Works of Joseph Hansen
Published as a fraternal courtesy to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.
Written: 1971
Source: International Information Bulletin
Transcription\HTML Markup:Andrew Pollack.
Sections:
I. In Reply to Comrade Maitan
The following article is in reply to two contributions to the current internal discussion in the world Trotskyist movement—one by Comrade Livio Maitan, “Once Again on the Revolutionary Perspectives in Latin America—Defense of an Orientation and a Method” (in an English translation in International Information Bulletin, No. 2, January 1971, pp. 6-20), and the other by Comrades Ernest Germain and Martine Knoeller, “The Strategic Orientation of the Revolutionists in Latin America” (in English in International Information Bulletin, No. 2, January 1971, pp. 21-32).
I have proceeded on the assumption that comrades will have just read or reread these two contributions and will therefore have the arguments freshly in mind. Since these and my attempted answers are often rather involved, it will perhaps be helpful to indicate the main points I propose to discuss.
The two contributions share a basic position—defense of a “turn” adopted at the last world congress; namely, an orientation toward the “strategy” of armed struggle or guerrilla warfare.
I will seek to show that this orientation—contrary to the contentions of the authors of the two contributions—does not represent a continuation of the views of Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky on guerrilla warfare. Instead, it stands in contrast to their views, and represents a departure from their strategy of building a mass revolutionary-socialist combat party.
I will go into the origin of the position of the authors of the two documents and cite further evidence in an effort to prove that their position represents an adaptation to ultraleftism, that this has already had bad repercussions in our movement internationally, and that it could prove dangerous to the future of the Fourth International if persisted in.
In addition, I will try to show that in the discussion now taking place in the vanguard in Latin America and elsewhere on the subject of the defeats suffered by the protagonists of guerrilla warfare in the past decade and the need to find something more effective, the majority position places us at a disadvantage in presenting the program of Trotskyism, and even plays into the hands of conscious anti-Leninists.
In passing, I will try to take up all the main arguments presented in the two documents even though this will take us down some side roads and require us to examine a number of exhibits from history. One of the more important items will be an exploration of the reasons for the persistence of certain errors, including the “strategy” of guerrilla warfare.
I will also take up the contention of the majority that no “alternative line” to theirs has been proposed. The truth is, as I will try to show, the majority displaced the previously held alternative line, voting for a new “orientation and method” of guerrilla warfare without drawing a proper balance sheet of the experience in Latin America and elsewhere with respect to the defeats suffered by this strategy, and without a concrete projection of what can be expected to result from the new line.
Without drawing any sharp line between the two documents, which are repetitious in some respects, I have divided my reply into two parts, one for each of the contributions. This division was intended, among other things, to facilitate pointing up the origin of the new orientation and some of the first consequences of applying it.
Brushing aside what the test of events has shown, Comrade Maitan reaffirms his support of the resolution passed at the last world congress in favor of guerrilla warfare.
The tone he has adopted and the new arguments he advances would indicate that he is persuaded that the best defense is to take the offensive. He implies that quite belatedly I reopened the discussion with the article I wrote last summer, “A Contribution to the Discussion on Revolutionary Strategy in Latin America.” (Available in English in International Information Bulletin, No. 6, July 1970.) by way of reply, Comrade Maitan argues as follows:
1. Factual inaccuracies, misreadings or misunderstandings, and flaws in reasoning are to be found in the criticisms I raised in my article.
2. If the situations in Bolivia and Peru—as I contended in my article—changed in a way not expected by the delegates at the last world congress who voted for the resolution on Latin America sponsored by Comrade Maitan and others, the possibility of such reversals was at least referred to in the resolution; and while the alteration occurred with quite unforeseen speed, Comrade Maitan is prepared to make his self-criticism on this.
Still, nothing in Latin America changed in such a way as to require any considerable modification of the basic orientation adopted by the majority at the last world congress—namely, centering the activities of the Trotskyist movement on preparing for rural guerrilla warfare for a prolonged period (while being ready to shift to urban guerrilla warfare, if this appears feasible, and while not excluding other forms of armed struggle of even more efficacious nature, however unlikely the perspective for these may appear to be at the moment).
3. In Argentina, Comrade Maitan is compelled to admit, things went badly. However, this had nothing to do with the “turn” adopted by the last world congress, which remains valid whatever actually happened. The comrades on the scene made serious errors.
4. In Bolivia, where another bad defeat was suffered, it does not matter. The comrades on the scene applied the line correctly. Circumstances beyond their control caused the defeat. If anything their experience further confirms the correctness of the line of the last world congress, inasmuch as defeats are often a precious source of lessons for the revolutionary movement.
5. The criticisms offered by me are to be understood as deriving from a scholastic approach that offers lip service to the idea of armed struggle while denying it in practice—in the tradition extending from Karl Kautsky to Rodney Arismendi; that is, from the centrist ideologist of the Second International to the Uruguayan Stalinist leader who seeks to straddle the line dividing those who favor armed struggle from those who favor peaceful coexistence.
6. Guerrilla warfare is a specific form of armed struggle, of the art of insurrection, backed by the full authority of our Marxist teachers. The beginnings are to be found in the writings of Engels. Lenin developed these beginnings more concretely, “even giving specific advice on makeup and technical education of partisan detachments.” Trotsky approved of engaging in guerrilla warfare under certain circumstances. What Comrade Maitan and those who agree with him are doing is filling in the outlines so admirably anticipated by the great Marxist masters.
The contentions advanced by Comrade Maitan obviously vary in weight and importance. To find a frame within which they may be judged most fruitfully, I propose not to follow his sequence, but to begin by taking his strongest argument—his appeal to authority.
Comrade Maitan brings in Engels on four items: (1) That Engels studied military questions very seriously. (2) That Engels held insurrection to be an art, subject to certain practical rules. (3) That Engels never changed his opinion on the central point, armed insurrection. (4) That in his letters, Engels “alluded several times to guerrilla warfare, notably with regard to the American Civil War and Poland. He noted, among other things, that geographical conditions were not sufficient for the development of guerrilla warfare if the social conditions were lacking.”
Up to now, I do not know of anyone in the Trotskyist movement who has ever disputed these points. What bearing they have in the current discussion remains a mystery.
On the other hand, it takes but little reading of Engels to find that he did not advocate a “strategy” of guerrilla warfare. He considered it an auxiliary in the field of war, or a phenomenon, hardly of major importance, observable or to be expected at certain phases in a war.
Comrade Maitan really ought to admit that Engels was neither a practitioner nor theoretician of guerrilla war as a strategy for winning a revolution, particularly rural guerrilla warfare for a prolonged period on a continental scale.
In appealing to Lenin, Comrade Maitan refers the reader to three articles. I will provide the precise sources in English to facilitate finding them: “The Political Strike and the Street Fighting in Moscow,” dated October 17, 1905 (Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 9, pp. 547-555); “Lessons of the Moscow Uprising,” dated August 29, 1906 (Ibid., Vol. 11, pp. 171-178); “Guerrilla Warfare,” dated September 30, 1906 (Ibid., pp. 213-224).
It is important, in my opinion, to read these articles in connection with the current discussion, not simply to place Comrade Maitan’s quotations in context, but to be able to judge more accurately whether the lessons to be drawn from these articles speak for or against the position adopted at the last world congress.
First of all, on method, a question raised by Comrade Maitan in the title of his article. Although he never explains in his text precisely what he means by “method,” he does cite Lenin on the necessity to be concrete. It is a very good quotation, deserving to be repeated somewhat more fully than the version provided by Comrade Maitan.
“Let us begin from the beginning,” Lenin said. “What are the fundamental demands which every Marxist should make of an examination of the question of forms of struggle? In the first place, Marxism differs from all primitive forms of socialism by not binding the movement to any one particular form of struggle. It recognizes the most varied forms of struggle; and it does not ‘concoct’ them, but only generalises, organises, gives conscious expression to those forms of struggle of the revolutionary classes which arise of themselves in the course of the movement. Absolutely hostile to all abstract formulas and to all doctrinaire recipes, Marxism demands an attentive attitude to the mass struggle in progress, which as the movement develops, as the class-consciousness of the masses grows, as economic and political crises become acute, continually gives rise to new and more varied methods of defense and attack. Marxism, therefore, positively does not reject any form of struggle. Under no circumstances does Marxism confine itself to the forms of struggle possible and in existence at the given moment only, recognising as it does that new forms of struggle, unknown to the participants of the given period, inevitably arise as the given social situation changes. In this respect Marxism learns, if we may so express it, from mass practice, and makes no claim whatever to teach the masses forms of struggle invented by ‘systematisers’ in the seclusion of their studies. We know—said Kautsky, for instance, when examining the forms of social revolution—that the coming crisis will introduce new forms of struggle that we are now unable to foresee.
“In the second place, Marxism demands an absolutely historical examination of the question of the forms of struggle. To treat this question apart from the concrete historical situation betrays a failure to understand the rudiments of dialectical materialism. At different stages of economic evolution, depending on differences in political, national-cultural, living and other conditions, different forms of struggle come to the fore and become the principal forms of struggle; and in connection with this, the secondary, auxiliary forms of struggle undergo change in their turn. To attempt to answer yes or no to the question whether any particular means of struggle should be used, without making a detailed examination of the concrete situation of the given movement at the given stage of its development, means completely to abandon the Marxist position.” (“Guerrilla Warfare,” pp. 213-214. Emphasis in original.)
This is the dialectical method, as stated by Lenin, that Marxists must follow in considering new forms of struggle such as the tactic of guerrilla warfare developed by the Russian masses themselves in a great revolutionary upsurge that had placed the struggle for power by the proletariat on the agenda as an immediate issue facing the revolutionary party.
Nowhere in the balance of his article examining the various facets of this new “auxiliary” form of struggle does Lenin so much as hint at the idea of adopting guerrilla warfare as a strategy or as “an orientation and a method” as Comrade Maitan does. Quite the contrary.
“In a period of civil war,” says Lenin, “the ideal party of the proletariat is a fighting party. This is absolutely incontrovertible. We are quite prepared to grant that it is possible to argue and prove the inexpediency, from the standpoint of civil war of particular forms of civil war at any particular moment. We fully admit criticism of diverse forms of civil war from the standpoint of military expediency and absolutely agree that in this question it is the Social-Democratic practical workers in each particular locality who must have the final say.” (Ibid., p. 221. Emphasis in original.)
Even further: “I can understand us refraining from Party leadership of this spontaneous struggle in a particular place or at a particular time because of the weakness and unpreparedness of our organisation. I realise that this question must be settled by the local practical workers, and that the remoulding of weak and unprepared organisations is no easy matter.” (Ibid., p. 221. Emphasis in original.)
In fact, Lenin stated flatly: “It is said that guerrilla warfare brings the class-conscious proletarians into close association with degraded, drunken riffraff. That is true. But it only means that the party of the proletariat can never regard guerrilla warfare as the only, or even as the chief, method of strugggle; it means that this method must be subordinated to other methods, that it must be commensurate with the chief methods of warfare, and must be ennobled by the enlightening and organising influence of socialism.” Ibid., p. 221. Emphasis added.)
First of all, Lenin said, Marxism learns from the masses; it does not teach the masses forms of struggle invented by “systematisers.” “In the second place, Marxism demands an absolutely historical examination of the question of the forms of struggle. To treat this question apart from the concrete historical situation betrays a failure to understand the rudiments of dialectical materialism.”
