As Communist revolutionaries, we recognize that the present contradictions of our society must be resolved by the dictatorship of the proletariat. We also recognize that this can only be achieved through armed struggle led by a democratic centralist organization guided by Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought. But our approach to all these questions has been one-sided in that it has consistently excluded the military aspect. We have seen that the United Front against Imperialism is the strategy for proletarian revolution as well as the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and we have shown the basis of the United Front in the five existing spearheads of anti-imperialist struggle. But we have acted as though this United Front existed independently of the actual conditions and forms of armed struggle, neither influencing nor being influenced by these objective conditions. We have worked hard on developing our theory and practice of democratic centralism. But again we have approached the question of organizational forms as if it made no difference that the revolutionary party in the U.S. will emerge during a period of developing fascism and armed struggle. We have in general tended to act as though the extensive military theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were not an intrinsic part of the science of Marxism-Leninism but was some kind of added bonus we could pick up at the right time. This paper is an attempt to begin to develop a Marxist-Leninist understanding of armed struggle in the American revolution and what that means for our tasks.
Today the revolutionary peoples of the entire world surround and batter the monster of U.S. imperialism from every side. Trapped in the storms of people’s war abroad, the ruling class faces utter chaos at home. The ferocious bellowings of U.S. imperialism come from the agony of its death-bed struggle.
Yet we must not fool ourselves. Though the ruling class is doomed, it is still very powerful tactically. The consciously revolutionary forces at home are still small and very weak, particularly in theory, organization, and the material ability to wage even defensive fights. Lashing out in its final throes, imperialism turns to genocide abroad and fascism at home.
At this historical moment, a revolutionary organization must develop the Marxist-Leninist strategy that the revolutionary masses need in order to win. It would be criminal to present ourselves as organizers and leaders unless we have this strategy. And the masses know this. They reject idealists as dangerous dreamers. Workers do not need to be convinced that the workers should rule the country. They want to know if this is possible, and, if so, how it could actually come about.
On the other hand, the correct Marxist-Leninist Strategy for proletarian revolution is not some hypothetical plan concocted in the privacy of a scholar’s library or by a gang of conspirators in a smoke-filled hideaway. Like all correct ideas, it emerges from the efforts of the masses themselves to change social reality. The possible forms of revolutionary armed struggle in any particular time and place are determined by the actual material conditions, the development of the primary and secondary contradictions, the current levels and forms of struggle, and – key to all – how the revolutionary masses are developing consciousness of all these factors. The winning strategy in one situation may be suicide in another, and no strategy can be successful unless the masses can understand and apply it.
Throughout history revolutionary wars have been struggles of great duration -protracted wars. The specific forms of each struggle have varied according to the relationship of class forces in each particular period of history, and according to differences in national conditions, but in each and every case the struggle was lengthy, covering years, decades, and in some cases even entire generations. Moreover, revolutionary war is protracted whether the main military struggle takes place before or after the seizure of state power. Revolutionary war is protracted because the ruling class has a deeply developed economic and cultural base as well as a monopoly on the development and use of the “legitimate” tools of force: the courts, the prisons, the police, and the armed forces. Combating the ruling class, which is armed to the teeth, always takes time, and for a long period the revolutionary forces are always relatively weak in relation to the ruling class.
Revolutionary war in this country will also be protracted. Indeed, it already is. The ruling class is still relatively strong and the revolutionary forces are now and will be for some time relatively weak. But historically, it is the imperialists who are weak and the revolutionary masses who are strong. As imperialism is battered by national liberation struggles at home and abroad, its internal contradictions increase from day to day, moving inevitably toward the moment when the masses recognize that the fundamental contradiction is that between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Already the level of class struggle, in all its forms, has become more intense than anything seen at least since the 1930’s. From a position of weakness the revolutionary forces are moving toward a position of strength.
But even the real and potential strength of the revolutionary forces can not change the fact that U.S. imperialism is a ferocious enemy. We stand face to face with the most dangerous ruling class in all of human history. It already has shown its willingness to use genocide against people’s war abroad and at home to combine general political repression with selective massacres. Every day the imperialists show their preparation for fascism, which will become more brazen and more vicious as resistance and revolutionary struggle increase. Again and again the ruling class will try to liquidate the revolutionary forces, which will be able to survive and grow only if they can meet counter-revolutionary violence with revolutionary violence. To defeat, this enemy we must prepare in every way for a long drawn-out struggle, a struggle that will have to overcome the sum total force that this most powerful ruling class in the history of the world is able to bring to bear.
