Rev Left Radio - Socialism and Man in Cuba: Che Guevara and the Revolution of Consciousness

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

Breht reads, reflects upon, and elaborates on Che Guevara's famous essay "Socialism and Man in Cuba" wherein Che argues that socialism cannot be reduced to changing property relations or economic structures; it must also produce a new kind of human being, less alienated, less governed by private self-interest, and more conscious of themselves as a social being. His central claim is that material transformation and the transformation of consciousness have to develop together, through education, collective struggle, moral incentives, self-discipline, and revolutionary practice.   ---------------------------------------------------- Learn more here: https://revleftradio.com/ Check out Unlearning Capitalism for more political educational resources

Hello everybody. All right, today I'm going to be reading a text, an important text. A text for one of the most famous quotes in the socialist and communist and Marxist tradition comes from. The idea that it might be ridiculous, but that the revolutionary is driven by a great sense of love. That is a quote from Che Guevara. That, of course, comes from the text that I'm going to read to you today. The quote exactly, I just pulled it up in the book, at the risk of seeming ridiculous. me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. That's almost cliche on the left at this point,

but it's so fucking important. It remains so essential to my whole orientation, to politics, the reason I got into this, and I just, I love that, that quote. And while everybody on the left knows about that quote, to the point of, again, almost a cliche on the left, you've seen the meme a million times, you've seen it quoted a million times, it's still important. And I still want to continue to assert it, but it comes from this text that I'm going to read to you today, Socialism and Man in Cuba by Ernesto Che Guevar. Now, before I get into this, I just want to say that I'm going to speak at the Socialism Conference on this text, and then I'm connecting it up with my conception of the Bodhisattva Revolutionary,

which I've done work on. I gave that speech at ASU, Dialectics, and Liberation, and I'm writing the book, A Letter to Young Revolutionaries, where I further articulate the concept of the Bodhisattva revolutionary. The speech I'm going to give is going to kind of take some basics from this work by Che and then build on it and articulate the need for a simultaneous transformation of the subjective and objective. Our interior lives as well as our political struggle to change the outside world, those two things must go together dialectically. And that's obviously something I've been pushing on the show for many, many years, the entire project, is centered around to some extent that that core idea that's a core aspect of the book a letter to

young revolutionaries that's coming out hopefully soon we're in the final editing stages of that process and so while i use a little bit of this text in my speech the speech itself is going to go well beyond this text but the text is short it was actually written in the form of a letter to editor of marcho which was like a weekly published sort of magazine in monte videio uruguay and it was first published in that magazine in March of 1965. So this is Che writing a letter to the editor of this that was published in that magazine, but in the process he covers many things from the dynamics of the objective struggle for Cuban National Liberation, as well as the subjective components of what makes not only a communal vanguard effective,

but also what the role of what the role of the individual is in the revolutionary process. So it's inspiring. It's important. It resonates with a lot of my work in general. And so I figure because it is relatively short, like 20 pages, if that, that I could just read it in full here for you today. So yeah, if you're going to the Socialism Conference, come to my speech. My speech will be on that Saturday, September 5th at noon. You can go on the Socialism Conference website to see the tickets.

You have to register for the conference, obviously. It's attached to a hotel, so you can buy a hotel room for the night or two, then come down to the conference center, and, you know, Saul Williams is going to be there. Angela Davis is going to be there. Lots of comrades from lots of different tendencies are going to be there, and this is my first time attending. I'm really looking forward to it. My friend, comrade, and patron of the show,

Asaya is going to be my chair, moderate the Q&A session, and introduce the speech, et cetera. She's been great on live calls. We've done Rev. Love Situation Room. She's moderated and helped organize those. And so behind the scenes, she's just done so much. For me and the show, and she's helping me even further with this speech at the Socialism

Conference, so I couldn't be more grateful to her. And I look forward to not only meeting her, but meeting anybody there. And as I said before, if we just gave away a free raffle, two free tickets, $300 plus dollars for free to a patron Kung Fu Kenny who won the raffle. So I'll see him there. Anybody that attends, obviously, to the talk itself. I'll hang out afterwards and mingle and take pictures and shake hands and talk to people. But then, of course, after we will also do a meetup at hopefully a local bar and grill something, more details to come on the Patreon. I'll make a whole post about it when I get the details hammered out. But after the conference, we're all going to meet up and talk.

hang out, drink, drink beers, have pizza, whatever it may be, and just enjoy each other's company outside the context of the sort of conference itself. So even if you can't make the conference, but you're in the area, you can come to that meetup if you're on the Patreon, and that's where the information will be coming soon. But without further ado, I'm going to go through socialism and man in Cuba by Che Guevara. And as always, as I do, you know me. I'll make my asides. I'll make my elaborations, make my connections as we go through. And I'll make it clear when I'm stepping away from the text and when I'm re-entering it. So let's go ahead and get started.

Dear Companiero, though belatedly, I am completing these notes in the course of my trip through Africa, hoping in this way to keep my promise. I would like to do so by dealing with the theme set forth in the title above. I think it may be of interest to Uruguayan readers. A common argument from the mouths of capitalist spokesmen in the ideological struggle against socialism is that socialism, or the period of building socialism into which we have entered, is characterized by the abolition of the individual for the sake of the state. I will not try to refute this argument solely on theoretical grounds,

but rather to establish the facts as they exist in Cuba and then add comments of a general nature. Let me begin by broadly sketching the history of our revolutionary struggle before and after taking power. So as an aside, this is 1965, several years into the revolution, which was launched six years more or less prior to him writing this. He's responding to, you know, capitalist denigrations and arguments against socialism that socialism doesn't care about the individual.

It's the tyranny of the state of the collective. And instead, he says, of, you know, merely arguing on theoretical grounds, he's going to establish what actually exists as it pertains to this broad question on the ground in Cuba in the wake of a successful revolution. So this is coming out of the material conditions of revolution and praxis and struggle that has succeeded, not on the philosophical or abstract theoretical grounds solely. Back to the text.

As is well known, the exact date of the beginning of revolutionary struggle, which would culminate in January 1959, was July 26, 1959, A group of men led by Fidel Castro attacked the Moncotta Garrison in Oriante province on the morning of that day. The attack was a failure. The failure became a disaster. And the survivors ended up in prison, beginning the revolutionary struggle again after they were freed by an amnesty. In this process, in which there was only the germ of socialism, man was a fundamental factor.

We put our trust in him, individual, specific, with a first and last name. name and the triumph or failure of the mission entrusted to him depended on his capacity for action. As an aside, this is socialism and man in Cuba. It's the way in which people in the past would replace the term human or person or humankind with man or mankind. So that's just, you know, Che of his time speaking in gendered language that is common in Spanish is a gendered language in particular, objects are gendered in the way that Spanish is constructed. But he's of his time, right? Mid-century Latin America.

So it is what it is. But of course, when he's talking about man, he's talking about human beings. Back to the text. Then came the stage of guerrilla struggle. It developed in two distinct environments. The people, the still sleeping mass that had to be mobilized. And it's vanguard, the guerrillas, the motor force of the mobilization. the generator of revolutionary consciousness and militant enthusiasm. This vanguard was the catalyzing

agent that created the subjective conditions necessary for victory. Here again, in the framework of the proletarianization of our thinking, of this revolution that took place in our habits and our minds, the individual was the basic factor. Every one of the fighters of the Sierra Maestra, who reached an upper rank in the revolutionary forces, has a record of outstanding deeds to his credit. They attained their rank on this basis. It was the first heroic period, and in it they competed for the heaviest responsibilities, for the greatest dangers, with no other satisfaction than fulfilling a duty. In our work of revolutionary education, we frequently return to this instructive theme, and the attitude of our fighters could be glimpsed the man of the future. On other occasions

in our history, the act of total dedication of the revolutionary cause was repeated. During October, the 1962 missile crisis, and in the days of Hurricane Flora, we saw exceptional deeds of valor and sacrifice performed by an entire people. Finding the method to perpetuate this heroic attitude in daily life is, from the ideological standpoint, one of our fundamental tasks. In January 1959, the revolutionary government was established with the participation of various members of the treacherous bourgeoisie. The presence of the rebel army as the basic element of strength

constituted the guarantee of power. Serious contradictions developed right away. In the first instance, in February 1959, these were resolved when Fidel Castro assumed leadership of the government taking the post of prime minister. This process culminated in July of that same year with the resignation under mass pressure of President Eurytia. In the history of the Cuban Revolution,

there now appeared a character, well-defined in its features, who would systematically reappear, the masses. This multifaceted being is not, as is claimed, the sum of elements of the same type, reduced, moreover, to that same type by the reigning system, which acts like a flock of sheep. It is true that it follows its leaders, basically Fidel Castro, without hesitation, but the degree to which he won this trust results precisely from having interpreted the people's desires and aspirations in their full meaning and from the sincere struggle to fulfill the promises that he made. The masses participated in the agrarian reform and in the difficult task of the administration of state enterprises.

It went through the heroic experiences of Playa Geroon, Bay of Pigs. It was hardened in the battles against various bands of bandits armed by the CIA. It lived through one of the most important decisions of modern times during the October crisis, and today it continues to work for the building of socialism. Viewed superficially, it might appear that those who speak of the subordination of the individual to the state are right. The masses carry out with matchless enthusiasm and discipline the tasks set out by the government, whether in the field of the economy, culture, defense, sports, etc. The initiative generally comes from Fidel or from the Revolutionary High Command

and is explained to the people who make it their own. In some cases, the party and government take a local experience and generalize it, following the same procedure. Nevertheless, the state sometimes makes mistakes. When one of these mistakes occurs, one notes a decline in collective enthusiasm due to the effect of a quantitative decrease in each of the elements that make up the masses. Work is paralyzed until it is reduced to insignificant amounts. It is time to make a correction. That is what happened in March 1962, as a result of the second. bacterian policy imposed on the party by Anabal Escalante.

Clearly, this mechanism is not enough to ensure a succession of sensible measures. A more structured connection with the masses is needed, and we must improve it in the course of the next years. But as far as initiatives originating in the upper strata of the government are concerned, we are currently utilizing the almost intuitive method of sounding out general reactions to the great problems we confront. And in this, Fidelism master. So as an aside, they're just talking about the contradictions of a new revolution,

that there is this structure with Fidel and the revolutionary vanguard at the top, trying to steer the ship of the state in the wake of revolution. And by so doing that, there are times when there are advancements and things are going well, and that increases morale among the masses. And there are times when mistakes happen, bumps in the road are hit, challenges need to be overcome. and that naturally results perhaps in a decline and enthusiasm and a decrease in morale. This is a revolution, a war, any competition, a goddamn sporting event where there's ups and downs.

There's victories and there's losses. There's times when you're on your back foot and there's times when you're advancing the ball, as it were. So he's just saying that these are unavoidable. There's the rise of opportunism. There's the attempt by the bourgeoisie to take over. after the revolution and steer it in its own directions. This was thwarted. But these are things that, you know, six years after a successful revolution,

Che is saying have happened and are happening. But the carrying out of the mass line, you know, which was theorized explicitly by Mao, but it obviously a core aspect of any effective socialist movement from the Black Panthers to the Cuban revolutionaries and beyond, the initiation of the mass line, the going to the people, the hearing their problems, the sounding out of their general reactions, as he says, to the great problems that we confront, and then taking all of that feedback from the people, their desires, their biggest challenges, the things they're most worried about, forming that into a political program and trying to see

that through to benefit the people and then going back to the people, seeing if those policies are working, if those projects are being advanced. and is it affecting the morale of people? Are people happy with the direction things are going? And then kind of steering and correcting from there. That is how basic organizing, good organizing is done. And that is how a socialist society has to sort of orient itself because socialism is a mass movement. It is fundamentally democratic. And it is goal oriented towards creating a better life, country, society world for the people that live it, that work it. for regular people, not for the elite. And so the vanguard structure is still, historically, the most potent, strategic form that socialist revolution has ever taken.

It's gotten the farthest from any competing strategy by far. It's able to, at one point, take over half of the fucking world for all of its flaws, all of its contradictions, all of its mistakes, all of its foibles. It was able to advance the ball for internationalism, anti-impeer. imperialism, anti-colonialism, and the socialist struggle in a way that no other strategy ever has, ever has. That could change tomorrow. People are always invited to go out and organize and test new theories, but the theories that have actually resulted from and been produced by successful revolutionary struggles are always the ones that I personally am going to emphasize. That's what actually turned me into a Marxist from just an anarchist or a libertarian Marxist.

or a general socialist back in the day was after I got a grasp on the theory, I understood the critique of capitalism, I understood the critique of colonialism, imperialism. My next question was, well, what's actually fucking worked? What's actually fucking worked? And that led me to Marxism, to Lenin, to Che, to Fidel, to Mao, to Rosa Luxembourg, to, you know, the PFLP,

the comrades in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas, all these movements that have, adopted Marxist methodology and strategy to their specific conditions and made advancements that were unmatched by any competing strategic formulation. Back to the text. In this, this mass line, Fidel is a master. His own special way of fusing himself with the people can be appreciated only by seeing him in action.

At the great public mass meetings, one can observe something like the dialogue of two tuning forks whose vibrations interact, producing new sounds. Fidel and the masses begin to vibrate together in a dialogue of growing intensity until they reached the climax in an abrupt conclusion crowned by our cry of struggle and victory. The difficult thing to understand for someone not living through the experience of the revolution is this close dialectical unity between the individual and the masses in which both are interrelated and at the same time in which the mass, as an aggregate of individuals interacts with its leaders. Some phenomena of this kind can be seen under capitalism when politicians appear capable of

mobilizing popular opinion. But when these are not genuine social movements, if they were, it would not be entirely correct, call them capitalist, they live only so long as the individual who inspires them or until the harshness of capitalist society puts an end to the people's illusions. And as an aside, we've seen that many times in just American history, where you have these populists or these mass mobilizers or these great orators who are able for a time to capture the mass's imagination and begin to mobilize them. But, you know, within the confines of a capitalist society, the institutional structures through which politics are expressed and a million other variables, ideological, superstructural, cultural, and just the economic material base

of the capitalist society, you know, those things always fizzle out. You know, after, like, even just Bernie Sanders in the United States context, 2016, if you were politically active at that time, which I was, there was a real sense like, holy shit. We might, this might be something. Many of us thought that. And I didn't think that just because I wanted to think that or because I was naive. It was because I was going to protest. I was going to mass community meetings.

