take-home: it's impossible, of course, to disagree with the bulk of the author's critique of Che's sense of "revolutionary impatience." he was beholden to a kind of military vanguardism, no doubt.
at the same time, however, there is a way in which this critique is too easy--for by presenting the entire history of guerrilla warfare through the prism of this commitment to a misguided heroism, mike gonzalez is able to recover a "lost possibility:" "if only they'd remembered to make links to the working-class," one thinks. a more responsible book about che would begin with the premise that it is never this easy--does it not make more sense to think of "military vanguardism" as the recognized worst of all possible options? could it not be that, amidst a workers' movement that is uninviting and co-opted, che took refuge in sheer voluntarism. not because he was self-involved, but because he couldn't stomach "patience" or failure? rather than allow us to wrap ourselves in the wonderful gifts of hindsight and orthodoxy, that would permit us to ask the really important questions: "they were aware of what they were doing, of their departures from the orthodoxy, and they still failed. now what?"
there is a way in which this line of defense, of course, is itself "too easy." nonetheless, the author can't be allowed to get off so easily--he often elides the question of "leadership" and "vanguardism" by supplying this trite rendering of revolutionary theory as dedicated entirely to "self-emancipation" (it seems like everyone's read a different translation of "What is to be done?" than I have, to be honest). but--again-- what do you do when self-emancipation doesn't present itself? perhaps one ought to ignore the feeling of urgency that motivated che (and the book makes a strong case for the futility and analytical fallacies of that impatience), but the author doesn't do his thesis any favors by implying that the alternative is more-or-less as simple as "making links with the workers" and snapping your fingers.
none of that is to deny the points of value in the book, just to object at the simplicity of its pedagogy. the author makes important points about the way in which the pathetic state of Communist politics in pre-WWII (owing in large part to the diktats of the Stalinists) turned an entire generation off of Marxist politics, and--he seems to suggest--towards this path of "revolutionary impatience." (at the same time, he doesn't answer the question this begs--if these were the only two alternatives, was Che preferable to the "bureaucratic patience" of the orthodox Marxists of the time?)
--- important quotes/excerpts ---
(7-18): Che's upbringing in the context of the history of Argentina
1880s: President Hipolito Yrigoyen in power; Argentina becomes a meat-exporting economy, exchanging foodstuffs for goods from Europe (lots of Italian, Spanish and German immigrants drawn to the country at this time)
1916, 1918: full male suffrage introduced, as well as social security. author gives this as time of increasing militancy of this immigrant working-class, which complemented the "rising discontent of an urban middle and lower middle class largely excluded from political life." a university reform movement which demandeda "democratic higher education."
1930: the "old interests" respond--a military coup, and in 1933 the new gov't signed a trade agreement with Britain, a defeat for the working-class. this military harbored sympathies for the Axis powers; Che's father was active in anti-fascist circles.
1940: military gov't of Castillo, though, locked into dependence with Britain, of course; and "there were also ideological reasons why an authoritarian nationalist government would feel neutral towards the old imperial power, Britain." regardless, "war, for a country whose main exports--meat and wheat--drove the competing armies, was a commercial opportunity."
1943: because of Castillo's suspected sympathies for the Allies, the GOU--a group of army officers--launched a coup; state of emergency was declared. nonetheless, by 1945 the army had declared with the allies, even though the fact that many Nazis fled to the country indicates that this was more opportunism than anything else. Juan Domingo Peron was among the officers now leading--he becomes Secretary of Labor, a position which gives him a pulpit for his populism. "Peron's base of support was a layer of newly arrived workers, recent immigrants from the countryside or the smaller provincial towns, who had gravitated towards the capital in search of work in its expanding industries... Evita came from the same world as they... They were Peron's mass base..."
1946: elections pitting Peron (who enjoyed support from business groups and right wing nationalists, as well) against the Democratic Union (which enjoyed support from other business interests as well as socialists and Communists). the Communists' base had been eaten into by Peron, and they also saw his support for the German-Italian axis through the eyes of the Soviet Union. Guevara's parents' sympathies were similar, resoundingly anti-fascist. all this spelled disaster for the Communists, insofar as they were "siding with imperialism, with the US government which was relentless in attacking Peron, and with the old landowning and industrial class against the man who claimed to speaking for all Argentines..."
(17-18): "Peronism had mobilised masses of working-class people, but in support of an authoritarian figure whose devotion to the people's cause seemed shallow and temporary. In any case, the people with whom the young Ernesto talked politics were unlikely to offer any kind of defense of Peron--they shared his distrust. On the other hand, authentic revolutionary tradition--the Communists and the socialists--were a poor lot in the Argentina in which he was growing up. They were rigid, corrupt, and manipulative, and unprincipled in their willingness to form alliances with people who should logically have been the enemies of the class they claimed to represent."