An historical understanding of revolutionary war as a protracted struggle must be transformed into a practical strategy to defeat the dual errors of adventurism and social pacifism. Adventurism comes in many forms, but in essence it approaches revolutionary war from the point of view of single decisive actions, battles, or campaigns. While adventurism can be a destructive tendency, far more dangerous is social pacifism, which preaches the present invincibility of the ruling class, shuns armed struggle, and spreads defeatism. The most insidious form of social pacifism agrees to armed struggle in principle but puts it-off to some distant time in the future. RED PAPERS 2 correctly points out: “To build the mass movement against fascism without preparing for offensive, illegal action, is to lead the masses into an ambush.” A strategic application of protracted war recognizes that only through armed struggle can the masses liberate themselves, but at the same time sees this armed struggle not in terms of glorious campaigns and actions but as the sum total of a war of attrition conducted by the masses against the ruling class.
Historically, the first stage of protracted revolutionary war has been guerilla warfare. This occurs within the period of strategic defensive, while the revolutionary forces are relatively weak and the reactionary forces relatively strong. The goal of this stage is to initiate attacks against the ruling class, while preserving and developing the revolutionary forces. Guerilla warfare is primarily a war of attrition, in which a relatively weaker force is able to mobilize and grow over time, moving to a position of strength. The power of guerilla warfare lies in its dialectical character; far from being the “mystical invention” of some bourgeois strategist, it wholly conforms to the dialectical development of class struggle. It develops unevenly but moves inevitably from low levels to higher levels of warfare.
The revolutionary struggle in the U.S. will certainly be waged primarily in the cities. Unlike other peoples’ wars, which inspire and teach us, ours will be fought in the urban areas. The importance of rural areas in other countries was that the majority of the oppressed and therefore revolutionary population of these countries were mostly peasants (small farmers) and rural proletariat.
Therefore, since these were people’s straggles, in order to rely on the masses the war had to be essentially rural in character, using the countryside to surround the seat of reactionary power, the cities. In the U.S., the revolutionary masses work and live for the most part in the urban areas. Our revolutionary countryside lies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But our own revolutionary forces are based in the cities.
In order to understand how protracted war, or for that matter armed revolution, is possible in the U.S., we have to understand the special role of urban guerilla warfare. First we should understand how urban guerilla warfare has developed historically.
Capitalism developed in the cities and developed two new military tools to secure power: guns and the modern army. Arabs brought gunpowder to Western Europe at the beginning of the 14th century, and soon guns were invented, just as the merchants in the towns began piling up capital. Ever since the time that the first capitalists used guns to get political power from the feudal lords, it has been true that “All political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The feudal lords ruled the countryside, surrounded by stone walls in their castles. The bourgeoisie (“bourgeoisie” originally meant people who lived in a town) didn’t have stone walls and huge tracts of land. What they did have was lots of money, and with that money they could hire workers to produce guns and gunpowder and unemployed people to fight for them. The first modern armies appeared in Italy in the 15th century. The stone walls and castles of the feudal lords fell in the face of manufactured cannons and hired armies.
From this time forward, the armies of the capitalists are mercenaries and conscripts. That is, they are either paid to fight or forced to fight. This was how modern army discipline became developed. Because severe discipline is necessary in order to hold a capitalist army together, strategy has to be built on this. Here was an army equipped with lethal weapons and fighting against its will. How could they go into combat? For three centuries the answer was: in a straight line. (Those of us who have been in the military understand how serious it still is “to get out of line.”) The entire mass of infantry had to move all at once, could only move on absolutely level ground, and once locked in combat either won or lost almost at a single blow. The first American revolution changed much of this. The rebels were fighting for their own interests, and they didn’t fight fair. They moved and fought in small groups. The line was powerless, faced with an invisible enemy melting away info the forests and into the masses of the people. From this point on, guerilla warfare has become increasingly important.
