Reddit reviews Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution

If I can add a little to the main point the comrade is making here, the Soviets nationalized and then centralized production, supply, and finance (and set manageable and equitable standards for wages, rents, and prices), and even democratized the local and regional administration (with trade unions as probably the most democratic representatives of the working class in their immediate ability to organize themselves) of their government, but broadly speaking, the Soviet party and state as a whole initially politicized but eventually de-politicized the working class as a centralizing force in society against other centralizing forces, primarily the managing class.

The party and state did accomplish the technical side of a socialist society fairly well (full employment, equitable wage scaling, universal public housing), but not the political. Workers organized countless groups, policies, and programs in their immediate lives, but never exactly saw themselves as a central class in a central conflict against their managers, who were a self-governing quasi-middle class that was separate from the party in its revolutionary periods (where skilled urban workers and farm workers were the bulk of party representatives) and revisionist periods (where quasi-middle class professionals and intellectuals were the bulk).

As Marxist-Leninists or Maoists, we acknowledge the administrative successes of Soviet socialism, but clearly see the need for perpetual class struggle (creating a centralizing and even hegemonic ideology most workers can understand, accept, and then participate in to refine, expand, and make concrete) as the only way to guarantee the type of successes (intensive productivity growth as a major example) seen in the early Soviet Union.

Note: I haven't read Helen Yaffe's book on Che Guevara yet, but her shorter writings show that Che clearly had a dynamic understanding of centralization and ideology as always inter-connecting in the class struggle after the revolution, and these two articles on China offer a preliminary look at the nature of the Chinese state, which is probably the single most necessary question we have to answer before trying to reassess a new political strategy, in China or anywhere else.

Mao also took copious notes on the book, some of which were published by Monthly Review Press under the title A Critique of Soviet Economics. Less well known (although arguably more politically and theoretically sound) is a similar study of the text by Che Guevara - at the moment only a spanish edition is available, but some of the key points are summarised by Tablada and Yaffe.

ELI5 is a fundamentally stupid concept. Complicated things require complex analysis, and while I could answer your question with "Cubans pick their own jobs" this doesn't answer the essence of the question, which is "how does the Cuban economy work?" For that I'm going to hope you're older than 5 years old and recommend this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Che-Guevara-The-Economics-Revolution/dp/0230218210

You said, and I quote, Che Guevara directly sent "queers" to concentration camps. This is completely false and nobody has ever made this claim. After having been debunked, you then switched to other styles of misinformation:

> "...but the UMAP camps have a clear legacy that traces back to Che's style of extrajudicial persecution. "

No historian has ever made this claim and this is a bizarre claim from right-wing blog. Only a few dozen were sent to the Guanahacabibes, and its purpose was for government officials only who had committed some crime against the public. Furthermore, it was completely voluntary, as shown here:

"The history of the Guanahacabibes as a 'rehabiliation centre', and one involving hard labour, presents a conceptual challenge, raising the spectre of the harsh reality of such camps in other socialist bloc countries. However, the voluntary character of the sentence at Guanahacabibes lends weight to Guevara's claim that it was not a feudal sanction but one of a complex of policies designed to raise managers' consciousness by linking their individual interest with the enterprise's progress and national development as a whole. In other words, Guanahacibies was one of the mechanisms implement to forge the concept of work as a social duty."

Source:Che Guevara, The Economics of Revolution.

Che himself described it as such:

" [We] only send to Guanahacabibes those doubtful cases where we are not sure people should go to jail. I believe that people who should go to jail should go to jail anyway. Whether long-standing militants or whatever, they should go to jail. We send to Guanahacabibes those people who should not go to jail, people who have committed crimes against revolutionary morals, to a greater or lesser degree, along with simultaneous sanctions like being deprived of their posts, and in other cases not those sanctions, but rather to be reeducated through labor. The work conditions are hard, but not bestial. And they are in charge of improving those conditions themselves."