I was going to these caucuses. I was talking to people. I was seeing people actually being mobilized and excited and pushing hard. And of course, Bernie's fucking flaws are very well known now, and the Democratic Party plunged that knife into his back and the movement that he gave voice to. And it went away. We saw that in the past with Eugene Debs. We saw that in the past with the Black Panther Party. All of these iterations of socialism throughout American history have eventually fizzled out or been snapped over the knee of the state. And so these are the conditions in which we have to struggle. And they are different conditions in the wake of a successful revolution, although there's difficulties, of course, in both. And, you know, one more thing I want to talk about a little bit here

before I get back to the text is this problem of capital mobility. There have been times in history, most times in history, where capital, in the history of capitalism, where capital was really rooted in the nation. that it was kind of constrained, right? If you were in the first gilded age, there wasn't necessarily a global market. There wasn't, you know, an ability to travel all over the world with modern technology like we have today and carry your capital across borders and let it flow.

It's really a product of neoliberal globalization that took an already globalized capitalism and really intensified that process. So now, one of the things that faces electoral socialism and social democracy as well as revolutionary socialist struggles is the ability for capital to, we call it capital strike or capital flight. In one way or another, capital no longer beholden to a single nation state in a really new way can move, can shift, can pull out its investments, can take capital. can take investments can really hurt the economy. If a Bernie Sanders or a Mom Donnie type figure, a Social Democrat or Democratic Socialist, pretty much the same thing in the end, if they were able to win electorally on a national level, if they were able to build a coalition in the House and Senate, win majorities.

Imagine a DSA majority in the House and the Senate, backed by mass mobilization on the streets, protests, organizing in communities, nested up all the way to a successful electoral front of, of, you know, let's just say democratic socialists, who we might have criticisms of, but obviously that would be a huge improvement on anything we've had in American history politically. It would be by far, it would represent the most left wing that the U.S. has ever gone politically and economically. And even if they did it all the right way, and let's just set aside fascism and set aside violence, set aside coups, all that aside, what would Capital do?

If there was an actual political movement that succeeded, Capital would flee. Capital would go on strike. Capital would move. One of the things in California, they're trying to do the billionaire tax. Gavin Newsom's slimy little fucking ass comes out, and he's worried because if we just do it in California, well, they'll just move to a different state. You know, when Mamdani in New York rose to power, all the fucking rich New York, Yorkers like, we'll just leave, we'll move to Florida. Some of them have, some of them don't. Some of them suck it up. And Mom Donnie isn't really doing a full frontal assault on the rich in any serious way that would really necessitate them to make big moves. But if he did,

if it were like that, Capital has this ability to move, to pull its resources out. And that's something that, whether you're an electoral socialist, a Social Democrat or a Democratic socialist, or a revolutionary socialist, or, you know, supporting of whatever advances the ball in any direction, that is something you're going to have to contend with, and that is something the masses are going to have to be prepared for. When a socialist revolution happens around the world, the international imperialist version of that is sanctions regimes, right? Just standing up to American power, standing up to Israel in any way, not even building a socialist economy, but just standing up against imperialism, refusing to allow Western corporations to plunder and rape

your country for its resources and siphon it to the imperial core. That gets you the punishment of a sanctions regime, which deprives your people of medicine, which deprives your ability to trade freely with the rest of the world, often stifles, if not reverses economic growth, reduces a country's ability to take economic growth and turn it into technological advancement to develop their productive forces, their science, their medicine, their technology. It's suffocates grabbing a country by the throat and throttling them, So they can't breathe.

And these are the ways that capital punishes. And that's something that is true. And we're going to have to increasingly deal with. And the new component of it is the hypermobility, the internationalization of capital. To the point where a lot of these capitalists, they'll buy property in Russia. They'll buy property in Europe. They'll buy property coastal property here in the United States. And they'll just move around.

They'll flee. If it gets too hot in one country, they'll go to another. And this way, they can still coalesce their interests. They can still fight for their interest. They're not captured by a single nation state. And the threat of a popular uprising is not as scary to them precisely because they can do that. And what is the socialist response? You have to prepare the masses for it. You have to have a movement that is strong enough to be willing to endure. the inevitable, whether you're a social democrat or a revolutionary, you have to prepare people to deal with the inevitable economic downturn as capital recoils and shrinks and goes on strike and punishes. And at the same time, what's the real solution to that? Here's the social democratic problem. They want to do these policies, you know, expand the welfare state, redistribute wealth

that requires taxing the rich, and really in a lot of instances in the capitalist modality requires economic growth to have a surplus by which you can leverage and put into these programs. You can do some of it by increasing taxes on the rich. You can do a lot of it by cutting down our military costs and taking our bases back. And all those things would be good and having the U.S. imperial apparatus be dismantled abroad would be good for my anti-imperialist red line. All those things would be good. but eventually you still, because you're a social Democrat, because you're operating in the confines and the context of capitalist markets and international capitalism, you have to walk this line

between pursuing your policies and not pissing off the rich too much, right? If you piss off the rich too much, then they will do that. They'll extract their capital. they'll result in economic stagnation or anti-growth or recession or depression. And that's the way that they would punish you, create pressure on the people to then vote in a candidate that would more easily serve their interest. The benefit of a revolution, you don't have to give a fuck about them anymore. You don't have to placate them. You don't have to walk that line.

You storm the Bastille. You bring out the guillatines. That's our solution to that problem. but the capital was privately owned. It has to be democratized. That is a process with its ups and downs and its own contradictions. But eventually, if the people can persevere enough, if they're educated enough, if they are headstrong enough, knowing that this is coming, knowing that they have to endure, building the dual power and community structures from the bottom up, as well as the institutional powers from the top down, to try our best to deal with it. in the meantime, our ultimate solution to that problem is that we want to socialize and democratize

capital itself. Socialism seeks to rip capital and the ability to invest in things away from private hands, which are about maximization of profit and the replication of capital for individual economic interest, rip it away from them, socialize and democratize it, so that we could take capital to democratically decide where that capital needs to go, what projects are worth funding. This is the real economic democracy. The capitalist class as such would be undermined by the socialization and democratization of capital. That is a process, though. And there's different ways of dealing. Look how China deals with it. China allows the private accumulation of capital. And although it takes, you know, command of the heights of the economy,

in many respects, and it does discipline and subordinate capital in various ways, regulates capital in various ways. It has decided that allowing billionaires who submit themselves to the national interest, right, allowing billionaires to deploy capital in non-essential parts of the economy and industry, in consumer markets and stuff like that, is their, is their approach. There are various versions within the old Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc who did things differently. Every situation is different. Your overall economic template is different.

You know, the economic status of your country during and after the revolution is different. Your capacity to trade and to have free trade amongst allied countries or to be attacked militarily and economically. Those are all different. So I understand why there would be different approaches to that, right? Even the new economic plan under the Bolsheviks and Lenin was an attempt to try to navigate some of these contradictions. But all that is to say, think about the difficulty of capital mobility, and think about how that applies to any left-wing strategy from electoral to revolutionary. Think about how the electoral democratic socialists have to walk that middle line and subordinate themselves to some extent so it's not to spook capital too much in order to see. their political goals advanced, although capital is very petty and petulant, and you know,

you can't ever make them fucking happy. So they'll always be assholes and dicks about it, no matter how much you try to walk that line. And the revolution, which is much harder to do than win elections, much, much harder to do, does have a solution to that problem, but even that would require radical transitionary period. And again, the difficulty of a globalized post-neutral neoliberal globalization international capitalist class with property and holdings and investment vehicles throughout the world, no longer centered in one nation, allows capital be much more nimble in escaping taxes or regulation or subordination or anything like that. And this is, I think, a unique dynamic of the 21st century that was apparent and was existent

in more elementary forms in the last century, but, you know, post-1990, post-globalization has really taken on a new dynamics. We're thinking about. Back to the text. In capitalist society, man is controlled by a pitiless law, usually beyond his comprehension. The alienated human specimen is tied to society as a whole by an invisible umbilical cord, the law of value. This law acts upon all aspects of his life, shaping his course and destiny.

The laws of capitalism, which are blind and are invisible to ordinary people, act upon the individual without his being aware of it. He sees only the vastness of a seemingly infinite horizon before him. That is how it is painted by capitalist propagandists who purport to draw a lesson from the example of Rockefeller, whether or not it is true, about the possibilities of success. the amount of poverty and suffering required for a Rockefeller to emerge, and the amount of depravity entailed in the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude are left out of the picture.

And it's not always possible for the popular forces to make these concepts clear. So what is he saying there? That the very, you know, the capitalist will say, you can be rich too, right? And the capitalists will say, the guys that got rich, they got rich by like super, hard work and innovation and they created so many jobs and in fact your job is tied to these guys being super rich you should be thankful to all the propaganda we hear from from you know capitalists and their and their lackeys in the media obscures purposefully the relationship between the amassing the massive amassing of personal wealth and the emiseration of many many many others

that you literally cannot become a billionaire in this world without inserting yourselves in chains and structures of exploitation and oppression and immiseration. There is just no way to accumulate that much money as an individual without harming and emiserating other human beings. And not only in a national sense, in an international sense, the supply chains all over the world, riddled with exploitation, with in some cases slavery and child labor, forced labor, coerced labor. And then even in the context of more above board markets and structures, you have just precarity and debt and exploitation and the basic structure of how profit accumulates and how labor is robbed in that process. Trying to, Che is saying it's difficult to work through the propaganda and to explain the realities because,

one thing that capitalism does in class society and its feudal enslaved forms always have is naturalize themselves. These systems assert themselves as natural. In the case of feudalism, as divinely ordained. In the case of capitalism in a scientific age, it's no longer about God and divine hierarchies. It's about human nature. And these are just how we're wired psychologically and biologically. And to go against this would be to go against human nature. And that's why socialism always fails, right? All of these are processes of attempting to naturalize unnatural and historically contingent systems. So, Che is pointing out the difficulty of making that clear to the masses, to people. Some people get it right away. Some people push back on it. Some people

are peppered with propaganda. They can't quite see through it. Some people are just kind of confused and muddled about the whole thing. You know, that's always going to be a difficulty. It's a difficulty now and just basic organizing and political education in the United States, let alone in the context of a revolution going through, you know, the difficulties and contradictions of that. Back to the text. A discussion of how the workers in the imperialist countries gradually lose the spirit of working class internationalism due to a certain degree of complicity in the exploitation of the dependent

countries and how this at the same time weakens the combativity of the masses in the imperialist countries would be appropriate here. But that is a theme which goes beyond the aim of these notes. So that was just a parenthetical, and he's talking about us. So let's say it again. A discussion of how the workers in the imperialist countries gradually lose the spirit of working class internationalism due to a certain degree of complicity in the exploitation of the dependent countries

and how this at the same time weakens the combativity of the masses in the imperialist countries would be appropriate to talk about here. But that's the theme which goes beyond the aim of these notes. So there's so much contained in the... in a parenthetical there. Back to the text. In any case, the road to success is pictured as beset with perils, perils that it would seem an individual with the proper qualities can overcome to attain

the goal. The reward is seen in the distance. The way is lonely. Furthermore, it is a contest among wolves. One can win only at the cost of the failure of others. I would now like to try to define the individual, the actor, and the actor. in this strange and moving drama of the building of socialism in his dual existence as a unique being and as a member of society.

I think the place to start is to recognize his quality of incompleteness, of being an unfinished product. The vestiges of the past are brought into the present in the individual consciousness, and a continual labor is necessary to eradicate them. The process is two-sided. On the one side, Society acts through direct and indirect education. On the other, the individual submits himself to a conscious process of self-education. The new society in formation has to compete fiercely with the past. This past makes itself felt not only in the individual consciousness, in which the residue of an education systematically oriented toward isolating the individual still weighs heavily,

but also through the very character of this transition period in which commodities, relations still persist. The commodity is the economic cell of capitalist society. So long as it exists, its effects will make themselves felt in the organization of production and, consequently, in human consciousness. Marx outlined the transition period as resulting from the explosive transformation of the capitalist system destroyed by its own contradictions. In historical reality, however, we have seen that some countries that were weak limbs on the tree of imperialism were torn off first, a phenomenon foreseen by Lenin. In these countries, capitalism had developed sufficiently to make its effects felt by the people

in one way or another, but it was not capitalism's internal contradictions that, having exhausted all possibilities, caused the system to explode. The struggle for liberation from a foreign oppressor, the misery caused by external events such as war, whose consequences privileged classes place on the backs of the exploited. Liberation movements aimed at overthrowing neocolonial regimes. These are the usual factors in unleashing this kind of explosion. Conscious action does the rest. So right there, he's just basically saying, we're living in the era of imperialism.

And whereas as Marx assumed that this revolution would occur at the cutting edge of capitalist dynamic development, where the productive forces were developed, up to such an extent that they became absurd in relation to the relations of production and that this contradiction within the capitalist system highly advanced pushing itself to its limits. That would be the cause of socialist revolution. And with Lenin and the rise of the Bolshevik revolution, we're talking about weak links in the imperialist chain. We're talking about the primary contradiction globally being imperialism.

And we see time and time again that the socialist revolutions are. aren't happening, as Marx might have, as Marx assumed they would, in the most advanced capitalist countries, they're happening in areas where capitalism might not be as advanced, as developed, but which is being subject to imperialist or neocolonial domination. And it is that domination that spurs people to fight back and in the process of fighting back, understand the connections to global capitalism and to become, you know, socialist in their approach, which was true of Cuba. Cuban revolutionaries didn't set out as principled Marxist Leninist. They became Marxist Leninist through the process of revolution. They were just initially fighting for national

liberation from the puppet dictatorship of Batista and the horrific violent fascist Batista regime. And in the process of that struggle, you know, that process was politically educative. And of course, figures like Che and Fidel are then reading Marx and understanding it. and filling out that theoretical background knowledge in that process. So he's basically saying that we live in the era of imperialism. Lenin was right. That's why they happen here and not over there. And earlier he made that point about the complicity of the working class in the Imperial Corps,

being to some degree tied into the exploitation of the global south of the dependent countries, and that actually acting as a sort of nullifying and sedating effect on the Imperial Corps and that's why you get reactionary nationalists in the Imperial Corps. Turn the fucking desert into glass. Bomb them all the hell. They've been fighting for thousands of years. Kick those motherfuckers back.

