S LIBERAL HELPERS

\ 27ally through contact with the Venezuelan situation, existed in Latin America at repeated intervalsThe kernel of the entire left was chiefly recruited from provided that the workers and peasants were prepared tothe compradore classes, the bourgeois, and petit-bour- mobilize and fight in ,their. immediate objective selfgeoiseducated strata. The cliquist form 'of Venezuelan interests. Why, then, this being true, do compradorepolitical life from Right through Left reminded me of regimes still exist?Ceylonese politics, in which all the leaders of the con- If this is true, how is it possible that capitalism stilltending parties -- Right-wing, Communist Party, exists in Latin America? There is not a single worker orTrotskyist were drawn from the same small group of peasant in Brazil who should not desire for the immefamilies.Brothers, cousins, and so forth from the same diate overthrow of the murderous regime in that country;compradore families were distributed throughout all why does it exist, then? These regimes persist onlyparties. National Ceylonese politics are almost a family because of the ideas which dominate the insides of thedrawing-room political discussion using the press and people's heads. In short, the central problem of revolunationallife generally for a private family drawing room. tionary struggle is, the foolish way of thinking whichThroughout the Spanish Caribbean, I discovered dominates the in_ides of the heads of workers andthrough my Venezu.elan and Cuban acquaintances, all peasants. (It is also true that similar but slightly differentthe principle and secondary revolutionary leaders either foolish ideas dominate the insides of the heads of mostknew one another T from university or knew a friend of a organizations of the North American Leff.)friend through university or family connections. The The essence of capitalist ideology, for which thepattern of family and other social connections made even peasant or petit-bourgeois mentality is the extreme form,"Marxist-oriented" revolutionary movements a matter of .is that alienation which causes the individual to seesettling differences within close social circles, himself as most inwardly a monad-like "little me"--asIn meeting such circles I saw first-hand the social Garcia Marquez has analyzed the,pathetic dominance oforigins of the stink of petit-bourgeois "Marxist" dilet- Latin American culture by this disease in Cien Anos detantism which continues to ooze from the writings of Soledad. The extreme version of this, the peasant Oreven the most "super-revolutionary" of Latin American petit-bourgeois mentality documented by Marquez, isgroups to the present day. In short, the young men and the extentialist world-outlook, in which each man is anwomen who play the key organizing role in creating these isolated island inside himself. His relationship to the';Marxist" groups are more oriented to the winning-over outer world, to society, even to his immediate family, is aof liberals from the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois strata, fraud of "honor," as we see in the disease of Machismo.to maintaining active discussions and friendly social This is the extreme form of the bourgeois ideologicalconnections with those liberals. Their relationship to the sickness analyzed successively by Hegel, Feuerbach, andworkers and peasants is essentially demagogic, a matter Marx. It is the bourgeois world-outlook which says thatof the most simplistic slogans, and crude recipes for a only the isolated individual could possibly know hisconception of "direct action" one would expect among innermost needs, only the isolated village could know itsschoolboys on a spree, proper desires, only the workers within one factoryMuch of Latin-American Leff political activity should manage their own affairs • without "outside"suggests to one that well-intentioned young people have interference from other employed or unemployedtransferred the conceptions of the university student workers, only fhe popular forces of each nation couldstrike into the realm of life-death struggles, and have know what is proper for their own nation. It is thisinvolved uneducated workers and peasants in what are ideology, this mental sickness, which compels the victimactually only imitations of campus upsurges -- with to act usually in only the way which leads to the perpetusomerifles and pistols added, ation of'capitalism.Many choose to insist that one not criticize misguided In this pathetic outlook, one has respect for the privaterevolutionary struggles on the premise that comrade self of the other person, one has respect for his opinions,Fidel has foolishly said one should not. Comrade Fidel is because he ("like me") must not be insulted and dis_not responsible for the idea; wherever petit-bourgeois honored by our looking below the surface of the falserevolutionaries gather around the world, the same petit- mask he presents to the outside world. In politics, thebourgeois Menshevik rejection of serious and open scien- bourgeois individual is eclectic; in the socialist movetificcritioism prevails, ment, his programs are eclectic porridges made up ofWhat are the facts? Comrade Che was half-correct courteous se_ctions from the treasured sentimenfs ofwhen he insisted that the objective conditions throughout "every section of the popular forces one seeks to attractLatin America demanded immediate revolution. It is to the unified struggle for national dignity andalso true that the objective conditions for revolution have righteousness." He is not a revolutionary, even when he