 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Today is October 9th. In 1967, on this day, October 9th, Che Guevara was killed, perhaps assassinated, in Bolivia, where he had gone to build a revolution alongside his comrades, many of them Cuban, some of them Bolivian. In honor of Che, on this day, almost 20 publishing houses from around the world, from Bharati Putta Kalam in Tamil Nadu to Expresso Popular in Brazil, will release a text, a free downloadable PDF, which contains two essays by Che Guevara. First essay is Letter to the Tri-Continental, and the second essay is Man and Socialism in Cuba. These are two iconic essays by Che Guevara. The text, a free downloadable PDF in about 20 languages, has a preface by Maria del Carmen Arlet Garcia, who's a researcher at the Che Guevara Institute in Havana, Cuba. And the text has an introduction, a fresh, brilliant introduction, by Ajaz Ahmed, who is joining us today to talk about his introduction, and as well about the importance of Che Guevara. Ajaz, welcome to People's Dispatch. Thank you very much. Well, as I said, today is the anniversary of the murder, assassination, death of Che Guevara. Che is generally understood in a sort of legendary way, you know, outside the real Che. He is lifted up to legend. In your introduction, you actually bring us back to Earth and give us some of the central themes of Che Guevara's life, very brief life, but a life filled with action and accomplishment. Could you walk us through a little bit about the context of Che's life and the things that he did in that life? Che, he has been raised to the level of a legend, rightly so. But I think what happens with raising of him to the level of a legend is that that the figure is romanticized out of his actual existence. Romanticized and romanticized both as this brilliant guerrilla fighter and as martyr to the revolutionary cause, fearless and so on, which is I think somewhat reductive. Che, I think from the very beginning of his, from the time of his youth, had first of all an immense curiosity about the world that he lived in. For example, while he was still a medical student, he went on a tour of all of Latin America to actually know his continent. Secondly, he was, I think from the very beginning, a very voracious reader on the one hand, trained medical doctor. And at the same time, a great voracious reader of revolutionary literature and revolutionary history. And it's significantly, and you know, the amazing thing about Che is that he, his entire life, actual texture of his life is that of profound internationalism so that it's, he happens to be in Guatemala at the time when there is an American intervention, sponsored coup d'etat against the government of our bands. And as a young man there, that is the first time he immediately commits himself to fight with arms in the defense of that revolution. So something that he said much later or variations of which he kept saying on his life is that when you are talking about the revolution and revolutionaries, it is not enough to support, it has you have to join the struggle and either win or lose. Die or you go to death or victory as a part, as an element, a proletarian element in this great revolutionary wave of our time. And he always saw himself as that. At the same time, for him, the ultimate arena of revolution was actually the world. And it's dialectically thought out that imperialism, you no longer have national, you know, capitalism in this country, in that country, in that country. The very fact that that capitalism has entered what, as he put it, the last stages of capitalism is imperialism. And in this stage, precisely because it is a global order, the revolution is intrinsically and fundamentally international in character. And more than that, he believed that it cannot be fought country by country. And that is what the essence of his letter to the tricontinental was two, three many Vietnam's and so on, that many, many fronts have to be opened up. The battle will be one either on a grand global scale or maybe lost country by country. So there was a profound internationalism of a personal temperament and personal view of himself. But there was also this dialectical understanding of what the relationship is between imperialism and the revolutionary possibility. And at the same time, while he thought of a revolution as something that has to happen on a global scale, he had a deep profound understanding of the relationship between revolutionary nationalism and the communist project, the socialist project, the communist project. So that is not that like some fashionable people was again, internationalism was not opposed against nationalism or as something higher than nationalism. You make a revolution in where you are, and you try to make open fronts nation by nation, where ever you may be. So it is. So within this perspective, very early in his life, from Guatemala, he had to run after the coup and ended up in Mexico where he met with them. And he had extraordinary, extraordinary insight of having very long discussion with chair, but at the end of it, committing himself to a lifelong partnership with chair for making the revolution in Cuba. Again, as an internationalist, partly as a Latin American internationalist, partly as global internationalist, for him, revolutionary