Go back to your own fucking country. The working class, not the entire working class, not every member of the working class, but a significant portion of them they identify with their bourgeoisie, with their national identity, and that completely undermines

the internationalism of the working class. as consciousness. So those things had to be worked out and made sense of. And Lenin and Che here are making sense of that. Back to the text. A complete education for social labor has not yet taken place in these countries. And wealth is far from being within the reach of the masses through the simple process of appropriation. Under development on the one hand and the usual flight of capital on the other make a rapid transition without sacrifices impossible. That's what I was just saying earlier. Let me read that again. Under development on the one hand, and the usual flight

of capital on the other make a rapid transition without sacrifices impossible. There remains a long way to go in constructing the economic base, and the temptation is very great to follow the beaten track of material interest as the lever with which to accelerate development. There is the danger that the forest will not be seen for the trees. The pipe dream that socialism can be achieved with the help of the dull instruments left to us by capitalism, the commodity as the economic cell, profitability, individual material interest as a lever, etc., can lead into a blind alley. And you wind up there after having traveled a long distance with many crossroads,

and it is hard to figure out just where you took the wrong turn. Meanwhile, the economic foundation that has been laid has done its work of undermining the development of consciousness. To build communism, it is necessary. simultaneous with the new material foundations to build the new man. So let me say that again, because he's echoing a core aspect of everything I argue. To build communism, it is necessary. Simultaneous with the new material foundations to build the new man, the new person.

The subjective aspect of revolution, along with the material aspect of revolution. These things are not sequential. One doesn't come before the other. They are simultaneous. They are dialectical. They co-occur. And so it is our responsibility, as I always say, not only to combat and struggle and organize and politically educate and operate on the outward objective political economic social terrain of struggle, but also at the same time to take seriously the need for our own self-education, the own elevation of our inner lives, the own construction of a socialist and communist subjectivity. And I find in my work and the concept behind the Bodhisatt for revolutionary is that it is remarkable how the deconstruction of ego identification and the expansion of consciousness beyond ego identification is remarkably correlative with what it would take subjectively to build a society of communists. That is it is precisely that hyper and automatic identification with ego, which is about me, the individual.

I want, I desire, I'm going to get, I'm scared, I need to dominate, I need to oppress, I need to keep the others over there so I can be safe. I need to accrue for me a mountain of wealth and privilege and comfort and make sure nobody else can take it for me. I'm always under threat, always looking out for me. The identification with the egoic structure in our consciousness is correlated with class society. And if you take a bunch of people conditioned in that, unable to see beyond ego identification, and try to build communism with them, you're going to run into these subjective limitations of that process. And that's when you get opportunism. That's when you get people out for themselves. We've seen it a million fucking times.

And so as we're building socialism through struggle and organizing, we also have to build the subjective capacity to inhabit a socialist world. And that, you know, I don't think that requires the overcoming of ego. I think it requires the maturation of ego and the humbling of the ego. Mature people, wise people are not narcissistic. They are not self-centered. They are not fixated on their own self and desire and advancement. The wisest, most mature people that you know that you've ever met in one way or another have subordinated their egoic goals and striving,

and desire machine for something bigger than themselves. Something bigger than themselves. That project can be sort of aborted and thwarted in various ways. It can go into dark places. You know, if you're like a Nazi and you're willing to go fight and die and do a mass shooting because you think it's going to start the race war, you might think that you're living for something bigger than yourself, but the whole structure of racism and violence and imposing it on others is still rooted in its trembling little ego.

So the ego thinks it's living for something bigger than itself, but it's fundamentally still an egoic project. To live for something bigger than yourself, to truly transcend the ego, it situates your whole being toward the service of others, towards love and compassion and unity, not for more division. Anything that seeks to divide, to isolate, to hurt, to keep them over there and us over here and keep us pure from those impure people over there, that is a reification of the ego, even if ostensual. You are, you are framing it as fighting for something bigger than yourself. And in those instances, like, fascists are ready to die for their distorted, dark vision of humanity. So if you're willing to die for something, you are, in a sense, living for something bigger than yourself, because you're willing to annihilate yourself for that thing.

But you're still living for something that emerges out of the ego. And you see this with, like, religious fascists of every stripe, you know, total dogmatists. there's a fanatical feverish insanity that that project can take. But true ego transcendence, I think, is a process by which we can build the subjectivities necessary to inhabit a post, not just post-capitalist, a post-class society. Yeah, imagine trying to build communism with the average American subjectivity right now. You know, you can't even tell people like, I'm not paying for your fucking health care. I'm not, I'm not going to wear a mask because you're scared.

I'm not going to fucking wear a mask. I can't breathe, and I have to breathe my own fucking breath, wearing a stupid fucking mask because you're fucking scared. Like, that mentality permeates American culture, capitalist societies more broadly. You can't build a better world with a bunch of little ego freaks. And I count myself, I mean, we're all, I'm not trying to. to act superior here. We're all ego identified most of the time, but it is a slow transition out of ego identification and toward a more expansive awareness, where your awareness and your consciousness are not confined into the pill bottle of the ego, but expand well beyond it. The

ego is still there. The personality structure is still there, right? But instead of being inhabited and automatically identified with, it is observed and not necessarily identified with. and as I say in my book in the same way that humans have overcome automatic identification with instincts. We all have instincts to eat, sleep, and fuck. Primordial evolutionary instincts, right? All the time we subordinate them. You go on a diet, you have an awareness that is expanded beyond the instinct for hunger. You can subordinate that instinct to a higher cause, to a reason, to a broader abstract goal that you want to,

in that case, perhaps it's losing weight or getting healthier. A sex, we're all sexual animals, right? Some people have more or less libido, but for the most part, at least, at certain parts of our lives, we are aflame with sexual desire. But we are constantly subordinating that. You're not going to be a freak that goes out and fucking rips people's clothes off or pulls out your genitals and shows people. Like, there are people like that.

They go to fucking jail and they're perverts and weirdos and freaks. You know, so we have the instinct, but we're not so identified. with it that we can't expand beyond it and subordinate it to a higher, to higher reason, to higher morality. And same with all the instincts. So animals are automatically identified with instincts. They don't have egos. They haven't built abstract linguistic thought and conceptual inner chatter. They don't have abstract conceptions of themselves as a separate thing. You know, our personality structures, how you think about yourself. You have a relationship with yourself, right? A dog or an owl or a fish. they don't have

an interlinguistic relationship to themselves. They are driven by instinct. The lion hunts the gazelle, the gazelle fucking runs. They're not balancing the morality of it. A lion doesn't hold himself back because he sees that the gazelle

just gave birth to a child and he doesn't want to take a mother away from their child. They're not subordinating instincts to higher forms of reason or morality. They're instinct identified. Humans have got beyond that. Now we're ego identified.

But if we were able to expand beyond instincts. We don't lose instincts. We still get hungry. We still get tired. We still want to fuck. But those are those are not things that we automatically have to play out. And in the same exact way, we want the next step in the evolution of consciousness is the ability to expand beyond the ego. It's still there. Personality structure is still there. It's conditioned by your society you were brought up in, the language you speak. You know, there's still an aspect of you that can think inwardly, think through a hard problem, to some extent, even have perhaps a rich inner life, which is just to say a rich dynamic inner relationship with your own existence, right?

But you are not so enamored by that that you automatically have to identify with that, which causes so much suffering. You can step back from that. You can silence that. You can silence the inner chatter. That is a more evolved, more mature human being. So even like, you know, we're living in the world of egos. Capitalism is like this ego monster freak globalized to the economic and global scale.

Super mature, wise people aren't meditating. They're not enlightened in most cases. But what they have done is they've seen the limitations of their ego. Their ego has been humbled. And they don't let their ego drive the fucking car anymore. And the place beyond that, that higher upper echelon of like normal wisdom, You can meet people in your life that are like that. Hopefully many of us are kind of like that,

especially as you age, you get less narcissistic, hopefully. The step beyond that would be an expansion of conscious awareness that totally transcends ego identification and becomes a new way of relating to yourself in the world that is outside of the trembling ego and its orientation to the world. So, you know, that's the that's the, that's the basic argument and it's fascinating to see Che not arguing down those exact lines

but I'm very much building on the core elements that Che is offering here and when he says to build communism it is necessary simultaneous with new material foundations to build the new man the new person I am echoing that sentiment and stuff like the Bodhisattva revolutionary and everything I just said back to the text

that is why it is very important to choose the right instrument for mobilizing the masses. Basically, this instrument must be moral in character, without neglecting, however, a correct use of the material incentive, especially of a social character. As I have already said, in moments of great peril,

it is easy to muster a powerful response to moral incentives. Retaining their effect, however, requires the development of a consciousness in which there is a new scale of values. Society as a whole must be converted into a gigantic school. In rough outline, this phenomenon is similar to the process by which capitalist consciousness was formed in its initial period.

Capitalism uses force, but it also educates people in the system. Direct propaganda is carried out by those entrusted with explaining the inevitability of class society, either through some theory of divine origin or a mechanical theory of natural law, something I said earlier. This lulls the masses, since they see themselves as being oppressed by an evil against, which it is impossible to struggle. As an aside, I was just saying that about how these systems naturalize themselves. And I use the example of the divine right of kings under feudalism.

And then I said in the scientific age, capitalism now talks about like natural law and human nature. And like to go against that is like to go against nature itself. It's almost like anti-scientific to do anything other than capitalism. That's the way in modernity we naturalize the system through science or some bastardized, laughable form of it. Scientism. And then in the feudal arrangements, pre-enlightenment, pre-science, yeah, it's God. It's naturalized because this is the way that God set things up. Who are you to go

against God? Going back to ancient Greece and slave societies, ancient Rome, yes, this is the upper echelon. There are, there's not one God. There are many gods. This is the world they live in. There are better humans and worse humans. There are humans born to be philosopher kings, and there are humans born to be their slaves. That's natural. That's how it's supposed to be. In all these instances, class society attempts to naturalize itself. And people obviously kind of fall for it. They're born in that system.

Their parents were born in that system. Their grandparents were born in that system. Their kids are being raised in that system. It's easy to think that the system you're in, the only system you've ever known, is in some way, shape, or form natural. And if somebody can come to you and say, it is natural and trying to do anything different than this

is so unnatural that it will everything you, anything good you do have will be lost because you're going against science, against human nature. Yeah, people would be like, oh, okay, okay, yeah, I don't want to do that. So then, you know, Che is talking about this, this aspect in which consciousness is formed under capitalism, superstructure of a base, and that, you know, this propaganda, it can be forced on people, but it's also just a natural structural product of the system. The superstructure of capitalism is a natural product. You don't need a conspiracy theory. You don't need people planning on how to go out and trick people.

The logic itself emerges from the base. And the logic perpetuates itself throughout all the cultural, legal, political, religious institutions within a given society, which requires, in order to break out of that, high levels of independent thought, of critical thought, of study of self-education, like all of us are engaged in, and then turning around trying to educate other people about it, which I'm engaged in and many of you are engaged in. Even if you're just organizing, you don't see yourself as doing like political education. You are doing political education.

Organizing is some of the most potent form of political education, more potent than me talking into a mic. Organizing people around their material interest is an educative process. and it can kind of break down some of the cages of capitalist propaganda and the naturalism of it. But when Che says something like that and I said something earlier, I wanted to be clear, I've never read this text. This is the first time I'm opening this text. I've heard that quote from it, but I've never read this document in my entire life. So it's really cool when I say something like that and then like two pages later, Che makes that exact same point.

It lets me know I'm on the right path. and the spirit of Che is alive. All right, back to the text. This lulls the masses, since they see themselves as being oppressed by an evil against which it's impossible to struggle, right? Naturalized systems. Next comes hope of improvement. And in this, capitalism differed from the earlier caste systems, which offered no way out. For some people, the principle of the caste system will remain in effect.

The reward for the obedient is to be transported after death, some fabulous other world where, according to the old beliefs, good people are rewarded. For other people, there is this innovation. Class divisions are determined by fate, but individuals can rise out of their class through work, initiative, etc. This process and the myth of the self-made man are profoundly hypocritical. It is the self-serving effort to turn a lie into the truth. In our case, direct education acquires a much greater importance. The explanation is convincing because it is true. No subterfuge is needed. It is carried on by the state's educational apparatus as a function of general, technical, and ideological education through such

agencies as the Ministry of Education and the party's informal apparatus. Education takes hold among the masses, and the foreseen new attitude tends to become a habit. The masses continue to make it their own and to influence those who have not yet educated themselves. This is the indirect form of educating the masses, just as powerful as the other. So he's saying there, like, the explanation is convincing because it's true, no subterfuge is needed. What he's saying is, unlike the propagandists for class society, we don't have to lie. Like, you know, what we're saying about this system, about how capitalism arose, about how the superstructures formed from the base, you know, how feudalism, like, lied to its people, saying that this is the divine rights and how

capitalism lies to people saying that this is a this is human nature those things are not true literally not true and so when you don't have truth on your side you have to engage in subterfuge or manipulation um you have to lie to people uh to deceive them in one way or another and then of course people who are convinced by this lie go out and propagate the lie not knowing they're propagating a lie they think they're speaking the truth um and so it's not even like the that is a pro-capitalist or whatever is always and everywhere engaged in like conscious manipulation and subterfuge right they're convinced they've been conditioned in the system they're convinced it's true and so when they go out and propagandize that and spread their beliefs they mean it and so they're not

actually lying but the whole system by which that subjectivity is produced is a lie is founded on untruths, which is basically a mask to naturalize an unnatural and unjust process of exploitation and personal accumulation of wealth at the expense of everyone else and increasingly of the planet itself. So, you know, socialists, we don't need a lie. And that's why Marx and Engel said communists disdain to conceal their views. We're not going to pretend to be something we're not. We're not, we don't have to lie and manipulate people into believing the things that we believe. you know we're not necessarily right about everything but the general thrust of what we say about capitalism about imperialism that's fucking true and the moral weight of like truth mixed with justice and a sincere

effort to fight against oppression and exploitation that is true and it speaks to something in our human spirit and once people start picking up on it just like probably you you dear listener there was a time when you had never heard of any of this stuff when you were just kind of like you know, soaking in the in the hot tub of capitalist propaganda because you're just from the society watching its movies, going to its schools, watching its television shows, reading its books, you know, listening to its politicians. And then something for some reason, it's all different for all of us. We started to question the system.

