(Cont'd. )
Guevara goes on to discuss the relationship between the leaders and the mass, noting the inadequacy of formal guarantees of democratic expression but illustrating how the masses show their will as in 1962 when a sectarian policy was imposed on the party by Anibal Escalante and a decline in collective enthusiasm is reflected by a resulting quantitative decrease of the contribution of each individual, each of the elements forming the whole of the masses. Work is so paralyzed that insignificant quantities are produced. And he goes on; 'The difficult thing for someone not living the experience of the revolution to understand is this close dialectical unity between the individual and the mass, in which the mass, as an aggregate of individuals, is interconnected with its leaders', In the under-developed countries the absence of a proletariat educated in social labour constitutes a big drawback in the formation of an industrialized, socialist country. The pressure of new economic forms creates pressures on the individual to conform, the individual attempts to adjust himself to new norms, new needs and he begins to educate himself. "Society as a whole must be converted into a gigantic school", "Despite the lack of institutions, which must be corrected gradually, the masses are now making history as a conscious aggregate of individuals fighting for the same cause, man under socialism, despite his apparent standardization, is more complete; despite the lack of perfect machinery for it, his opportunities for expressing himself and making himself felt in the social organism are infinitely greater, It is still necessary to strengthen his conscious participation, individual and collective, in all the mechanisms of management and production, and to link it to the idea of the need for technical and ideological education so that he sees how closely interdependent these processes are how their advancement is parallel, In this way he will reach total consciousness of his social function, which equivalent to his full realization as a human being, once the chains of alienation are broken. This will be translated concretely into the regaining of his true nature through liberated labour and the expression of his proper human condition through culture and art", Che went on to talk of the role of art and culture in the revolution and gave a theoretical criticism of that school of art known as 'socialist realism'. "Why then should we try to find the only valid prescription for art in the frozen forms of Socialist Realism? We cannot counterpose the concept of Socialist Realism to that of freedom, because the latter does not yet exist and will not exist until the complete development of the new society. Let us not attempt, from the pontifical throne of realism-at-any-cost, to condemn all the art forms which have evolved since the first half of the 19th Century for we would then fall into the Proudhonian mistake of returning to the past, of putting a straitjacket on the artistic expression of the man who is being bom and is in the process of making himself, What is needed is the development of an ideological-cultural mechanism which permits both free inquiry and the uprooting of the weeds which multiply so easily in the fertile soil of state subsidies", The last portion of the document should be reproduced in full, but owing to space problems a small portion will be given. Che talks about the responsibility of a revolutionary in our epoch, about the necessity for a vanguard leader to idealize his love of the people to make it their most sacred cause. He talks about the secrifices that must be made . ° eS med REE
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