The same stricture applies, in my opinion, to the positions taken by our Marxist teachers. If we do not consider those positions in the light of the concrete historical situation, we can open ourselves to the charge of failing to understand the rudiments of dialectical materialism. Comrade Maitan may not be open to such a charge inasmuch as he refers us to articles by Lenin that enable us, in connection with other articles written by him in those years, to ascertain the concrete situation in 1905-07 in Russia for ourselves. It is to be hoped that every comrade in the world Trotskyist movement will take the trouble to do this.
One of the rewards may be some clues toward solving a tantalizing mystery. In combing through the works of Lenin for statements that might be cited in association with his own position, however badly they fitted, why was Comrade Maitan able to find so little outside of what Lenin wrote in 1906?
After all, Lenin lived for another eighteen years, didn’t he? His interest in the ways and means of winning a revolution remained unflagging, didn’t it? Why did he write so little, then, on guerrilla war even as an “auxiliary” form of struggle “subordinated to other methods”?
The context in which Lenin considered the question in 1906 was a great revolutionary mass upsurge that proceeded from “a strike and demonstrations to isolated barricades”; from “isolated barricades to the mass erection of barricades and street fighting against the troops. Over the heads of the organisations, the mass proletarian struggle developed from a strike to an uprising.” (Lenin: “Lessons of the Moscow Uprising,” op. cit., p. 172.)
In this immense mass uprising, in which soviets were formed that came under the leadership of Trotsky, it appeared possible to win power. This confronted the revolutionary party with the immediate problem, among others, of organizing the military side of the insurrection. One of the factors in this was guerrilla war which flared without the Bolsheviks having taken the initiative in it.
Lenin, weighing this development, concluded that guerrilla war should be viewed as an auxiliary form of struggle within the context of the “classical” pattern of a revolution headed by a working class fighting for power under the leadership of a revolutionary-socialist party.
Since Comrade Maitan considers this “classical” pattern to be the least likely to occur in Latin America in the coming period, one can gauge how far he stretches things in appealing to Lenin for authority on making guerrilla war the main orientation.
Lenin did not draw up a balance sheet on the party’s involvement in guerrilla war. He did, however, draw up a balance sheet of the period in which this occurred. Strange as it may seem from Comrade Maitan’s standpoint, Lenin did this by taking up a different “auxiliary” form of struggle—the active boycott of the elections which the Bolsheviks had called for, and which to them was the counterpart in the electoral arena to opening up armed struggle in the extra-parliamentary field.
As is well known, the revolutionary upsurge dies down, and by 1907, when new elections were set, Lenin proposed participating in them. His article of June 26, 1907, “Against Boycott,” includes his balance sheet of the previous period: (See op. cit., Vol. 13, pp. 17-49.)
“Two phases in the development of the Russian revolution now stand out before us in all their clarity: the phase of upswing (1905) and the phase of decline (1906-07).” (P. 29) It follows from this that Lenin had misjudged the situation somewhat in 1906 when he wrote “Guerrilla Warfare.” He had not seen that the ebb had already set in. His article “Against Boycott” was intended, as he indicates, to make a rectification of this misjudgment.
“We have already pointed out above,” he wrote, “that the condition for the success of the boycott of 1905 was a sweeping, universal, powerful, and rapid upswing of the revolution. We must now examine, in the first place, what bearing a specially powerful upswing of the struggle has on the boycott, and, secondly, what the characteristic and distinctive features of a specially powerful upswing are.
“Boycott, as we have already stated, is a struggle not within the framework of a given institution, but against its emergence. Any given institution can be derived only from the already existing, i.e., the old, regime. Consequently, the boycott is a means of struggle aimed directly at overthrowing the old regime, or, at the worst, i.e., when the assault is not strong enough for overthrow, at weakening it to such an extent that it would be unable to set up that institution, unable to make it operate. [Lenin adds a footnote: “Reference everywhere in the text is to active boycott, that is, not just a refusal to take part in the institutions of the old regime, but an attack upon this regime. Readers who are not familiar with Social-Democratic literature of the period of the Bulygin Duma boycott should be reminded that the Social-Democrats spoke openly at the time about active boycott, sharply contrasting it to passive boycott, and even linking it with an armed uprising.”] Consequently, to be successful the boycott requires a direct struggle against the old regime, an uprising against it and mass disobedience to it in a large number of cases (such mass disobedience is one of the conditions for preparing an uprising). Boycott is a refusal to recognise the old regime, a refusal, of course, not in words, but in deeds, i.e., it is something that finds expression not only in cries or slogans of organisations, but in a definite movement of the mass of the people, who systematically defy the laws of the old regime, systematically set up new institutions, which, though unlawful, actually exist, and so on and so forth. The connection between boycott and the broad revolutionary upswing is thus obvious: boycott is the most decisive means of struggle, which rejects not the form of organisation of the given institution, but its very existence. Boycott is a declaration of open war against the old regime, a direct attack upon it. Unless there is a broad revolutionary upswing, unless there is mass unrest which overflows, as it were, the bounds of the old legality, there can be no question of the boycott succeeding.” (Pp. 24-26. Emphasis in original.)
Ended along with the boycott, of course, was its complement, engaging in technical preparations for an armed uprising. Why didn’t Lenin draw up a balance sheet on the “auxiliary” form of struggle, guerrilla warfare? He had reason to find the question embarrassing, as we shall see.
A balance sheet in historical retrospect exists nonetheless. The author of the balance sheet is Leon Trotsky and it is to be found in his biography of Stalin.
In view of its pertinence to the discussion now being conducted in the Fourth International, and the fact that the leaders of the majority position on this question have not mentioned it up to now, I take the liberty of quoting it in its entirety despite its length.
Trotsky has just referred to the period of reaction following the defeat of the 1905 revolution. He continues:
“Terror from above was supplemented by terror from below. [The fight of] the routed insurrectionists continued convulsively for a long time in the form of scattered local explosions, guerrilla raids, group and individual terrorist acts. The course of the revolution was characterized with remarkable clarity by statistics of the terror. 233 persons were assassinated in 1905; 768 in 1906; 1,231 in 1907. The number of wounded showed a somewhat different ratio, since the terrorists were learning to be better shots. The terrorist wave reached its crest in 1907. ‘There were days,’ wrote a liberal observer, ‘when several big acts of terror were accompanied by as many as scores of minor attempts and assassinations of lower rank officialdom... Bomb laboratories were established in all cities, the bombs destroying some of their careless makers...’ and the like. Krassin’s alchemy became strongly democratized.
“On the whole, the three-year period from 1905 through 1907 is particularly notable for both terrorist acts and strikes. But what stands out is the divergence between their statistical records: while the number of strikers fell off rapidly from year to year, the number of terrorist acts mounted with equal rapidity. Clearly, individual terrorism increased as the mass movement declined. Yet terrorism could not grow stronger indefinitely. The impetus unleashed by the revolution was bound to spend itself in terrorism as it had spent itself in other spheres. Indeed, while there were 1,231 assassinations in 1907, they dropped to 400 in 1908 and to about a hundred in 1909. The growing percentage of the merely wounded indicated, moreover, that now the shooting was being done by untrained amateurs, mostly by callow youngsters.
“In the Caucasus, with its romantic traditions of highway robbery and gory feuds still very much alive, guerrilla warfare found any number of fearless practitioners. More than a thousand terrorist acts of all kinds were perpetrated in Transcaucasia alone during 1905-1907, the years of the First Revolution. Fighting detachments found also a great spread of activity in the Urals, under the leadership of the Bolsheviks, and in Poland under the banner of the P.P.S. (Polish Socialist Party). On the second of August, 1906, scores of policemen and soldiers were assassinated on the streets of Warsaw and other Polish cities. According to the explanation of the leaders, the purpose of these attacks was ‘to bolster the revolutionary mood of the proletariat.’ The leader of these leaders was Joseph Pilsudski, the future ‘liberator’ of Poland, and its oppressor. Commenting on the Warsaw events, Lenin wrote: ‘We advise the numerous fighting groups of our Party to terminate their inactivity and to initiate some guerrilla operations...’ ‘And these appeals of the Bolshevik leaders,’ commented General Spiridovich, ‘were not without issue, despite the countermanding action of the [Menshevik] Central Committee.’
“Of great moment in the sanguine encounters of the terrorists with the police was the question of money, the sinews of any war, including civil war. Prior to the Constitutional Manifesto of 1905 the revolutionary movement was financed principally by the liberal bourgeoisie and by the radical intellectuals. That was true also in the case of the Bolsheviks, whom the liberal opposition then regarded as merely somewhat bolder revolutionary democrats. But when the bourgeoisie shifted its hopes to the future Duma, it began to regard the revolutionists as an obstacle in the way of coming to terms with the monarchy. That change of front struck a powerful blow at the finances of the revolution. Lockouts and unemployment stopped the intake of money from the workers. In the meantime, the revolutionary organizations had developed large political machines with their own printshops, publishing houses, staffs of agitators, and, finally fighting detachments in constant need of armaments. Under the circumstances, there was no way to continue financing the revolution except by securing the wherewithal by force. The initiative, as almost always, came from below. The first expropriations went off rather peacefully, quite often with a tacit understanding between the ‘expropriators’ and the employees of the expropriated institutions. There was the story of the clerks in the Nadezhda Insurance Company reassuring the faltering expropriators with the words, ‘Don’t worry, comrades!’ But this idyllic period did not last long. Following the bourgeoisie, the intellectuals, including the self-same bank clerks, drifted away from the revolution. Police measures became more stringent. Casualties increased on both sides. Deprived of support and sympathy, the ‘fighting organizations’ quickly went up in smoke or just as quickly disappeared.
“A typical picture of how even the most disciplined detachments degenerated is given in his memoirs by the already-cited Samoilov, the former Duma deputy of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk textile workers. The detachment, acting originally ‘under the directives of the Party Center,’ began to ‘misbehave’ during the second half of 1906. When it offered the Party only a part of the money it had stolen at a factory (having killed the cashier during the act), the Party Committee refused it flatly and reprimanded the fighters. But it was already too late; they were disintegrating rapidly and soon descended to ‘bandit attacks of the most ordinary criminal type.’ Always having large sums of money, the fighters began to preoccupy themselves with carousing, in the course of which they often fell into the hands of the police. Thus, little by little, the entire fighting detachment came to an ignominious end. ‘We must, however, admit,’ writes Samoilov, ‘that in its ranks were not a few ... genuinely devoted comrades who were loyal to the cause of the revolution and some with hearts as pure as crystal...’
“The original purpose of the fighting organizations was to assume leadership of the rebellious masses, teaching them how to use arms and how to deliver the most telling blows at the enemy. The main, if not the only, theoretician in that field of endeavor was Lenin. After the December Insurrection was crushed, the new problem was what to do about the fighting organizations. Lenin came to the Stockholm Congress with the draft of a resolution, which, while giving due credit to guerrilla activities as the inevitable continuation of the December Insurrection and as part of the preparation for the impending major offensive against Tsarism, allowed the so-called expropriations of financial means ‘under the control of the Party.’ But the Bolsheviks withdrew this resolution of theirs under the pressure of disagreement in their own midst. By a majority of sixty-four votes to four, with twenty not voting, the Menshevik resolution was passed, which categorically forbade ‘expropriations’ of private persons and institutions, while tolerating the seizure of state finances only in the event that organs of revolutionary government were set up in a given locality; that is, only in direct connection with a popular uprising. The twenty-four delegates who either abstained from voting or voted against this resolution made up the Leninist irreconcilable half of the Bolshevik faction.
“In the extensive printed report about the Stockholm Congress, Lenin avoided mention of the resolution concerning armed acts altogether, on the grounds that he was not present during the discussion. ‘Besides, it is, of course, not a question of principle.’ It is hardly possible that Lenin’s absence was accidental: he simply did not want to have his hands tied. Similarly, a year later at the London Congress, Lenin, who as chairman was obliged to be present during the discussion on the question of expropriations, did not vote, in spite of violent protests from the Menshevik benches. The London resolution categorically forbade expropriations and ordered dissolution of the Party’s ‘fighting organizations.’
