MARX AND MARXISM

Marx and Marxism



Marx and Marxism

“Years pass, fashions change, post-modernism succeeds modernism, democratorships replace dictatorships, and the Berlin Wall falls under the new Wall of Money. But thirty years later, Che Guevara's message is still a glowing beacon to those who know that a better world is possible”.

Introduction

There is something in the life and the legacy of the Argentinean doctor/guerrilla/Cuban revolutionary which still speaks to the generations coming of age in 1997. How else can we explain the mounting numbers of articles, books, films, and debates on Che? It is not simply in commemoration of the 30th anniversary of his death; who was interested in the thirtieth anniversary of Joseph Stalin's death, in 1983?

Like Jose Marti, Emiliano Zapata, Augusto Sandino, Farabundo Marti, and Camilo Torres, Che is one of those heroic figures who died still fighting, gun in hand, and who have become, forever, seeds of the future planted in the soil of Latin America, stars of hope in the heavens of people's aspirations and desires, glowing coals banked under the grey ash of disappointment and disenchantment.

In every upsurge of revolutionary movements in Latin America over the last thirty years, from Argentina to Chile, from Nicaragua to El Salvador, from Guatemala to Mexico and Chiapas, there are traces of "Guevarismo" -sometimes clear, sometimes faint. Not only in the collective visions of those who struggle, but also in their debates over methods, strategy, and the very nature of "the struggle".

Seeds of Guevarismo have been germinating over the last thirty years, in soil furnished by the political culture of the Latin American left. Now these seeds are bearing stems, leaves, and fruits Che's traces are one of the red threads of which people from Patagonia to the Rio Grand weave their dreams.

Are Che's ideas out of date? Is it now possible to transform Latin America without a revolution? This is the theory which some Latin American leftist theoreticians (calling themselves "realists") have advanced in recent years, starting with the talented writer and journalist, Jorge Castaneda in his well-known book Utopia Disarmed (1993).

Theme Analysis of Internationalism in Che Guevara's Political Though

Che was not only a heroic fighter, but a revolutionary thinker, with a political and moral project and a system of ideas and values for which he fought and gave his life. The philosophy which gave his political and ideological choices their coherence, colour, and taste was a deep revolutionary humanism. For Che, the true Communist, the true revolutionary was one who felt that the great problems of all humanity were his or her personal problems, one who was capable of "feeling anguish whenever someone was assassinated, no matter where it was in the world, and of feeling exultation whenever a new banner of liberty was raised somewhere else" (Guevara, 1968:118).

Che's internationalism -a way of life, a secular faith, a categorical imperative, and a spiritual "nationality"- was the living and concrete expression of this revolutionary Marxist humanism.

The guevarist legacy, which left its imprint on the strategies of Latin American revolutionary groups from ...