Maybe we had some lived experience that contradicted what the system told us was the case about the system. We saw the injustices of it. We sought to like, why is, if they, if what they say is true, if what I was taught to believe is true, then why does X, Y, and Z happen? That seems to be a contradiction. And through that process of recognizing a contradiction between what the society says is true and what actually seems to be true, we begin to drive ourselves forward to be propelled forward into study, into research, into deepening our understanding of structures and systems

and history and philosophy and economics. And we learn, not that we are the sole purveyors or possessors of truth, capital T, but we learn the lies of the system. And we learn that we can counteract those lies with the truth. The truth often really is on our side in a way that it's not on the side of the racist and the fascist and the reactionary, who also have critiques of the status quo, but take it in the total opposite direction. The truth is not on your side if you say white people are inherently superior. We build civilization and the browns and the blacks.

They just, they ride in our coattails and they, they flood our cities because we're the best. We make these great countries and they are jealous. So they come in our cities and our countries and fucking ruin. The truth is not on your side. Genuinely. And I'm not saying that from a position of like bias where my side is true and their side is false. Like any objective analysis, aliens coming down, right? Super advanced aliens coming down and analyzing the situation, assuming they have, you know,

access to like objective analysis from a higher level where they can actually look at. at human society and understand it even deeper than humans themselves do. There's no way they're coming out the other end of that doing seek hails. You know, there's no way they're coming out the other end of that saying Elon Musk deserves a trillion dollars. No. And so in that sense, like truly truth is on our side, it's often hard to explain in combating the conditioning makes it particularly difficult, whereas the fascist just has to play into

the already existing conditioning, right? the hyper individualism, the precarity and the fear of the other, mistrust, the want for safety, the subconscious drive of fear and hatred and disgust. These things are cultivated under class society and under the colonialist superstructure. And so it's easy to play into those. And, you know, reactionaries often can mobilize a lot of people and get a lot of people over to their side for a time. But their political projects never suggest. succeed because they're rooted in lies. And so you see fascist movement after fascist movement

implode on itself. Unlike socialism, it often has the support of the capitalist class in those countries, at least huge parts of the capitalist class. And despite that support those systems and those ways of running things fizzle out, capitalism itself is fizzling out. It's no longer able to produce what it could in a past given certain conditions. And it's ramping up its contradictions. And people are seeing the system is fucking insane and works less and less. The truth is not on their side. That should not make us arrogant.

It should actually humble us. That the truth is generally on our side, but we still have a lot to learn. And we're still going to be humbled in ways that we weren't expecting. And there are things that we think are true which are going to turn out to be false. And we're going to have to be able in the name of truth, except that we were wrong about this or that thing. And that process is still happening to all of us. So don't ever think that this gives you a reason to be haughty or cocky or conceded or overly confident.

Because at the end of the day, the mountain of things we don't know will always be infinitely larger than the ant-hill of things we do, just by virtue of us being limited sentient creatures. products of biological evolution with certain nervous systems that can't possibly comprehend everything or have access to it or have the bandwidth to remember everything that it learns, let alone learn everything there is to know and remember it. So food for thought and the importance, of course, of political education. Back to the text. But the process is a conscious one. The individual continually feels the impact of the new social power and perceives that he does not entirely measure up to its standards. Under the pressure of indirect education, he tries to adjust himself to a situation

that he feels his right and that his own lack of development had prevented him from reaching previously. In short, he educates himself. In this period of the building of socialism, we can see the new man, the new person being born. His image is not yet completely finished. It never will be, since the process goes forward hand in hand with the development of new economic forms. Let me say that again. In this period of the building of socialism, we can see the new person being born. His image is not yet completely finished. It never will be since the process goes forward hand in hand with the development of new economic forms. So what Jay is saying there is the dialectical relationship between the subjective and the objective continue to play out. There's no final

destination point. In history or in the dialectic, contradictions never all of a sudden reach a final point and then disappear forever history life nature is moved forward is an ongoing evolutionary process and human beings themselves as nietzsche said is a is a creature in transition i'm leaving aside much of also what nietzsche thought you know he said that humans feel themselves really to be a creature in transition we come out of apes and and we're headed towards something we don't know um and and and evolution, biological and cultural evolution, is still playing out. There is no endpoint. What are humans going to be like in a million years if we survive that long?

You know, they're going to be exactly like us? No, they're going to be much, what were humans like a million years ago? Homo sapiens didn't even exist yet. Our particular form of like the great apes evolutionary tree branch, anatomically modern human beings came about 200, 300,000 years ago at the absolute latest. Before that were predecessors and, you know, evolutionary ancestors. So a million years ago, there's no human beings. We were basically much more like chimps a million years ago.

We were chimp-like. And now look where we are. And now think if we went from chimps to fucking human beings with art and philosophy and technology, smashing atoms in the CERN particle collider, building space systems and ships that orbit around the planet you know developing vaccines curing diseases you know with all the other

shit that that is to our detriment the lower forms of our nature those are still profound unprecedented staggering possibilities that couldn't even be imagined a million years ago and so you add technology in the mix and try to think what humans are going to be like

in a million years if we survive it's utterly impossible so we are always in in process and that's that's a truth of dialectics in general. Nothing's ever finished. There's no end point. It is constant evolution, constant unfolding. Back to the text. Aside from those whose lack of education makes them take the solitary road towards satisfying their own personal ambitions, there are those, even within this new panorama of a unified march forward, who have a tendency to walk separate from the masses accompanying them. What is important, however, is that each day men are acquiring ever more consciousness of the need for their incorporation into society and, at the same time, of their importance as the motor of that society.

They no longer travel completely alone over lost roads toward distant aspirations. They follow their vanguard, consisting of the party, the advance workers, the advanced men and women who walk in unity with the masses and in close communion with them. The vanguards have their eyes fixed on the future and its reward. but it is not a vision of something for the individual. The prize is the new society in which men and women will have different characteristics, the society of communist man. So let me say that again. The vanguards have their eyes fixed on the future and its reward,

but it's not a vision of something for the individual. It's so funny because that reminds me of like, you know, Buddhist conceptions of enlightenment, where it's like the ego is trying to become enlightened. It wants to obtain enlightenment, right? It hears about it. It kind of understands it. It's like, oh, this place of contentment and peace. So the ego does what the ego does, which is desire and grasp and strive and reach for,

trying to obtain a thing, right? But the irony of the whole process is if you ever get that advanced in Buddhist meditation practice, it is precisely the thing that thinks it can obtain enlightenment that goes away. So in the end, you get nothing. because the you that wanted the thing is the thing that fucking disappears. So when he says the vanguard have their eyes fixed on the future

and its reward, but it's not a vision of something for the individual, it kind of resonates interestingly with that, in my opinion. But he says the prize is the new society in which men will have different characteristics, the society of communist man. And again, he's just saying,

this process of socialism is not only transforming the material world and the organization of of the material world, it at the same exact time is transforming our consciousness. And that process continues to play out side by side dialectically until, you know, people and material processes coalesce together to be able to move through socialism and toward communism, which is itself a continual evolution and unfolding in advancement. Back to the text.

The road is long and full of difficulties. At times, we lose our way and must turn back. At other times we go too fast and separate ourselves from the masses. Sometimes we go too slow and feel the hot breath of those treading at our heels. In our zeal as revolutionists, we try to move ahead as fast as possible, clearing the way. But we know we must draw our nourishment from the masses, and that it can advance more rapidly only if we aspire it by our example. Despite the importance given to moral incentives,

the fact that there remains a division into two main groups, excluding, of course, the minority that, for one reason or another, does not participate in the building of socialism, indicates the relative lack of development of social consciousness. The Vanguard group is ideologically more advanced than the masses. The latter understands the new values, but not sufficiently. While among the former, there has been a qualitative change that enables them to make sacrifices in their capacity as an advanced guard, the latter, the masses see only part of the picture and must be sub-sumption. to incentives and pressures of a certain intensity. This is the dictatorship of the proletariat

operating not only on the defeated class, but also on individuals of the victorious class. So as an aside, this is incredibly crucial, and it's not saying, like, it's not this superior situation where, like, the vanguard knows best, just shut up and listen to us. It's like the masses and the vanguard are in dialectical relationship. Each has something the other doesn't. A vanguard without the masses is just a sect. It's just a re-regear. It's just a re-react. reading group, right? The masses without a vanguard are just sort of disorganized and unable to move forward in a shared direction. And so the vanguard emerges from the masses. Certainly there are those within any movement that are more advanced that study the theoretical terrain, the historical

examples of socialism, learn and in that capacity lead, not as people who impose themselves on the masses, but as those who, in genuine socialist struggle, emerged naturally and organically from the masses. I think of a Che Guevara, but you could also think of a Fred Hampton, right? Fred Hampton was a part of the vanguard, of the vanguard. If the Black Panthers were the vanguard of socialism in the United States, arguable, we could debate that. They certainly had a mass base in their community. They certainly made huge advancements that haven't really been replicated sense. And they were able to do that precisely because they had leaders like Fred Hampton, right, who was not somebody who imposed himself on the masses. He got his vanguard status

precisely because of the respect and credibility he earned among the masses. He emerged out of the masses, right? And that is that that is their true van, despite the criticisms of the vanguard Party, that they're elitist, that they turn up their noses at the masses, that they think that they know best, and they tell the masses, they heard the masses, they impose on the masses. You know, not saying that's never happened, but in genuine socialist development, that whole metaphysical static division between them and them, these two groups, collapses into a dialectical unity. And real vanguard leaders understand this.

and they're not there to advance their own material interest, and that's where the consciousness comes in. To be in the vanguard is not only to be the most advanced theoretically in leading the revolutionary struggle, it's also to do the inner moral, spiritual, existential work to be worthy of that position. And if you don't do that subjective work, you betray the revolution.

You betray the masses. If you're still hyper-individualist, if you're still ambitious in the way that's just about you, right? If you're using your power and your leverage in this relatively privileged position to sort of weaponize that to get stuff for you,

sex or money or fame or recognition or power, you betrayed the revolution. It's not about you. And really, to really live like that is rare. There's a material vanguard that also has to be the subjective vanguard. That you take it seriously, not that we have a vanguard in the U.S. right now,

but if we hope to populate one, And if we hope to contribute to the, to the emergence of one, we better fucking do everything we can to develop our own subjectivities in the process of trying to develop the material forces of revolution, the objective forces of revolution. We have to take seriously, you know, our profound responsibility. And even that doesn't guarantee you're going to, you know, you can and you should be willing to contribute wherever you can. Dead Press says I can be a leader and I can be a follower. An old line, I forget what they said is on their album, Let's Get Free, I believe. But he was rapping something and he said, you know,

I can lead or I can follow. I can play my role. I can be in the vanguard. If I'm needed, I can fall back into the masses I will. I can be whatever needs to happen because this isn't whatever role I can play that will advance the ball. Because it's not about me anymore. You know, I don't have an ego that says, want to be in charge. I know what's right. You don't. Let me tell you. That subjectivity is the thing

that we're overcoming in this process. So I like the way that he's talking about it. And again, to the untrained ear, to the anti-Marxist, anti-Vanguardist ear, you could see why they would take it. Oh, come on. You guys are the special group and you guys lead the masses who don't understand enough. But is that not the case? Is that not the case that people need education that some people advance more than others, that some people are better organizers than others, that some people have just studied more and dedicated more time to learning the theory and are better at teaching it than others. Somebody could actually know the theory better than the second person, but the second person has the credibility or the charisma or the capacity to articulate it

in a way that the first person who might understand it technically better doesn't have. We've seen that in socialist revolutionary history. We're figures within a vanguard, somebody might be more advanced theoretically. but don't have the pull and the charisma and the ability to articulate or the qualities of a leader. Right? So they have to play a different role. That's fine. Only the ego would say, no, I want to be in that role.

No, I want that power. No, I know better than you. That's, that's an ego perspective. So that's precisely what has to be overcome to be worthy of the potential of being a part of a Vanguard party. Back to the text. All of this means that for total success, a series of mechanisms of revolutionary institutions is needed. Along with the image of the multitudes marching toward the future,

comes the concept of institutionalization as a harmonious set of channels, steps, restraints, and well-oiled mechanisms that facilitate the advance, that facilitate the natural selection of those destined to march in the vanguard, and that bestow rewards on those who fulfill their duties and punishments on those who commit a crime against the society that is being given. built. So there's a, there's a mechanism of, of restraint. Like if there is somebody that, that does take advantage of their, of their position, uses it for their own benefit, undermines the very premises of the revolutionary movement in the new society. There are punitive, extra punishments

for that person. Because you were given an inordinate amount of responsibility, and you, you took advantage of that and leveraged that position to benefit yourself at the expense of others. The worst crime you could commit, a crime against the entire movement that we've all been building together because your ego wants to assert itself and wants to get for itself something that somebody else doesn't have. Back to the text. This institutionalization of the revolution has not yet been achieved. We are looking for something new that will permit a complete identification between the government and the community in its entirety, something appropriate to the special conditions of the building of socialism, while avoiding to the utmost a transplanting of the

commonplaces of bourgeois democracy, such as legislative chambers, for example, into the society information. So you're saying, we don't want to replicate capitalist structures, bourgeois democratic structures, in our new socialist society, but we do need to find ways to hold that society, that government, that vanguard party accountable to the masses without, you know, the way that the bourgeois democracy pretends to do that is by the legislative chambers, the Senate, the division of the three branches of government, blah, blah, blah, checks and balances. And we see how well that actually works. That replicates capitalist logic.