In the French Revolution, and even more in the proletarian revolutions of 1848 guerilla warfare moved into the cities. Early 19th century cities were overgrown medieval cities, filled with mazes of narrow streets and alleys. So barricade and street fighting was quite effective for the workers and their allies. But as the bourgeoisie consolidated its own power, they leveled the existing workers’ quarters in the central cities and built in their place broad, long, straight thoroughfares which could be commanded by the artillery and machine-guns developed in the 1860’s and mass produced in their factories. The armies of the state now had almost insurmountable physical advantages over the revolutionary urban proletariat. This, together with the ability of the bourgeoisie to rally urban petty bourgeoisie, led Engels to conclude that “rebellion in the old style, the street fight with barricades, ... was to a considerable extent obsolete.”
The 1905 Russian revolution changed all this, as Lenin pointed out in “Lessons of the Moscow Uprising.” Lenin drew several lessons from the spontaneous actions of the masses, including “As is always the case, practice marched ahead of theory.” First of all, “the general strike, as an independent and predominant form of struggle, is out of date.” Second:,
It is not enough to take sides on the question of an armed uprising. Those who are opposed to it, those who do not prepare for it, must be ruthlessly dismissed from the ranks of the supporters of the revolution, sent packing to its enemies, to the traitors or cowards; for the day is approaching when the force of events and the conditions of the struggle will compel us to distinguish between enemies and friends according to this principle.
And then the specific conclusion. Lenin saw that “it is high time now ... to review Engels’ conclusions” because new class relations and new military factors had created “new barricade tactics”:
These tactics are the tactics of guerilla warfare. The organization required for such tactics is that of mobile and exceedingly small units, units of ten, three or even two persons. We often meet Social-Democrats now who scoff whenever units of five or three are mentioned. But scoffing is only a cheap way of ignoring the new question of tactics and organization raised by street fighting under the conditions imposed by modern military technique.
Lenin’s other writings during this period begin to develop the Marxist-Leninist theory of urban guerilla warfare and point out many practical aspects for revolutionaries. Hopefully the following quotations will lead to intensive study:
However much you may turn up your noses, gentlemen, at the question of night attacks and similar purely tactical military questions, however much you may pull wry faces about the “plan” of assigning secretaries of organisations, or their members in general, to stand on duty to provide for any military exigency – life goes its own way, revolution teaches, taking in hand and shaking up the most inveterate pedants .. . The stationing of patrols and the billeting of squads are all purely military functions; they are all initial operations of a revolutionary army and constitute the organisation of an insurrection, the organisation of revolutionary rule, which matures and becomes stronger through these small preparations, through these minor clashes, testing its own strength, learning to fight, training itself for victory . . . (“The Black Hundreds and the Organisation of an Uprising”)
... military operations together with the people are now commencing. It is by engaging in such operations that the pioneers of armed struggle become fused with the masses not merely in word but in deed ... (“From the Defensive to the Offensive”)
It horrifies me – I give you my word – it horrifies me to find that there has been talk about bombs for over six months, yet not one has been made. And it is the most learned if people who are doing the talking – Go to the youth, gentlemen ... Form fighting squads at once everywhere, among the students, and especially among the workers, etc., etc. Let them arm themselves at once as best they can, be it with a revolver, a knife, a rag soaked in kerosene for starting fires, etc. ... Do not make membership in the R.S.D.L.P. an absolute condition – that would be an absurd demand for an armed uprising. Do not refuse to contact any group, even if it consists of only three persons; make it one sole condition that it should be reliable as far as police spying is concerned and prepared to fight the tsar’s troops.
