BOO KS
131
country and because too the failure of Trotskyism to provide a recipe
for successful revolutionary practice in the face of those dilemmas is
an inescapable fact.
What is the part of the peasantry in the making
of a socialist revolution?
Marx could see no part for them, Mao
invented one
ex nihilo
and called it Marxist, and every position inter–
mediate between Marx's and Mao's has been taken up by some Marxist
theorist at some time. Trotskyism at the very least represents the thesis
of the ineliminable necessity of the participation of an industrial working
class in revolution-making.
Can there be socialism in one country?
One
paradox of post-Stalin Stalinism is that it may be those who are most
repelled by the surviving Stalinist features of the Soviet Union who
therefore try to build a socialist revolution in isolation from the Soviet
camp or at least in the minimum of contact with it. But in so doing
they revive the very thesis of "socialism in one country" on which
Stalinism was founded and in this way reject Trotskyism.
What
is
the
place of the revolutionary party?
The orthodox Communist Parties in
Latin America are obviously not revolutionary parties; their weakness
and their reformism are notorious. But in the struggle waged by peasant
guerrillas there is little room for a party at all. Hence Trotskyism once
more appears as the ghost of orthodox Bolshevism, repudiating mili–
tantly the only militant strategies apparently open in Latin America.
Guevara's position is thus easily defined by contrast with that of
Trotskyism, and in this at least Debray is perceptive. But if Guevara
offered us a revolution made by peasants, a revolution which creates
socialism in one country, and a revolution with a revolutionary army
rather than a revolutionary party, he aspired to do so as a Marxist–
Leninist, and here is the crux. For if Bolshevism can only appear in
the modem world in ghostly form, Trotskyism is indeed its authentic
ghost. How then can an anti-Trotskyist position be grafted on to Marx–
ism-Leninism? To answer this question will return us to my initial
inquiry as to the tragic flaw in the role acted out by Che. For what
Che uses to close the gap between what the Marxist-Leninist must hold
on an objective analysis to be a situation in which the socialist revolu–
tion cannot yet be made and the revolutionary aspirations of the
selfsame Marxist-Leninist who confronts himself with this, as it must
seem, defeatist analysis, is an appeal to pure will. Lenin too was con–
fronted with this gap and at every stage wrestled to link the present and
the future by means of a consciousness nurtured by the organizational
forms of the party. In Guevara, although questions of organization are
treated with intellectual respect, it is the voluntarist component of
Leninism which is appealed to as never before.
Consider for example the question of planning. Guevara conducted