“It was not, of course, a matter of abstract morality. All classes and all parties approached the problem of assassination not from the point of view of the Biblical commandment but from the vantage point of the historical interests represented. When the Pope and his cardinals blessed the arms of Franco none of the conservative statesmen suggested that they be imprisoned for inciting murders. Official moralists come out against violence when the violence in question is revolutionary. On the contrary, whoever really fights against class oppression, must perforce acknowledge revolution. Whoever acknowledges revolution, acknowledges civil war. Finally, ‘guerrilla warfare is an inescapable form of struggle... whenever more or less extensive intervals occur between major engagements in a civil war.’ [Lenin.] From the point of view of the general principles of the class struggle, all of that was quite irrefutable. Disagreements came with the evaluation of concrete historical circumstances. When two major battles of the civil war are separated from each other by two or three months, that interval will inevitably be filled in with guerrilla blows against the enemy. But when the ‘intermission’ is stretched out over years, guerrilla war ceases to be a preparation for a new battle and becomes instead a mere convulsion after defeat. It is, of course, not easy to determine the moment of the break.
“Questions of Boycottism and of guerrilla activities were closely interrelated. It is permissible to boycott representative assemblies only in the event that the mass movement is sufficiently strong either to overthrow them or to ignore them. But when the masses are in retreat, the tactic of the boycott loses its revolutionary meaning. Lenin understood that and explained it better than others. As early as 1906 he repudiated the boycott of the Duma. After the coup of June third, 1907, he led a resolute fight against the Boycottists precisely because the high-tide had been succeeded by the ebb-tide. It was self-evident that guerrilla activities had become sheer anarchism when it was necessary to utilize even the arena of Tsarist ‘parliamentarism’ in order to prepare the ground for the mobilization of the masses. At the crest of the civil war guerrilla activities augmented and stimulated the mass movement; in the period of reaction they attempted to replace it, but, as a matter of fact, merely embarrassed the Party and speeded its disintegration. Olminsky, one of the more noticeable of Lenin’s companions-in-arms, shed critical light on that period from the perspective of Soviet times. ‘Not a few of the fine youth,’ he wrote, ‘perished on the gibbet; others degenerated; still others were disappointed in the revolution. At the same time people at large began to confound revolutionists with ordinary bandits. Later, when the revival of the revolutionary labor movement began, that revival was slowest in those cities where “exes” [expropriations—J.H.] had been most numerous. (As an example, I might name Baku and Saratov.)’” (Stalin, pp. 95-99.)
Long as this quotation is, it still does not complete Trotsky’s balance sheet. Further on, in the same chapter, he considers a specific incident, the Tiflis expropriation of June 12, 1907:
“The Tiflis expropriation could in no way be regarded as a guerrilla clash between two battles in a civil war. Lenin could not help but see that the insurrection had been shoved ahead into the hazy future. As far as he was concerned, the problem consisted this time only of a simple attempt to assure financial means to the Party at the expense of the enemy, for the impending period of uncertainty. Lenin could not resist the temptation, took advantage of a [missing word in original] opportunity, of a happy ‘exception.’ In that sense, one must say outright that the idea of the Tiflis-expropriation contained in it a goodly element of adventurism, which, as a rule, was foreign to Lenin’s politics. The case with Stalin was. different. Broad historical considerations had little value in his eyes. The resolution of the London Congress was only an irksome scrap of paper, to be nullified by means of a crude trick. Success would justify the risk. Souvarine argues that it is not fair to shift responsibility from the leader of the faction to a secondary figure. There is no question here of shifting responsibility. At the time, the majority of the Bolshevik faction was opposed to Lenin on the question of expropriations. The Bolsheviks, in direct contact with the fighting detachments, had extremely convincing observations of their own, which Lenin, again an emigrant, did not have. Without corrections from below, the leader of the greatest genius is bound to make crude errors. The fact remains that Stalin was not among those who understood the inadmissibility of guerrilla actions under conditions of revolutionary retreat. And that was no accident. To him the Party was first of all a machine. The machine required financial means in order to exist. The financial means could be obtained with the aid of another machine, independent of [the] life and of the struggle of the masses. There Stalin was in his own element.
“The consequences of this tragic adventure, which rounded out an entire phase of Party life, were rather serious. The fight over the Tiflis expropriation poisoned relations inside the Party and inside the Bolshevik faction itself for a long time to come. From then on, Lenin changed fronts and came out more resolutely than ever against the tactic of expropriations, which for a time became the heritage of the ‘Left’ Wing among the Bolsheviks. For the last time the Tiflis ‘affair’ was officially reviewed by the Party Central Committee in January, 1910, upon the insistence of the Mensheviks. The resolution sharply condemned expropriation as an inadmissable violation of Party discipline, while conceding that rendering harm to the labor movement was not the intention of the participants, who had been ‘guided by a faulty understanding of Party interests.’ No one was expelled. No one was mentioned by name. Koba [Stalin] was thus amnestied along with the others, as one who had been guided by ‘a faulty understanding of Party interests.’” (Ibid., pp. 109-110.)
The above quotations are taken from one of the chapters of the Stalin biography that were completed by Trotsky before he was assassinated in 1940. The views expressed by Trotsky in this chapter undoubtedly represent his final thinking on the subject of guerrilla warfare.
No doubt this accounts for the fact that in the Transitional Program, which he wrote in 1938, Trotsky does not even mention guerrilla warfare, still less rural guerrilla war for a prolonged period on a continental scale.
The section in the Transitional Program concerning transitional steps to be considered in defending the gains of the working class against fascist attack and the counterrevolution in general speaks throughout in terms of the masses and their organizations.
“Only armed workers’ detachments, who feel the support of tens of millions of toilers behind them,” writes Trotsky, “can successfully prevail against the fascist bands.” Tens of millions of toilers behind them!
“The struggle against fascism,” continues Trotsky, “does not start in the liberal editorial office but in the factory—and ends in the street. Scabs and private gun-men in factory plants are the basic nuclei of the fascist army. Strike pickets are the basic nuclei of the proletarian army. This is our point of departure. In connection with every strike and street demonstration, it is imperative to propagate the necessity of creating workers’ groups for self-defense. It is necessary to write this slogan into the program of the revolutionary wing of the trade unions. It is imperative everywhere possible, beginning with the youth groups, to organize groups for self-defense; to drill and acquaint them with the use of arms.” (Emphasis in original.)
From this point of departure, further developments hinge on the course of the mass movement:
“A new upsurge of the mass movement should serve not only to increase the number of these units but also to unite them according to neighborhoods, cities, regions. It is necessary to give organized expression to the valid hatred of the workers toward scabs and bands of gangsters and fascists. It is necessary to advance the slogan of a workers’ militia as the one serious guarantee for the inviolability of workers’ organizations, meetings, and press.” (Emphasis in the original.)
The culmination of this process is the arming of the proletariat as an imperative concomitant element of the struggle for liberation. “When the proletariat wills it, it will
find the road and the means of arming. In this field, also, the leadership falls naturally to the sections of the Fourth International.”
In appealing to authority for justification of the orientation toward guerrilla warfare, Comrade Maitan quoted only two sentences from the Transitional Program. Is it necessary, in the light of the evidence, to point out what liberties he has taken with Trotsky’s thought on this question in order to bring him into the camp of the strategists of guerrilla warfare?
In thumbing through the texts in search of quotations, it is curious that Comrade Maitan decided not to use one of much more recent date. This is the point included in the statement of principles upon which the major groupings in the world Trotskyist movement succeeded in achieving reunification in 1963 after a split that had lasted almost a decade. The point is as follows:
“13. Along the road of a revolution beginning with simple democratic demands and ending in the rupture of capitalist property relations, guerrilla warfare conducted by landless peasant and semiproletarian forces, under a leadership that becomes committed to carrying the revolution through to a conclusion, can play a decisive role in undermining and precipitating the downfall of a colonial or semicolonial power. This is one of the main lessons to be drawn from experience since the second world war. It must be consciously incorporated into the strategy of building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries.” (“For Early Reunification of the World Trotskyist Movement,” republished in Intercontinental Press, May 11, 1970, p. 444.)
Until Comrade Maitan chooses to explain why he left out this reference, one can only speculate as to his reasons.
Perhaps his main consideration was that the stand taken by the Reunification Congress on this question stood in the way of the guerrilla-war orientation he came to adopt.
1. The Reunification Congress placed utilization of guerrilla action on the plane of tactics, within the general strategy of building a revolutionary Marxist party.
2. The Reunification Congress confined utilization of the tactic to the “colonial countries.”
An additional consideration, which Comrade Maitan may have had in mind in deciding not to cite this document, was that it was drawn up and submitted to the world Trotskyist movement as a principled basis for its reunification by the Political Committee of the Socialist Workers party. The inclusion of point No. 13 shows that the leadership of the Socialist Workers party recognized the role played by guerrilla warfare after World War II in countries like Cuba. This fact does not fit in with the thesis that the SWP leaders belong to the line of “classical centrism from Kautsky in 1910 to Rodney Arismendi” rather than the classical line of revolutionary socialism running from Engels to Leon Trotsky in 1940.
Comrade Maitan appealed to authority in an effort to bolster his position. The effort was counterproductive. Our Marxist teachers were unanimous in regarding guerrilla warfare as a tactical question, at best an “auxiliary” form of struggle within the general strategy of building a revolutionary party, at worst tragic adventurism that could deal heavy damage to the party and set back the revolutionary movement as a whole. In short, they speak for the position maintained by the minority at the last world congress.
Upon completing his selection of quotations, Comrade Maitan states his general conclusion:
“From my brief review of the conceptions of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, I obviously do not draw the conclusion that the orientation of armed struggle we are proposing for this stage in Latin America flows automatically from these conceptions. That would in fact be using the method we reject as scholastic. Our concern is to emphasize that our conceptions and criteria are part and parcel of the approach of the masters of revolutionary Marxism and no one can accuse us of any ultraleft-tinted revisionism. We are drawing on the generalizations, outlines, and even some extremely valuable anticipations of the past. Our task is to fill in these outlines with a concrete content in the specific conditions under which we are struggling now.” (Op. cit., p. 13.)
From the standpoint of methodology, this is a revealing paragraph. Comrade Maitan states that the orientation he is proposing for this stage in Latin America does not flow automatically from the conceptions developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.
I would agree on that, and add that neither does the orientation proposed by the minority flow “automatically” from those conceptions. The orientation, even though reached within the general frame of the conceptions developed by our Marxist teachers, must be checked against the reality.
But that is not all. As dialectical materialists we must ascertain how any changes in the reality affect the conceptions developed by our Marxist teachers.
Thus in proposing a change in orientation as far-reaching as the one voted for by the majority at the last world congress, the proponents of that change were duty bound to state how our Marxist teachers viewed the question of guerrilla warfare and how their conclusions should be modified. This was required in order to maintain the continuity of Marxist theory on this question.
But the comrades of the majority did not do this in preparing their documents for the congress, nor did they do it at the congress. It is first now—after the change in orientation and under pressure from the challenge of the minority—that Comrade Maitan turns his attention to this task; and we see that he begins in a most unpromising way. He does not even provide a correct presentation of the views of our Marxist teachers.
