Socialism and revolutionary morality

Ernesto Guevara is not only a revolutionary Quixote or a theoretician of socialist construction. He is something much more important: he is a moral example.

This memorial might not seem so materialist; one may say that it is a subjective treatment. To that I quickly reply that it

Guevara was that: a militant example of firm morality. An internationalist, he shook with rage in the face of a criminal U.S. attack against Jacobo Arbenz’s Guatemala. That and other political and ideological reasons made him determined to join a group of patriotic Cubans, led by Fidel Castro, to liberate Cuba from the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

What made Guevara give up everything—family, personal fortune, and professional career—to join that handful of fighters? What force moved him to attach himself to the Caribbean island, far from the land of his birth? Why did Che, after the triumph of the revolution and after it was consolidated, occupying high positions and ministerial responsibilities, abandon that security and head off to Bolivia to face the military brutes and the Rangers trained by the U.S.?

That force is not a mystery, and it did not fall from the sky. It was born in his consciousness—individual and social—and it is called revolutionary morality.

Those were the same convictions for which the writer John Reed fought in the October Revolution together with the Russian workers and peasants. It was the same idealism that moved the doctor Norman Bethune, representing the left of United States and Canada, to join the revolutionary Chinese communists, distinguishing himself for his bravery and his scientific knowledge in the 8th Army where he died due to an infection while caring for the wounded.

It was the same moral spirit as the International Brigades, many of them Argentinean, that converged in 1936 to the Spanish Republic to fight fascism. There are many more examples like these.

Of course, Che did not reject those who, following the fall of Batista, took on the massive task of building a new Cuba. He was a minister and functionary himself. But in a moment of introspection in his life, he believed that he should continue the struggle together with the other Latin American peoples on the long and steep road to liberation. So he set off for Bolivia.

Like Francisco de Miranda

Guevara can be compared to Francisco de Miranda. Guevara was made of the same human material as de Miranda. The Venezuelan, precursor of Independence, had fought as a volunteer in the U.S. Revolution of 1776, and the French Revolution of 1789. He returned to Latin America when the hour came to fight for the emancipation of the Spanish-American colonies. The Spanish put him in prison, buried him in a dungeon underground, and when he died in captivity, cremated his remains to leave no trace of his life. In the historical museum in Caracas, next to the place where the remains of the Liberator Bolívar and other Venezuelan patriots rest, an open casket can be seen symbolically waiting for the remains of Miranda.

The imperialists of yesterday and today are enraged by the bodies of revolutionaries. They resort to crimes, torture, elimination, as well as to the hiding of the remains of those that have fallen in combat.

That is the hypocritical morality of the ruling classes. They don’t know that the example of revolutionaries transcend their own person, transforming into a weapon much more powerful than conventional weapons—the collective will, displaying in every sense consciousness of revolution and transformation. That was the case of Ernesto Guevara—his life, his ideas, his social practice.

In an interview with the journalist Jean Daniel in Algiers in July 1963 for the magazine L’Express, Che said, “I’m not interested in economic socialism without communist morality. We are struggling against poverty, but we are also struggling against alienation. One of the fundamental objectives of Marxism is to eliminate ‘individual interests’ and profit from psychological motivations. Marx worried as much about the economic factors as about their repercussions on the spirit. He called this the ‘fact of consciousness.’ If communism does not take an interest in the facts of consciousness, it will be a means of distribution, but it will never be a revolutionary morality.”

Ethics and freedom

Guevara was an idealist, but it was an ethical idealism, which is not to be confused with philosophical idealism. On the contrary, the morality of the ruling classes—in reality, their immorality—always protects the absence of freedom, inequality, and exploitation, even as they determine harsh class antagonisms.

The content of the new moral ideal derives from a profound social necessity, from a warm hope, from an energetic will for something different, for something opposite to what exists. In short, the moral ideal is the set of desires and hopes that provoke antagonism with the existing state of things.

The moral ideal is known as a means for joining and inciting the transformative forces in the struggle against the existing order. It forms a powerful lever to overcome this state of things.

Revolutionary morality, then, is not only negation and contradiction. It is a means of reuniting and pushing forward the forces of the oppressed classes. It comes out of the socio-economic conditions, the technological development of each society, and from cultural development. Like the social instinct, the moral ideal is not an end but a force, or rather a weapon in the social struggle for existence. The moral ideal is a particular weapon for a particular situation of the class struggle or struggle for national liberation.