It doesn't actually represent or give voice to working people, poor people. It's not really democratic in any serious way. And Lenin and Marx and angles, they said you can't just take the state wholesale and call it socialist. The state must be radically transformed. formed in the process of taking it over. And Che is echoing exactly that right now. Back to the text. Some experiments aimed at the gradual institutionalization of the revolution have been made,

but without undue haste. The greatest break has been our fear, lest any appearance of formality might separate us from the masses and from the individual, might make us lose sight of the ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration, to see man liberated from his alienation. despite the lack of institutions, which must be overcome gradually, the masses are now making history as a conscious collection of individuals fighting for the same cause. Man under socialism, despite his apparent standardization, is more complete. Despite the lack of a perfect mechanism for it, his opportunities for expressing himself

and making himself felt in the social organism are infinitely greater. So here he's saying the individual actually has more ways in which they can express themselves and participate in the construction and perpetuation of society than they do under capitalism despite the lie that socialism somehow is tyrannical to the individual, that only liberal capitalism really respects the individual. Give me a fucking break. So in this way, man or women, people are more complete under socialism. That's why Fred Hampton said, if you're scared of socialism, you're scared of yourself. because there is this shift of responsibility to each and every one of us,

whatever role you're playing in the struggle. We all have this new responsibility. And if you're scared of that, if you're scared of having more to contribute, more say, more responsibility, more obligation, more duties,

you know, more at stake, and you don't just want to be told what to do by the elites, forced to do by the elites, that's socialism. That's actually more democratic, than anything liberalism has ever produced. And if you're scared of that,

then you have to be scared of yourself, of your community, of your people. Because that's ultimately what is taking the lead here. That is the baton being ripped out of the hands of the capitalist and put into not a new elite or whatever, a new power structure, but into the hands of the masses themselves, to make a democratic society that extends democracy into the workplace, into the economy, that organizes the economy collectively around collective needs,

democratizes and socializes community life all the way up to national life and international life. Back to the text. It is still necessary to deepen his conscious participation, individual and collective, in all the mechanisms of management and production, and to link this to the idea of the need for technical and ideological education so that he sees how closely interdependent these processes are and how their advancement is truly parallel. in this way he will reach total consciousness of his social being which is equivalent to his full realization

as a human creature once the chains of alienation are broken so let me say that again in this way he will reach total consciousness of his social being and the analogy to the bodhisattva revolutionary and to buddhism is that in the process of overcoming automatic identification with the ego you begin to viscerally feel and see with increasing clarity and to the ability to see with increasing clarity your utter interdependence on all other human beings, on society itself, on the earth itself, on the cosmos itself. The barrier of separation between you and here and everything else out there is a barrier erected by identification with the ego. And when that barrier falls, you feel yourself to be part of this radically wider, bigger, interdependent process, that you and I are not separate. that us and the earth are not separate.

And that is sort of coming into consciousness, not of yourself as an individual separate ego that is put into the world and that one day will be obliterated from it, which scares the ego, but rather as the emergence of a node of a radically interconnected cosmos. And on the social level of a radically interconnected people,

of a civilizational level, we are deeply connected to every single one of all of our ancestors, Every person that came before us, every person that will come after us, we are nodes through which that spider web of connections actually passes, is made manifest and material in the real world. And as a society, what ails you, ails me. If we have a society with high rates of homelessness, that suffering spills over even to those who aren't homeless. If we have a society where people, well, some people are not well educated, that creates problems even for those that are educated. the illusion, the illusion of the rich in 21st century American life, they truly think that they can separate themselves from the rest of us and from the earth from the consequences of their own actions.

They think they can separate themselves from the consequences that are the product of their accumulation of wealth, privilege, and power in the first place. By the very act of them participating in the accumulation of profit and power and privilege, they create the conditions that undermine that. And the ego says, that's okay. I can just keep all of them over there. I can build a bigger wall. I can create a more militarized police state. I can make a gated community farther from the rest of them. I can send my kids to a different school.

That is a delusion of separateness rooted in the ego, of a low level of social consciousness, and that will undermine itself. We don't need to put pressure on it. We don't need to point out how it's wrong. By its very nature, it's wrong. undermines itself and reveals itself over time through contradiction to be wrong. That's a galleon. That's Marxist.

That's dialectical. For a time. They can get away with it. They have been. For a time. But how did the French elites in Versailles a year before the revolution feel? Pretty goddamn good. The rabble can't come all the way out here.

I've been to Versailles, by the way. I've been to Paris. I've driven the train. I rode the train. 45 minutes to the countryside to where Versailles was, this opulent, enormous palace, dude. And walking through the fucking halls, which is now, it's now obviously a museum, thanks to the French Revolution. It's no longer the house of the rich.

It's a museum that the public has access to. Walking through the halls, oh, my God, the grandeur of it. The grandeur of it. If I was rich being served by servants, having every one of my desires met, no connection at all to the masses, to the rabble. Oh, they're bitching outside the gates. Let them eat cake. Fuck them.

Who gives a shit? You know, the French elite were indulging themselves in these huge, expensive, glamorous parties, right? With all the food and wine and beverages, you know, anybody could imagine, while the people outside who made their life of luxury possible couldn't afford bread. Well, that's okay. We can separate. They're different than us. They're out there.

We're in here. We're good. We got the guards and we've got the big gates. And we're 45 minutes outside of Paris proper. Peasants don't have cars yet. What are they going to do? Walk all the way out here? No, they'll get tired.

And they're, you know, that's a several hour walk. It's not going to happen. We're separate from them. Until they weren't. Until the Bastille got stormed. Until the guilletines got rolled out. Until the gates of Versailles fell. So it's the hubris of the rich.

And it plays itself out over and over and over again. And it gives credence to our vision of a society without that shit. A communist vision of humanity is one that is beyond the division of human beings into those who have opulent, luxurious lives of comfort and enormous privilege and power and wealth at the expense of the majority of people who have to toil away, live in precarity and uncertainty, you know, fucking struggle to afford groceries, can't get good health care, don't know if they'll ever retire, or are working in the mines or fucking subject to slavery or supply chains that are rotted out by horrific forms of abuse and violent coercion.

We believe as communists. We believe in a, that humanity will or can eventually evolve and mature beyond this stage of human development. What Einstein called this predatory phase of human development. It is absurd. these people, whether they're French aristocracy, or they're the fucking Trump family today, sitting in Mar-a-Lago, all throughout history, these people are not better,

they're not smarter, they're not more moral, they're not more honorable, they don't deserve any of this shit through luck and contingency and happenstance of birth and a bunch of things that none of them controlled, they happen to win the lottery and be given this life of luxury that the vast majority of human beings don't have.

And their ego convinces themselves that they really are superior, they really do deserve it, we really are stupid, we really are rabble, we are a means to their end. The ego makes a nice little story out of that. And that is what we want to overcome,

and anybody who is not a communist, who is not a socialist, for whatever your politics are, I don't care. If you are not a communist, if you do not have as your ultimate political goal, the transcendence of class society, you support this stupid, brutal fucking system from the ancient

Greek slave societies through the hereditary monarchies of feudalism and the tribute systems, peasants and serfs and landlords, all the way up to the modern day situation where we have homeless people on every block in major cities and the world's first trillionaire at the same time. Whatever your politics are, if you are anti-communist, you say, this is either good or this is inevitable. this stratification of people into extremely rich and fucking the toilers, the various strata of completely immisorated to precarious worker to slightly more comfortable worker. If your politics or anything but communist, you think that's okay. You think we should keep doing that.

Or you think we can never not do that. It really is human nature. So either you're a moral freak and you think that we shouldn't do that, or you are completely propagandized super structural subject of class society, and you have been convinced that this is natural. There's no third option. And you can gnash your teeth and rent your garments and come up with all your arguments and quote fucking Friedman or Anne Rand or whoever the founding fathers,

do whatever you want. But at the end of the day, your politics genuinely supports morally and intellectually the core idea that some people should work, and toil their entire lives away so that other people can live lives of unimaginable luxury and in opulence. You believe that. Back to the text. This will be translated concretely into the reconquering of his true nature through liberated labor

and the expression of his own human condition through culture and art. In order for him to develop in the first way, work must acquire a new status. Man as a commodity ceases to exist, and a system is installed that establishes a quota for the fulfillment of his social duty. The means of production belong to society, and the machine is merely the trench where duty is fulfilled. Man begins to free his thinking of the annoying fact that he needs to work to satisfy his animal needs. He starts to see himself reflected in his work and to understand his full stature as a human being through the object created, through the work accomplished.

Work no longer entails surrendering a part of his being in the form of labor power sold, which no longer belongs to him, but represents an emancipation of himself, a contribution to the common life in which he has reflected the fulfillment of his social duty. And just as an aside, think about that really quickly.

You go to work. You know, you feel disconnected from your labor. Your boss tells you what to wear, when to show up, he can fire you at any time for any reason, or she can fire you at any time for any reason. You know that oftentimes you put in more work than you get back.

You know, your whole life, begins to revolve for many of us in the working class about just going to work so we can get enough money to pay our bills so we can come back to work. I mean, it really is, even in a consumer hyper-developed society, it's subsistence level in some extent. Subsistence not like if I don't, you know, I'm going to die tonight because I don't have enough food, but subsistence in like the average quality of your life where your whole life begins to revolve around getting to work so you can get money so you can pay your bills so you can go back to work to get more money to pay your bills. that's alienating that's meaningless it makes us feel empty and shitty and we fucking rebel against it

something deep within us rebels against it and we either kill that part of us that rebels we either subordinate our spirit to that process or we desperately try to find ways out of it maybe we succeed but then we look back and realize everybody else we love is still stuck now doing that same exact job depends on your job some jobs won't exist under socialism but doing that same same exact job under conditions in which capitalism has fallen, you're working with your community, you're growing vegetables, you're doing electrical work, you're paving roads, you're taking out the trash, all jobs that existed under capitalism. But in this new context, they take on totally different internal form, that they cease to be this alienating slog of precarity and uncertainty and

basically forced labor, just so you can survive and provide for yourself or your family, ceases to be that and becomes like a meaningful contribution to something bigger than yourself, to your community, to your society, and to a cause that has, as its end goal, the liberation of humanity. The same exact work. Now, the work that I do right now, grueling physical labor construction type shit, there's also a deep craftsmanship to it, of course, but I've even told my coworkers, if I wasn't in a union, I wouldn't be doing this. If you take away the dignity of the union, which is just the kernel of what's of socialism, of worker power in capitalist society, the union. Take away the dignity of the union, the ability to go to your union steward

and bitch about your boss when they're driving you too hard, the high wages, you know, once you turn out as a journeyman, the benefits to be able for, you know, the health care for my family, the sense of like all the shit that I have to do every day, even just taking away the union part of it. The wages go down. There's no more benefits. benefits, you don't have any way to push back against your boss, I wouldn't do it. The work is too shitty. Like, it's too fucking demanding, it's too shitty. I'm not doing that under non-union conditions, straight up.

The union makes it tolerable enough for me to do that. So that's just a shift from non-union to union under capitalism. And that's the same exact job. So doing the same exact thing, in lieu of the dignity of a union, material and subjective dignity that comes with the union, despite all its flaws and limitations, we can talk about that all day. That same exact work would not be worth doing without that qualitative change in the context in which I'm working.

So that's just a, and I've said that out loud to my coworkers. So that's just a tiny example of that qualitative shift in the context of the work you're doing, even if it is the same work. So that's what Shay is saying here, and I think that is true. That is important. Now, if you're hostile to socialism, if you're hostile to this, social project. If you want to go back, if you're a fascist, a reactionary, you lost your plantation, and you went from somebody that was being served by servants to somebody having to work alongside

the working class to pick up trash in your neighborhood or cook meals for the community, that feels like a loss of status, and you might feel like, I don't want, this work is not edifying. But you weren't part of the working class. You were part of the exploiting class. Now you're brought down to the level of equal with everybody else, and that feels like oppression to you. That feels like oppression to you. That's the Miami's and Cubans, the Cubans in Miami. You know, that's the Iranians in L.A., you know, these various other refugees from various revolutions that find the safe house of global fascism here in the United States. they hate it.

It feels subjectively like oppression because they were asked to be equals with the people they previously took advantage of, exploited, or lived off of. That's not always true. There's some nuances there. But for the most part, just the Cuban example is precisely that.

And I say as well, when Israel and Zionism eventually inevitably falls one way or another, the Zionists who can't, let's say there was a one-state solution, right? equal rights, equal civil rights, a democratic society, free, liberated Palestine were Jews and Christians and Muslims and the secular, all had equal civil rights, equal political representation, equal human rights, equal dignity. There would be Israeli Zionists who would feel that to be

oppression. They would flee to the United States and they would spend a great deal of their time agitating against the liberated Palestine, fomenting hatred and division and propaganda against it, and they'll subjectively feel like they're righteous. The Zionists that can't live as equals with the Arab and sees living as equals in a liberated, democratic, egalitarian state as a demotion, right, would come over here, argue for that destruction of the free Palestine and feel justified in it in the same exact way that that Miami Cuban Miami Cubans in Miami the Marco Rubio types the whole community there all right wing they love they want to see the communist government in Cuba overthrown they want

the restoration you know the Iranians would want some of them want the restoration of the Shah there's no restoration of Batista but the restoration of a basically the other option would be a U.S. government approved, ran, infiltrated puppet government. That, yeah, would open up the markets. It would open up trade. The U.S. would reward Cuba for its subservience. They want to see that. And they feel righteous about it. They don't imagine themselves as evil. The Zionist in Israel, you know, stealing Palestinians' homes, supporting a genocide in Gaza, supporting, you know, settlers in the West Bank or whatever,

they don't see themselves as evil. The Nazis didn't see themselves as evil. Subjectively, they create a story in which, you know, they have to do this. They actually are the good guys. They're defending their people, right? And if it wasn't for this, then, you know, our people would be slaughtered in mass. The Aryans would be displaced or, you know, The Jews would no longer have a homeland, and everybody would come for us and tear us limb from limb.

It's the only thing standing between, you know, they justify it. People justify it. So all of that is to say that just the subjective correlate of that and the, the qualitative shift, from being a worker under capitalism to a worker under socialism and then comparing the qualitative shift of being in the exploiting class and having to be brought down to the level of equal with other people. For the Zionist to be equal to the Arab or the plantation owner to be equal to the person who works it, for Trump to see himself as equal to the people who are building his fucking ballroom, right, or bringing him his third Coke of the day or whatever the fuck, for them to see themselves as equal is feels like denigration.