To be noted additionally in his general conclusion cited above is that having explained that his orientation does not flow “automatically” from the conceptions of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, Comrade Maitan almost immediately qualifies what he has said in such a way as to leave us in doubt. According to him, the method followed in reaching the majority orientation on guerrilla warfare was to draw on “generalizations, outlines, and even some extremely valuable anticipations” and to “fill” them with “a concrete content” taken from the current situation in Latin America. In other words, you set up an empty mold and fill it with material lying at hand.
What if you make a mistake in choosing the “outlines”? Then the corresponding selection of “concrete content” will automatically be wrong. Has Comrade Maitan permitted us to glimpse the method that led him into his mistaken orientation? If so, he himself has provided us with the label—it is scholastic.
The question of the relationship between the guerrilla orientation and the Leninist theory and practice of party building is not confined to our own ranks. It presents a formidable problem for us on a world scale in relation to other currents that have their own theoreticians. I will cite an example that deserves the closest attention.
The November 15, 1970, issue of the New York Times Magazine printed an article by Sanche de Gramont entitled “How One Pleasant, Scholarly Young Man From Brazil Became a Kidnapping, Gun-Toting, Bombing Revolutionary.” The article was based on an interview in Algiers with Ladislas Dowbor, one of the leaders of the Popular Revolutionary Vanguard (VPR), who was captured by the Sao Paulo police on April 21, 1970, tortured, and released two months later on June 14, along with thirty-nine other guerrilla fighters, in return for the release of the kidnapped West German Ambassador von Holleben.
At the age of twenty-six, Dowbor, an economist of Polish ancestry, became converted in 1967 to the view of Carlos Marighella. As is known, Marighella was not a foquista, nor is Dowbor.
Gramont said of Dowbor: “He gives the impression of being a theoretician, who although lacking any aptitude or liking for violent action, has willed himself to participate in the operations of armed groups because they conform with his analysis of the situation in Brazil.”
The article quoted Dowbor extensively, placing particular emphasis on his theories. “As Ladislas Dowbor... explained the process,” said Gramont, “the decision to deal exclusively in armed actions was not impetuous or improvised, but the result of a careful political analysis.”
Here are some of Dowbor’s points:
“You cannot build the revolutionary consciousness of a population through political explanations. But military actions can create this consciousness....
“When we invest a factory and force the manager who is two weeks late with salaries to pay his men, we provoke the army, the police, the press and the clergy into taking positions against us and in support of the visible enemy. It is then that the workers are able to identify the system as an enemy.”
The police have to demonstrate to the bourgeoisie that they are doing their job, and so they organize a repression. “The workers see the police and the army and the press working together and come to recognize that the enemy is not individual but social. And that is already a form of class consciousness.”
Dowbor has done some reading. That he has read accurately can be judged from the following:
“Now, this method of creating class consciousness through armed action is very different from the methods that Lenin developed for the creation of a workers’ party. If you are mainly concerned with organizing the masses, you address yourself to those classes that are most capable of being organized, like labor, large groups of men with identical interests who are easy to reach. But armed action, which means living in small, clandestine cells, reduces the possibility of contact with the population. We must rely on the repercussions of our actions. If it is a violent action, it will appeal to those parts of the population that are sensitive to violence—that is, the marginal masses, the unemployed, the favelados.
“Tactically, when you perform an armed action, you don’t limit yourself to the interests of one class. You are reaching the masses not through political cells or speeches or pamphlets, but through the fait accompli of violent action. We are not telling them, look, it’s better for you to organize a strike against your oppressors, we are saying, here is what we have done against the system. This makes us a mobilization movement, not an organizational movement.”
It is clear enough from this explanation that Dowbor, after studying Lenin’s theory of party building, believes that it has been superseded. He explains:
“Another advantage of small, radical military groups is that it solves the Leninist problem of how to remain in the vanguard, ahead of the masses. Classical Communist parties run the risk of being outflanked by their own rank and file, but we remain far ahead of the masses by the very nature of our struggle. With us, it is not the masses that fight, but the political elite.”
Such an elite, of course, has its own problems—to which its theoreticians have addressed themselves:
“We run the risk of isolating ourselves from the masses, since we are fighting and they are not. That is why we do not attempt political education. We do not lecture on socialism or other theories the masses won’t understand. Our attacks against the visible enemy are immediately understood.”
It is not my intention to suggest that Comrade Maitan shares Dowbor’s views. In the current discussion in our movement, Comrade Maitan’s contributions are studded with affirmations on the need for party building and the need to avoid becoming isolated from the masses. What I do suggest is that guerrilla fighters of a serious theoretical turn of mind like Dowbor would only laugh at the suggestion that the Trotskyists, in deciding at their last world congress to orient toward guerrilla war, took a general outline provided by Lenin and simply filled it with a concrete content to be found in the current situation in Latin America. They don’t need rationalizations of that kind to bolster their own views.
To argue convincingly against the theory espoused by Dowbor, it is necessary to begin by explaining why the Leninist theory of organizing a mass revolutionary-socialist party remains completely valid today. As against Dowbor’s theory, which elevates guerrilla warfare into a strategy, it is necessary to demote guerrilla warfare to its proper place; that is, to a tactical level. In this context, Comrade Maitan’s repeated references to his record in opposing Debrayism are beside the point. The Dowbors, who exist in other countries besides Brazil, are not Debrayists. In fact, Dowbor explained to the correspondent of the New York Times that one of the basic principles of his movement “was a refutation of the so-called foco...theory of Regis Debray....”
The Tupamaros hold similar views. They consider the work of formulating a program and of building a mass party to have been superseded. Their fundamental view is that “revolutionary action in itself ... generates revolutionary consciousness, organisation and conditions.” (Quoted in “Uruguay: A Role for Urban Guerrillas?” by Jean Stubbs in the January 1971 issue of International, p. 38.)
As an example, they cite Cuba: “Instead of the long process of the formation of a mass party, a guerrilla foco is installed with a dozen men and this generates consciousness, organisation and revolutionary conditions which culminate in a true Revolution.”
They hold this position very firmly: “The basic principles of a socialist Revolution are given and tried out in countries like Cuba, and there’s no need to discuss it more. It’s enough to stick to those principles, and show—by deeds—the path of insurrection to achieve their application.”
This contempt for the revolutionary theory and practice of Leninism is fostered by one of the peculiarities of Uruguay of which the Tupamaros are very much aware: “Our armed forces, some 12,000 men [they mean the armed forces of the state], weakly armed and trained are one of the weakest repressive apparatus in Latin America.” (p. 40.)
It is instructive that the Tuparamos do not involve themselves in debating over theories as to the relative merits of the variants of guerrilla warfare. Insofar as they display concern for theory, it touches only the key issue separating them from Leninism; that is, the role of a combat party. As they see it, it is sufficient for twelve men to begin exemplary actions of an insurrectional nature and the rest will follow.
Another example, this time from Bolivia, will enable us to bring the problem into still sharper focus. The example has the additional advantage that it concerns a “foquista,” therefore a “guerrillerista” easily answered by Comrade Maitan. It is no one less than Ciro Bustos, who was imprisoned along with Regis Debray on charges of having participated in the guerrilla front opened in Bolivia by Che Guevara.
Bustos, upon being released from prison, went to Chile, since owing to the repression under the Levingston government he could not go to his native country of Argentina. An interview with him was published in the February 2, 1971, issue of Punto Final.
In the interview, Ciro Bustos made clear that throughout his imprisonment in Camiri, Bolivia, he successfully maintained the guise of not being a guerrilla fighter, of being instead a “simple gull” who had been “taken in” by the guerrillas. He did this at first in order to help protect his comrades. Once begun, he was compelled to continue the role to his “disgust.”
The truth is, however, that he was and remains a convinced guerrilla fighter, an advocate of “foquismo,” meaning by this “a revolutionary nucleus in action, installed in a definite zone....”
He was asked the following question:
“What changes in revolutionary theory did Che’s guerrilla introduce, viewed in critical perspective?”
Ciro Bustos replied:
“‘Che’s guerrilla,’ if you are referring to his action in Bolivia, was the result of his entire trajectory as a guerrilla leader from the Sierra Maestra up to his death. Fidel Castro and the group that brought Che into the Cuban feat, resorted to a method of struggle that has always been used in Latin America, including in the wars for independence and later by Zapata and Villa in Mexico and by Sandino in Nicaragua.
“The change was—as a method of struggle—to carry guerrilla warfare from the level of tactics to strategy [llevar la guerrilla del plano tactico al estrategico], and in the political arena [lo politico] to establish and demonstrate, in Cuba, that the revolution is not made along the road of sterile ideological ‘chit-chat,’ but along the road of armed struggle and that for a Latin America, fundamentally peasant, the principal form of struggle is guerrilla warfare. Che, with his permanent elaboration of theory and with his practical example lifted this schema to a high level, where the alternative is no longer national but implies the necessity—inescapably—of confronting and destroying imperialism by means of armed struggle, generated and developed throughout the subcontinent as the only possibility of achieving the genuine liberation of our peoples.”
The conclusion reached by Ciro Bustos that the peoples of Latin America will achieve their emancipation from imperialism only by taking arms in hand is dead right. No revolutionist will dispute it.
His theory of how this goal is to be reached is simplicity itself. You take guerrilla warfare as it has always been practiced in Latin America and lift it from a tactic to a strategy. This eliminates the need for any sterile ideological chit-chat about Leninism, Trotskyism, or the role of a revolutionary-socialist party, or the problem of connecting up with the masses.
If you grant the basic premise of this disciple of Che Guevara that it is feasible to convert guerrilla warfare from a tactic to a strategy, it appears to me that the rest of the position taken by Ciro Bustos is quite consistent. In fact, as if in a laboratory experiment—since he was not present at the last world congress and in all likelihood has not yet heard that such a thing occurred—he enables us to see in two paragraphs where the basic position of the majority on this question ends up logically.
In light of the foregoing, let me remind the leading comrades of the majority of the way the minority at the last world congress insisted upon the importance of regarding guerrilla warfare as a tactic and not a strategy.
It will be recalled that in the preparatory discussion, I submitted a document “Assessment of the Draft Resolution on Latin America.” (Available in English in International Information Bulletin, No. 5, February 1969.) At the end of the document, I stressed three points “in order to avoid any possible misunderstanding.” Two of these involved international actions, such as campaigns around single situations or single issues, and mobilizing aid for a national section under heavy repression. As was to be expected, these were acceptable to everyone.
The third point concerned orientation in relation to guerrilla war. At the time I could see no reason why the author or authors of the draft resolution on Latin America would not accept this, too. To my surprise, they rejected it. Here is the point:
“(3) A section of the Fourth International may find that at a certain stage of the revolutionary process in its country, it is necessary and productive to engage in guerrilla war, as a specific form of armed struggle. The proviso is that it be conceived as a tactic entailed by political considerations, not as a new-found formula guaranteeing quick or certain success, and that it be within the means available to the section. This holds, it should be added, not only for Latin America but for similar areas elsewhere.
“Finally, in view of the differences that have emerged over the relative place of guerrilla war as a tactic, it would be well to examine the question more specifically in relation to the Transitional Program. Our movement has already recognized that in certain countries, under certain circumstances, guerrilla war can play a positive role. However, it has not analyzed the negative consequences of guerrilla war if it is attempted in countries, or under circumstances, where it is out of place. Experience would now seem to testify rather heavily for the conclusion that while the appearance of guerrillas can signify a sharp rise in the class struggle, it can also mark a phase of decline, in which case it must be judged as a sign of despair and desperation, one of the symptoms of defeat.
“As a consciously applied tactic, guerrilla war would seem to come under the sections of the Transitional Program dealing with the arming of the proletariat and the linkup between the proletariat and the peasantry.
