

Here, to understand Che's Marxism, we need to consider the conditions of his Bolivian enterprise. Bolivia is a small and relatively underdeveloped country in the geographical heart of South America; and it seems that it was primarily this geo-political fact which made it attractive to Che as the detonator of the revolutionary liberation of the whole continent. It had a government which (like many in South America) called itself 'revolutionary', but was not so in any respect that Che would recognise; and it had an army which was small, ill-equipped, and had been savagely mauled back in the 1930s in a war with Paraguay, an even smaller and more primitive state. It had lots of jungle and plenty of peasants, and its economy depended upon tin, the miners of which commodity were frequently in a turbulent condition.

Anyone looking at these conditions with a fresh eye would light upon the tin miners as the evident beginning of a revolutionary movement in Bolivia. But it would seem that Che looked at Bolivia and saw only Cuba; looked at its wild and inhospitable countryside and saw the Sierra Maestra; looked at President Barrientos, and saw only the figure of Batista. What Che established in Bolivia was a carbon copy of what Fidel had done in Cuba. And since Che was, far more than Fidel, a theoretical animal, the conclusion is tempting that Che was the victim of his own theory. He seems to have believed that Cuba was nothing else but the first instance of a pattern that could be repeated in other parts of Latin America. He had, like so many figures in history, learned the lessons of experience—the wrong lessons. For what was missing in Bolivia was a thousand particular characteristics—the radical organisation in the cities, the feebleness of the Batista government, and perhaps above all the fact of leadership by the able, articulate, intuitive and entirely native Fidel.

Thinking in international terms, Che clearly thought that a revolution could be induced in Bolivia without a prominent Bolivian leader. No doubt he had to think this, since no serious candidate was available; but even beyond this inevitable deficiency, Che (and Fidel) exhibited an astonishing indifference to local Bolivian sensibilities. They failed to win over the peasants, they alienated the local communist party and they never managed to have more than a few effective Bolivians fighting amongst their picked Cuban veterans.

In this respect, then, Che has run the whole gamut of experience available to a Marxist theoretician. He bucked the theory to make a revolution, reconstructed the theory to fit the revolution he had made, and then proceeded to demonstrate by his actions the inadequacy of his own theory. It is not an enviable odyssey and it is unlikely to be frequently repeated.

Yet the adventures of a man are not the same as the premises of an ideology. The accidents which often lead to fatal consequences in the world of action are a standing ceteris paribus clause for an ideology; and an adroit use of this clause will prevent any theory from being refuted. We must therefore qualify our conclusion in two ways: firstly, that Che's failure in Bolivia does not necessarily indicate that the theory of the foco must be discarded, for it may simply be the case that ill-luck and poor preparation led to that particular disaster. More importantly, the very failure itself has abundantly the heroic quality which Che often spoke about in his writings and speeches. Whilst the Bolivian episode did—to some extent—refute one part of Che's Marxism, it also illustrated another part, and one which, although of less interest to practical revolutionaries, is far more important in generating the legend. This part of Guevara's Marxism is his preoccupation with 'the new man'.

The most suitable text for illustrating this preoccupation is "Man and Socialism in Cuba," perhaps the most famous pamphlet he ever wrote. It is here that Che states what may be vulgarly called the ideals of the movement: and the central ideal is the creation of the new man. This figure of the inevitable future is sketched out against the familiar Marxist account of twentieth-century life. Man suffers a kind of death, we learn, during the eight hours of his daily work, and even the artistic creations by which he might express the (presumed) anguish of his environmentally determined situation have been restricted by an ideological conditioning through which the monopoly capitalists prevent art from becoming (what Che thinks it must become if it is to be authentic) a 'weapon of denunciation and accusation'.

Man is exploited, and consequently his moral stature is diminished; but this happens very largely without his awareness. His attention is focused (by the agents of the monopoly capitalists) upon the success of a Rockefeller, and diverted away from the unsavory facts which made such a gigantic accumulation of wealth in the hands of one man possible. Since this is a rhetorical document, it would be unfair to press too hard upon its logical inadequacies. We need merely to note that Che has in full measure the belief common among men of his time that human beings are 'conditioned' by the environment in which they live, and that the adoption of revolutionary Marxism, although not inexplicable in terms of social conditions, is the one form of human behavior in which man throws off his 'conditioning' and embraces freedom. Clearly this is an equivocation upon the notion of 'conditioning', for the conditioning that a man can throw off is no conditioning at all. What is evidently being used here is the commonsense distinction between proceeding thoughtlessly along the paths of habit on the one hand, and becoming more self-conscious and deliberate on the other. This latter is a casual distinction we commonly make; but as transposed into Marxist ideology, it is dressed in a different vocabulary and becomes a pseudo-science of social determination. What Che has to say about it is very little distinguished from the writings of any other exponent of Marxist beliefs; what does distinguish him is his intense interest in the other term of the contrast—the new man who will replace the spiritual cripple of today's capitalist world.

