 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 Tricontinental, 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 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. 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 contexts 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 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 leader on the one hand trained medical doctor and at the same time a great voracious leader 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 in America 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 of 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 uh uh thought out that imperialism you 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 wars two three many vietnam's and so on that many many fronts have to be opened up the battle will be won either on a grand global scale or maybe lost country by country so there was there was a profound internationalism of a personal temperament and personal view and 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 um while he 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 uh so that is not that uh like some fashionable people was again internationalism was not posed against nationalism or as something higher than nationalism uh 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 um within this perspective uh very early in his life um from guatimana he he had to run after the after the coup and ended up in mexico where he met fidel 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 a global internationalist uh for him revolutionary project was a revolutionary project if it was not happening in his country argentina um he would fully and completely commit himself to the cuban revolution which he did and with an extraordinary dedication and once he had done that and once the revolution uh was successful uh and he emerged as one of the key leaders not only one of the key guerrilla leaders during the war but also key leaders of the revolution in fact uh in fact he was something of a um he sometimes acted as uh something of a not ambassador something more than ambassador less than head of state representing cuba in any number of world forums um always fidel was of course always a great leader unquestionably 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 set to fidel uh look you're 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 uh and it was a joint project but it was a division of labor in which he did in fact participate in african countries in uh 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 except so there is this 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 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 you know 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 uh productivism as such uh in fact uh in fact when i when i read jay on that side of jay i always think of early marks um for 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 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 uh destroys nature outside human beings but it destroys human nature itself uh 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 uh in fact the kind of uh 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 uh 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 um well as a young person in Calcutta the first jay 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 um 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 an 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 our 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 Che 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 ultimately that little thing that he says there that not all doctors like that you know you have been involved in this the 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 after a great earthquake and things like that all over the world unilaterally the socialist doctors go there on a human mission as ambassadors of Cuban socialism and as this new kind of human being that Che is talking about in this article in which it's it's 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 or have read because 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 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 of of communism that comes after the productive forces have reached their maximum capacity and etc 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 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 is something about the tricontinental revolutions you know there's a very strong tendency of that sort in in Mao you know again and again there's a to 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 in a place like Canada where where it is a state within the republic of the bourgeoisie with very limited resources and so on and then 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 the communist movement in in Canada is trying to create and you see glimpses of what you know it can it can be if you had a fully socialist right in that kind if you can do it within the republic of the bourgeoisie this dreadful republic 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 for a chair to be sensitive to all of this and so eloquent about it it was extraordinary because in that time the second international notion of what socialism should be can be but it was also you know 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 Che 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 Pentagon because they have intervening against actual growing revolutionary movement to make them in the book 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 9th 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 it anti-imperialist.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. Ejaz Ahmed thanks for joining us thank you very much you