“A critical study of the varied experience with guerrilla war in a whole series of countries would be extremely useful to put this tactic in better perspective, to relate it properly to political strategy, and to counteract the rather widespread tendency to elevate it into a universal formula and even a panacea.” (p. 14.)
The rejection of this point was decisive in dividing the delegates at the last world congress into a majority and a minority. Perhaps some of the comrades of the majority did not understand what was involved. The quotations from Ciro Bustos, from the Tuparamos, and from Ladislas Dowbor will, I hope, make things clearer.
Taken in the light of Comrade Maitan’s orientation toward guerrilla warfare, the quotations should also assist in providing a better understanding of the forces exerting pressure on our movement. In face of this pressure and the rejection of the position of regarding guerrilla warfare as a tactic, perhaps it will be understood why we feel some skepticism with regard to Comrade Maitan’s assurances that on party building he has not changed at all—he still holds it to be the ABC of Leninism and a sine qua non.
From a leader who rejects the Leninist concept of guerrilla warfare as an “auxiliary” form of struggle, such assurances are not convincing. I am reminded of the famous line from Bob Dylan: “You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
In the discussion at the last world congress, the comrades of the majority insisted with some vehemence that the orientation toward guerrilla warfare involved Latin America and nowhere else.
The minority contended that this was an arbitrary and artificial approach that failed to take into account a series of different sets of interrelationships. Here is what I wrote in “Assessment of the Draft Resolution on Latin America”:
“Another point to consider is whether the central concept in the draft resolution on Latin America, namely, giving a ‘geographic-military’ orientation priority over political strategy, can be logically confined to just one continent.
“The Cubans have hardly viewed it that way, and certainly the tendencies immediately under their influence do not view it that way. They incline rather strongly to view it as an internationally valid orientation, except—perhaps—in the imperialist sector, about which they have little to say; and the sector of the degenerated or deformed workers states about which they have nothing at all to say so far as the struggle for a political revolution is concerned. It would be very difficult to find convincing arguments to persuade these currents that in the colonial world as a whole the tactic of preparation of and engagement in rural guerrilla war for a prolonged period is valid only for Latin America.
“In fact logic speaks for an opposite conclusion. If the draft resolution on Latin America were to be passed in its present form by the coming world congress, our movement would be hard put to explain why the orientation decided on as good for Latin America was considered to be bad for the rest of the colonial and semicolonial world. It would certainly be contended that such a position is inconsistent and that such a sharp geographical demarcation cannot reasonably be made.” (pp. 11-12.)
This view has been confirmed so strikingly that one wonders what prevents Comrade Maitan and those who agree with him from writing about it and drawing the appropriate conclusions. I will leave aside the situation in the Middle East, and even Quebec, to take up a development that is absolutely decisive in showing that the orientation cannot be confined to Latin America, or even the colonial world generally, inasmuch as it has taken place in the central stronghold of the international capitalist system.
The two editors of Scanlan’s, a monthly expose publication in the United States, devoted their entire January 1971 issue of ninety-six fullsized pages to the single theme, emblazoned in colors on the cover: “Suppressed Issue: Guerrilla War in the USA.” (The words “suppressed issue” refer to the fact that three printers in the U.S. refused to handle the issue. The editors moved to Canada to publish their magazine, shipping it across the border to subscribers and newsstands.)
The main feature is a section entitled “Guerrilla Acts of Sabotage and Terrorism in the United States 1965-1970.” This is a day-by-day listing, running from February 12, 1965, to September 7, 1970, of every “definable instance of left-wing terrorism and sabotage in America since such acts began in 1965” that Scanlan’s reporters and researchers could find in the press or in official reports. The grand total, according to their adding machine, amounts to 1,391 cases. (I will leave aside the validity of the list, which is rather dubious.)
In the opinion of the editors, what is occurring—although the government refuses to admit it—is “urban guerrilla war in the most advanced industrial nation in the world.”
Editor Warren Hinckle is of the view that “if the bombings continue this fall [1970] at the current hurricane pace, it is only going to take someone to say it is so and guerrilla warfare will become a catchword of the 1970’s along with women’s liberation and the mini skirt.”
The authors believe that the Nixon administration is completely unable to stop it:
“The FBI, the Secret Service, the Treasury Department, the Pentagon, the CIA and even the Bureau of Mines are all in on the chase. With all the resources at their disposal to monitor and supervise reputed revolutionaries, it must be a matter of considerable professional and political embarrasment that the combined law enforcement, military, security and spy establishment of the United States has been unable to catch even a literal handful of the thousands of underground revolutionaries who, now as a matter of daily benediction, harass the government with sniper fire or bombs.”
Why are they so hard to catch? Because of the effectiveness of their organizational technique. They are divided into tiny cells, consisting of as few as three persons.
What is the social origin of most of these guerrilla fighters?
There are two broad groupings: one consists of members of the black and other nonwhite communities; the other “is the white and middle-to-upper-class citizens of college or dropout age....”
Are these engagers in sabotage and terrorism to be associated with any particular organization?
“The highest profile among the practitioners of this art of the explosionist raspberry,” replies Editor Hinckle, “are the Weatherman, who make it a point of principle each time they blow up something to drive the FBI quite crazy by popping up somewhere in the country and telling how they got away with it. It is all a little in the manner of a terrorist’s April Fool, but the joke appears always to be on the FBI.”
Where did this “new wave of urban guerrillas” get the idea?
“Our object was to document planned guerrilla actions that clearly employed the technique of urban guerrilla warfare as practiced in Latin America.” The Tupamaros are mentioned various times. Hinckle refers to the tactics “successfully employed by insurgent forces in Ireland, China, Israel, Algeria, Cuba and currently in Latin American and African nations....”
These tactics “are being experimentally adapted to American surroundings by black urban guerrillas and the burgeoning middle and upper-middle class white revolutionaries who operate with relative impunity from college oriented communities which have become cultural and political ‘enclaves’ in America.”
And who are the theoreticians studied by the new wave of urban guerrillas?
“The revolutionary ideology that Mao defined in his treatises on guerrilla war is regarded in most instances as absolute, major exceptions being his political structure and the encrusted bureaucracy of vertical communism.”
Another authority is Regis Debray. “The primary theoretician of the ‘new guerrilla’ is Regis Debray, a young French philosopher-journalist and close friend of Fidel Castro....
“Accepting Mao’s concept of the guerrillas being one with the people as the sine qua non of a successful guerrilla movement, Debray rejected Mao’s principle that ‘politics directs the gun.’ Rather, it is the gun, in the form of successful guerrilla actions against definable manifestations of imperialism and oppression of the people, which defines and develops successful revolutionary politics.
“This shattering revision of traditional Marxism offs the Communist Party from its traditional and cherished role as the political vanguard which sets the correct ‘line’ for the people. The guerrillas, through terrorist and military actions geared to gain propaganda successes, gradually politicize and assemble the exploited classes on their side. Communist bureaucrats are left out in the cold.
“What drives most professional observers of the new American revolutionaries to such fits of distraction and disgust is their lack of discernible ‘goals,’ of ‘something to replace what they want to tear down,’ their emphasis on the primacy of revolutionary tactics over political structure. Yet this reality, so defiant of traditional politics, is the carefully thought out ideological cornerstone of contemporary guerrilla theory as it is being practiced in Latin America and experimented with under the unique conditions that the United States has to offer any pioneers. The traditional left, and particularly the older left—from social democrats on the right to leftover descendants of the Luddites on the left—takes about as much joy in guerrilla politics as Sprio Agnew.”
Still another source of the guerrilla gospel is Carlos Marighella. “Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla ... is prized as a crime-doer’s textbook by American guerrillas.”
The editors indicate their appreciation of the applicability of Marighella’s prescriptions to the “unique conditions” of the United States by including selections from the Minimanual.
Finally, what is the program of the new wave of urban guerrilla fighters in the United States?
“All American guerrilla groups,” Editor Hinckle informs us, “have revolutionary tactics in common, but few share any common ideology. Few, indeed, have a definable ideology or postrevolutionary program. Most are feeling their way along the bombing trail, letting the tactics, as it were, quarterback the action in the manner suggested by Regis Debray....
“If the guerrillas can be said to uniformly agree on any goals of American guerrilla warfare in addition to fighting the hated war in Southeast Asia, it would be to support national liberation movements throughout the world and, of course, the black liberation struggle in the United States.”
The issue contains some interviews with members of the “new wave” that offer us a rare view of their psychological makeup, including—according to the editors—their almost universal use of drugs, ranging from the mildest to the hardest, but for lack of space I will leave these aside.
It would be a mistake to think that this reportage can be dismissed as a piece of propaganda designed to advance the Weatherman group that cannot possibly have much impact in the current situation in the United States. Like all political bids in the radical movement, it requires analysis and an answer by the Trotskyist movement. Its importance can be judged from the fact that the Central Headquarters of the Black Panther party, upon receiving an advance copy of the January issue of Scanlan’s, gave it official approval and began serializing it in the weekly Black Panther.
The entire front page of the December 19, 1970, issue of The Black Panther was used to duplicate the headline “Guerrilla War in the U.S.A.” A map of the United States from Scanlan’s, showing in clusters, graduated as to size, where acts of “armed propaganda” have occurred in the past five years was likewise featured on the front page of The Black Panther as well as an editorial, repeating word for word some of the paragraphs written by Warren Hinckle.
Through The Black Panther, if not through other channels, the issue of urban guerrilla war in the United States has been raised in the vanguard on an international scale. It can be sidestepped only at heavy political cost. What answer should we give?
It is true that a great rise has occurred in the United States in acts of individual violence, not to mention ghetto explosions, or neighborhood flare-ups. The causes lie in the deteriorating economic and social situation and the effort of the capitalist state to repress the resulting dissatisfaction. The escalation of violence is one of the signs of this dialectical interplay.
To recognize this and to seek to turn the radicalization of the Afro-Americans and other oppressed nationalities, the women, and the campus toward constructing the only instrument that can offer a genuine solution—a mass revolutionary-socialist party—is one thing. To place the label of “urban guerrilla war” on the radicalization and to seek to divert it into the dead end of terrorism and sabotage conducted by tiny groups, lacking any consistent revolutionary ideology at all and in isolation from the working class, is something else again. A question of basic principles is involved.
To meet this challenge—which the Socialist Workers party can be counted on to do—requires, among other things, an effective polemic against the sources from which the “new wave of urban guerrillas” draws theoretical nourishment. This includes not only Debray, but Mao, Marighella, the Tupamaros, the Weatherman experimentalists, and, in general, any ideologist who considers the Leninist strategy of party building to have been superseded by guerrilla action, whether rural or urban.
In my article “A Contribution to the Discussion on Revolutionary Strategy in Latin America,” I asserted:
“The course prescribed by Comrade Maitan and made official in the Latin-American resolution represents a concession to ultraleftism. This is how it must be characterized objectively.” (0p. Cit., p. 12.)
As to how a resolution of this kind could gain a majority, I offered an explanation along the following lines:
First, that some of the radicalizing youth which our movement had recently begun recruiting in various areas were not yet free of ultraleftism. This was to be expected, owing to their lack of political experience. These youth especially admired the Latin-American guerrilla fighters, above all Che Guevara, which of course was not to their discredit—quite the contrary—but which did present a problem to be overcome in their further development.
Secondly, a sector of the Trotskyist movement in Latin America had become convinced that we faced an impasse unless we turned to guerrilla action. What was required, as these comrades saw it, was more than a tactical approach to engaging in guerrilla warfare. “They wanted total commitment of the movement as a whole, the elevation of engagement on the guerrilla road into a principle.” (Ibid., p. 12.)
It was the combination of these two views among many of the delegates at the last world congress, I said, that provided Comrade Maitan with his majority.
