Any Marxists here?
Okay, so i havnt figured out my personal stance but I know pretty much what its about.
I'm doing a report for school about Che Guevara, and I'm supposed to do it from a communist/marxist point of view, and I thought that it would be nifty to interview somebody, who believes in communism and stuff, about Che Guevara, his political career, and how he did advancing his cause.
So if you wanna talk about it, or pretend your a marxist and talk about it, i'll get a really nice grade on my paper! or if you just wanna rant, thats okay too.
I'm doing a report for school about Che Guevara, and I'm supposed to do it from a communist/marxist point of view, and I thought that it would be nifty to interview somebody, who believes in communism and stuff, about Che Guevara, his political career, and how he did advancing his cause.
So if you wanna talk about it, or pretend your a marxist and talk about it, i'll get a really nice grade on my paper! or if you just wanna rant, thats okay too.
Comments
...oops...did I say that out loud?!
sincerely,
david bowie
(detroit)
The second thing you need to know is that he & Castro were buddies fighting to overthrow a rather corrupt mafia riddle Cuban Government......
They lived in the hills of cuba gaining popular support from the masses of Cuban people & eventually took over the country in a relatively bloodless war.
Things looked good for a while...Then came the "Bay of Pigs", an aborted USA backed invasion / re-occupation.
With it's failure, Castro thought to give Krushchev a call & asked for lots of missiles with Nuke heads on them.
Kennedy called the soviets bluff & WW111 was averted by the skin of our teeth.
Shortly after, Castro & Che had a huge punch up....Disagreeing as to the direction of the Revolution.
Che left to try to ferment marxist revolutions through-out Sth America.
Mostly he was a huge failure, because what little local support he had, was wittled away to nothing as a result of his habit of executing anyone who didn't happen to believe in his revolution....Nothing like a doctor killing to encourage peasant farmers to support him & his brand of marxist revolution. Che for all his charisma, failed to understand the plight of peasants & got his comeuppance in Bolivia..he was executed by a Bolivian officer after months of trying to ferment revolution....
Meanwhile back in Cuba, Castro denounced the execution, but secretly rejoiced that his only real opposition had been snuffed out.....
So Che like all marxists who work within "closed circles of truth" failed to truly concientise the very people they were claiming to liberate....
Meanwhile hippies up & down the coast all thought of Che as some sort of Poster idol & even ( sick ) turned him into a messainic meshiah figure with Christ like qualities.. all of which can't gloss over the fact that he was a cold blooded murderer.....who like all failed Marxists was addicted to the idea of continual revolution born out of violent upheaval...
Originally posted by aquafire
Meanwhile hippies up & down the coast all thought of Che as some sort of Poster idol & even ( sick ) turned him into a messainic meshiah figure with Christ like qualities.. all of which can't gloss over the fact that he was a cold blooded murderer.....who like all failed Marxists was addicted to the idea of continual revolution born out of violent upheaval...
That's ecause he looked so good . . . and that olive drab hat is sooos stylish
Originally posted by New
he was actually an argentinian.
You've been to high-school damm hell !
But if they taught you to read you will note that I didn't actually say he was Cuban..now did I ? Go on Fess up
Originally posted by aquafire
You've been to high-school damm hell !
But if they taught you to read you will note that I didn't actually say he was Cuban..now did I ? Go on Fess up
No,you didn't.
But, I Think its unlikely that he in any way threatend Castro's leadership. I think it was more a case of traditional disagreement on the left. The old Local Vs. Global revolution thing.
Of fragile health (he was astmatic since the age of two), Ernesto Guevara was early on quite hostile to the less than stirring represntative democracy, and after a Peronist stint (perhaps to spite his parents) he turned to the teachings of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.
Having participated in the struggle against Batista with Castro, wjere he gained the nickname of ?Che? (?pal?, ?chum?), he was given the presidency of the Cuban National Bank.
