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academic atmosphere of Debray's arguments. For however authentically
Debray may reproduce what is new and Cuban he does so in a setting
and a style which is old and French. So that while in Guevara's own
narratives the Marxism-Leninism somehow coexists with a sense of the
Cuban revolution as a chain of improvisations and coincidences, in
Debray's writing revolutionary action becomes nothing but matter for
theoretical formulas counterposed to other theoretical formulas. Acci–
dent has disappeared and with it truth.
We find in Debray a constant reiteration of Sartrian themes. There
are the same strange attempts to unite historical necessity and absolute
freedom, to dissent from Stalinism and yet to count Stalin among the
revolutionary ancestors and to portray Trotskyism and the viIIain of the
piece; indeed Debray explicitly refers back to Sartre's fifteen-year-old
anti-Trotskyist polemic in
The Communists and Peace.
One can well
understand why Trotsky's ghost haunts Sartre and Debray. For both
Sartre and Debray have a peculiar conception - far more elitist than
that of Leninism - of an inert mass of be it workers, be it peasants,
who need a leadership of particular gifts to rouse them to revolutionary
activity. Sartre in 1952 and 1954 was equally contemptuous of those
sociologists who declared that the French working classes were not revolu–
tionary and those Trotskyists who declared that they were revolution–
ary - but that their revolutionary tendencies were suppressed or in–
hibited by their reaction to the Stalinist leadership of the PCF. On
Sartre's view the working masses are not, but will become a revolu–
tionary class precisely because the Communist Party presents them with
goals which transcend their immediate needs; so for Debray the guer–
rilla army is to present the peasants with goals which transcend their
immediate needs.
It
is a doctrine which enables Sartre and Debray to
set on one side in the most arbitrary way the question of what workers
or peasants do in fact want now. It also enables Sartre to disregard the
theoretical positions of Stalinist bureaucrats; his understanding of the
falsity of Stalinism seems in his writings of the early fifties only mar–
ginal to his evaluation of Stalinism's political function. So Debray too
exalts questions of organization over questions of political goals and
programs and sneers at the Trotskyists for their emphasis upon fun–
damental theory.
In his intellectual style then Debray is unlike Che; but Che himself
could not avoid facing dilemmas which in other contexts were respon-
sible for creating Trotskyism, and he could not avoid making choices
,.
which were incompatible with Trotskyism. This is because Trotsky him-
self had had to face at successive points in his career all the dilemmas
of those who wish to make a Marxist revolution in an underdeveloped