The propagandists must supply each group with brief and simple recipes for making bombs, give them an elementary explanation of the type of work, and then leave it all to them. Squads must at once begin military training by launching operations immediately, at once. Some may at once undertake to kill a spy or blow up a police station, others to raid a bank to confiscate funds for the insurrection . . . But the essential thing is to begin at once to learn from actual practice; have no fear of these trial attacks. They may, of course, degenerate into extremes, but that is an evil of morrow, whereas the evil today is our inertness, our doctrinaire spirit, our learned immobility, and our senile fear of initiative. Let every group learn, if it is only by beating up policemen: a score or so victims will be more than compensated for by the fact that this will train hundreds of experienced fighters, who tomorrow will be leading hundreds of thousands. (“To the Combat Committee of the St. Petersburg Committee”)
The contingents may be of any strength, beginning with two or three people. They must arm themselves as best they can (rifles, revolvers, bombs, knives, knuckle-dusters, sticks, rags soaked in kerosene for starting fires . . .) Under no circumstances should they wait for help from other sources, from above, from the outside; they must procure everything themselves ... It must not be forgotten that the chances are 100 to 1 that events will take us unawares, and that it will be necessary to come together under terribly difficult conditions.
Even without arms, the groups can play a most important part: 1) by leading the mass; 2) by attacking, whenever a favourable opportunity presents itself, policemen . . . and seizing their arms; 3) by rescuing the arrested or injured when there are only a few police about: 4) by getting on the roofs ... and showering stones ... on the troops, etc. Given sufficient push, an organised and well knit combat group constitutes a tremendous force. Under no circumstances should the formation of the group be abandoned or postponed on the plea of lack of arms...
Further, revolutionary army groups should under no circumstances confine themselves to preparatory work alone, but should begin military action as soon as possible ... The groups can and should immediately take advantage of every opportunity for active work, and must by no means put matters off until a general uprising, because fitness for the uprising cannot be acquired except by training under fire. (“Tasks of Revolutionary Army Contingents”)
We should remember that Lenin wrote all this during the 1905 Russian revolution, which was defeated. In fact, the urban proletarian forces in Russia in 1905 were not capable of maintaining the struggle nearly as long as the Black rebellions in the cities of the U.S. between the summer of 1964 and the spring of 1968. Why this is true, despite the fact that the Russian proletariat was only 12 years away from victorious revolution, we shall examine in more detail later. But one factor was the physical nature of those Russian cities compared to that of our own cities today.
The neatly laid out central cities of late 19th century Europe could not accommodate the waves of people swept from the land into the factories. By the middle of the 20th century, European cities were once again beginning to provide some advantages for proletarian and anti-fascist forces. This made possible the urban guerilla fighting in Madrid, the seven-month defense of the Warsaw ghetto, and the steadily growing underground resistance in Paris and other French cities, which probably could have liberated France in a year or two without the Anglo-American invasion. Most major Amerikan cities in the last third of the 20th century provide much greater physical advantages for the revolutionary forces.
An important counter-insurgency theorist for the enemy, Colonel Rex Applegate, argues that urban jungles are far more difficult terrain for their forces than any tropical rainforest or mountainous region. Jungles or even mountains are essentially two dimensional, and are subject to saturation bombing with napalm, phosphorous, and explosives. But cities like New York or Chicago, with their high-rise apartments and multi-layered underground systems, are three-dimensional jungles. Furthermore, rural guerillas can never be completely integrated with large masses of people, because the rural population itself is spread out in small villages and farms. The urban guerilla, on the other hand, swims in a real ocean of the people.
We see both advantages operating in the recent successful ambush of two pigs in Chicago. The guerillas fired from a huge high-rise apartment complex, and were even able to prevent three attempts by massed pigs to recover the bodies of their fallen fellow oinkers. The enemy had no idea exactly where the fire was coming from. They did not have the option of returning massive fire, because to do so would have further revolutionized the thousands of people in the apartment complex, not to mention the effects on the city, the nation, even the world. Even in searching for the guerillas, the pigs had to kick in literally hundreds of doors.
No other society in history has been so overwhelmingly urbanized. The industrialization of agriculture has poured the population of the countryside in wave after wave into the cities. The shift has been particularly rapid for the Black and Brown peoples. Within four decades for the Black nation, and within two for the Chicano and Puerto Rican people, the majority has moved from the countryside into the very centers of the cities. The Black and Brown nations have abruptly shifted from peasant nations to what may be the first two nations in history to be predominantly composed of urban industrial proletariat.
