Dialectics, the masses, & what U.S. communists must learn from history’s successful revolutions

Without a material basis, revolutionary militancy is only adventurism. To rush into the class and anti-colonial conflict with eagerness for war, without considering what preparations war will require and whether the given moment calls for it, is counterproductive. Ultra-left strains of the communist movement, like the Naxalite Maoists in India, have committed this error and consequently found themselves in a never-ending cycle of guerrilla warfare. In even worse cases, like the Maoist followers of Chairman Gonzalo in Peru, they’ve been totally defeated. As Mao himself said, to go on the offensive when the masses aren’t ready is adventurism.

However, even more dangerous is the other error that Mao described: refusing to engage in militancy when the conditions demand that communists protect themselves from counterrevolutionary violence. He described this as right opportunism. When communists have committed this error, like was the case for the PKI in Indonesia (which refused to arm its members during the leadup to the 1965 anti-communist coup), they’ve neen exterminated or terrorized into submission. Crucial for our success is finding a balance between these two extremes of overly eager militancy, and neglect towards militancy. Pivotal towards this are knowing how to gauge when the conditions necessitate action, and knowing exactly what will be required to mount such a defense against counterrevolutionary terror.

I’ll make this into a guide for how to do so within the United States. But the reasoning behind what I’ll describe can also be utilized for tactical decisions by liberation movements outside the imperial center. In fact, it’s from the exploited country of Peru that I’ll be drawing my prime example of tactical maneuvers done wrong. And it’s from the formerly colonized countries Vietnam and Cuba that I’ll draw my main examples of militancy done right.

Gonzaloism: when communists fail to win the masses

Last year, one Medium columnist (who’s interestingly named me as an example of someone who goes boldly far in my willingness to talk about militancy) put forth an analysis of the mistakes that Gonzalo and his Shining Path made. Their conclusion was Gonzalo followed the dogmatic logic behind Mao’s Cultural Revolution: that proletarian revolution must follow a linear path where after the Communist Party comes to power, a purge of what the Party’s leadership judges to be “reactionary elements” must follow. The way Mao’s camp went about this, which today’s Communist Party of China has rightly disavowed, was to unleash insufficiently disciplined violence so that the “capitalist roaders” (or rather the communists who properly understand how to develop an impoverished country) could be crushed. As this columnist assesses, what Gonzalo did was take these incorrect ideas of Mao’s, and magnify them:

Gonzalo — not anymore Guzmán [Gonzalo’s original name] — had a flawed understanding of strategy, to say the least. If one is to look at the other important “kindred” regime of the era — Democratic Kampuchea — one can easily see the same linearity I mention: the KR had de facto control over the country at the time their most well-known policies were implemented. At their greatest power, SP [Shining Path] held significant power over the forests of central Peru — the modern San Matías San Carlos reserve — and its influence or areas of operation extended from Lima to the Brazilian border, and from San Martín to Puno. Yet, it had no absolute or significant control over these territories — no “forward bases”, as the guerrilla term goes, not even the support of the majority of the population. Which brings me to another point. SP had an infamously strong perception of indigenous and rural communities. Their ideas somewhat mirrored those of the Democratic Kampuchea regime: “everyone must embrace our ideology, and if they don’t, they are our enemy”. 

Why were the SP adventurist? Because ironically just as their idol Mao warned against, they acted out of step with the masses. They ignored the reality that they lacked the popular support required for a guerrilla army to exercise sovereignty, which naturally led to conflicts between them and the masses—especially the indigenous masses, who are the people that communists throughout the Americas should be especially careful to respect. As the Medium columnist assesses, “SP clearly lacked either the ability to bribe their way to acceptation — to earn the ‘hearts and minds’ — or the strength to chronically subjugate the communities they alienated. Precisely because of this was how its arguably biggest enemy was created: the ronderos.”

