To win the masses, revolutionaries must properly study their conditions
There’s a big qualifier to all of the tactics described by Che’s Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare: that without sufficient support from the masses, none of them can be applied, and if one tries to apply them they’ll at best end up running in an endless circle of skirmishes with the state. To gain this level of support, we must understand the conditions that we’re operating within. Which is tied in with that requirement of avoiding adventurism, because both adventurism and poor understanding of conditions stem from the same error: lax theoretical study.
An example of this is the failed insurgency of the Shining Path, Peru’s Maoist guerrilla organization. What led to the excessive violence that lost the Maoists the support of the masses, and that gave anti-communist propagandists an opportunity to believably exaggerate the abuses of the guerrillas, was the dogmatic approach that they took in attempting their People’s War. They sought to impose an inflexible governing model upon the zones they controlled, which led to avoidable clashes with people they could otherwise have gotten on their side. Their insistence on replacing tribal governing structures, despite these structures having worked for millennia beforehand, provoked indigenous opposition. This helped undo their insurgency.
A current example, not coincidentally, also comes from Maoism: in the Philippines, the Maoist guerrillas stick to an outdated line which claims that communists should only ally with the rural population and ignore the urban proletariat. This approach was arguably defensible in the 60s, but as is so often the case for Maoists, they’ve remained entrenched in a decades-old series of stances that lead to unnecessary antagonism. Their organization has experienced schisms specifically over this debate of whether to reach out to the urban proletariat. People within the zones they’ve “liberated” often betray them out of self-interest, because their narrow approach has made it needlessly hard for the guerrillas to earn the loyalty of much of even the rural population.
Their related hostility towards China’s supposed “social imperialism” has led them to start attacking the Chinese firms which are helping the nation develop a new level of infrastructure, further setting back their potential to bring the masses demonstrable material benefits. There’s a reason why it’s Filipino communists who’ve won me over towards not supporting their country’s guerrilla forces: these forces may have military power, but this turns into a double-edged sword without proper ideological guidance. The same is being proven by the Naxalite Maoist guerrillas in India, which have embraced a parallel adventurist approach and have also found themselves fighting an unwinnable war.
To avoid such a fate, we must learn to discern between the helpful parts of Che’s guide to guerrilla warfare, and the parts that can lead us astray due to their omitting the theoretical details required for gaining adequate mass backing. An example of the latter is this section:
At the outset there is a more or less homogeneous group, with some arms, that devotes itself almost exclusively to hiding in the wildest and most inaccessible places, making little contact with the peasants. It strikes a fortunate blow and its fame grows. A few peasants, dispossessed of their land or engaged in a struggle to conserve it and young idealists of other classes join the nucleus; it acquires greater audacity and starts to operate in inhabited places, making more contact with the people of the zone; it repeats attacks, always fleeing after making them; suddenly it engages in combat with some column or other and destroys its vanguard. Men continue to join it; it has increased in number, but its organization remains exactly the same; its caution diminishes, and it ventures into more populous zones.
Che was correct in this assessment, but he then went on to carry out Focoism, a model that lacks the mass basis which is required for such a revolt. Like the approaches of the Shining Path, the Philippine Maoists, or the Naxalites, Focoism is an angle that’s encouraged the guerrillas to act out of step with the masses. Its assumption that an army from a foreign land can win a revolution, despite being made up of fighters who haven’t had time to directly study the conditions they’re operating within, is self-defeating. As Lin Piao wrote in Long Live the Victory of People’s War: “The liberation of the masses is accomplished by the masses themselves – this is a basic principle of Marxism-Leninism. Revolution or people’s war in any country is the business of the masses in that country and should be carried out primarily by their own efforts; there is no other way.” In his 1969 critique of focoism, Jim Dann says about that quote:
The truth of this statement becomes clear when we examine the relative forces in a revolutionary situation. The class enemy retains superiority in numbers of armed men and in weaponry until the last battle. Despite serious study of military tactics, the enemy may often prove superior in his knowledge of the purely military aspects of war – he’s been at it longer. To this “superiority,” the revolutionary forces answer with the inexhaustible power of the working people. Their labor, organized into a fighting force behind the revolutionary outlook of seizing state power and establishing the dictatorship of the working class, can bring down the entire imperialist structure. Their strength is crucial. This means that no outside army can make a socialist revolution for the masses, or sustain it for very long if it attempts to. Unless the masses themselves make the revolution, it will eventually fail. Working people throughout the imperialist world are taught that they are powerless, cannot think, and must depend on “great leaders.” But the workers will learn to produce their own leaders, to rely on their own resources and labor, and to make their revolution.