It's subjectively, viscerally felt to be oppression. And that's just, that is a form of fucking psychosis. And fuck them. All right, back to the text. We are doing everything possible to give work this new status of social duty and to link it on the one side with the development of technology, which will create the conditions for greater freedom. And on the other side, with voluntary work based on the Marxist appreciation that man truly reaches his full human condition when he produces without being compelled by physical necessity to sell himself as a person. commodity. Of course, there are still coercive aspects to work, even when it is voluntary. Man has not transformed all the coercion that surrounds him into conditioned reflexes of a social

character, and in many cases he still produces under the pressures of his environment. Fidel calls this moral compulsion. He still needs to undergo a complete spiritual rebirth in his attitude towards his own work, freed from the direct pressure of his social environment, though linked to it by his new habits. That will be communism. The change in consciousness does not take place automatically, just as change in the economy does not take place automatically. The alterations are slow and are not rhythmic.

There are periods of acceleration, ones that are slower, and even retrogressions. Furthermore, we must take into account, as I pointed out before, that we are not dealing with a period of pure transition, as Marx envisaged in his critique of the Gotha program, but rather with a new phase unforeseen by him, an initial period of the transition to communism or of the construction of socialism. It is taking place in the midst of violent class struggles, and with elements of capitalism within it that obscure a complete understanding of its essence.

If we add to this the scholasticism that has held back the development of Marxist philosophy and impeded a systematic treatment of the transition period whose political economy has not been developed, we must agree that we are still in diapers, and that it is necessary to devote ourselves to investigate all the principal characteristics of this period before elaborating an economic and political theory of greater scope. The resulting theory will, no doubt, put great stress on the two pillars of the construction of socialism, the education of the new man and the development of technology. Much remains to be done in regards to both, but delay is least excusable in regard to the concept of technology as a basic foundation, since this is not a question of going forward blindly, but of

following a long stretch of road already opened up by the world's most advanced countries. This is why Fidel pounds away with such insistence on the need for the technological and scientific training of our people, and especially of its vanguard. In the field of ideas that do not lead to activities involving production, it is easier to see the division between material and spiritual necessity. For a long time, man has been trying to free himself from alienation through culture and art. while he dies every day during the eight or more hours in which he functions as a commodity, he comes to life afterward in his spiritual creations.

But this remedy bears the germ of the same sickness. It is a solitary individual seeking harmony with the world. He defends his individuality, which is oppressed by the environment, and reacts to aesthetic ideas as a unique being whose aspiration is to remain immaculate. It is nothing more than an attempt to escape. The law of value is no longer simply a reaffirm. reflection of the relations of production. The monopoly capitalists, even while employing purely empirical methods, surround it with the complicated scaffolding that turns it into a docile servant.

The superstructure demands a kind of art that the artist has to be educated in. Rebels are subdued by the machine, and only exceptional talents may create their own work. The rest become shame-faced hirelings, or are crushed. A school of artistic inquiry is invented, which is said to be the definition of freedom, but this inquiry has its limits, imperceptible until we clash with them, that is, until the real problems of man and his alienation arise. Meaningless, anguish, or vulgar amusement, thus become convenient safety valves for human anxiety. The idea of using art as a weapon of protest is combated. Those who play by the rules of the game are showered with honors, such honors as a monkey

might get for performing pirouettes. The condition is that you not try to escape from the invisible cage. So I believe he's talking about the subordination of art and sort of artistic and cultural expression to the overarching material base of society. So those who play by the rules of the game, those who create art that are aligned with or not hostile to, that order are showered with honors in the same way a monkey might get praised for performing pirouettes. A dog might get praised for sitting on command, right? And the only condition that you can keep doing your work and keep getting praise for it is that you try not to escape from the invisible cage. You accept the basic premises of society. And, you know, we can see artists all around us, as one example,

who align themselves with the dominant social values and are rewarded thusly. And those who really challenge it and are pushed to the margins are pushed underground in music and fiction and art. that's always the dynamic which is not to say that somebody with you know hostility towards the system can't break through but often when you break through

for whatever reason being hostile to that system you're not hostile in a complete way and your elevation within that system actually acts as a release valve for the frustrations of people within it many such works of art and film that

are ostensibly revolutionary on their surface that act as cathartic release valves for a society and kind of take place of any actual revolution capitalist society needs those outlets so you know so there's some there's some nuance at play there but that's what i believe he's saying i could reread that and maybe come to different or deeper conclusions but i believe that's what's being said here back to the text when the revolution took power there was an exodus of those who had been completely housebroken the rest whether they were revolutionaries or not, saw a new road.

Artistic inquiry experienced a new impulse. The paths, however, had already been more or less laid out, and the escapist concept hid itself behind the word freedom. This attitude was often found even among the revolutionaries themselves, a reflection in their consciousness of bourgeois idealism. In countries that have gone through a similar process, attempts have been made to combat such tendencies by an exaggerated dogmatism. general culture was virtually a taboo, and the acme of cultural aspiration was declared to be

formally exact, to be the formally exact representation of nature. This was later transformed into a mechanical representation of the social reality they wanted to show, the ideal society, almost without conflicts or contradictions, that they sought to create. Socialism is young and has its mistakes. We revolutionaries often lack the knowledge and intellectual daring needed to meet the task of developing the new man with methods different from the conventional ones, and the conventional methods suffer from the influences of the society that created them. Again, the theme of the relationship between form and content is posed. Disorientation is widespread, and we are absorbed by the problems of material construction.

There are no artists of great authority who, at the same time, have great revolutionary authority. The men of the party must take this task in hand and seek attainment of the main goal to educate the people. What is sought then is simplification, something everyone can understand, something functionaries understand. True artistic inquiry ends, and the problem of general culture is reduced to taking some things from the socialist present and some from the dead, therefore not dangerous past. Thus, socialist realism arises upon the foundations of the art of the last century. But the realistic art of the 19th century also has a class character, more purely capitalist perhaps than this decade. in art of the 20th century that reveals the anguish of alienated man. In the field of culture, capitalism has given all that it had to give, and nothing remains but the stench of a corpse, today's decadence in art.

Let me say that part again, and see if this applies to a modern American culture. In the field of culture, capitalism has given all that it had to give, and nothing remains but the stench of a corpse. Today's decadence in art. We see, you know, go to a movie theater, and you'll see, you know, see prequels and sequels and and and you know old IP ran over and over and over and into the mother fucking ground for the sole sake of profit maximization that you know true gorgeous films of course still do exist but the overarching popular cultural unfolding in in American society has really decayed it's it's become decadent it's become sort of empty, hollow, unable to produce new things.

It really does, like, it does reflect a certain stagnation in the material base in the overall vibe and effective orientation of society overall. And there are periods where capitalism was dynamic, where capitalism was ascendant, where liberalism was dynamic and ascendant. And great works of modern art came out of that period because at that point

there was the sort of material dynamism and the promotion of new horizons that gave rise to genuinely new forms of artistic expression and as those forms are sort of dying on the branches as they become less and less prevalent as music and art and literature

and film all kind of failed to move forward failed to progress stagnate sort of reorder old forms, unable to create something truly new, that is a super structural sign of the stagnation at the roots of the material base. And I think we are seeing that, which is not to say that every single piece of art produced in American society is bad or shitty or stagnant or not unique or new, but just that the overarching direction of those things have stagnated, have decayed,

are often decadent in nature and are not sort of producing new forms and new types of content that are truly unique that speak to different aspects of human subjectivity, yearning, etc. So I'm pretty sure that that is kind of what he's saying and the idea of socialist realism being one foot in the old world and one foot in the new I think does more or less ring true. but back to the text But why try to find the only valid prescription In the frozen forms of socialist realism We cannot counterpose freedom to socialist realism

Because the former does not yet exist And will not exist until the complete development Of the new society But we must not, from the pontifical throne Of realism at all costs, condemn all art forms Since the first half of the 19th century For we would then fall into the Prudonian mistake

Of going back to the past, of putting a straight jacket on the artistic expression of the man who is being born and is in the process of making himself. So here what he's basically saying is he's arguing against a sort of cultural dogmatism, which we have seen manifest in various socialist projects in the 20th century, which insisted on certain forms of science, on certain forms of art, as the only valid socialist form of art in reaction to, you know, capitalist forms of, you know, superstructural forms. arms. So to make that harsh dichotomy of this is, this belongs to that. That's bourgeois. There's no place for that. Only this is an acceptable way to express yourself. It's a reaction. It's a dogmatic

reaction to the overall ideological struggle in an embryonic socialism that's trying to defend itself. And Che is kind of saying, like, we don't need to go like that. We don't need to be dogmatic in that way. We can let art kind of take its own course and expect that things will still be rooted in the past. You know, our socialist material base is still embryonic. We're still developing. We don't have to fall into various forms of dogmatism. And I think he's just using art here as an example of one of the kind of more absurd ways that a certain sort of authoritarian dogmatism, if you will, might manifest in these difficult circumstances and manifest particularly in the artistic domain of the superstructure. So I think he's being very even-handed and open-minded.

it here. And dogmatism in general, like strict doctrinaire dogmatism, it's either this or it's that. You cannot, you cannot disagree with any of this or you are hostile to everything we believe in. That's ultimately unhelpful. That is a sort of degradation of the socialist spirit into a hunched, defensive posture that is, that is unable to move forward, and that kind of contributes to a stagnation itself. And so, you know, there's a difference between being principled and being like dogmatic as fuck and being weird about it. And again, I think dogmatism is ultimately kind of a product of the ego holding on to its particular beliefs too strongly. That is an dogmatism is a product of egoism, which is ultimately rooted in a sort of narcissism of the personality

or narcissism of the personality's ideas and an insistence that, it already knows, and if you don't know, you don't get it, you disagree, you are fundamentally wrong. We can understand why that emerges while also being like it's not necessary and it's actually counterproductive. Back to the text. What is needed is the development of an ideological cultural mechanism that permits both free inquiry and the uprooting of the weeds that multiply so easily in the fertilized soil of state subsidies. So let's say that again. What is needed to kind of, you know, to not fall into dogmatism to keep an open-mindedness is the development of an ideological cultural mechanism that permits both free inquiry and the uprooting of the weeds that multiply so easily

in the fertilized soil of state subsidies the state subsidizing art you know broadly just throwing money out there for the development of art it will obviously give rise to people taking advantage of that i mean the cia funding rap artists in cuba right is an example of what happens like if you're too open with it, you're taking state, you know, precious state resources, and you're giving it to a bunch of people and some of those people will be using it and weaponizing against that very state that allowed for the subsidization of art itself, right? But at the same time, like the development of humanity and the dignity of the human spirit requires genuine freedom, you know, genuine freedom to inquire, to create, to explore, to make

mistakes. That's the human aspect. Trying to control that, trying to dogmatically suffocate that, or put it in a very narrow gateway, it undermines what we're trying to accomplish, subjectively and objectively. And so, like, we really have to be the torchbearers of human freedom. I'm a socialist, I'm a communist, because I believe in total human freedom, total human liberation. freedom is not something we compromise on in the pursuit of abstract ideals freedom is the goal freedom from oppression freedom from exploitation the freedom to be a human being both a healthy individual embedded in a healthy collective the dialectical relationship between the collective and the individual we don't suffocate one in promotion of the other because then that's anti-dialectical to the

core you undermine both in that process so you know i think that is that's a difficulty especially when you're under assault. I understand why that wasn't always the case in many socialist experiments, totally, materially. But we should still continue to hold out our philosophy as ultimately a philosophy of human freedom, of human flourishing, and of new forms of democracy that hitherto have never really been known to humanity at large. In my next book, in defense of the communist vision, tentative title, I am going to write an entire essay on human, on human, human freedom and the socialist and communist position of individual human freedom and the ways

in which liberalism, capitalism, class society actually precludes the possibility of genuine individual freedom while pretending to champion it. Back to the text. In our country, the error of mechanical realism has not appeared, but rather it's opposite. And that is so because the need for the creation of a new man has not been understood, a new man who would represent neither the ideas of the 19th century, nor those of our own decadent and morbid century. What we must create is the man of the 21st century, although this is still a subjective aspiration, not yet systematized. This is precisely one of the

fundamental objectives of our study and our work. To the extent that we achieve concrete successes on a theoretical plane, or vice versa, to the extent that we draw theoretical conclusions of a broad character on the basis of our concrete research, we will have made a value of a value of contribution to Marxism-Leninism, to the cause of humanity. By reacting against the man of the 19th century, we have relapsed into the decadence of the 20th century. It is not a very grave error, but we must overcome it, lest we open a wide breach for revisionism. The great multitudes continue to develop. The new ideas are gaining a good momentum within society. The material possibilities for the integrated development of absolutely all members of society make the task much more fruitful.

is a time of struggle. The future is ours. To sum up, the fault of many of our artists and intellectuals lies in their original sin. They are not truly revolutionaries. We can try to graft the elm tree so that it will bear pears, but at the same time, we must plant pear trees. New generations will come that will be free of original sin. The probabilities that great artists will appear will be greater to the degree that the field of culture and the possibilities for expression are broadened. So let's go back. and revisit what he's saying there. To sum up, the fault of many of our artists and intellectuals

lies in their original sin, that they're not truly revolutionaries. Their subjectivities, he's saying, are created in the previous era, the pre-revolutionary context. Those subjectivities persist into the new era. And when he says, we can't graft the elm tree so that it will bear pairs. You can't take

an apple tree and make it produce strawberries. You know, you can't take an elm and make it produce pairs. You know, some people just are hardened around a subjectivity forged pre-revolution. And, you know, it's sort of useless to try to get every single one of them to be what they're not. But at the same time, he says we must plant pear trees, meaning new generations of people are going to be born and raised in a socialist context, in a socialist society, under a new subjectivity. And we're working

political education to create the conditions in which those people's subjectivities will be formed at a higher level under new conditions will be the new man, the new woman that Che is envisioning for socialism and ultimately communism. That is needed for socialism and eventually communism. So the anti-socialists might see that as nefarious, you know, oh, they want to, they want to brainwash our children. You already do that. Capitalist society already brainwashed. washes them. Feudal society already brainwashed them. Slave society already brainwashes them. We are trying to de-brainwash. We are trying to liberate them from that brainwashing. And so, you know, the bad faith actors and the anti-socialist and anti-communist, they will always act in

bad faith, either explicitly, knowledgeably, deceitfully, or just as a product of their own dogmas and their own, you know, disdain for our entire political project. But I think it's totally reasonable to say that new generations will be socialized under new conditions, and that will give rise to new types of people, and we won't have to ultimately forever deal with these sort of, you know, hangovers from a previous era. And, you know, just imagine building socialism in the United States. Think of all the millions and millions of peoples whose subjectivities are totally conditioned in the pre-revolutionary American situation who are hostile, reactionary hyper-individualist. There's no world in which every single person comes along, you know, who are willing to develop themselves in the direction

of a new society. They will always nurse the subjectivities of the previous era, whether explicitly in like political reaction or implicitly in their behaviors and patterns and orientation. in temperament. But, you know, that's what they're, that's what Che is saying they're dealing with in Cuba. And it's not surprising. It's actually to be expected. But these are the, these are one of the contradictions that they're trying to navigate. Back to the text.