Armed revolutionary acts, including the ambushing of dozens of pigs, all across the country seem to indicate that the Black nation is in a transition from the mass spontaneous uprisings of 1964-1968 to the first stages of organized guerilla warfare. The forms of struggle of Brown people may develop even more rapidly. Within hours of the pig attack on the Chicano Moratorium, several pigs were skillfully ambushed. In this context, the key problem for white revolutionaries is well stated in RED PAPERS 2: “A primary manifestation of white chauvinism among revolutionaries is the marked tendency to consider armed struggle the domain of Blacks and ideological struggle the domain of whites. Somehow, white skins are assumed to be too valuable to sacrifice to a pig’s bullet, while Black and Brown minds are seen as unable to cope with the theory of Marxism-Leninism.” But of course the problem is not primarily the attitudes of white revolutionaries, but in the extremely uneven development of the revolutionary consciousness of the Black and Brown masses on one hand and the white masses on the other. Recognizing that the American revolution will be protracted, urban, and irregular allows us to start dealing with the specifics of this problem.
A unique feature of this particular decaying empire is that two of the nations it oppresses, the Black nation and the Chicano nation, exist within its own heartland. Although many people of these two nations work as an agricultural proletariat, Blacks in the South and Chicanos in the Southwest, the majority of both Blacks and Browns live in the great cities and work in the most advanced industries. The heart of the Amerikan economy remains the auto industry, from which depend steel, oil, rubber, glass, machine tools, and many service and finance branches. The overall membership of the United Automobile Workers is now over 50% Black. Actual production workers are probably 65-80% Black. Detroit itself is overwhelmingly a Black city. The industrial proletariat in San Jose and Los Angeles is largely Chicano, in New York largely Puerto Rican. In all sections of the country and in all the basic industries, Black and Brown workers are increasing as a percentage of production workers. The industrial proletariat of the imperialist homeland to a large extent consists of people from the internal colonies. Furthermore, Washington, the capital itself, the rotting brain of the great Babylonian world empire, is 80% Black, and every government office is largely staffed on the lower levels by Black workers.
As RED PAPERS 2 points out, this means that the oppressed peoples have a special and leading role1 in the overall struggle of the proletariat and the United Front against Imperialism. The main military aspect is an extreme contradiction for the imperialists. Weapons and tactics that can be used against Hiroshima or Ben Tre can hardly be employed against the empire’s centers of industry and government, and if the imperialists move to open genocide at home they will have to begin with their own clerks, typists, and maintenance men.
This decaying empire is driven by its own internal contradictions. Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, in which the least productive and most parasitic form of capital, finance capital, becomes dominant. It becomes increasingly less profitable to invest surplus capital in the mother country, so the imperialists are driven to the suicidal course of looting the entire world, not to provide for any basic human needs, but to produce all that is inherently useless, wasteful, and destructive. Rising capitalism used evil means to create necessary goods and services; decadent capitalism destroys resources to create new evils. The features of this decaying capitalism create the conditions of the armed struggle that will overthrow it.
In 1930, Stalin saw that a new feature had emerged in most capitalist countries, shaken by imperialist wars, the socialist revolution in the U.S.S.R., and the national liberation struggles of the oppressed nations. He pointed out that where before there were reserve armies of the unemployed, there were now “Permanent armies of the unemployed.” (Political Report of the C.C. to the 16th Congress of the C.P.S.U., June 27, 1930) As we are just beginning to understand, this has a profound influence on class relations. A reserve army of the unemployed is clearly part of the proletariat. In boom times they work; during crises they don’t. People in the reserve army are constantly seeking employment. But when the crisis becomes permanent, as it has been since 1929, a new social stratum appears, a mass of people who know that they will never have steady work. In Amerika, the permanent army of the unemployed has been mostly Black, Brown, Yellow, and Red, but more whites are now joining its ranks, particularly in Appalachia, the Pacific Northwest, and some cities, notably Chicago. It may or may not be correct to call these people “lumpen-proletariat,” but it’s clear that they have different relations to other classes than did the lumpenproletariat of Marx’s day, during the rise of industrial capitalism. At that time, the lumpen-proletariat was a relatively small group of individual failures and misfits from all classes, for one reason or another excluded from a rapidly expanding industrial proletariat. There may have been reason for the proletariat to scorn the lumpenproletariat. But in the present period, that, of the permanent stagnation of capitalism, class relations are different. The working class as a whole is being increasingly loaded with back-breaking debts, public and private. Workers not only have to pay for the imperialists’ wars, but for the trashy commodities that they themselves are forced to produce and consume. At any moment they may expect to enter the ever-growing reserve army of the unemployed, which consists largely of Third World people, youth, and women. And every month, tens of thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands give up hope of finding a job, disappear from the unemployment statistics, and move from the reserve army to the permanent army of the unemployed.