But it’s not just outside guerrilla armies that can make this mistake of fighting without adequately knowing the conditions, then consequently failing. Communists from the given region’s local areas can commit this error as well; what undermines them is unwillingness to sufficiently study their own conditions. This is proven by all of those examples of homegrown Maoist guerrillas who’ve acted dogmatically. And in the imperial center, there’s even more of a danger of those who seek to become the revolution’s vanguard falling into this trap. We’re in a country that’s not only the prime benefactor of global imperialist extraction, but a settler colony that only exists due to the continuation of a colonial occupation and a refusal to pay back the African nation. Consequently, we have organizations like the Center for Political Innovation mixing communism with the U.S. flag, and with fascist rhetoric about “international bankers.” These kinds of factions may as well be foreign, because they seek to impose a reactionary-adjacent governing model that’s modeled after Europe onto the territories of hundreds of indigenous First Nations.
The proletariat will not win here if these chauvinistic and ahistorical ideas dominate the socialist movement. They’ll alienate the colonized proletariat, just as the Shining Path’s dogmatism did. Which will produce antagonisms that sabotage the revolution. We must study decolonial theory to avoid the chauvinistic errors of groups like the CPI, and we must do so while avoiding the ultra-leftist errors of the Maoists. The revolutionary program that will work on this continent is going to have to be a new one within the history of communism. One that throws out the innately reactionary patriotism towards the country it exists within, and embraces a post-colonial paradigm to replace one of settler-colonialism and empire.
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Rainer,
Thank you for this very important post. This is especially relevant now, because we are facing a ton of people, socialists, who are claiming those of us who support the war are "not Marxist-Leninists."
They don't see the connection between the need for:
1. Recognizing that we must accept the material conditions in which we live. We do not pick the way the world is.
2. We live in a world which is dominated by Western imperialism. It has destroyed many in the Global South since the fall of the Soviet Union. The death toll from the 2003 Iraq invasion is 1.2 million people.
3. Russia is acting in a defensive manner because it is threatened by NATO building up to its gates. NATO is not a defensive alliance. It is an aggressive one, camouflaged as a defensive one. It is responsible for destroying Libya, which was the most prosperous nation in Africa. Now it is a failed state with public slave markets. It also destroyed Yugoslavia, bombing it into oblivion. The Republicans in Congress recently were working on a bill that would force the U.S. to defend Ukraine against Russia. This was to be used to retake Crimea, and to trap Donetsk and Luhansk. Putin would not have been able to protect them because he couldn't risk WWIII.
4. People fetishize the role of "sovereign rights," all part of the nonsense of liberal democracy. But this fails to account for the implications of exercising these choices. It is myopic and entitled. As Marx discussed, the notion of "rights" is a bourgeois trap, used to create the moral equivalent of minimum wage, in which we are entitled to a 15 minute smoke break when we should be co-owners of the shop. We should be invested in our relations with others, not breaking them down to standardized units. "Rights" are the abandonment of the old "noblesse oblige."
Next, people fail to consider that Sun Tzu was right, that there is a balance of power. When that is disrupted, war results, balancing the equation. If we don't recognize the reality of other nations and our relationships, they will remind us with violence. This is the real world, not some political science seminar.
5. A unipolar world is a dangerous one. The benefit of Russia as a counterbalancing force against the West has saved the Syrians from a brutal 10 year war, funded by the U.S., giving jihadi's weapons. It saved Venezuela from being attacked by the U.S., as Putin put troops there, temporarily. The Russian people have suffered immensely. They don't need to be squeezed like a boa constrictor out of existence by NATO encirclement. They have suffered enough.
6. There is a martyr complex that some socialists have. They would rather be Purity Queens than pragmatically build socialism by being involved in the world. We can only make the world better by engaging with it, not idealistically dreaming of one. Marxism-Leninism is the only historically proven way to overturn capitalism and replace it with socialism, holding it for the long term. Trotskyism and libertarian socialism have never amounted to anything. A snitch like George Orwell was a Purity Queen. He developed a list of socialists and communists, writing down why he thought they were "fake." Later in life, he turned this over to the government in exchange for a good job. Many lives were ruined. It was a monstrous thing to do. My experience has been that the reason socialism has not succeeded is because there are many on the left who are backstabbers. It is like herding cats to get them to work together. Meanwhile, the right tows the line and builds coalitions to prevail. And that they do. I have had countless numbers of people whom I thought were comrades cancel me. They prefer their dogma to being a comrade.
7. Being a comrade is about having faith. It is about loyalty, and giving another comrade the benefit of the doubt. My experience has been that Western communists are far more likely to toss you under the bus for not holding the "correct" dogma than Eastern comrades. People from China, Indonesia, and Vietnam are often less doctrinaire. They are realists. Frankly, I think they know what dialectical materialism actually means.
Thank you again for your excellent writing. You are an important Marxist-Leninist thinker and voice. Your work is greatly appreciated.