Almost over. Our task is to prevent the current generation torn asunder by its conflicts from becoming perverted and from perverting new generations. We must not create either docile servants of official thought or scholarship. students who live at the expense of the state practicing freedom in quotation marks. Revolutionaries will come who will sing the song of the new man in the true voice of the people. And that is a process that takes time. In our society, the youth and the party play a big part. The former, the youth, is especially important because it is the malleable clay from which the new

man can be built without any of the old vestiges. The youth are treated in accordance with our aspirations. Their education is every day more complete, and we are not forgetting about their integration into work from the outset. Our scholarship students do physical work during their vacations or along with their studying. Work is a reward in some cases, a means of education and others, but it is never a punishment. A new generation is truly being born. The party is a vanguard organization. It is made up of the best workers who are proposed for membership by their fellow workers. That's what I mean by organic development, emerging out of the masses organically, like a Fred Hampton, right? He says it's

made up of the best workers who are proposed for membership into the vanguard by their fellow workers. They emerge organically from the masses. It is a minority, but it has great authority because of the quality of its cadres. Our aspiration is for the party to become a mass party, but only when the masses have reached the level of the vanguard, that is, when they're educated for communism. Our work constantly aims at this education. The party is the living example. Its cadres must teach hard work and sacrifice. By their action, they must lead the masses to the completion of the revolutionary task, and this involves years of hard struggle against the difficulties of construction, class enemies, the maladies of the past, imperialism.

I would now like to explain the role played by the individual. By man as an individual within the masses who make history. This is our experience and is not a prescription. Fidel gave the revolution its impulse in the first years and also its leadership. He always set its tone. But there's a good group of revolutionaries who are developing along the same road as the central leader. And there's a great mass that follows its leaders because it has faith in them. It has faith in them because they have known how to interpret its aspirations. It is not a great mass that follows its leaders. It is not a great mass that not a matter of how many kilograms of meat one has to eat, nor of how many times a year someone can go to the beach, nor how many pretty things from abroad you might be able to buy with

present-day wages. It is a matter of making the individual feel more complete, with much more internal richness and much more responsibility. As an aside, the dialectic between freedom and responsibility, that the other side of genuine freedom is genuine responsibility, is something I explore deeply in the first part of my book, A Letter to Young Revolutionaries, where I take this idea and I really flesh it out, that freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same exact coin, and that there's an American impulse for all the freedom without any of the responsibility, right? I want the freedom to not wear a mask during a pandemic. I have no responsibility to anybody else who might get sick, right? I have all the freedom in the world to amass as much money

as I possibly can on the backs of anybody else, and I owe absolutely fucking nothing to the them for it. It is the, it is the toddler's conception of freedom. I want everything I want and I don't want to give anything. That is not actually freedom and that undermines the possibility of freedom itself dialectically. True freedom to be a truly free human being is also to be a person who faces their responsibilities. The responsibilities that come with freedom. Back to the text. The individual in our country knows that the glorious period in which he happens to live is one of sacrifice. He is familiar with sacrifice. The first ones came to know it in the Sierra Maestra, and wherever they fought, afterward all of Cuba came to know it.

Cuba is the vanguard of Latin America and must make sacrifices because it occupies the post of advanced guard, because it shows the masses of Latin America the road to full freedom. Within the country, the leadership has to carry out its vanguard role. and it must be said with all sincerity that in a real revolution to which one gives his all and from which one expects no material reward the task of the vanguard revolutionary is at one in the same time magnificent and agonizing let me say that again it must be said with all sincerity that in a real revolution to which one gives his all and from which one expects no material reward The task of the vanguard revolutionary is at one in the same time magnificent and agonizing. Freedom and responsibility.

Privilege and duty. To give, give, give and not expect anything in return. To do it for something bigger than yourself. For others. I'm not doing this. I'm not doing all this. I'm not burdening all this responsibility. Carrying out all these tasks so that I can get something out of it.

I'm doing it so that we can get something. something out of it so that my children and your children might live in a better world. I am sacrificing my own interests and petty desires for the interest of the bigger collective, of the bigger project, of the bigger cause. It's one of the most noble aspects of our nature to be willing to do that. Good parents do it all the time, right? A good parent loves their kid, gives to their kid, takes care of their kid in no way, shape, or form expects them to be paid back by their kid. We do it because we love them. We would do anything for them.

We live for them before we live for ourselves. We would die for them. There's nothing they could give us. We're not doing this for, it's often hard, challenging, emotionally rot. You know, brings out, raising multiple children, brings out parts of you that are very difficult, repeats old traumas from your childhood, right? shows you just how impatient you are. It's incredibly, incredibly challenging. There's so many sacrifices that come with being a parent.

But it's also in a way, a microcosm of what the vanguard or what the revolutionary must be for the whole. What a good parent is to their child without any of the condescending undertones that that might implicate, right? Like I'm the parent. I'm the adult. You're the kid. They don't know anything. I have to take care of them. No.

Not that patronizing savior shit. But just the raw love. of a good parent towards their child and the willingness to do anything for that child, to create a better world for that child, to create good conditions for that child, take care of that child, keep that child healthy and protected and safe and loved. They do that without a single expectation of any sort of reward, other than maybe the reciprocal love of the child. The child loves them back.

You know, the reward is like when my kid is scared and comes to me because he knows that he's safe in my arms, you know, or that when my kid comes up out of nowhere and tells me he loves me. That's the reward. That's because that's just unity. That's the obliteration of division

that is just radical, ecstatic love. And to take that core concept, turn it into a social obligation to others, to complete strangers, to children who aren't your own, to children who aren't even born yet, that takes a certain sort of, person, an elevated, mature, wise person who is no longer dominated by them and their narcissistic

goals, desires, petulant wants, needs, and doing things transactionally as a means for their own end. That's a rare person. They do exist. Plenty of them exist. You and I are trying to become more and more that type of person, despite our frailties, flaws and setbacks. But that's the relationship. And that's the task. Back to the text. Here's the quote. At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary

is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. Perhaps it is one of the great dramas of the leader that he must combine a passionate spirit with a cold intelligence and make painful decisions without flinching. Our vanguard revolution,

must make an ideal of this love of the people, of the most sacred causes, and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend with small doses of daily affection to the level where ordinary men put their love into practice. So let me say that again. They cannot descend with small doses of daily affection to the level where ordinary men put their love in practice. Ordinary meaning I love me and mine, right? Like I love my kids, you know, I love my nieces and nephew. my neighbor's kids, they're all right. I'll protect them if they need it. I don't love them as much as I love my kid, whatever.

The further you get out from my neighborhood and my community, I don't know them, you know. The people over there, the people in Palestine, those aren't my kids. That's not my shit. I have nothing to do. I don't care about that conflict at all. It has nothing to do with me.

That is like kind of the ordinary level of basic consciousness that most people have, most of the time. Individuals can have that as their default and breakthrough and elevate themselves temporarily. You know, sometimes people, that have gone up can come back down and recoil back into their egoic little small forms of love. But what Che is saying is that true revolutionaries, effective vanguard revolutionaries, they can't descend backwards into that.

They have to put their love of the whole, of the cause of all people, of the future of humanity at the forefront of their mind and not shrink it back down to me and mine. Back to the text. The leaders of the revolution have children, just beginning to talk. who are not learning to say, daddy. They have wives who must be part of the general sacrifice of their lives in order to take the revolution to its destiny. The circle of their friends is limited strictly

to the circle of comrades in the revolution. There is no life outside of it. So he's just showing the sacrifices that these revolutionaries have to make, right? The time away from their children. He says their children are not even learning how to say daddy, because daddy's not around, he's fighting, right? Wives. Being, you know, being a wife of somebody that's whatever, fighting overseas or, you know, being gone, having, waging this revolution to create a better future for them and their children and their families and their friends and their communities and their country.

But that that's a sacrifice that is being made. The Vanguard Revolutionary isn't just, you know, enjoying the power and privileges and wealth of being in the elite class like the bourgeois elite do. They're sacrificing themselves for others. and these are real fucking sacrifices. And yeah, the circle of friends limited to the circle of comrades. Like, I'm just with you guys all the time. You know, you comrades, guys and girls fighting in this revolution in the trenches with me. I'm not having a social life.

You know, you're waging revolution. You're not going to the bar and meeting up with your friends from high school. You know, and there's no time for that. So he's just saying these are the sacrifices that real revolutionaries are making right now. Just to build a better future for everybody. In these circumstances, back to the text, one must have a big dose of humanity, a big dose of a sense of justice and truth in order not to fall into dogmatic extremes, into cold scholasticism, into an isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity is transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples as a moving force. the revolutionary, the ideological motor force of the revolution within his party,

is consumed by this uninterrupted activity that comes to an end only with death, unless the construction of socialism is accomplished on a world scale. So he's saying this is, you know, even if we're building it in a country, the goal is to build it so, you know, globally, socialism globally. And so understanding that this activity is not going to like one day, everything's settled and finished. We did global socialism. Now we can rest.

The true revolutionary understands that his work is his life work, and he will die before seeing the consequences of it totally play out. Like hearkens back to that quote about people planting trees that they will not know the shade of. That in and of itself is a sort of sacrifice. Back to the text. If his revolutionary zeal is blunted when the most urgent tasks have been accomplished on a local scale,

and he forgets about proletarian internationalism, the revolution he leads will cease to be a driving force and sink into a comfortable drowsiness that imperialism, our irreconcilable enemy, will utilize to gain ground. Proletarian internationalism is a duty, but it is also a revolutionary necessity. This is the way we educate our people.

Of course, there are dangers in the present situation, and not only that of dogmatism, not only that of freezing the ties with the masses midway and the great task, There is also the danger of the weaknesses that we can fall into. If a man thinks that dedicating his entire life to the revolution means that in return, he should not be distracted by such worries as that his child lacks certain things, that his children's shoes are worn out, that his family lacks some necessity, then with this reasoning he opens his mind to infection by the germs of future corruption.

What a fascinating point. So you have the revolutionary. You have them out there sacrificing, making sacrifices. dedicating himself to the revolution. And here's one of the things that happens with people. On the left, in this world, you can sympathize and be compassionate and loving and even sacrificing

for humanity as an abstract communal category. But in your day-to-day interactions with the people in your actual life, you can be neglectful. You can be less than compassionate, less than patient. You can wax poetic about the need to liberate humanity, right from the shackles of the chains they are born into and at the same time be an asshole to your wife or neglect your children when they want to play so what chay is saying here is no no no no no yes i talked

about sacrifice yes sacrifices are necessary yes you won't always get to spend time with your wife and your kids when you're fighting out on the front lines yes but let's not use the fact that you're dedicating your life to the to revolution as an excuse not to also when you can have the responsibilities to your people you know and and if you're able to do that if you're able to only have this sacrificing attitude this compassion this love for humanity in the abstract but you're not able to actually also correlate that with and shore that up with that same exact sense of self-sacrifice and love and compassion for the people closest to you who depend on you well you're saying that opens your mind to germs of a future corruption because what you're doing is you're universalizing and globalizing humanity and saying

I'm fighting for that. But when you individualize it, when you bring it down to the concrete scale of daily life, you're dismissive, you're neglectful, you're hostile, you don't care. That's not a good person. That's not the full dialectic of love. It has to be both and. and the true measure of how a person has evolved or changed for the better subjectively is not merely what they can get on a pedestal and opine about global oppression and this and that and exploitation but is how do you actually treat the people in your actual life you know in the Buddhist world of meditation like an ongoing joke is like you know how how you know awakened are you how enlightened are you how enlightened you how enlightened you how enlightened

are you? I don't know, ask my wife. She has to deal with me every fucking day. You know, you guys get to see whoever you're talking to. If you're a spiritual guru, you guys get to see the best of me. You get to fantasize that I'm some like enlightened figure up here. Oh, he's so patient. He's so calm. He's so kind. But what happens when I'm actually at home when I get frustrated when my wife calls me out for some bullshit when I get impatient and yell at my kids? Do I recognize that? Do I do I take what I learned on the on the meditation cushion and actually apply it in the concrete realities of my daily life the people that are actually daily affected by the sort of person i am or do i keep divided this abstract realm where i'm calm and peaceful and i present myself to the world as a wise

compassionate creature but at the house my you know i refuse to take out the trash or i treat my wife like shit or i don't attend to her needs you know So, you know, that's obviously, like, what they're saying is like this subjective development caches out, not in the abstract, not in your abstract love for humanity as a whole, or the compassion you might feel at a stranger's suffering. But that and the people that you actually deal with in your real life. That's where the rubber meets the road within her transformation. Because that's the hardest part.

That's where you're tested. Another version of that is like, oh, you know, you go, you go, you go. meditate on a retreat for three months. These sophisticated, refined forms of consciousness are being expressed through you. You're calm and peaceful. You're sitting with hours of inner silence, awash and bliss. You couldn't imagine so much as swatting at a fly, much less yelling at somebody, barking at somebody.