Often, the specification is extremely crude, since it derives from the easy device of inserting the word 'revolutionary' before moral words which are universally regarded as virtues. There are times when Che indulges in what is virtually self-parody, and exhorts us to engage in revolutionary struggle with revolutionary dedication towards revolutionary aims. In the end, the new man does not turn out to be very much more than a revolutionary paragon:

We are seeking something new that will allow a perfect identification between the government and the community as a whole, adapted to the special conditions of the building of socialism and avoiding to the utmost the common-place of bourgeois democracy transplanted to the society in formation … the ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration (is) to see man freed from alienation.

This freedom is specified in two main ways. The first is that the new man will be the possessor of a highly developed social consciousness. This means, presumably, that the category of the private will disappear from his thinking. It certainly means that the new man will hold the same beliefs about social reality which are already held by Che himself, along with the revolutionary vanguard. In other words, the distinction between agreeing with Che's Marxist interpretation of the world, and disagreeing with it, has been transposed into the distinction between being socially conscious and remaining 'conditioned' and unaware. The doctrine of social consciousness, in other words, is a vehicle of dogmatism by which the promotion of one particular interpretation of social life is being passed off as the only possible thought on the subject.

The new man, then, will be a dedicated communist. His second general characteristic is that he will be a dedicated worker towards the communal goal of building up the community. Since Che speaks for an 'underdeveloped' country, the actual content of the work of building up the community is, quite simply, economic self-sufficiency. What it would be beyond that is very little specified. But there is one part of the revolutionary work which is so powerful that it has infused the entire picture:

Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality. This is perhaps one of the great dramas of a leader; he must combine an impassioned spirit with a bold mind and make painful decisions without flinching. Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize their love for the people, for the most hallowed causes, and make it one and indivisible…. They must struggle every day so that their love of living humanity is transformed into concrete deeds, into acts that will serve as an example, as a mobilizing factor.

Love is the master passion of the new man. It involves 'doing away with human pettiness' and it will be both higher and more persistent than love found under contemporary conditions: 'There ought to be a spirit of sacrifice not reserved for heroic days only, but for every moment.' Again: 'One ought always to be attentive to the human mass that surrounds one.'

In praising the speech which has supplied these last quotations, Che's editor, Professor Gerassi, writes:

'… the author gently criticizes Cuba's communist youth for its dogmatism, dependence on official directives, lack of inventiveness, lack of individuality—yes, Che was always fostering individualism—and continues with a beautiful, moving definition of what a communist youth ought to be.'

Che's emphasis on the new man may, then, be taken initially as evidence of his attachment to individuality, but to an individuality of a new and more complete kind than exists now. If there is any part of Che's Marxism (by contrast with other features of his career) which is responsible for the legend, it is to be found here. Communism has often been associated with a soulless collectivity, a kind of endless corvée directed towards some remote and abstract goal. But here is a major exponent of communism out flanking the appeal of capitalism on its own individualist ground.

Significantly enough, perhaps, it is in passages like this that Che sounds most like an old-fashioned Christian preacher; and he may easily be presented as a man trying to fuse the best of the old moral ideals with the most complete attention to the social realities which religious exhortation in the past has often ignored. Nor can this theme in Che be dismissed as merely the attractive rhetoric of a man who was, after all, something of a poet. For in his enjoyment of power, Che showed a powerful and continuous hostility to the capitalist device of material incentives, because he believed that such incentives split people off from one another; he believed that they stood in the way of developing the only truly socialist motive for working harder—socialist emulation.

Yet before we take Che's devotion to individuality entirely at its face value, we must consider two important qualifications. The first arises immediately if we ask: What exactly does Che mean by 'individuality'? A man like John Stuart Mill, who in his essay On Liberty supplied the classic account of individuality, believed that each person has his own unique thoughts to think and lines of action to pursue; and in what Che would call a capitalist society, which Mill would call a liberal one, the laws and governing institutions should be so framed as to permit the greatest possible development of such resources of individuality. But we can hardly believe that Che is thinking anything remotely like this when we read:

Thus we go forward. Fidel is at the head of the immense column—we are neither ashamed nor afraid to say so—followed by the best party cadres, and right after them, so close that their great strength is felt, come the people as a whole, a solid bulk of individualities moving toward a common aim; individuals who have achieved the awareness of what must be done; men who struggle to leave the domain of necessity and enter that of freedom.