Comrade Maitan’s insistence on the need and the possibility of a quick breakthrough provided a platform on which these two sectors could unite. The perspective of gaining leadership of a mass movement, or even winning power in a selected country in short order, was very attractive to some of the impatient youth, and, of course, dovetailed with the thinking of those who visualized guerrilla warfare as having extraordinary powers not available to other means.
The role played by Comrade Maitan was thus of key importance in cementing together the combination.
On Comrade Maitan’s own evolution—which also played a role, naturally—I said among other things: “It was precisely following this exhilarating expansion of forces [the dramatic growth in the May-June 1968 period] that some of the leaders of the Fourth International, above all Comrade Maitan, began adapting to ultraleftism.” (Ibid., p. 12)
In his current article “Once Again on the Revolutionary Perspectives in Latin America—Defense of an Orientation and a Method,” Comrade Maitan—speaking for himself, if not the others—protests that even if the formulation “began adapting to ultraleftism” were apt, “unfortunately the chronology is wrong.” To prove his point, he states: “From Comrade Hansen’s first article itself it can be deduced that I had defined my orientation before May 1968 and thus before the Trotskyist breakthrough in France was concretized in the building of the Ligue.” (Op. cit., p. 6.)
I am quite willing to stand corrected on the date of Comrade Maitan’s conversion to the guerrilla orientation, all the more so inasmuch as, despite his remark about my insinuating he “cleverly manipulated” the delegates, he does not challenge my analysis of the composition of the majority. Just the same it is regrettable that he himself is not more specific about his own evolution on this question.
The best I can do, going by the available record, is to put it somewhere between two dates.
The first date is 1965. In that year, Comrade Maitan wrote an article “Some Criticisms and Comments Concerning the Document on the African Revolution” in which he posed “the hypothesis of formation, for example, of a workers state in Egypt in a relatively cold way, without the active revolutionary intervention of the masses at the crucial moment of the qualitative leap.” (In English in International Information Bulletin, December 1965. See also my reply in the same issue of the Bulletin, “Nasser’s Egypt—On the Way to a Workers State?”
According to this view, if I am not mistaken, a regime like the one headed by Nasser could create a workers state in a “cold way”; that is, without a revolution, without the mobilization of the masses, and, one supposes, without guerrilla warfare, either rural or urban, or any other form of armed struggle whether viewed as a tactic or a strategy.
The second date is May 15, 1968, the date of the letter sent by Comrade Maitan to the United Secretariat, which he submitted under the title “An Insufficient Document” to the international precongress discussion. The stand taken in this letter appears to me to be in polar opposition to the stand taken in the 1965 article. Let me recall the two key paragraphs:
“But it is only by successes or revolutionary struggles at the head of a mass movement in one or several countries that we will be able to surmount our difficulties and present contradictions. What is expected from us from now on is that we demonstrate in practice the historical value of our movement and we will be judged essentially on this basis. This can appear, at bottom, to be an elementary truth, but it is a question of inspiring our whole activity with this recognition. It is a question more precisely of determining in what countries we have the best chance of a breakthrough and subordinating everything to the elementary necessity for a success in these countries, and even, if necessary, in a single country. The rest will come later.
“There are, in fact, several countries where we at present have possibilities for an important breakthrough (youth movement in France, antiwar movement and youth movement in the United States, South Africa with a certain time) and we must unquestionably make an effort in the direction of India, but we must place everything above all on a sector of Latin America and you know very well which one. We must exploit the preparatory period of the congress to convince the entire movement to operate in practice, every day, with this perspective. Permit me to express myself a little paradoxically: it is necessary to understand and to explain that at the present stage the International will be built around Bolivia.” (In English in International Information Bulletin, January 1969, Part 2, pp. 17-18.)
In place of a “relatively cold way”—in which the Fourth International is excluded from playing an active role -the perspective has veered to concentrating everything on a “breakthrough” whereby a small group of Fourth Internationalists, by picking up the gun, can place themselves at the head of the masses and win power in short order, even if they have to keep repeating the attempt for a decade or more.
My attempt at bracketing the date of Comrade Maitan’s conversion may be incorrect. Perhaps it occurred much earlier and he sees no contradiction between his current advocacy of a guerrilla orientation and his earlier view that a workers state can be formed in a relatively cold way, “without the active revolutionary intervention of the masses at the crucial moment of the qualitative leap.”
It may be that it all depends on which country you have in mind. In some, the hot way is required. In others the relatively cold way is sufficient.
Even at the cost of my having to make another self-criticism, I hope more material will be provided by Comrade Maitan on this question.
One of the items in the evolution of Comrade Maitan’s thinking might have been the internal developments in the Italian section of the Fourth International at that time, when, if I am informed correctly, the bulk of the youth were lost to a Maoist current. But the notorious paucity of records concerning the internal life of the Italian section precludes me from forming a judgment. Perhaps Comrade Maitan can offer us some information on this not unimportant aspect of the question.
Comrade Maitan is vexed at my conclusion that the course prescribed by him and made official in the Latin-American resolution represents a concession to ultraleftism. I stated further—and I see no reason to change this opinion:
“Consistent application of the course charted by Comrade Maitan would prove disastrous for the Fourth International. The line could hardly be confined to Latin America or even the colonial world generally, for the same ultraleft tendencies to which the adaptation has been made are operative in the imperialist centers. Fostering an ultraleft course in Latin America would surely be paralleled by permissiveness toward ultraleftism, if not worse, in the imperialist centers. In fact, there is evidence that this has already been occurring in the quite different context of conditions in Britain.” (“A Contribution to the Discussion on Revolutionary Strategy in Latin America,” Op. cit., p. 12.)
Comrade Maitan brushes this aside with the comment that “while not denying that connections exist between the orientations proposed for Latin America and possible orientations in other sectors, we think that no progress can be made in our discussion by mixing in problems which if they need be discussed at all, should be taken up in a different context.” (“Once Again on the Revolutionary Perspectives in Latin America—Defense of an Orientation and a Method.” Op. cit. p. 6.)
Unfortunately, it is not possible, as we have seen, to cut things up so neatly and so disposably. I should like to insist on the importance of the interrelationship between the guerrilla orientation for Latin America adopted at the last world congress and the orientation followed by certain other sectors of the world Trotskyist movement.
The London Times of January 12, 1971, published an article entitled “The stagnant revolution.” A subtitle was still more eye-catching: “Robin Blackburn looks at the New Left in disarray.”
The article was not about the New Left in Britain but—the United States. Blackburn, or course, told it like it is.
“So far,” he said, “nothing has emerged to fill the gap left by the collapse of Students for a Democratic Society which split into warring factions last year and in the process completely lost its strength among the mass of students. Today the various revolutionary splinter groups are no larger than their counterparts in Britain and certainly smaller than those in France, Germany, Italy or Japan. Yet they command more attention than their numbers alone would seem to warrant since, in a situation already charged with social tension, they are readier to move from the word to the deed.”
No, Blackburn is not referring to the Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers party and the Young Socialist Alliance or to any of the groups that have jointly inspired and mounted the mass mobilizations against the war in Vietnam that caused one president to drop out of active politics and that have led Nixon to say that he may end up as only a “one-term” president. Blackburn has other forces in mind:
“The F.B.I. claims that there were more than 3,000 ‘bombings’ last year, causing many millions of dollars of damage, though as yet little loss of life. Most of these actions are the work of small collectives, comprising a dozen or, at most, two dozen members. The only white revolutionary organization committed to such tactics is the Weathermen, formerly a faction within the S.D.S.: its membership is entirely underground and cannot number more than a few hundred.
“The urge to ‘pick up the gun’ in part reflects the sense of impotence of the mass radical movement, which has proved unable to stop the war in Indo-China, let alone pose a revolutionary challenge to American capitalism. Only a tiny minority has drawn the conclusion that outright civil war is the only option left.”
Blackburn mentions specific cases of bombings ascribable to those who have presumably opted for outright civil war. He includes in his survey the following: “At the end of last year Hoover of the F.B.I. announced that he had discovered a collective, comprising almost entirely of priests and nuns, with a plan to kidnap a White House official to be exchanged for a bombing halt in IndoChina.”
(Blackburn is referring to the Daniel and Philip Berrigan frame-up case. He fails to mention that the two pacifist priests, speaking from their prison cells in Danbury, Connecticut, where they were alleged to have masterminded the plot, branded the charges as fabrications.)
I will cite two more paragraphs to show beyond question the ideology represented by Robin Blackburn:
“Just when repression or frustration seem to have destroyed the revolutionary movement, it is sustained by the eruption of revolt in some new context. Another source of its power of survival is the new youth culture which has merged with revolutionary politics in a variety of bizarre forms. The old left formed tightly integrated political parties which provided for every aspect of its members....
“The Weatherman consciously tries to extend the links between the cultural and political underground, which is why it sprung Timothy Leary from jail, winning him over to its political line in the process. The Weatherman claims that the prevalence of the youth culture renders revolutionaries much less visible to the agents of repression. It has now been underground for over six months and none of them has been captured in spite of the fact that all their leaders are on the F.B.I.’s most-wanted list.”
The true situation is quite different from Blackburn’s account. Both the Black Panthers and the Weatherpeople were already deeply divided when Robin Blackburn wrote his article. The factional struggle in the Black Panther Party soon flared into a public scandal with each side “expelling” the other on charges that included the foulest personal recriminations. This internal war can appear bizarre and even incomprehensible unless you know the central political issue—the “strategy” of armed struggle in the U.S., that is, the very developments Blackburn found so exhilarating in the American scene.
Robin Blackburn is silent about it, but surely he must have been aware of the December 6, 1970, “New Morning” statement released by the “Weather Underground” over the signature of Bernadine Dohrn, one of the leaders involved in the Manhattan townhouse explosion in which three Weatherpeople lost their lives. The letter is of great interest, for it expresses the views of a sector that is moving away from the “strategy” of guerrilla warfare after having tasted its fruits. Here are some of the points made by Dohrn:
“It has been nine months since the townhouse explosion. In that time, the future of our revolution has been changed decisively. A growing illegal organization of young women and men can live and fight and love inside Babylon. The FBI can’t catch us; we’ve pierced their bulletproof shield. But the townhouse forever destroyed our belief that armed struggle is the only real revolutionary struggle.
“It is time for the movement to go out into the air, to organize, to risk calling rallies and demonstrations, to convince that mass actions against the war and in support of rebellions do make a difference....
“The deaths of three friends ended our military conception of what we are doing. It took us weeks of careful talking to rediscover our roots, to remember that we had been turned-on to the possibilities of revolution by denying the schools, the jobs, the death relationships we were ‘educated’ for.”
Weatherwoman Dohrn tells how the group opened up its bombing activities with inner qualms. “Many people in the collective did not want to be involved in the large scale, almost random bombing offensive that was planned. But they struggled day and night and eventually, everyone agreed to do their part.”
“At the end,” she continues, “they believed and acted as if only those who die are proved revolutionaries.” They went into action without really considering what came next.
“This tendency to consider only bombings or picking up the gun as revolutionary, with the glorification of the heavier the better, we’ve called the military error. After the explosion, we called off all armed actions until such time as we felt the causes had been understood and acted upon. We found that the alternative direction already existed among us and had been developed within other collectives. We became aware that a group of outlaws who are isolated from the youth communities do not have a sense of what is going on, cannot develop strategies that grow to include large numbers of people....
“We are so used to feeling powerless that we believe the pig propaganda about the death of the movement, or some bad politics about rallies being obsolete and bullshit....
