Introducing this issue
The majority of this issue of IMR is dedicated to aspects of Latin American revolutionary Marxist thought. As we celebrate and reflect on the lessons of May 1968, we publish a tribute to Ernesto Che Guevara, whose contribution to the renaissance of Marxist thought in that year, while posthumous, influenced millions of revolutionary-minded youth, throughout the world.
What accounts for the enduring impact of Che's ideas? Of course for many of his generation it was because Che was 'the most complete man of his time' as Sartre concluded; his life spanning the guerilla struggle in the Sierra Maestra, the chairmanship of the National Bank of Cuba, and his eventual death at the hands of the CIA in Bolivia. But as Michael Lowy has pointed out it is more 'the rigorous, total and monolithic coherence between theory and practice, words and deeds'' that ensures that Che's thought remains at the heart of current debates in Cuba and Nicaragua.
In Cuba, continuing economic problems and the opening of debate around economic reforms in the USSR has forced a reevaluation of some of the issues raised by the great economic debate of 1963-64. In this debate Che opposed the crude materialist argument that people's behaviour would change only as a result of the development of the productive forces. But his own position was not the idealist one attributed to him since by his detractors-that people had to be changed before society could be changed. In fact Che proposed the simultaneous transformation of conditions and of people, each aspect reinforcing the other.
This prospect, foreseen by Marx in the Theses on Feuerbach, informs the essay by Orlando Nunez. Nunez is Director of the Centre for the Study of Agrarian Reform in Nicaragua. He is also the author (with Roger Burbach) of the recently published Fire in the Americas? which makes an important contribution to the forging of a revolutionary agenda for the whole continent.
The privations and suffering of the Nicaraguan people as a result of the US-backed contra war still continue despite the current round of negotiations. Under these conditions the question of how to consolidate and entrench the aims of the revolution in the consciousness of the masses is
= -aring one. It is this problem that Nunez is confronting when he pro-
?.ses that if there is a morality for those who are content with the established capitalist order, then there must be a morality for revoluionaries too. He vigorously attacks the Kautskian idea that Marxism is alien to the idea of revolutionary morality. Drawing on a wide range of sources including Reich and Trotsky, he proposes the resurrection of the ideas of Saint-Just and the French Revolution; if it is done for one it is done for all—a proposition with relevance for those countries where the
Ideas of Reagan and Thatcher's property-holding democracy hold sway.
A further polemic against economic reductionism is provided by Luis
Vitale's study of the problems of external debt in Latin America. We publish here the final chapter of his remarkable book Historia de la Deuda externa latina america. A case study of Mexico by Sergio Rodriguez completes our dossier. Rodriguez, a leader of the Mexican PRT, defends the notion that Mexico remains a semi-colonial country, despite industrialisation. He provides a detailed examination of changes in the labour process in the country, focussing particularly on the growth of the maquiladoros, factories who assemble finished products from components assembled abroad, usually intended for re-export. The consequences of restructuration has thrown the ruling PRI into crisis in that country. Rodriguez finishes with the need for the left to develop an alternative to decadent
The final two articles deal with discussions developed in previous
In our last issue we carried contributions to a debate on the Philippines.
Here we conclude the debate with the summary, which tackles the complicated problem of what attitude revolutionaries should have adopted to
Finally, we print a further contribution to the evaluation of the life and work of Antonio Gramsci. Our issue of Summer 1987, commemorating the life and work of the great revolutionary, was very well received by our readers and here we print a further contribution by Michael Lowy, on the influences which shaped Gramsci's thought and brought it close to that of another outstanding figure of twentieth century Marxism-Georg Lukacs.
1. M Lowy, The Marxism of Che Guevara, (New York: Monthly Review Press),
2. Roger Burbach and Orlanda Nunez, Fire in the Americas, (London: Verso), populism.
* issues.
1973.
1987.
4 International Marxist Review
* the constitutional referendum of February 1987.
Notes
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