While he was satisfied by the Marxist turn revolutionary Cuba was taking of which he overestimated his contribution (it was due in large part to US' hostility toward it as well as to deep-rooted anti-US feelings in Cuba), he nonetheless felt the sedentary life of bank adminstrator (even of a proletarian bank), or even an industry minister, wasn't the life for him. Moreover, as the schism between Moscow and Peking was taking form, Guevara was resolutely more in favour of Mao Zedong (in whom he saw a loyal disciple of the line going form Marx to Stalin) than of the reactionary Khrushchev, who had gone as far as publically condemning Stalin, and preferred compromise with the capitalist West after having tried confrontation.
Given that Castro had chosen to stay tied to Moscow (Cuba's economy was subsidised by the USSR till the demise of the latter), all this caused his fall from favour in the early sixties. So he travelled a lot to Asia and Africa and became more and more disillusioned with the Soviet system, which he saw as another form of the inherently exploitative nature of the powers of the Northern Hemisphere; his Marxism was now more and more infused with Maoism and Third-World militantism or tercermundismo.
So now he set out to the most agricultural, least industrial (and thus least likely to have an urban proletariat ?ripe for revolutionary activity? according to classical Marxist doctrine) countries of South America to reproduce what Mao had done in China.
He sought to organise the Bolivian peasantry to do just that. However, while a core of poor campesinos was indeed devoted to him and selfless in struggle, he failed to find favour in most of the rest of them, and his war tactics were also to prove rather lame.
Like his revolutionary predecessors, he didn't miss the fact that the very peasants who were fighting the good fight, would also be untrustworthy elements after the revolution succeeds given that their basic aspiration was to have their small tract of land on which they could grow enough food for their needs and sell the surplus, an undoubtedly petit-bourgeois endeavour and a therefore treacherous one.
But to crown his failure at mobilising the Bolivian peasantry, he was captured by some local amateurish pseudo-fascists and put to death.
Yet his espousing of Maoism and Third-World militancy, his condemnation of Soviet ideology as a form of oppressive industrial imperialism equivalent to US capitalism itself, along with his bearded charisma (with Christ-like overtones) charmed millions of Western middle-class to rich kids of the first generation having been born in an era of unprecedented affluence, due to the very combined success of strong democratic state and strong entreprising capitalist economy they so despised (much of their revolt was actually against that relative opulence and safety, which they saw as a form of oppression); and so El Che became a modern idol and icon, to the profit of bourgeois entrepreneurs making tee-shirts and posters everywhere.
[While I could not avoid some expressions of irony, sarcasm or otherwise mockery of the ideology, substracting some of them and trying to find the bright side of others (like ?well sure killing those peasants after the revoltion wouldn't be nice, but wasn't that a necessary price to pay to avoid the return of imperialism??) might do the trick]
I never went to high school..but i did have fun at a girls summer class
Originally posted by aquafire
Ditto...everything I said..but which you put more eloquently.....
I never went to high school..
....but I did have fun at an all girls summer school
Yeah! My 300 Post Birthday.....!
What a better way to celebrate it than by having some fun at Marxism's expense !
"I agree with you in theory-- in theory, communism works... In theory"
sure communism and marxism aren't exactly the same thing, but when ur a fascist, all pinkos look alike.
Originally posted by BuonRotto
Marxism: nice idea that doesn't work.
It might be more accurate to say - Marxism: nice idea, but people keep doing it wrong.
Originally posted by kneelbeforezod
It might be more accurate to say - Marxism: nice idea, but people keep doing it wrong.
True, but it's human nature to do it wrong, or at least it's human nature to screw it up.
Originally posted by kneelbeforezod
It might be more accurate to say - Marxism: nice idea, but people keep doing it wrong.
No, it is an idea that can not work inherently for many reasons, first among them that it assumes an undesrtanding of humanity and then would force us to fit that anthropomorphic and misguided idea of what humanity is: hence it inherently leads to totalitarianism.
Originally posted by Immanuel Goldstein
[While I could not avoid some expressions of irony, sarcasm or otherwise mockery of the ideology, substracting some of them and trying to find the bright side of others (like ?well sure killing those peasants after the revoltion wouldn't be nice, but wasn't that a necessary price to pay to avoid the return of imperialism??) might do the trick]
I never understood, the strange admiration of Che among the occidental world. The only thing that i remember of his biography, was all the dirty blood on his hands.
His place is more on hell than on T-shirts.