The ronderos were a militia movement that fought against the SP. And due to Gonzaloism’s adventurism and chauvinism, the social factors which produced them weren’t necessarily reactionary. The SP failed to respect the self-determination of the indigenous nations whose lands it was operating within, and this strengthened the support for the ronderos. It replaced the tribal power structures with the structures that the Gonzaloists decided were best, without adequately considering the traditions of the Natives (or the fact that these practices have been effective governing models for millennia). The consequence was failure to gain the social base required for a sustainable guerrilla insurgency. The equivalent has happened with today’s Maoist guerrillas in India and the Philippines, which are locked in an endless cycle of costly struggle due to their ultra-leftist and adventurist approach.

For the Gonzaloists, these problems with Maoism were made doubly self-detrimental due to their exacerbating the colonial contradiction. If you try to dictate policies without following the leadership of the indigenous and otherwise colonized peoples, you’ll place yourself in irreconcilable conflict with the masses, making it all the less likely that you’ll win. This combination of adventurism and chauvinism isn’t exclusive to Maoism, but extends to every strain that doesn’t understand dialectics, whether anarchism or the “patriotic socialist” faction of U.S. Marxist-Leninists. As an indigenous communist I know has said to me about one adventurist anarchist group in our area: “White guys taking armed control over indigenous land without taking care to consult the First Nations? That’s colonialism.”

As Che Guevara wrote in Guerrilla Warfare, “Conduct toward the civil population ought to be regulated by a large respect for all the rules and traditions of the people of the zone, in order to demonstrate effectively, with deeds, the moral superiority of the guerrilla fighter over the oppressing soldier.”

Revolutionaries in the U.S., and in every other settler-colonial state (which as we’ve seen includes places like Peru), must not neglect the preferences of the nations whose land they live on. We must place the abolition of the United States, and the full returning of land jurisdiction to the indigenous nations the United States occupies, as equal in priority to building socialism. Because socialism can’t develop here, or in any other corner of the Americas, as long as its representatives perpetuate the colonial contradiction. Such is just one of the many dangers of adventurism, which will always cause one to act out of step with the masses and therefore out of reach of revolution.

Ho Chi Minh Thought: when communists successfully apply dialectics to act in sync with the masses

Communists in the imperial center shouldn’t try to replicate an approach which worked within a formerly colonized country, that would be committing the same kind of error of the Maoists here who think they can simply copy China’s specific model for People’s War. But we should study why revolutions like the one in Vietnam succeeded so we can apply these lessons to our conditions.

In 2020, the Communist Party of Vietnam assessed what Ho Chi Minh Thought says about the masses:

In each historical period of revolution, the Party's mass mobilization work have different contents and methods, but the most important goal is to strengthen the close relationship between the Party and the people, to firmly consolidate the people's beliefs in the Party and the State, to mobilize and widely attract people of all strata to actively participate in revolutionary movements, patriotic emulations and to strengthen the great unity bloc of the entire nation. In the time of the resistance war, the national construction was still full of difficulties, in "Mass Mobilization", Uncle [Ho] had foreseen the cause of reform and pointed out the source of strength to carry out the reform: "Reform and construction work is the responsibility of the people”. In fact, the cause of reform is also initiated from the people, as the 8th National Party Congress document affirmed: “It is the people's opinions, aspirations and initiatives that are the origin of the Party's line of renovation. Thanks to the people's response to the renovation policy and bravely striving and overcoming many difficulties and challenges, the renewal can obtain achievements today".

How does this statement apply to our conditions? For one, it doesn’t mean we ought to promote patriotism for the United States. Whereas Vietnam is a cohesive nation, one that’s been unified through the mutual struggles of its ethnic groups against colonialism and imperialism, the “United States” is like Israel: a colony of settlers whose existence is irreconcilably in conflict with the colonized peoples. Thus the need for adequately addressing the colonial contradiction. But we should apply Uncle Ho’s practices of strengthening the relationship between the Party and the people, and of mobilizing and attracting people of all strata.

What does this mandate we do? That we let the masses be our leaders, instead of trying to dictate what the masses do as the Gonzaloists did. This means continuously investigating what the material needs of the masses are at a given moment, and addressing those needs. If the masses need food, or other mutual aid items, we’ll provide them. If the masses need protection from fascist violence, we’ll provide this as well. These are the services the Black Panthers made available to their communities, and the masses of the imperial center increasingly need such help. So we must equip and train our cadres to deliver them.