(20): "In many ways, the history of modern Argentina is a struggle between the city on the banks of the River Plante, whose connections were always with Europe, and an interior--a vast expanse of varied landscapes--whose natural links are with Latin America"
(24): in 1952, revolution (at the forefront of which were miners) and co-option in Bolivia
(29-30): history of Guatemala:
1900s: coffee and later banana economy, oriented towards the US market--"for the first forty years of the 20th century is the history of one major North American company, United Fruit, and its founder and owner, Sam Zemurray... By the early 1940s, some 40 percent of Guatemala's land was under the control of the company known throughout Central America as La Yunai.
1944: Rafael Arevalo annuonces a reform program--key to which was land reform and trade union rights
1951: Jacob Arbenz, a young military officer who had served under Arevalo, comes to power, intending to carry the program through to completion. "It is important to emphasize that Arbenz was no revolutionary. In a sense, his project was the modernization of the economy under a Guatemalan state able to control and determine the allocation of its own resources. But the process of fairly moderate reform that he set in motion unleashed other forces which he could not easily control... The process, therefore, was announced from above but driven from below."
1954: "...several key figures in the Washington government were intimately involveed with the United Fruit Company--among them John Foster Dulles, Secretary of Staet, and his brother Allen Dulles, head of the CIA... Together they organized the overthrow of Arbenz, which was to led by a financed military force under Carlos Castillo Armas."
(31-32): "At a fairly basic level, the intransigence of the North Americans encouraged Che's instinctive feeling that there was no alternative to armed resistance. When the coup came, and Guatemala City was bombarded from the air for weeks, there was very little armed resistance. The reasons why are still a matter of debate..."
(34): what Che would learn from the Arbenz coup:
He could have given arms to the people, but he did not want to... Now we see the result.
(39-40): Cuban history:
1898: Cuban "independence"
1901: Platt Amendment, which gave US right to intervene to defend its interests. Guantanamo Bay ceded on a 99-year lease--"Washington nominated the head of the national bank, the customs service, and the police. It was an early step in the incorporation of Cuba into the US economy--as a supplier of the sugar that was becoming so important a component of the new urban diet, and as a market for US goods [raw materials and captive market, check] "Within the first three years of indepdence... speculators from US... bought up an estimated 60 percent of the land."
1921: by this date, US owned bulk of large sugar plantations.
1929: Depression hit Cuba hard--popular resentment against then-in-power Machado grew.
1933: protests toppled the government--the leader of the non-commissioned officers in the army, Batista, called upon the students to name the new president. He was a professor named Grau San Martin. He "introduced the eight-hour day, rescinded the Platt Amendment, and announced the coming nationalisation of the electric industry."
1934: Sergeants' revolt led by Batista takes power, though, with tacit backing of US--Batista in effective control from this point on, though he takes presidency in 1940. Communist Party supports him, owing to the "popular front policy"--"this strategy was not a consequence of the particular conditions in any one country, but the result of the Soviet Union's concern to build a wide international coalition against Nazism... its political cost was enormous... In Spain for example, the consequence was that the Communist Party opposed the development of a revolutionary response to the fascist uprising of 1936 and instead threw in its lot with a coalition of centre and right wing parties whose one unifying feature was their fear of a workers' revolution."
1944: Grau San Martin becomes president. by 1947, after the end of the peace of the "popular front" era, he has turned on the Communists.
1948: "the slippery and corrupt" Prio Socarras takes his place.
1951: Chibas kills himself on air in the run-up into the 1952 Congress elections. soon after Batista takes power in a coup that was to last till the revolution. "His immediate actions once in power were a sign of things to come: he banned political parties, filled the state with his cronies, and launched a campaign of repression."
(44): "Like many middle-class student nationailsts, [Castro] was suspicious of the Communists... In Cuba, as elsewhere, they had colluded with governments that were corrupt and authoritarian in exchange for support for the Soviet Union. Communism was a discredited and corrupted notion by the time Castro's generation encountered it."
(46-47): Raul was the link between the July 26 Movement, and the Communists. Nonetheless: "For Raul and Fidel, change could be the result of armed actions of a minotirity. They, and not the working class, would be the subjects of this process of change. This way of understanding what it means to be a revolutionary reflected the group's middle-class background, but much more importantly it betrayed the political distance between them and workers. Their project saw an independent state which could decree change in society from above. In this process, the main instrument was not mass organization or the power of workers, but the arms held by the revolutionaries."
