Marxism and Guerrilla Warfare

Home , Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare (book)

Marx and Engels had noted the important role played by guerrilla warfare in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars (Marx 1980), in India during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (Marx and Engels 1959), and in the United States, particularly by Confederate forces, during the Civil War (Marx and Engels 1961), but they never made a direct connection between guerrilla warfare and proletarian revolution. Indeed, it is notable that Lenin, in writing about guerrilla warfare in the context of the 1905 revolution, made no mention of Marx and Engels in this regard. For Lenin, guerrilla warfare was a matter of tactics relevant “when the mass movement has actually reached the point of an uprising and when fairly large intervals occur between the ‘big engagements’ in the civil war” (Lenin 1972e: 219). Trotsky, as we saw in Chapter 5, thought of guerrilla warfare in the same way, relevant for the conditions of the Civil War but not so for the standing Red Army after the Bolsheviks achieved victory. It was the association between guerrilla warfare and national liberation and anti-imperialist movements over the course of the twentieth century that el- evated guerrilla warfare to the level of strategy for Marxism. There was no one model of guerrilla warfare applied mechanically in every circumstance, but instead a variety of forms reflecting the specific social and historical conditions in which these struggles took place. In this chapter I examine the strategy of people’s war associated with Mao Zedong and the strategy of the foco associated with Che Guevara. There are a number of reasons why a comparison between Gramsci, Mao and Che is a fruitful one.1 First, all three are credited with applying Marxism to the specific structural and historical realities of their respective social formations. In so doing, they exemplify Lenin’s argument that Marxism is not a dogma to be applied mechanically but instead requires ‘the concrete analysis of a concrete situation.’ In particular, despite the tendency to situate Italy within the advanced capitalist West, the significance which the Southern Question played in Gramsci’s work suggests a structural affinity with the predominantly peasant social formations in which Mao and Che developed their Marxism. Second, the problem of revolutionary consciousness

1 Corrigan, Ramsay and Sayer (1979), Dirlik (2005), and Todd (1974) have made explicit the affinity between Gramsci and Mao. While the link between Gramsci and Che has not been given the same attention, I would argue that it is nonetheless a notable one (see Rosengarten 2015).

90 chapter 6 was at the core of their respective social theories. Gramsci, Mao and Che all spoke of the necessity for the proletariat to take a position of cultural as well as political leadership of the peasantry as a condition for a successful revolution. In this context, they pointed to the significant role played by a vanguard political party that was connected organically to the masses in constructing proletarian hegemony, both within the revolutionary movement itself and in the transition to socialism. Third, Mao and Che, as did Gramsci, represented a challenge to the leading role of the Soviet Union within the world communist movement, with its perceived distortions of the different historical and social forces characteristic of the periphery of imperialism, following the Second World War. Finally, there is a temporal connection between the three in that the significance of their work for critical social theory came to be recognized at roughly the same time (the late 1960s/early 1970s). As a result, Mao’s and Che’s military experience makes them especially significant for understanding the strengths and limitations of Gramsci’s use of the military metaphor for understanding revolutionary political strategy.

People’s War

The strategy of people’s war was developed in the context of the multiple stages of China’s revolutionary war, first against the Kuomintang, then in an anti-imperialist war against Japanese occupation, and finally in the civil war leading to the defeat of the Kuomintang and the proclamation of the Peoples’ Republic of China in 1949. When, under the influence of the Comintern, the Chinese Communist Party’s strategy of accepting the hegemony of the national bourgeois Kuomintang and, in 1927, seizing power through armed insurrec- tion in the cities ended in disastrous failure (Isaacs 2009), the Party retreated to the countryside in order to develop a peasant-based revolutionary movement. Mao argued that a strategy based on achieving a quick, decisive military victory, such as the insurrectionary strategy associated with the Soviet revolution, was inappropriate for the conditions faced by the Red Army in China. He was critical of those within the Party who argued that

it is enough merely to study the experience of revolutionary war in Russia, or, to put it more concretely, that it is enough merely to follow the laws by which the civil war in the Soviet Union was directed and the military manuals published by Soviet military organizations. They do not see that these laws and manuals embody the specific characteristics of the civil war and the Red Army in the Soviet Union and that if we copy and apply