Principled anti-colonialism fits into this strategy of making the people’s opinions and aspirations the origin of the revolution’s actions. Just because most within the U.S. currently have a sense of patriotism for the colonial identity, we shouldn’t blindly share this opinion; most in this country also believe the imperialist propaganda about Chinese “human rights abuses,” but no serious communist shares this incorrect opinion on China. People are shaped by their conditions, and if we change the conditions from a settler-colonial state that’s the center of global imperialism to a post-colonial workers democracy, these backwards sentiments will diminish and eventually go extinct. When we return all of the stolen land to the tribes, and build socialism within the pan-indigenous confederacy that will then likely form, most people won’t cling to the colonial identity, nor to xenophobic the lies that the imperialists have put in their heads. That identity, and these hateful attitudes, will no longer be nurtured by their conditions. 

Such an approach is different from the dogmatic commandism of the Gonzaloists; it’s akin to what every successful socialist revolution has done, which is combat backwards sentiments by abolishing the power structures that reinforce reactionary thinking.

What’s most important is that we fulfill the people’s material needs, which are shared by proletarians both from the oppressed nations and from the settler demographics. Regardless of someone’s skin color or ethnicity, if they’re poor, they aspire to be freed from their scarcity (though those from the oppressed nations experience poverty in higher proportions than whites). And if we satisfy this aspiration, they’ll reward us with their support. 

Given those fatal complications that have come when communists in the Americas have failed to respect the self-determination of the colonized nations, embracing “patriotic socialism” in a settler-colonial state won’t win us the masses. It might win us some support from the white labor aristocrats, but they’re some of the last people we should be appealing towards, since a white person who seeks to preserve settlerism has their interests not in the proletariat but in petty-bourgeois white landowners. Which obviously isn’t where the revolutionary struggle is going to stem from; a sociological analysis of today’s United States shows the colonized nations to be the societal facets most likely to start off that revolt.

If we address the colonial contradiction by opposing settlerism, while fulfilling the material needs of the people, we’ll bypass the two big pitfalls of the Gonzaloists: conflict with the colonized, and lack of ability to win the backing of the broader masses. It’s regarding the latter challenge that we can look to Che Guevara’s account of how revolution won in Cuba, which provides details on what it will mean to address the material needs of the masses in the long term.

Che Guevara’s approach: when the revolutionaries win by fulfilling the material needs of the masses

When studying Che on militancy, it’s important to note that we shouldn’t adopt his doctrine of focoism, which is adventurist in that it uncritically applies Che’s statement that “It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them.” Just because this was true for Cuba during Che’s time, it isn’t necessarily true for your location during your time. As Mao was right about many things while wrong about others, so was Che. But we should learn from what he was right about.

And what he was right about is that for revolutionaries to liberate territories, they must gain the backing of the locals. Which is how to practically apply the truism that revolutionaries must let the masses lead them; we can’t act until the masses have given us permission to act. We can’t practice the tactics detailed in Che’s Guerrilla Warfare until we’ve built a relationship with the masses deep enough for the locals to provide us with the shelter, logistical support, and democratic legitimacy to liberate a given piece of territory.

To find this out, it’s best to read all of Guerrilla Warfare. But here’s a summary of Che’s advice in the area of winning the people’s hearts and minds, along with Che quotes that pertain to this issue:

-Don’t try to trample over the cultures and interests of the colonized peoples you’re operating among. This is crucial for establishing the perceived right to govern that’s essential towards mass consent for the tactics Che describes. The context of Che’s statement about respecting the traditions of the locals is the assessment that “A fundamental part of guerrilla tactics is the treatment accorded to the people of the zone. Even the treatment accorded the enemy is important; the norm to be followed should be an absolute inflexibility at the time of attack, an absolute inflexibility toward all the despicable elements that resort to informing and assassination, and clemency as absolute as possible toward the enemy soldiers who go into the fight performing or believing that they perform a military duty.” Avoiding the SP’s errors in relating to the colonized nations is instrumental for fostering the social factors that make these policies effective at gaining and retaining territory. In the case of the U.S., this means following a model of fully returning the stolen lands to the tribes.

