132
ALASDAIR MACINTYRE
a polemic against the French Communist expert on
planification,
Charles Bettelheim, in which he argued that because of the level that
consciousness (in the Marxist sense) had reached in the world at large,
the social and political consciousness of Marxists in a country where
the objective conditions for a socialist revolution had not yet been
reached could nonetheless enable them to transcend those limitations
and to do what seemed objectively impossible. From this premise Che
argued further in more general terms for a relative independence of
cultural superstructure from economic basis. This led him to quarrel
with Bettelheim and other Marxists on economic policy. Material in–
centives, such as may be provided by a wages structure may be ap–
propriate as the mainspring of a market economy, but are inappropri–
ate to socialism. Centralized planning demands the centralization of
major economic decision-making, but it does not require centralized
management.
What are to take the place of material incentives and of the dic–
tates of centralized management? A new motivation springing from the
new nature of socialist man. Moral incentives must be the mainspring;
material incentives must be subordinate. The word "moral" recurs
throughout Che's writings. He was the minister who awarded the title
"Hero of Labor" to workers who excelled. In his speeches to workers
he constantly urged sacrifice and hard work. His personal asceticism
put his right to make such calls beyond question. But their theoretical
justification is quite another matter.
Behind the Leninist voluntarism we see in Che the revival of an
older answer to the Marxist dilemma about morality. Marx himself
never raises explicitly the question of the motives of those who seek
to achieve socialism. At the turn of the century when Bernstein raised
the question of the moral foundations of socialism and turned back to
Kant's invocation of duty in order to answer it, Kautsky replied to
him with a crude invocation of utilitarianism which relied on an under–
lying appeal to material self-interest; and Rosa Luxemburg in her
polemics against Bernstein avoided coming to grips with this question
at all. Bernstein's Kantian answer was in fact more influential than we
sometimes realize; and to be Kantian was not necessarily to be a right–
wing social democrat. After 1914 Kautsky the orthodox Marxist was far
to the right of Karl Liebknecht, the Kantian and Spartacist. Guevara
was Karl Liebknecht's spiritual heir; like Liebknecht he in the end
bore witness to the fact that moral heroism is not enough. In the im–
probable environment of Cuba, Kantian moral theory was reborn as re–
volutionary.
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