These are individualities only in the sense that a tray of buns straight from the baker's oven contains a collection of individualities. Each is separate, but in all essential respects they are made up of the same materials, they have the same awarness of the same 'what must be done'. And if we pursue this line of thought further we shall find many occasions on which Che speaks exactly like an old-fashioned Stalinist agitator—or 'orientator' as Fidel guilefully renamed the function: he harangues the workers to produce more and to rise above their personal preoccupations in order to join in the common struggle. Indeed, this theme becomes at times so obtrusive that the inspiring notion of the 'new man' looks like nothing so much as a carrot to induce people to drive tractors more carefully, or to ease pining for luxuries like chewing gum and lipstick which are no longer imported from the United States. And although it is perilous to extract a doctrine from writings which are fundamentally rhetorical, we must conclude that although Che makes use of the appeal of individualism, his view of the matter is consistently the one he expressed when he discussed revolutionary medicine:

Individualism, in the form of the individual action of a person alone in a social milieu, must disappear in Cuba. In the future, individualism ought to be the efficient utilization of the whole individual for the absolute benefit of a collectivity.

There could be no better illustration than this of the way in which an ideological thinker appropriates an attractive term for propaganda purposes, and changes the meaning so that it means precisely the opposite of what once made it attractive.

The second qualification we must make to Che's individualism is closely related to the first. One of the most important differences between current capitalist society and the revolutionary society of the future is that the first has a government which must repress the people whilst the second has only leaders, or a vanguard, who are one in love and feeling with the people. The desire to eliminate politics from life, to create a community in which no one shall be rendered alien by his exercise of power, is as old as Rousseau and (in this century) as wide as the seven seas. It is by no means confined to Marxism, but it is a very powerful motor of that doctrine. To anyone who stands outside this current of thought, the aspiration can only seem delusory, the more so because it is precisely the leaders speaking most about love who have perpetrated some of the worst excesses of our time. The love which is supposed to unite Fidel and his people, for example, has had to emerge out of the early apparatus of televised executions and the constant hostility of some hundreds of thousands of Cubans who have preferred exile to the benefits of such a love.

We may go further: virtually all modern politics is an exercise of ventriloquism, in which the rulers speak on behalf of a populace which is most of the time necessarily mute. In the countries conventionally recognised as democratic—countries like Britain and America—this muteness is qualified by periodic elections, and by a fairly constant ferment of discussion and criticism. Nevertheless, it is of the nature of authority that whoever holds it must in the end make a pronouncement which shall be accepted as the political decision of the populace involved. Now most ideologies are devices by which this ventriloquial act may be carried on with virtually no interference from the puppet whatever. A democratic government, having to face elections, must come to some terms with the political opinions of its working class. But a Marxist government does not have a working class: it has a proletariat, whose consciousness may (by the rules of the ideology) be objectively determined, and instead of a political problem the government is faced by a pseudo-educational one: how to make the people conscious of what it must be thinking (but actually may not be). A great deal of what Che has to say is part of this kind of ventriloquial performance. The justification of it—as given to a group of communist youth—goes as follows:

If we—disoriented by the phenomenon of sectarianism—were unable to interpret the voice of the people, which is the wisest and most orienting voice of all; if we did not succeed in receiving the vibrations of the people and transforming them into concrete ideas, exact directives, then we were ill-equipped to issue those directives to the Union of Young Communists.

In politics at least, a posture of humility often disguises arrogance; and those whom men wish to control they first drown in flattery. The 'concrete ideas' which the Cuban government articulates from the 'vibrations' of the people are indistinguishable from the practices of all the other countries in which Marxism has become the official creed. Here is Che discussing the central problem that arises from the pretence that there is no gap between a government and its people:

And today … the workers consider the state as just one more boss, and they treat it as a boss. And since this [Che is referring to the new Cuba] is a state completely opposed to the State as Boss, we must establish long, fatiguing dialogues between the state and the workers, who although they certainly will be convinced in the end, during this period, during this dialogue, have braked progress.

This is one more version of the Stalinist argument that no safeguards (such as an opposition) are needed in a communist society, because the only oppression is class oppression, and classes have been abolished. It is a Quixotic argument in the most literal sense, for no intelligent worker is going to be taken in by propaganda pictures of Che or Fidel out in the fields humping bags of sugar. And it is particularly Latins who will, once the excitement of the moment is past, treat with amusement such exhortations as that of Che to 'raise our voices and make Fidel's radio vibrate. From every Cuban mouth a single shout: "Cuba si, Yankees nol Cuba si, Yankees no!'" The political problem is that when the puppet does get restless, and the 'dialogue' fails, the ventriloquist generally resorts to clouting him.

Our conclusion must be that although Che had a journalistic flair for the concrete detail, and although he was supremely sensitive to the intellectual and emotional atmosphere of his time, his Marxism is really very little distinguished from that of other Marxists. In the field of revolutionary guerrilla tactics, he will no doubt be remembered for a variety of devices and observations; he is the inventor, for example, of the 'beehive effect' whereby one of the leaders, 'an outstanding guerrilla fighter, jumps off to another region and repeats the chain of development of guerrilla warfare—subject, of course, to a central command.' But in the field of theory he has contributed very little, which is not surprising, since he was man who wrote gestures, postures, promises and exhortations, rather than arguments of any depth.