Then you have to go back home to your family Thanksgiving dinner. Now we get to see if things really cash out. Now we get to see just how much you. actually learned because now you're in an environment where you're really being tested, old trauma patterns, old habitual responses, old ways in which this or that family member can push your buttons and get under your skin, you know, that is actually where this shit plays out. And so I think in so many ways, Che is saying a similar thing with the Marxist revolutionary. Back to the text. In our case, we have maintained that our children should have or should go without those things that the children

of the common man have to go without, or that our family should understand this and struggle for it to be that way. The revolution is made through man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit day by day. Thus we march on. At the head of the immense column,

we are neither ashamed nor afraid to say it, is Fidel. After him come the best cadres of the party, and immediately behind them, so close that we feel its tremendous force, comes the people and its entirety. A solid structure of indefiards. individualities moving toward a common goal, individuals who have attained consciousness of what

must be done, men who fight to escape from the realm of necessity and to enter that of freedom. This great throng organizes itself. Its organization is a result of its consciousness of the necessity of this organization. It is no longer a dispersed force, divisible into thousands of fragments thrown into the air like splinters from a hand grenade, trying by any means to achieve some protection from an uncertain future in desperate struggle with their fellows. Does that not perfectly describe the American proletariat, the American people, a dispersed force divided into thousands of fragments thrown into the air like splinters from a hand grenade, trying by any means to achieve some protection from an uncertain future in desperate

struggle with their fellows? is that not the exact situation the average American finds themselves in? No cohesiveness, no unity, no comradeship, every man out for himself, dog-eat-world, everybody's scared, living in precarious lives, don't know if they'll be able to retire, don't know if they're going to get sick next week and have to fucking go bankrupt because of medical bills, don't know if they're going to get fired from their job. I think I'd already said that. You know, don't know all the million things that can happen, scared, anxious, uncertain, precarious. And then having a million different ways that that precarity is manifested politically and consciously. Conspiracy thinking, reactionary thinking, in-cell culture, looks maxing, new age, hippie-dippy-dippy

bullshit, liberal electoralism, blue-vers red, partisan hackery. All the million different ways in which a sort of shared struggle for the bulk of American people who are not rich, the bottom 80%. We've got a shared material struggle. We share often the same anxieties about the future, about our families, about our children's lives, about what comes next, about, you know, what happens in the future. And despite that shared sort of anxiety and foundation of disturbance, are super structural factors, including the algorithms that were subject to, our tech oligarch overlords, you

know, tweaking those algorithms and being pushed into a hyper-individualist society just destroys the concept that we could come together and do something about it. It's me versus you. I got to climb over that guy. You know, I got to get that promotion instead of that guy. I have to, you know, do this or that. I got to by any means necessary. I'm going to tell the boss on that guy so that I might be able to get a promotion in a little bit. We turn against each other. We fight with each other. We're divided in a million different ways. And so we aren't a threat to the ruling class. We can be as angry as we want.

Everybody hates the government. Everybody, right, left center, every regular working person that I know, every single person I work with hates the fucking government, hates the economic elite, and yet can do nothing about it, cannot come together in any way, shape, or form to do anything about it. So, yes, there should be a threat against the elite. They should be scared.

but they know that we are so divided that we're not a threat. It is precisely in our fragmentation, our infinite fragmentation, that we cease to be a threat, that we are controlled, that we can be policed, we can be monitored, we can be intimidated, we can be subdued, we can be dealt with. And insofar as Marxism is the political strategy that urges people to see themselves as working people, to come together as working people, to fight together for, a better world for all working people across the entire planet coming to each other despite our differences, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, despite our lived experiences, we have shared

material interests through which we could organize around, come together and form a singular force. That is their worst nightmare. And that is why Marxism and communism, socialism, in particular, is the boogeyman of American society and always has been. socialism doesn't work, but why you're so scared of it? No, socialism is bullshit, it's all stupid, goes against human nature, it always fails. And why are you so scared, man? Why do you always have to convince us that it's like the worst thing ever? That it's so bad.

That is that, that is the tyranny against freedom and we have to ramp up these red scares whenever America's in a bad situation. It's the commies coming. They're coming. Why are you so scared if everything we believe is bullshit and fails on its own accord? Why do you have to sanction an embargo and bomb? these countries. Why do you have to do CIA infiltration and coups of these countries? Let

them fail. They know that that's the real threat. They'll dress it up in their rhetoric. They'll pretend like we're all stupid idiots, you know, blue-haired college kids who just want free stuff. Socialism has never worked anywhere. It's against human nature. But deep down, they're scared of it.

And they're throwing anything and everything at the wall because that's the only thing that could genuinely pose a threat to them. Regular people across the country and across the world coming together despite their differences around shared material interest to dislodge this parasitic class which lives of luxury on top of our suffering and toil. So they have to denigrate Marxism. It has to be beaten out of us at a young age. They have to

lie about us. They have to caricaturize us. Stereotype us. Amp up, ramp up fear about us. They're not as scared of the liberals. Anarchists throwing bricks through windows. They They can be dealt with. But the idea there should be high levels of disciplined organization centered around a rising class consciousness that understands itself fundamentally at odds with the people with all the money and power. And that only through high levels of organization of the masses

can we create the political power and leverage necessary to actually confront that parasitic class. That is the only threat to them. That threat's not even present, and they're still doing a number. red scare. We're not even organized on the level we can even pretend to be close to that, and they're still doing the red scare. It really does live rent-free in the back of their minds. And I think that's a testament to the potency of the Marxist tradition in particular. It's theoretical

clarity, it's strategic and organizational depth, its historical frameworks, It's understanding of society through contradiction, through an unfolding process driven forward by contradiction. This apprehension of history and philosophy and science and economics and social forces and class dynamics. This is actually true. This is actually getting close to how things actually work. And that is a threat to the way things are. Back to the text. We know that sacrifices lie ahead and that we must pay a price for the heroism.

fact that we are as a nation of Vanguard. We as leaders know that we must pay a price for the right to say that we are at the head of a people that is at the head of Latin America. Each and every one of us punctually pays his quota of sacrifice, conscious of being rewarded with the satisfaction of fulfilling a duty, conscious of advancing with everyone toward the new man visible on the horizon. Allow me to draw some conclusions. We socialists are freer because we are more complete. We are more complete because we are freer. The skeleton of our complete freedom is already formed. The flesh and the clothing are lacking. We will create them. Our freedom and its daily sustenance are paid for in blood and sacrifice. Our sacrifice is conscious, an installment payment on the freedom that we are building.

The road is long and in part unknown. We know our limitations. We will create the man of the 21st century, we ourselves. We will forge ourselves in daily action, creating a new man with a new technology. The individual plays a role in mobilizing and leading the masses insofar as he embodies the highest virtues and aspirations of the people and does not wander from the path. Clearing the way is the vanguard group, the best among the good, the party. The basic clay of our work is the youth. We place our hope in them and prepare them to take the banner from our hands. If this inarticulate letter clarifies anything, it has accomplished the objective that motivated it. Receive our ritual greeting, which is like a handshake or an Ava Marie Parisma.

Patria O Mouerte. Homeland or death. All right, Che being a little humble at the end. If this inarticulate letter clarifies anything, it clarified a lot. And you really get a peek into to Chey's mind you know him like Lennon before him and Mao before him taking theory and testing it through the iron forge of actual

revolutionary struggle clarifying theory in that process that dialectic between theory and praxis and Che is grasping in a way that you know few others have really grasped and that in my own humble way I hope to forward the torch carrying on

the radical relationship between the subjective elements of revolution and the objective ones, the dialectical relationship therein. You know, Paulo Freire, pedagogy of the oppressed, is doing stuff like this. There are many instances of socialist figures throughout history. Rosa Luxembourg, in her own rich inner life and the expression of it, is articulating implicitly this idea of the development of subjectivity. marks and angles constructing what we now call the basin superstructure analysis is showing how consciousness, which can be which can be the superstructure, you know, arises from the material base and co-relates thereafter. It's not a one-to-one. This comes first and then this happens. It turns around and shapes itself. It is a dialectic and an unfolding process, not a static hierarchy of things. Volgar materialism makes it static. vulgar materialism is vulgar because it's reductionist which is to say it's non-dialectical

um and so if you are somebody that thinks or says or here's somebody that thinks or says oh no no no no no we do revolution we change the material base of society then sequentially after that people are then changed based in the society that are growing up in a new material place so we're materialist that has to come first and then we can talk about consciousness, that's non-dialectical. These things are unfolding at the same time. These things are co-related, deeply inexorable processes that are co-evolving. And so when you go out and organize, you're also developing your subjectivity. Morally, you're being politically educated, you're facing certain challenges that force you to respond in certain ways. And either you

rise to that challenge and succeed or you fail in various ways. People are, organizations and individuals are often limited in what they can do objectively precisely because they refuse to do the inner necessary work of maturation, right? They're too egoic. They're too sectarian. They're too dogmatic. They turn people off. They think they know everything. They're an asshole. Right. Or in a different way, they're abusive. They're a creep. They're using this so they can get some sexual desire met or that they can pursue validation within a subcultural niche or that they can somehow get power over others and be the head of this cadre and tell people what to do. These are all ways in which the egoic structure itself, the subjectivity fostered underclass

society manifests within an ostensible attempt to transform that society, but because it is not doing the inner work, it limits itself. It actually undermines itself completely. We've seen that. We've seen it in organizations collapsing. We see it in individuals. the online world gives this a really nice ability to express itself because people are often anonymous. They can kind of be, if not anonymous, they are separated from immediate social consequence. So they can be like incredibly hostile to everybody. They can think they know it all. Very dismissive of everybody who disagrees with them, right?

Very dogmatic, very sectarian. They know best and you don't understand. Who's going to follow somebody like that? Who's going to be won over by somebody like that? Humble yourself, motherfucker. If you want to be, if you want to have any contribution, humble yourself, motherfucker, this is essential. And so this is not just some separate thing or some particular interest that I have.

This is deep in the socialist tradition. This is an ongoing thing. And we all have a responsibility to meet that and to cultivate within ourselves the qualities and their virtues. necessary to be able to possibly play a constructive role going forward in the political struggle for the liberation of humanity from exploitation, oppression, domination, etc. So take it seriously yourself. First things first. I mean, you can meditate and all that.

You can start working at the edges of the ego. I highly recommend it. Take back your attention. Read books, study, understand things. Go spend time alone in nature. Right. Take your inner life and start culta. cultivating your inner life in general.

A rich inner life is a good thing to have. Humble yourself academically and intellectually by getting outside of your comfort zone, reading stuff that is hostile to your already existing beliefs and views, struggling with criticism in a way that doesn't provoke this whiny little defensive egoic posture. And then beyond that, take your ethical shit seriously. How do you treat people? Come on. How are you treating people?

treat yourself because there's also this phenomena of people who are very compassionate and loving to other people right but are so harsh with themselves so cruel with themselves so mean to themselves so unforgiving to themselves you can't be like that either love yourself be gentle with yourself understand you're flawed you're a human being you're limited humble yourself intellectually and just try sincerely your best to be a better person every day to learn from your mistakes, to apologize when you make mistakes, to try to rectify what you can, when you fuck up, when you're an asshole, right? When you do something bad, when you harm somebody, whether you meant to or not,

when you lose your patience, when you lash out, when you say something that hurts your partner, just because you're in a bad fucking mood. Can you realize that? Can you apologize for that? Can you rectify that? Can you try to not do it again? And if you do do it again, can you more quickly take accountability for that, more quickly apologize for that, more quickly rectify that?

become a more honest person, a more vulnerable person, right? Become a more generous person. Find ways to serve others in tiny little ways. You don't have to go save the world. Can you hold the door open for the lady coming in behind you? Can you bring your wife home flowers for no other reason than you love her? Can you spend a little extra time off your phone reading a book with your kid? Or teaching them to play chess or going on a hike?

There's a million different ways in which you're, we can consciously through daily practice cultivate a more moral, more ethical, more virtuous, more focused, more harmonious, more content subjectivity that can then be used and is forged in the process of going out in the world and doing your best to make it better. Unattached to consequences. You don't actually know if all your work trying to build a better world will actually win. That's the fucking thing. We could lose.

Our whole project could crash in fire. Fascism, AI, apocalypse, climate, and there's a million ways in which things could go wrong. Our communist vision never comes to fruition. Our socialist vision never comes to fruition.

We don't control how human history plays out. We can only control how we respond in our circumstances. And we can certainly become better people every single day and we can give our life over to something bigger than ourselves. It doesn't mean throw your life away. It doesn't mean go on some adventurous shit and get yourself killed or get yourself locked up for no reason. That's adventureism. That's not something that is anybody's asking anybody to do, right? You can balance your life and your

responsibilities to your kids and your family with a life committed to trying your best to contribute whatever you meaningfully can to creating a better world. You can become a more ethical person. You can continually educate yourself. You can insist that you have control over your mind. You don't give it over to techno corporations who want to leverage it so they can sell your data so they can make more profit. You can make all these decisions. You can't control the world you're born into. You can't control what's happening in the world. You can't snap your fingers and stop Trump or stop ICE or stop the genocide in Palestine or stop the war in Iran. Those are things that are outside your control. You have to accept that personally that I cannot control those things and then look to the

things in your life that you can control. What do I have influence over? Who can I reach? How can I be a better person today? What can I do in my community to solve a material problem? How can I link up with people around the country that are doing similar things? How can I keep at the forefront of my mind and teach other people the humanity of human beings in the global south who are so often through the colonial mind dehumanized turned into savages or whose lives are somehow less than our lives. How can I humanize them? And then a bunch of us doing those things together, a bunch of us coming together and organizing, a bunch of us being as ethical and virtuous as we possibly can, working every day to be better people, a bunch of us starting to engage in meditation practices

to begin to observe how the ego functions and how the incessant inner dialogue is really unhelpful and how we can become more compassionate, more of us contributing to making the world a better place and helping other people, that is quantity into quality. There is a quantitative buildup of that sort of activity

that can one day lead to a qualitative shift in the overall nature of the situation that we find ourselves in. And so you have to do this stuff without expecting reward and with accepting the fact that you don't know how it all plays out in the end. and you're still going to devote your life to it

because you know it's the right thing to do and you will find meaning in that process so that is socialism and man in Cuba by Che Guevara I had a really fun time reading that that was the first time I read the entire text I really appreciate Che his spirit lives on his words live on

where you know he's been dead for decades and yet here we are learning from him being inspired by him letting ourselves be uplifted by him it's a beautiful thing. And when we say revolutionaries never die, this is why. They continue to live on. They continue to teach from beyond the grave.

They continue to inspire from beyond the grave. The people who killed them, the person who killed Malcolm X, the person who killed Fred Hampton, the Frye Corp agents who killed Rosa Luxembourg, the CIA-backed agent who killed Che Guevara in Bolivia. Who are they again? Who reads their words? who remembers their names

who flies flags with their face on it revolutionaries never die