Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution

Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/yaffe180209.html

by Helen Yaffe
18.02.09

'I didn't know Che had any economic ideas' has been a frequent reply
I've received when telling people about the topic of my research and
my book Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution. It reflects the
caricature of Guevara as a romantic guerrilla fighter with idealist
notions of how human beings are motivated and how social change is
brought about. The consequence is to overlook his contribution to
Cuba's economic development and socialist political economy debates
and hence to lose any lessons that can be drawn from his endeavours.

It censors the complexity of economic decisions and debates within
the Cuban Revolution, as if the revolutionaries who seized power on 1
January 1959 were chaotic adventurers whose economic policies were
based on a naïve ideological agenda and not reflecting concrete
conditions and constraints in the process of development. For
example, Cuba's incorporation into the socialist bloc's trade
relations, its continued dependence on sugar as a principal export
and the importation of 'backward' technology from the socialist
countries are viewed as political preferences -- with little
recognition made of the limits placed on Cuba's development path by
the imposition of the US blockade or the denial of credit from the
Western countries. It also plays into the interpretation that sees
Fidel Castro as synonymous with the Revolution, so that all policies
were generated by this one omnipresent individual according to his
whims, psychological traits and struggle for domination.

The research carried out for this book involves interviews with 50 of
Guevara's colleagues during his work as President of the National
Bank of Cuba (1959-1960), head of the Department of Industrialisation
(1959-1961) and Minister of Industries (1961-1965). These
individuals were not passive or homogenous. They were as varied and
complicated as the rest of us. Their ideas, values and capacities
evolved with their experience of working at his side. From their
recollections springs a dynamic and rich history of grappling with
problems, searching for solutions and experimenting with policies,
structures and techniques. Guevara's own voice emerges through them
-- giving us an insight into the development of his own work and
ideas. It is also recorded in the internal meeting transcripts,
reports, speeches, articles and letters consulted during the research
for this book.

In late September 2008, George W Bush, perhaps the most neo-liberal,
anti-regulation, aggressively imperialist US president in history,
declared: 'The market is not functioning properly.' What did he
mean? The market is failing to secure the continued accumulation and
expansion of capital -- threatening a crisis of the entire capitalist
system and throwing into question the most basic premises of
bourgeois economics. For decades it has been hammered into us that
only the free market ensures efficiency, productivity and growth --
the profit motive via cutthroat competition, deregulation and
removing all constraints to 'rational economic man'. But what form
of rationality justifies the fact that 200 individuals have more
wealth than over 40% of the world's population? What logic leaves 12
million children under the age of five to die every year from
malnutrition, diarrhoea and easily preventable diseases? Is this a
rational way for humanity to organise production and distribution --
making hundreds of species extinct each day and leading the world
towards an ecological disaster?

If the market isn't functioning what alternatives are there? There
have been few such poignant moments in history to talk about the
economics of revolution. In rescuing Guevara's work as a member of
the Cuban government, this book hopes to place his economic ideas
firmly on the table for consideration in the search for alternatives.
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Helen Yaffe, a Teaching Fellow in Latin American history at
University College London, is the author of Che Guevara: The
Economics of Revolution. She has an article in the March 2009 issue
of the journal Latin American Perspectives, a special issue
commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. This
article first appeared as an entry in her blog on 12 December 2008
under a creative commons 2.5 license.

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