The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.62/No.22           June 8, 1998 
 
 
Pathfinder Issues New Edition Of `Che: Economics And Politics'  

BY SARA LOBMAN
Pathfinder has just published a new English-language edition of Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism by Carlos Tablada. It has a new preface by Mary-Alice Waters and an entirely new photo section, containing more than two dozen photographs, many appearing in an English-language book for the first time.

It also incorporates editing done by the author for Pathfinder's 1997 Spanish-language edition. A new French- language edition will be published later this year.

The book draws on many of Guevara's writings in the initial years of the Cuban revolution. A central leader of the July 26 Movement and Rebel Army, which led the revolutionary war that overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship, Guevara was Cuba's minister of industry from 1961 to 1965.

In that capacity he was directly responsible for reorganizing on new working-class foundations some 70 percent of industry in Cuba, while at the same time maintaining production, as former owners and most of the old management personnel left the country.

Many of the concrete questions that Cuba's revolutionary leadership dealt with in leading working men and women in Cuba to begin the transition to socialism - transforming themselves in the process -are the subject of this book. How do workers and farmers take more and more control over the political direction and administration of the state and economy - factory by factory and in the country as a whole? What is the place of education and broader culture in building a new society? How can voluntary labor begin to change how human beings view work? What role do moral incentives play in the fight for efficiency in a workers state? What is the character and place of material incentives?

Socialism, Guevara notes, "is not a matter of how many kilograms of meat one has to eat, not of how many times a year someone can go to the beach, nor how many pretty things from abroad one 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."

In her preface Waters notes that the questions Che Guevara addresses remain the most important questions of our epoch.

The economic and social crises engendered throughout the world by capitalism in its death agony would not be alien to Guevara, she says. "With one important qualification: imperialism is weaker than it was thirty years ago, more vulnerable, and the working class is a larger percentage of the population. The stakes have gone up. It is the capitalist world that will face the gravest crisis in the years ahead," Waters explains.

The new edition of Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism is a valuable weapon in the hands of revolutionary fighters around the world who are determined to learn from and apply the example of workers and farmers in Cuba.  
 
 
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