(58): December 1956--Celia Sanchez was to meet them; but waited two days and left. There was also an abortive urban uprising, led by Frank Pais. "Of the 82 men who had boarded the Granma, just 19 had survived. Another eight would join them later... The 26 July Movement had supporters and sympathisers scattered across the island, but they were not connected with the trade unions or any other organizations outside their own circle... "
(59): "No guerrilla group (or foco, as Che would later describe it) could survive without the support of an urban movement. The relationship between mountain (sierra) and plain (llano) was at the heart of the political debates in the years that followed--above all, in the argument about which section should lead the movement."
(62): "The reality is that in [Che's] vision of the revolutionary war--a war conducted by revolutionaries on behalf of the masses--the staet of the workers' movement or the mass urban resistance was not an essential issue. In Che's view, the heart of the struggle was in the guerilla struggle in the mountains--la sierra."
(66): Frank Pais making the right noises about building support in the urban areas, maybe opening another front; Fidel, though, "imposed his political vision. The building of the rebel army was to be the absolute priority, and a call was to be issued for the organization of a 'civic resistance' whose essential function was to support the guerrilla fighters..." Author attributes this to increasing authoritarianism on Fidel's part.
(70): [crux of author's critique]"[Che] identified urban politics (the llano) with reformism and the politics of the guerrillas in the hills (the sierra) with revolution. Che spoke about the city as an undifferentiated place. In fact, his dismissal of the urban struggle effectively marginalised trade unions and workers too. Yet the sierra was not rural Cuba, where a class of peasant farmers and agricultural workers might have been seen as an alternative base for a revolutionary movement. These sections of Cuban society lived on the 'plains' too. Che (and Fidel) meant the more remote and difficult terrain of the Sierra Maestra--ideal for a cat-and-mouse military strategy, but not a region whose sparse and scattered population could build a social movement. The strategy that Che and Fidel had in common envisaged a guerrilla war conducted by small groups of revolutionary fighters rather than by the masses in whose name they claimed to be waging the struggle."
(72): failure of the Cienfuegos attack in 1957--300 tortured and killed by Batista. US increasing fed-up of Batista, it seems, rumors of possible contacts through Frank Pais?
(73): Che on discipline: "Che was extremely harsh with his own men and with anyone who endangered the cause, deliberately or otherwise. He readily executed informers and deserters, yet was magnanimous with enemy soldiers. This was a response that could only have arisen out of military code of honour."
(73): "He described himslf as a Marxist now. Yet for Marx, a revolution was the moment when the working class achieved its own liberation through collective action. This does not appear in Che's worldview."
(78): failure of the general strike called by 26 July Movement in 1958 (Batista had postponed elections). "In the aftermath, the 26 July Movement made a decisive turn..." towards the guerrilla struggle. Fidel's authority confirmed.
(78): "Che had reached the conclusions that he would later develop in Guerrilla Warfare.First, that a popular army can win a military struggle against a regular army. Second, that in the particular conditions of Latin America it is the poor peasants who are the most revolutionary class-rather than organized workers in industry or agriculture. Third, that the conditions for revolution do not need to exist before the struggle begins--the revolutionary foco can create them."
(79): Key page of author's critique [not very satisfying, i must say, particularly this strange fealty to the orthodox prescription in demonstrably heterodox circumstances]: "Che was reacting against a certain pessimist gradualism that he had heard from other socialists--the notion that 'objective conditions' had to exist before change was possible... Yet in identifying the poor peasantry as the key social group in the revolution, Che was specifically rejecting Marxistm's central idea--that it is the power of the organized working class alone that can bring about a social revolution. Some countries in Latin America were still dominated by small-scale agricultural production--and the argument that the peasantry was a revolutionary class still had some weight in those circumstances. But like his own country, Argentina... Cuba was integrated into an international economy as a mono-producer of sugar and was already highly urbanized... Che's conception of revolution only acknowledged the role of those who carried the arms and did the fighting. They alone were the revolutionary actors. What of the uban workers, the students, the people in the small towns? Their task was to supply the fighters... In a military structure there could be neither democracy nor transparency--both could spell disaster in a military context. But in a society, their absence would be a disaster."
(83): Fidel towards the Communists was at this stage, pragmatic--didn't want to give the US an opportunity, in particular. "Che, on the other hand, while fiercely critical of the Cuban Communists in many respects, described himself as a Communist. He supported the Soviet Union... Yet as the revolution evolved, Che would become increasingly critical of the Soviet model while Fidel would become the leader and symbol of Cuban communism."
(89): the tide turned mainly due to objective factors: "The failure of the elections, the sucess of small-scale but well publicized guerrilla actions in the area, the increasing brutality of Batista and the growing alienation of the population that it produced, had accelerated the collapse of the regime--particularly as increasing numbers of conscript soldiers gave up the fight."
(92-93): argument here that though Fidel was eager to take full credit on behalf of the 26 July Movement, there were many other factors that led to Batista's downfall, notably the ending of support by the US (an arms embargo was in place), as well as agitation by other political organizations.
