[Marxism] Regis Debray and God

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/features/article2442689.ece
13 April 2007 11:09

Régis Debray worked with Castro, fought with Che, 
and later advised Mitterrand. Now he salutes, but 
does not worship, God. Gerry Feehily meets him in Paris

Do all lives lead to and spring from a single 
moment? An illustration: it's 1964, and Che 
Guevara, in the gardens of the Cuban Embassy in 
Algiers, interrupts a game of chess to flick 
through Sartre's review Les Temps Modernes. He 
comes to an essay on urban and rural guerrilla 
movements written by a 23-year-old graduate of 
the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure in 
Paris. Guevara has a translation forwarded to 
Fidel Castro, who invites its author, then 
teaching philosophy in drab Nancy, eastern 
France, to Havana. The young man accepts, and so 
begins a journey from Cuba to the Bolivian 
jungle, to Allende's Chile, even to the Elysée Palace.

Now, 40 years after setting out, the writer and 
philosopher Régis Debray sits in an apartment off 
the Boulevard St Germain in Paris. Volumes of 
Victor Hugo lie strewn on the table, a portrait 
of Kafka hangs on the wall. The room looks on to 
the rue de l'Odéon, where Joyce read from 
Finnegans Wake at the original Shakespeare and 
Co. bookshop. The friendly clutter within, the 
tranquil streets inhabited by literary ghosts 
without, suggest journeys through mindscapes 
rather than through rebellion and dictatorships.

"I was very literary as a young man, but highly 
politicised," Debray says. "Both vocations were 
stored in strictly separate compartments, with a 
certain humourlessness. A Communist party member, 
I was also inspired by Orwell, the great solitary 
irredentist... Life in France under De Gaulle 
seemed blocked. Although I now believe my 
imagination was greater than my sense of reality, 
your destiny falls into your lap, so to speak, 
because you would have it so." By 1965, Cuba's 
revolution had survived the Bay of Pigs invasion 
and assassination attempts on Castro. For Debray, 
it was "a heady time". "In the West... the 
proletariat, sated on consumer goods and postwar 
prosperity, had fumbled the revolutionary torch. 
But it had been taken up again by peasant 
movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America."

Debray was catapulted into Castro's inner circle. 
He spent weekends in combat training in the 
Sierra Maestra with other guerilleros, while 
all-night conversations in the capital focused on 
history, theory and the relative merits of AK47s 
over M16s. It was soon to become clear, however, 
that revolution was exporting none too well, as 
Guevara's botched Congo expedition of 1965 would 
prove. "My misgivings crystallised during Che's 
Bolivian expedition, but I went nonetheless," 
Debray recalls. "Shortly after his capture and 
execution (with a nod, of course, from 
Washington) in November '67, I was arrested and 
imprisoned. Four blank, sterile years followed. 
Beyond dreams of escape, I was kept alive by 
books - like all intellectuals - and I had time 
to reflect on history in the long term."

Here Debray saw the blind spot in Communist 
thinking. "Aside from the limits to armed 
struggle, I was struck by the lack of 
revolutionary fraternity between Cubans and 
Bolivian guerrillas, and also by the sight of the 
widows of dead Bolivian soldiers baying for my 
foreigner's blood. In solitary confinement I 
turned to thinking about the collective, the 'we'.

"It struck me that a Chinese Marxist has more in 
common with a Chinese Confucianist than an 
English Marxist. They are both Chinese, after 
all. The national is ineradicable. History as 
tradition, language, even the clothes you wear, 
will always take precedence over ideas, and any 
politics that fails to take on board the 
particularities of a culture is hollow."

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