-Inform the masses about what the revolution is fighting for, and why it’s in their immediate interests to support the revolution over the oppressor. Che writes that “along with centers for study of present and future zones of operations, intensive popular work must be undertaken to explain the motives of the revolution, its ends, and to spread the incontrovertible truth that victory of the enemy against the people is finally impossible.” The latter can’t come until after the revolution has gained enough strength to shift beyond its initial stage of concealed operations, and can hold jurisdiction over a given locality. Essential towards the leadup to this point is making clear to the masses that the revolutionaries aim to free society from the systemic evils that the masses are most desperate to be freed from. In the U.S., some of these most pressing evils are the racist militarized police state, the carceral state that keeps millions imprisoned or stripped of their rights, and the settler state that deprives colonized peoples of clean water (whether in Flint or at Standing Rock) for the benefit of capital.

-Disseminate propaganda to the locals through channels that the revolutionaries have either seized or set up. It’s important to put forth the pieces of information that pertain to the struggle, which Che describes as follows: “The great watchwords of the revolutionary movement, the watchword of a general strike at an opportune moment, of help to the rebel forces, of unity, etc., should be explained. Other periodicals can be published; for example, one explaining the tasks of those elements in the whole island [or region] which are not combatants but which nevertheless carry out diverse acts of sabotage, of attempts, etc. Within the organization there can be periodicals aimed at the enemy's soldiers; these will explain facts of which they are otherwise kept ignorant. News bulletins and proclamations about the movement are very useful. The most effective propaganda is that which is prepared within the guerrilla zone. Priority will be given to the diffusion of ideas among natives of the zone, offering explanations of the theoretical significance of the insurrection, already known to them as a fact. In this zone there will also be peasant periodicals, the general organ of all the guerrilla forces, and bulletins and proclamations. There will also be the radio.” 

Che describes the radio as the most important tool for propaganda in such a scenario, and this will likely be true for our conditions as well; the U.S. military has plans to shut off internet and cell phone access in parts of the country should an internal revolt occur, so seizing and making use of the local radio apparatuses will be essential.

-Establish a sustainable social contract between the revolutionaries and the locals. This process Che describes as one of consistently acting in good faith. Act selflessly and with perpetual consideration of the needs of the masses, and the masses will reward you: “The first task is to gain the absolute confidence of the inhabitants of the zone; and this confidence is won by a positive attitude toward their problems, by help and a constant program of orientation, by the defense of their interests and the punishment of all who attempt to take advantage of the chaotic moment in which they live in order to use pressure, dispossess the peasants, seize their harvests, etc. The line should be soft and hard at the same time: soft and with a spontaneous cooperation for all those who honestly sympathize with the revolutionary movement; hard upon those who are attacking it outright, fomenting dissentions, or simply communicating important information to the enemy army.” This hardness is different from the approach of the SP in that it’s willing to compromise according to the conditions. It isn’t excessive in its rule, being careful not to alienate the masses as the Gonzaloists did.

-Set up a new economic system that doesn’t conflict with the interests of the masses. The bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, who will be the ones leading the charge of violent counterrevolution, will naturally get penalized through the redistribution of their material possessions, and through the returning of their stolen indigenous lands. But as Che describes, the broader masses should be treated with friendliness: “Raising supplies, as we explained in a previous chapter, can be carried out in various ways: through direct or indirect taxes, through direct or indirect donations, and through confiscations; all this goes to make up the large chapter on supplies for the guerrilla army. Keep in mind that the zone ought by no means to be impoverished by the direct action of the rebel army, even though the latter will be responsible indirectly for the impoverishment that results from enemy encirclement, a fact that the adversary’s propaganda will repeatedly point out. Precisely for this reason conflicts ought not to be created by direct causes. There ought not be, for example, any regulations that prevent the farmers of a zone in liberated territory from selling their products outside that territory, save in extreme and transitory circumstances and with a full explanation of these interruptions to the peasantry.” The revolutionaries shouldn’t become bandits as far as the people are concerned, or the people will reject the revolutionaries.

If we apply these lessons, victory will be ours. If we ignore them in any capacity, and be tempted by adventurism, dogmatism, opportunism, commandism, or chauvinism, we’ll be unable to win.

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