project was a revolutionary project if it was not happening in his country, Argentina. He would fully and completely commit himself to the Cuban revolution, which he did with an extraordinary dedication. And once he had done that, and once the revolution was successful, and he emerged as one of the key leaders, not only one of the key leaders during the war, but also key leaders of the revolution. In fact, he was something of a, he sometimes acted as something of a not ambassador, something more than ambassador, less than head of state, representing Cuba in any number of world forums. Fidel was, of course, always a great leader and questionably, but he had that kind of a position in his world out there. So committed himself entirely to the Cuban revolution and at the same time, said to Fidel, look, you're the head of the revolutionary government in Cuba and you don't have the freedom to attend to the making of a world revolution. I, on the other hand, can have that freedom. And it was joint project, but it was a division of labor in which he did in fact participate in African countries and towards the end, when he went to Bolivia, the idea was not only to make a revolution in Bolivia, but hopefully create bases there that could then help extend the revolutionary process into Argentina, I'd say. So there is this extraordinary kind of internationalism in him. The other thing that I think is very important about Jay, and this again, I think also applies to Fidel, but since we're talking about Jay, Jay had a certain idea of what the revolution does. What does it mean to make a communist revolution and build a communist society? And in that he did never subscribe to this instrumental notion that you have to go through a period of massive socialist primitive accumulation and then in high levels of industrialization and high levels of production and so on. He was very skeptical of that idea of productivism as such. In fact, when I read Jay on that side of Jay, I always think of early Marx, for Jay, one of the absolute objectives of communism is to create human beings and other human beings and other human beings and then who then create a society of such human beings, who as he puts it quite clearly, who then overcome the kind of distortions of human personality that capitalism has introduced to our own psyche, our own nature and so on. And this is classical Marxism. Marx said that the capitalism not only destroys nature outside human beings, but it destroys human nature itself. Human beings no longer act in a natural manner. In fact, capitalism gives them an entirely different view, individualization, alienation from themselves, alienation from their production processing, alienation from society, abstraction of money, etc., etc. You live an alienated existence and overcoming that and for that Jay was quite clear you did not need a very high level of industrial production. In fact, the kind of advanced capitalism that we are dealing with is so destructive that any real communism will have to step back and create a society in which it is not, the aim is not to create more and more goods and more and more commodities, but what human beings need for happiness and for reconstructing human society that has been destroyed by capitalism. And that this is a process that is what revolutionary process itself makes possible for human beings to imagine what a revolutionary society would be like. You know, well, as a young person in Calcutta, the first Che book I came across was the episodes of a revolutionary war, which are, you know, his diary reflections on the war. And, you know, I read it, of course, with great interest and I couldn't really figure it out because the edition we had had no context. You know, it just was his reflections. We were under an air attack and there's a charming sequence which I'll never forget where he is tending to, you know, a civilian in the Sierra Maestra and she basically says, you know, doctors always they fool you and he tries to explain that not this kind of doctor. And that puzzled me. I remember this vividly, this idea that no, there's a different kind of doctor and there's a different kind of of a person in the world. And then later, I read Man and Socialism in Cuba, which we've included in this text, which really affected me greatly because it talked directly about, you know, the nature of what it is to be a human being. And I suppose what you're saying as well is there's not only an echo of all of Marx, but there's an echo of a text that I don't think he read, which was Marx's 1844 Paris manuscripts. But regardless of that, he seemed to touch something that that text, which you know, is part of a book is just so beautiful. I want to just briefly, if you could reflect on this thing you were just talking about, which is, you know, we don't have to be the kind of people we were. We can be a different kind of people. And, you know, it goes against every bourgeois assault on socialism, which says that, look, your ideas are beautiful. They're just not possible because we're not that kind of person. And Jay is just saying, listen, people, you don't have to be that kind of person because to be honest, you're not that kind of person. That's what they're telling you, you are. Yeah, yeah, it is very interesting that you remember that