The heroes that the bourgeois historians talk about—Guizot, Michelet, Carlyle—were called ‘innovators’, or ‘great’, seemed to be generated by their epoch. The new person that socialism talks about is not some chimera-like hero of the Classics or of the liberal-reactionary historiography of the 19th Century.

George Plekhanov said that the individual peculiarities of eminent personalities determine the individual aspect of historical events. The element of chance always plays a certain role in the course of these events, whose orientation is determined in the last instance by the so-called general causes. It is the development of the productive forces and the mutual relations between those in the socio-economic processes of production that determine them. But in reality there is an inter-determination, and interrelation between people and means, which is not mechanical but, rather is transformed dialectically in creation. As Mariátegui said, socialism is ‘heroic creation.’

Guevara reflected in a creative way on this theme of revolutionary morality, on the role of the individual and the masses in society.

He maintained there is a tight dialectical unity between the individual and the masses, and that the masses, as a group of individuals, interrelate with leaders.

With respect to the individual, Guevara pointed out that as an unfinished product, the negative aspects of the past are transferred to the present in the individual consciousness, and that in order to wipe out that false consciousness, continuous work needs to be carried out.

Person and self-education

This is a double process, where society acts through direct and indirect education, and the individual also submits to a process of formation and self-education.

In revolutionary times it is easy to live up to moral stimuli. But to maintain that new consciousness, forged with the development of the new society, it is necessary to develop a consciousness in which values take on new categories. For that, Che said, “society in its totality must be converted into a gigantic school.”

In the period of socialist construction, Guevara pointed out, “We can see the new person being born. Its image is not yet finished; it can never be since the process runs parallel to the development of new economic forms.”

The road is long and full of difficulties. Sometimes, in order to travel the route one must retreat. Other times, leaders and masses separate as a result of traveling too fast. In order to take the right path that allows harmonious and creative growth, it is necessary to create the mechanisms and the revolutionary institutions that permit the “identification,” said Che, “between the government and the community in its entirety, adjusted to the specific conditions of the construction of socialism and staying as far as possible away from the common spaces of bourgeois democracy.”

Guevara warned that it is necessary to emphasize conscious participation, individual and collective, in all the mechanisms of leadership and production, and to link them to the idea of the necessity of technical and ideological education in a way that these processes are tightly interwoven and their advances are in parallel. “This way the total consciousness of the social being can be achieved—that which amounts to the complete realization as a human creature, breaking the chains of alienation,” said Che.

He added: “This translates concretely in the reappropriation of one’s nature through liberated work, and the expression of one’s human condition through culture and art.”

Without dogmas or theorems

Guevara did not believe that socialism or its construction was a dogma or a theorem. Neither was it a form of state capitalism. For that reason he reflected, “Socialism is young and has errors. Many times revolutionaries lack the awareness and the intellectual audacity necessary to face up to the task of developing the new person by unconventional methods. They suffer from the influence of the society that created them. Disorientation is great and the problems of material construction absorb us.”

It was for this reason that he thought that the struggle against dogmatism and superficiality was a task at each and every moment in the construction of socialism. In his letter ‘Socialism and Man in Cuba’ to the weekly magazine ‘Marcha’ in Montevideo, published on March 12, 1965, Guevara concluded in the following way: “We socialists are more free because we are more complete; we are more complete because we are more free.”

He added, “The road is long and in part unknown. We know our limitations. We are making the person of the 21st century—it is ourselves. We are forging ourselves in day-to-day life, creating a new person by new techniques. Personality plays the role of mobilizing and leading, insofar as it embodies the highest virtues and aspirations of the people and it does not stray from the path.”

The new generations

This was the revolutionary morality that Che talked about. It is his great legacy to the new generations of Latin Americans. Che was an example of the new man, shown through his own life, his lack of self-interest, and his dedication. He is like the cases of John Reed, Norman Bethune, and many others.

There are many themes to remember in the many-faceted life of this man who died when he was 39 years old, before he reached the peak of his sharp intelligence. But what can be learned from him above all is his message of freedom for the oppressed, for all the suffering men and women of Latin America and for all the oppressed peoples and nations.

Articles may be reprinted with credit to Socialism and Liberation magazine.