“The demonstrations and strikes following the rape of Indochina and the murders at Jackson and Kent last May showed real power and made a strong difference. New people were reached and involved and the government was put on the defensive.” (Rat, December 17, 1971.)
Bernadine Dohrn’s letter made an impact among the protagonists of urban guerrilla war in the United States and Canada. Among the Black Panthers it served to detonate the growing internal frictions.
Nine of the Black Panthers on trial in New York wrote an open letter in reply to Bernadine Dohrn. The letter, published in the January 19, 1971, issue of the East Village Other, cited Che Guevara and Carlos Marighella with approval, and denounced the strategy of party building in the strongest terms.
The publication of this letter by Eldridge Cleaver’s faction was answered by Huey Newton’s faction with immediate expulsions, and Eldridge Cleaver responded in kind. The Black Panther party was split wide open. After that, the key issue became obscured by personal insults, charges of murder, and threats of assassination.
One final item, and the true situation—so cavalierly ignored by Robin Blackburn—will be outlined sufficiently well for our discussion.
According to Blackburn, Timothy Leary was won over to the Weatherman line. In January Leary was placed under house arrest in Algiers by Eldridge Cleaver. The key difference again was over armed struggle.
Leary, having become convinced he should be a revolutionary, was faithfully studying the works of Kim Il Sung. But he had not really changed his basic views. He had simply added armed struggle as a finishing touch. In his opinion, up to now revolutions have simply meant the substitution of one set of “armed dictators” for another. “I think that if my philosophy is understood, we might find a way out of this boring, repetitious cycle of one armed group overthrowing another and becoming just as bad.”
Here is how it can be done: “In order to break this cycle, I firmly believe that you must liberate people’s nervous systems. Free their nervous systems and the rest follows. [Isn’t it remarkable how the rest follows?—J.H.] That is my philosophy and I can summarize it in a few sentences. Internal Liberation must precede external. And you must move from neurological liberation to the religious, to the sexual, to the cultural, to the economic, to the political, to the armed—instead of the other way.” (Quoted in Good Times, February 19, 1971.)
Eldridge Cleaver believes in the reverse order, or at least beginning with armed struggle. Hence the need to keep the good patron saint of hallucinogens under close surveillance in his quarters in Algiers.
The obligation to bring the British public up to date on the seamier side of urban guerrilla war in the United States concerns the London Times and the guest writer whom they billed as “an editor of the New Left Review in Britain.”
Of primary interest to us is something more immediate—The Red Mole bills this British Weatherman and conscious anti-Leninist as a member of its Editorial Board.
This fact helps explain the otherwise puzzling hybrid character of The Red Mole.
During the period when a sector of the world Trotskyist movement was practicing “entryism sui generis,” one of the ploys was to start up a paper that adopted the guise of being “left centrist.” The idea was that when a sector of the organized working class ultimately began moving in a revolutionary direction it would, in its first stage, be left centrist. To be in position to head such a current, some of the Trotskyists who engaged in entryism sui generis thought they had to appear as left centrists—even though they were really revolutionists.
A supporting circle around the “left centrist” paper made a convenient halfway house for a group of Trotskyists doing entry work and another group assigned to maintaining an “independent” group and sometimes an “independent” newspaper or magazine, often distinguished for its irregularity.
The entire tactic was dangerous, particularly if stretched out. The Stalinist or Social Democratic milieu in which the entry work was carried out was conducive to disintegration of revolutionary morale. The “independent” work tended to become downgraded in importance. Recruiting to Trotskyism, particularly the integration of new cadres, presented special difficulties that inclined the Trotskyist militants to take anything but an aggressive attitude in this field. Out of fear of not conforming to specifications, the “left centrist” paper tended to be politically sluggish and unattractive (genuinely left-centrist papers were often much more audacious in taking a stance further to the left, particularly in occasionally opening their columns to Trotskyist material labeled as such). Worst of all, among some members carrying out this tactic, the left-centrist mask, worn so long, finally tended to become the person—the one-time Trotskyist changed into a hardened left-centrist.
The Red Mole is remindful of a sui generis “left centrist” Trotskyist paper—but viewed in a mirror in which the former sign “keep right” reads, as it should in a reflection, “keep left.”
The new schema would seem to run as follows: The milieu in which we work is the radicalizing students. In their first stage, they pass through ultraleftism. You have to be there to meet them and attract them. The best tactic in speaking with them is to adopt an ultraleft stance. Just as the old sui generis paper tried to include genuine left centrists on its editorial board, so The Red Mole tries to include genuine representatives of the “new wave of urban guerrillas,” or facsimiles thereof, like British Weatherman Robin Blackburn.
It should be observed that in both instances—both the old sui generis paper and The Red Mole—the premises are sound enough. Revolutionists have to remain in contact with the masses, either a sector in movement or one likely to move. Currently, the Trotskyists have to remain in contact with the radicalizing youth, recruiting to the maximum from them.
What is disputable in both instances is the symmetrical tactical course, which in neither case follows from the premises. To remain in contact with sources of recruitment, and to carry out actual recruitment successfully, does not require adaptation to the mistakes, prejudices, or low-level of political experience and understanding encountered among those we are seeking to win over. Their training as Trotskyists must begin in the very process of recruiting them.
To adapt to the milieu entails three immediate dangers: (1) confusion as to where Trotskyism stands on issues of considerable substance; (2) loss of one’s own militants to the milieu; (3) waste of time and missing of opportunities.
The current permissive attitude toward ultraleftism involves basically similar dangers. Moreover a new logic can be set in motion. Just as entryism fostered the belief among some of those who practiced it that left centrism is Trotskyism, so permissiveness toward ultraleftism can become converted into the conviction that ultraleftism is Trotskyism.
The outcome can thus be most deleterious to the main task facing our movement as a whole—construction of a Leninist-type party.
The confusion created by The Red Mole’s adaptation to ultraleftism carries a political overhead. A good example was the scandal resulting from the display given to the article on the Labour party by Editorial Board Member Robin Blackburn in the April 15, 1970, issue and the failure to answer it properly.
In “Let It Bleed,” Blackburn argued that the Labour party was a “capitalist party,” not essentially different from the Tory party, that its hold over the British working class had been “weakened,” and therefore in the upcoming general election it should be actively fought by revolutionists.
Blackburn proposed a course of action:
“The central argument of this article is that after the recent extended experience of Labour Government it would be absolutely incorrect for us to offer any kind of support to Harold Wilson or the Party he leads. I will assume that no Marxist can believe in passively abstaining from politics, especially during an election period when the political consciousness of the masses is stimulated. I will therefore conclude that the only principled course for revolutionary socialists during the coming election will be an active campaign to discredit both of Britain’s large capitalist parties. In this campaign we should certainly pull none of our punches. We should disrupt the campaigns of the bourgeois parties and their leading spokesmen using all the imaginative and direct methods which the last few years have taught us.”
It is true that the editors printed a brief note stating that with Blackburn’s article The Red Mole “opens a long-needed discussion on the Labour Party—a problem which has bedevilled the revolutionary movement since its existence. Our pages will be open to all comrades wishing to discuss the question.”
However, no article of equivalent length, stating the position of the , British Trotskyists, was carried in the same issue. No opposing view at all was printed in that issue. In fact, from the editorial note itself there was no way of knowing that Blackburn did not represent the view of the Editorial Board on this question. For all anyone might know, reading that issue of The Red Mole, Blackburn’s analysis and conclusions might be those of the British Trotskyists.
This created a considerable problem. In other English-speaking countries in particular, the Trotskyists were suddenly confronted with the political necessity of publicly disavowing the ultraleft line carried by The Red Mole on this question.
For Blackburn, of course, it was quite a coup, a good example of what a partisan of urban guerrilla warfare can accomplish with an adroit and well-timed thrust.
Two issues later, May 14, 1970, The Red Mole published the first contribution in the discussion “open to all comrades wishing to discuss the question.”
This was a letter from Pat Jordan, Secretary, International Marxist Group. After praising Blackburn on some things, Comrade Jordan ventured to say, “I think him wrong in some of his assumptions.”
Then he came to the main point of his letter: “As soon as time permits I will be putting down my thoughts in full.”
“In the meantime,” he continued, “a few points:”
The strongest of these was that he thought Blackburn was “wrong in comparing the Labour Party with the U.S. Democratic Party.”
For himself, Comrade Jordan took a pessimistic view of the pragmatic possibilities: “If all the revolutionary Marxists in the whole country went all out to persuade people to vote Labour, it is doubtful whether this would win the L.P. one seat.”
However, it was necessary to indicate preferences. He would prefer Labour to win because that “would help to destroy social democracy.”
As to what the revolutionary movement ought to do, Comrade Jordan proposed: “The fruitful thing revolutionaries can do in the coming General Election campaign is to use the heightened’ political interest (especially among the young people) to spread revolutionary ideas and expose the bourgeois politicians of all parties.”
To undo the damage caused by Blackburn’s article, this letter was much too little and much too late.
The June 1, 1970, issue of The Red Mole carried the promised article by Comrade Jordan. He had little difficulty disposing of Blackburn’s analysis of the nature of the Labour party; but it must be said that when he reached the point where it became necessary to project a course of action, he came down with a sudden case of stomach pains
“For reasons given above, I am in favour of the victory of Labour in the coming election campaign. However, it would be the height of foolishness to draw from this the conclusion that revolutionaries’ main activity should be that of calling upon people to vote Labour. In the first place, it is totally unrealistic to think that small revolutionary groups can influence the outcome of the election. Secondly, to make our main thrust the slogan ‘Vote Labour’ would be to put ourselves on the left-wing of those forces mystifying the whole electoral process. This would, in effect, be adding our weight to those processes which enable the Labour Party to divert working class aspirations. It would also hinder our endeavors to spread revolutionary ideas and our efforts to warn the working class that its main concern should be to prepare for an attack from whatever government emerges.
“To concentrate upon the slogan ‘Keep the Tories Out’ would be merely another way of saying ‘Vote Labour,’ under present circumstances.
“However, it is imperative, from a Marxist point of view, to explain very clearly to the politically aware why it would be best for Labour to win. This is an educational process, not an election-deciding exercise.”
Is it too much to say that this position is ambiguous? The IMG rejects the course of running a candidate of its own. It has no independent alternative, not even a candidate for a minor post. Nevertheless the IMG refuses to back the slogan “Vote Labour.” Thus the IMG opens itself to the charge of following an abstentionist policy.
Times can arise when it would be correct to call for a boycott of bourgeois elections—an active boycott. However, as we know from Lenin, this implies a revolutionary upsurge in which the working class is prepared to drive for power, arms in hand. That was hardly the situation in Britain in 1970. Electoral illusions still persist among the majority of the British workers however few are to be found in the head of Robin Blackburn.
Seeking a “vector” that would enable him to avoid the charge of abstentionism, Comrade Jordan said: “I am in favour of the victory of Labour....”
And what does a worker do in the voting booth? Nothing more than take off his cap and salute like a red mole?
The way Comrade Jordan muddled through in his article does not end the story. On another page of the very same issue of The Red Mole a contrasting line came out with admirable clarity.
In a cartoon strip, two political demagogues stand, each on his soap box, the one labeled “Vote Conservative Now,” the other “Vote Labour!” (Underneath, the cartoonist has written, “They’re all the same.”) A red mole holds up his sign, “Workers and students struggle against capitalism!”
A second panel shows a crowd of moles ganging up on the two speakers, physically beating both of them, trampling them underfoot, tearing up the placard marked “Vote Labour,” and joining a long line of moles triumphantly carrying the red flag. That’s a bully way of dispelling the electoral illusions of the British workers and showing them what we think of free speech!