particular passage from his diary of the Revolutionary War about the doctors. Because I mean, ultimately, that little thing that he says there that not all doctors like that. You know, you have been involved in this. The medical missions that the Cubans have been sending out into the world, regardless of what kind of political system they have, it's not only that they went to Venezuela because it was a fraternal socialist country. They sent them to Pakistan after a great earthquake and things like that all over the world. Unilaterally, these socialist doctors go there on a human mission as ambassadors of human socialism and as this new kind of human being that Jay is talking about in this article, in which it's not a relation, it's not a relation that goes through the mechanisms of exchange. It is not a money relation. That fundamental thing, you know, he may have been already read the 1844 manuscripts, but you're quite right. That is what I thought of when I was reading the article recently. But Marx actually comes to it everywhere, including the manifesto again and again about throughout capital detox. So this is something very fundamental in Marxism. But since the second international, there has been this other kind of notion of communism that comes after the productive forces have reached their maximum capacity, etc. Whereas what we find is that in reality, that process is endless. Revolution does not come at the end of it. Revolution is an interruption of it. Revolution interrupts. It reverses. And it sets up on, sets up a logic of changing human beings, human relations. Very idea of what is a valuable human life. And that, I think, is something that he, of course, says it most beautifully and as a fundamental tenet of communist belief. But I think there's something about the tricontinental revolutions. You know, there's a very strong tendency of that sort in Mao. Again and again, to be able to create a really anti-capitalist socialist society at a relatively low level of development of productive forces, because human being can do it. You see some of it, quite a bit of it, again and again in a place like Canada, where it is a state within the Republic of the bourgeoisie with very limited resources and so on. And yet there are extraordinary moments again and again and again, where this human solidarity for the sake of us all, no one in particular, this erupts and becomes a part of the way of life that the communist movement in Canada is trying to create. And you see glimpses of what it can be if you had a fully socialist society of that kind. If you can do it within the Republic of the bourgeoisie, this dreadful Republic of the bourgeoisie, with so little resources, then this is something that is conceivable as a form of planetary life, which can reverse all the horrors that capitalism has created, both in human nature and the nature outside. And for Jay to be sensitive to all of this and so eloquent about it was extraordinary, because in that time the second international notion of what socialism should be or can be was also quite dominant in the Soviet Union and some of what Jay is saying is partly a criticism of what has not been done in the existing socialist countries in terms of creating this new kind of human being, not to the extent that he wanted to, etc. Well, you know, when we later, we're going to put together more of Jay's text, the other text is his speech in Algiers, where he goes into this at great length and it's a brilliant speech. Finally, again, this is October 9th, when we're releasing this book, which will just be called Jay, with a gorgeous picture, you know, done by our designer things from Tri-Continental. It's a really remarkable cover. On this day, Jay Guevara was assassinated. And we are very much thinking of commemorating it as the International Day to Abolish the CIA. And so I just wanted a reflection from you on this moment of ours in the anti-imperialist struggle, you know, where we are to some extent on the back foot. And this idea of an International Day to Abolish the CIA. Oh, absolutely. International Day to Abolish the CIA. But we should also have an International Day to Abolish the Pentagon. Of course. Of course, you know, the amount of you have also written about it, the amount of damage CIA itself has done to the revolutions of Tri-Continental directly is at least as much as pentagonist. Because they have intervened against actual growing revolutionary movement to nip them in the burden. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, great. Well, you know, this is People's Dispatch, which is the media arm of movements around the world. We are commemorating on October 9, the assassination of Che Guevara in the midst of the International Week of Anti-Imperialist Actions, which is a project which you can find out about at antiimperialist.org. Please go and download in one of 20 languages, Canada, Gujarati, Spanish, Portuguese, Slovenian, Hindi, English. Download this text called Che. It's quite remarkable. And I know that if you read man and socialism in Cuba with the same open heart as I remember reading it as a teenager, it's going to have a big impact on you because it has an impact on everybody that allows this text to come into them without fighting it. Eja Zemba, thanks for joining us. Thank you very much.