(95): dispensing "revolutionary justice:" about 55 executed in Havana in the first few days (70 executed by Raul, in Oriente). By May the number had risen to around 550. "These were the torturers, the police spies, the most zealous servants of Batista's police state."
(102): again, the critique re-phrased: "The notion that revolution comprises the self-emancipation of the working class is absolutely central to Marx's thought. From being the objects of the interests of others, the majority become the governors of their own lives by transforming society through their own actions. It is a core principle in revolutionary Marxism. Yet the guerrilla war theory replaces this idea with another--that the revolutionaries will make the revolution on behalf of the wider class."
(105-106): "Who were these young revolutionaries? ...they came largely from the middle class and were driven above all by a hatred of imperialism. They were largely nationalists for whom national independence and self-determination was the most important issue. For the most part they did not come from a Communist tradition... When Che insisted that revolutionaries need not wait for the objective conditions for revolution to exist, he was obliquely referring to the Communist parties..."
(106-108): three concerns in the early months--(!) how to ensure defence of the revolution; (2) an economic program, and what kind of land reform (class of peasants, or collectivization); (3) what would the political direction of the revolution be?
(108): "How could a small economy, dependent for more than 80 percent of its export earnings on one product--sugar--break its dependency? One answer was to diversify the economy--the other was to develop industrially."
(123-124): The beginnings of revolutionary terror--Che making illegal any offense to "revolutionary morality," founding a "labor camp," etc.
(125): "At first, the response of the Cuban population was extremely positive. Yet there was a missing element in Che's argument. Involvement and participation could be ends in themselves, provided they were real. Endless declarations of loyalty by the leaders to the led, however, were no substitute for a genuine workers' democracy in which it was the popular organizations which made the decisions and the government which carried them out."
(127): on eve of Bay of Pigs, Cuban state rounds up 35,000 people!
(129): by 1962, 500,000 people, bulk of Cuba's professional class, had fled to the US
(131): "Che's impatience with material realities was at the heart of his political theory. If the revolutionaries could substitute for the masses in making the revolution, the revolutionary state could overcome the material limitations it faced, he argued."
(140-141): "Che emphasises over and over again in his essay that the guerrilla army must be located in the countryside, and recruit above all among the peasantry, because it is they who have suffered the most brutal exploitation. But suffering, of course, does not create revolutionaries. On the contrary, without collective organisation and the confidence that comes from the experience of struggle, and without the power to strike at the very heart of capitalism--the machinery of production--suffering can produce despair and a sense of impotence." This impatience, the author argues, came into conflict more and more with the USSR's commitment to "peaceful coexistence."
(148): Che's critique of the USSR in Algiers, declaring in favor of Third World solidarity--decrying the USSR for their failure to support liberation movements, calling them 'accomplices of imperialism.'
(149): on Man and Socialism: "Why did he lay such emphasis on the question of a new consciousness? It was certainly not for economic reasons, or because committed people are more efficient producers... It went to the very heart of Che's political ideas, for it emphasized the subjective over the objective, the effort of will that could overcome uncompromising material conditions. This was a central notion in his Guerrilla Warfare... It flew in the face of a revolutionary tradition which recognized the dialectical relationship between the individual and his or her circumstances...
(149-154): misadventure in Congo, where the "disorganization was total." Nasser had warned him that he would become 'Another Tarzan, a white man among black men, leading and protecting them... It can't be done.'
(160): most salient critique of Che's strategy in Bolivia--he set up shop in the Eastern region, which was home to the peasantry that the 1964-coup leader, Rene Barrientos, had wooed. much more suited would have been the mining areas of the West that Barrientos had repressed and home to a "glorious revolutionary tradition."
(164): "This was not an ideal moment for a major offensive, but it would have been a perfect time for the patient rebuilding of political organization, especially with the enormous moral authority of Che behind it. Guevara, however was wedded to the idea of guerilla warfare, and did not see the organized working class as a central actor in his vision of revolution."
(168): in the words of one Richard Harris:
The defeat of Che's guerrilla operation and the main flaw in Che's strategy--as well as Debray's theorising about revolutionary guerrilla warfare... might be called a kind of military vanguardism. By reducing popular revolution to a special form of guerrilla warfare, Che's strategy and Debray's early writings overemphasized the military aspects of initating a revolutionary struggle against an unjust regime. And they underemphasized the political dimension of organizing the base of popular support needed for a successful revolutionary struggle.
(168): "It does Che's memory no credit to refuse to acknowledge the brutal truth that this was a terrible and costly failure born of Che's insistence that the will of the revolutionar can overcome objective conditions and substitute the individual for the movement of an entire class. That way lies martyrdom, not social revolution."
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