As to the relative impact of the article written by the secretary of the IMG and the accompanying cartoon there is no question as to which made the greater impression on the readers of The Red Mole. “Imaginative and direct methods” pay off! Especially when used by an editor to tip off the readers as to the paper’s real line.
Within the IMG, a minority tendency voiced some telling criticisms of the orientation of the majority. I will not go into the internal differences in the IMG at this time, but refer comrades to the extensive compilation of both the minority and majority documents entitled “Key Documents Discussed by the IMG Membership in Preparation for Their March 1970 Conference.” (See SWP Internal Information Bulletin, October 1970.)
Of special interest in connection with the immediate point is the article dated May 17, 1970, by Connie Harris “The Labour Party in Perspective—In Reply to Robin Blackburn.” This was submitted to The Red Mole for publication in accordance with the public announcement that “Our pages will be open to all comrades wishing to discuss the question.”
Despite the promise, the article by Connie Harris was rejected.
How unrealistic it is for Comrade Maitan to seek to confine the discussion to Latin America was shown in a most convincing way by the attempts of two different small groups, each calling themselves “FLQ,” to imitate in Montreal what some of the guerrilla groups have been doing in Uruguay, Brazil, and elsewhere. Not only that. The reaction of The Red Mole was something more than enthusiastic. Urban guerrilla warfare “right in the heart of Canada itself!”
The Canadian Trotskyist movement, which was under heavy attack in the general repression—two of its leading members were imprisoned—had little choice but to publicly state its differences with The Red Mole on this question.
In an article in the December 21, 1970, issue of Labor Challenge, Comrade Ross Dowson sought, first, to rectify the bad reporting of The Red Mole concerning the nature, views, and political level of the FLQ. Secondly, he maintained that the support voiced by The Red Mole for the means used by the two action groups was ultraleft.
“The Red Mole article,” Comrade Dowson wrote, “commences with a lengthy quotation by Leon Trotsky where he rejects any concept that individual terror is permissible or impermissible from a ‘pure morals’ point of view and where he expresses his ‘sympathies’ with terrorists in their struggle against national and political oppression.
“But this is far from sufficient to explain Trotsky’s, the revolutionary socialist, position on individual terror. To the above it is necessary to add a further statement by Trotsky: ‘Individual terrorism in our eyes is inadmissible—precisely for the reason that it lowers the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to impotence and directs their glances and hopes towards the great avenger and emancipator who will some day come and accomplish this mission....
“‘If a pinch of powder and a slug of lead are ample to shoot the enemy through the neck, where is the need of a class organization ... what need is there for a party? What is the need of meetings, mass agitation, elections?’ asks Trotsky.
“Exactly. Insofar as the handful of persons who identify themselves as FLQ have articulated any theory it is a melange of ideas, all of which reject all of the forms under which real struggle is now unfolding in Quebec. It is the concept of guerrilla actions, undertaken by small groups, that are supposed to terrorize the bourgeoisie, render capitalist society inoperative and open the way to a change in power, or to spark the working class, already poised, into massive and decisive action—any and every theory that is substitutist for the class and for the building of mass action.
“Needless to say the kidnappings and the murder committed in the name of the FLQ have achieved, as could be foreseen, none of the results desired by their perpetrators. Far from embarrassing the government and bringing it to the brink they have served to strengthen its hand. They have neither inspired nor mobilized the Quebecois, other than the forces of conservatism behind Drapeau in the Montreal civic elections.”
While the Canadian Trotskyists were trying to differentiate their own position from the ultraleft one taken by The Red Mole, they were confronted by an even worse problem—what to do about the remarks made by Comrade Tariq Ali on a television panel filmed at Oxford by CTV, the national Canadian television network. This program was shown throughout Canada, while our comrades, like the rest of the left, were doing their best to mobilize a massive defense against the repression.
Some very provocative questions were directed at Comrade Ali. In answering, he did not appear to keep well in mind the situation in Canada and the need to help to the best of his ability in mobilizing a broad defense against the repression.
For instance, he was asked: “Do you believe, sir, that society today has reached the point where you see you have to use violence to achieve your ends?”
Comrade Ali replied: “I would say that this is largely a tactical question, depending precisely on the degree of opposition which we encounter in our struggle for socialism. But briefly, the answer is yes. I think that to achieve the ends we believe in to the establishment of a socialist republic, I believe that a certain element of violence is absolutely necessary.”
Another provocative question was: “When you were president of the Oxford Debating Union did you not invite Governor Wallace of Alabama to speak at the Oxford Union?”
Comrade Ali answered: “Yes. Do you know why? Because we would have killed him.”
That did not come off so well, and Comrade Ali was soon explaining: “Of course, when I say, ‘Kill him,’ I don’t mean it necessarily literally. It’s a tactical question. If I believed we could get away with killing him we would. It is a question of if you are organized to do so. I don’t think we are. I meant kill him politically. That is what we wanted to do, but that wouldn’t have taken place because Wallace wouldn’t have got further past Oxford Station.”
The setting for broadcasting this TV program, it should be underlined, was Canada in the midst of a great police hunt for urban guerrillas charged with kidnapping and murder. It was shown on the television screens during a repression in which our own headquarters and the homes of many comrades were raided, and two of our leaders were thrown into prison.
Comrade Ali did what he could to turn the provocative questions into a high-level dialogue on the difference between “individual terror” with mass support and “individual terror” without mass support—a distinction a bit too fine, one must suppose, for the Canadian audience to appreciate at the moment. “At times,” he said, “I think that individual terror becomes necessary. I don’t believe in individual terror as a principle; I am completely opposed to it. I’ll give you a concrete instance. I don’t believe in solving this particular argument by shooting off a few people, who are making rude noises. Nor do I that individual terror can in itself bring you any nearer to what we believe in. Of course not. I believe that individual terror is justified when you have a mass movement, when you have mass support inside a particular society, then it is justified.”
Could one disapprove of the Canadian Trotskyists thinking: “Defend us from our friends; we can defend ourselves from our enemies”?
In seeking the source of the ultrared coloration of the IMG, the personal inclinations of the majority of its leaders should not be taken as the decisive determinant. It can hardly be questioned that some of them feel more comfortable in a red T-shirt adorned with their totem than in less imaginative dress. It is understandable that in trying to recruit from the radicalizing youth they are responsive to a certain degree to the pressure of this milieu. Yet their intentions are the best. The key point to bear in mind is that they are only trying to apply the orientation adopted by the last world congress.
Indeed, from this standpoint, they are rather consistent. If urban guerrilla warfare works for the Tupamaros in a city as large as Montevideo, is it logical to exclude experimenting with it in other large cities? Robin Blackburn, a member of the Editorial Board of The Red Mole is excited over what the Weatherpeople have done in the U.S.; and other members, it seems, became similarly enthused over what was done in Montreal by the FLQ commandos.
One would think that the majority, leadership of the Fourth International would recognize the truly dangerous implications flowing from the guerrilla orientation they sponsored at the last world congress.
Let me turn now to a question that at first sight seems hardly worth taking up but that on further examination turns out to be of some concern.
In the article I wrote, “A Contribution to the Discussion on Revolutionary Strategy in Latin America,” I included a section entitled “The Extraordinary Value of Hugo Blanco’s Work.” In summarizing the facts, I mentioned the name of Comrade Nahuel Moreno.
Comrade Maitan agrees by and large with what I wrote about the gains made in Peru before the imprisonment of Comrade Blanco. He objects, however, to my mentioning the name of Comrade Moreno in the way I did. In a footnote, Comrade Maitan says: “In his document Hansen presents Moreno in a very favorable light, writing: ‘Our first big advance came in Peru through the work of Hugo Blanco, carried out with the active participation of Argentine comrades like Daniel Pereyra and Eduardo Creus under the leadership of Comrade Nahuel Moreno.’ A stage in the life of our Peruvian movement on which the opinions of the participants are, to say the least, divided, is presented in a grossly oversimplified way. Furthermore, it is not our movement’s style to use expressions like ‘Under the leadership of Comrade Nahuel Moreno,’ which should be avoided even if they had any correspondence with the reality.” (“Once Again on the Revolutionary Perspectives in Latin America—Defense of an Orientation and a Method.” Op. cit., p. 19.)
My comment was based on what I saw at the time during a trip in which I visited both Peru and Argentina as well as other countries. It is true that sharp tactical differences subsequently arose among the comrades. I did not go into these because the conclusions to be drawn would not have changed the overall lesson that one of the prime reasons for the defeat suffered in Peru in 1963 “was the absence of a Leninist combat party on a national scale.” Despite Comrade Maitan’s criticism, I am still of the opinion that what I said about Comrade Moreno’s role was factually accurate.
Of course, Comrade Maitan had his own sources of information at the time I visited Peru and Argentina; that is, the Buro Latinoamericano (BLA) which operated under the leadership of J. Posadas. While I never met Posadas himself to my knowledge, I did meet various members of the BLA. My impression was that they were not to be trusted as sources of information. Nothing that has happened since has caused me to change this opinion. However, I am quite willing to consider any evidence in Comrade Maitan’s possession that might lead me to reconsider.
Comrade Maitan’s footnote is appended to a sharp political attack against Comrade Moreno. The basis utilized for this is a document “by Comrade Moreno at the end of 1967” that takes as a starting point in analyzing the revolutionary reality in the southern end of South America the fact that Inti Peredo and his guerrilla group still survived after the death of Che Guevara. According to the quotation, Comrade Moreno wrote that the number one task is “first to save and then to consolidate the ELN and Inti as its unchallenged leader. There is no more urgent task than this.”
Comrade Maitan cites an additional paragraph in which Comrade Moreno insists on the importance of OLAS and the importance of joining “its armed detachments” or helping “to create them where they do not exist. This means loyal and disciplined recognition of the leadership of OLAS, recognition of the disciplined and centralized character which the struggle and its Latin-American organization must have, and most of all the need to maintain direct contact with the Cuban leadership, which is the unchallenged leadership of the continental civil war and of OLAS. It also means our unconditional entry into its armed detachments....”
Comrade Maitan then says:
“This piece in unique is a melange of mechanical formulations, opportunism, adventurism, and distortion of the objective facts. But how can it be explained that after writing this Moreno opted for the minority line and that Comrade Hansen has never had the least occasion to differentiate himself from him?” (Ibid. p. 10.)
To further understand the context of Comrade Maitan’s remarks and his bringing in the quotation, it should be noted that he is responding to my raising the question of whether the Bolivian comrades in becoming engaged in Inti Peredo’s guerrilla front in Bolivia were aware that he held a foquista concept and was opposed to forming a political party.
Comrade Maitan unfortunately did not provide the source of the quotation. This did not facilitate my search to find it. Thus, as yet, I have not been able to check it in the original. I do not thereby challenge its existence. There are gaps in my files owing mainly to the fact that the comrades in many countries in Latin America, including Argentina, have had to work in underground conditions for long years. Sometimes they overlook sending documents to New York. In certain instances, while they mail them, they never get through. Consequently I can make only a rough approximation of the context in which such a unique melange, as Comrade Maitan puts it, “of mechanical formulations, opportunism, adventurism, and distortion of the objective facts” could have been written.
1. The Argentine comrades were doing their best to support the Bolivian section in the course being followed there. Thus the October 16, 1967, issue of La Verdad carried an article on the situation in Bolivia “by the wellknown leader Hugo Gonzalez Moscoso.”
2. Fidel Castro’s confirmation October 18, 1967 that Che Guevara had been killed (he was executed October 9), set off a wave of mourning among leftists everywhere in which the world Trotskyist movement participated. The date cited by Comrade Maitan for the quotation he used would indicate that it was written in this period.
3. In a document written in January 1968 and published in Estrateg