When some of his Companeros claimed that the sentencing seemed extreme, he replied by emphasizing its voluntary nature:

" I haven’t seen anyone leaving feeling bitter or indignant. One should not have this concept of Guanahacabibes [as a feudal punishment] or there is the risk that people who go there think of it as the end of the world. We don’t consider it that. And people go to Guanahacabibes to work; it isn’t their undoing or anything like that … What’s more, those who go to Guanahacabibes are those who want to go. Those who don’t want to go leave the Ministry. No one should go to Guanahacabibes who does not want to go, leave and work somewhere else. There is no opposition to this. "

There is no comparison at all between a voluntary labor camp for misbehaving people in the ministry, and forced interment of people who are unable to participate in the military due to the current regulations at the time, which is what UMAP (which was shutdown in the 1960s). UMAP was also likely purposed by Raul Castro while he was minister of FAR ( Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias). Che Guevara simply had nothing to do with it, and there is no connection between his policies of reform for bad actorys in the Ministry (of which only a dozen or so were ever sent there, and it was completely voluntary) and UMAP.

Finally, according to Anderson, Guevara's opinion of homosexuality was not really known, but he does say: " Homosexuality was illegal in the 1960s in pretty much the entire world. I don’t know his views on being gay, but I know that there were a few people around him who were, and he didn’t persecute them " (Source).

You are simply spreading myths and right-wing rumors online that are absolutely baseless.

> To make an export economy of sugar and tobacco to Russia? Huge achievement, having an export economy for the other white people.

If you can't see the difference between the extreme damage US imperialism did to Latin America vs that of Russia you are absolutely hopeless. US imperialism is what has created most of these banana republics that are to the right of most social democracies. The amount killed in Cuba by Batista was in the tens of thousands, and it was a banana republic with extreme racial discrimination and inequality.

You're also ignoring that Cuba was embargoed by the United States, so the US had little choice, and you're also ignoring that Che Guevara actually opposed the ongoing soviet influence in Latin America. Everybody who has even a basic familiarity with Guevara knows he purposed a united Latin America, and his initial plan for Cuba was to make them self-reliant through industrialization. This was made economically unfeasible due to the embargo and because of the lack of support the feelings of most Cuban revolutionaries that they needed to be an agricultural economy, a costly mistake that Cuba has never really gotten out of.

In Che's critique of leninism, he claimed that the USSR had never abandoned the law of value, and he described Stalin's manual of the soviet political in harsh terms claiming it to be effectively useless.

" Here's some homophobic, antisemitic and white supremacist..."

Those are prejudiced remarks and he also condemned white imperialism in the very same book. It's obvious you have never even read it. And the first two quotes you posted is completely out of context, and actually from the same passage, however, it leaves out:

" And the two ancient races have now begun a hard life together, fraught with bickering and squabbles. Discrimination and poverty unite them in the daily fight for survival but their different ways of approaching life separate them completely "

It's obvious he was actually describing the reaction of Africans and Portuguese to discrimination. After the first motorcycle trip (and before he became a committed socialist), he described himself as a reformed individual and renounced any such prejudiced (not exactly racist, as he doesn't link them to any racial characteristics, but rather to their behavior in certain circumstances).

By the time he became a socialist, he actually saw black liberation as synonymous with anti-capitalism. This was noted by UCLA political science professor Mark Sawyer, who said Che's earlier remarks "reflects a Ché whose views evolved on the issue of race and who eventually saw black liberation as synonymous with ending oppression."

Che went onto to fight with Afro-Cubans in the Congo, had a best friend and body guard who was black (Pombo), and even denounced the KKK at the UN.

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It's clear that Che became a complete anti-racist, however, Bakunin and Proudhon maintained their racist views throughout the rest of their life.

> Can I ask if youre an anarchist? If so you should check out ABRA in Havana and see how they feel about your buddy.

I consider myself an anarchist in the syndicalist tradition, yes, in that the complete goal is a society based on syndicalism.

However, your blatant distortion of the facts is basically historical revisionism. Che's views could be considered more "anarchist" than any market anarchist, and, in fact, Proudhon never renounced his extremely racist views, where as Che did renounced his prejudiced comments. His economics also made much more sense.As for your comments about how Che ran things, he ran things far better than many of the Spanish anarchists and performed better as a solider than the anarchists in Ukraine.

As for the opinion of Latin-American anarchists, most oppose US imperialism, including in venezuela. And many anarchists have actually responded to and debunked the white anarchist writers at libcom, who post articles about Che Guevara, Chomsky, etc. that are filled with your type of misinformation and distortions.

Your whole post was a mostly nonsense, and most of it was outright false.