It is incorrect to make the contradiction between employed and unemployed workers into a class contradiction, let alone an antagonistic contradiction. The question for revolutionaries is not whether to organize in the factories or in the streets. The question is how to unite the entire working class so that the desperation of the streets can be combined with the power that exists at the point of production. And that is the key question not only for organizing, but for material struggle.
Decaying imperialism is based on a vast structure of debt, which it literally owes to the future. The historically falling rate of profit has forced capitalism not only to count its chickens before they are hatched but actually to eat the eggs. The great secret of deficit financing is simply how to steal profits from the future. In principle deficit financing borrows from future profits, invests this as capital, and thus, by providing a bigger capital base, creates greater future profits than there would have been if the borrowing had not taken place. But as the rate of profit falls in the super-saturated domestic economy, the borrowed future profits are used increasingly to finance imperialist wars and domestic repression, both of which are, to say the least, extremely unprofitable. Instead of expanding the actual capital base, deficit financing now undermines it. And this irrational and downright fiendish use of resources and people everywhere stimulates revolutionary ideas and actions.
During the period of rising capitalism, in 19th century Europe or early 20th century Russia, material attacks on capitalist industry or centers of finance could not do any real damage to capitalism itself. Capitalism was bound to develop anyhow, and it was the very development of growing capitalism which produced revolutionary contradictions. Furthermore, there were not enough productive facilities to satisfy the needs of the people, so physical destruction of any industrial equipment was against the immediate interests of the people. The situation is very different now. Capitalism is not only decaying but extremely vulnerable. The falling rate of profit leaves huge corporations like Chrysler, Lockheed, and General Dynamics on the brink of ruin, and even topples a monster the size of the 8-billion dollar Penn Central, largest transportation enterprise in the world. Every material blow hastens its downfall. And in its overbloated condition, literally forcing us to consume its insane overproduction, most of its productive facilities do us more harm than good. Sabotage thus becomes an integral part of the strategy of protracted war unfolding first through urban guerilla warfare. The social pacifist argument that certain particular acts of sabotage (or window breaking) will not destroy imperialism is merely the opposite side of the adventurist view that these particular acts will bring the empire to its knees. Sabotage must be based on the principle of protracted war: the accumulation of small acts, engaged in by more and more people, constitutes strategic action.
Decaying imperialism is vulnerable to material attack not only as an economic system but also as a physical entity. Its utility systems are delicate, overstretched, indefensible, and absolutely vital. In 1965, a single circuit-breaker in a Niagra Falls power station caused an extended total power failure in New York and four other middle Atlantic states. Now there are “brownouts” caused by the normal summer overload. The movement of water supplies in or garbage out of the cities is constantly on the verge of breakdown. The point here is not the actual level of these services, which is still very high compared to most of the world, but the fact that they are in irreversible decay. This is not the era of expanding capitalism, extending vital new lines of transportation and power. It is the era of decadent capitalism, which congests itself in mazes of unnecessary roads, provided unneeded vehicles that poison the air and which forces people to go into debt to buy needless appliances to consume electricity it can barely produce.
Although it would be adventurism to think that the empire could be quickly destroyed through an attack on its complex system of power, transportation, and communication, we should recognize that large areas can be instantly paralyzed by such simple acts as the blocking of freeways and bridges, the destruction of power stations, and the disruption of communications. This can be especially critical where urban centers are linked with suburban centers or satellite industrial areas. Such acts must be seen in terms of the special characteristics of the U.S. struggle.
Throughout the struggle, the revolutionary forces will always be in close proximity to the reactionary forces. It must be understood that in this country urban area, are at the same time the base for revolutionary political power and the bastions of the ruling class. This situation has several disadvantages for the revolutionary forces. The ruling class will defend itself ferociously in the city. It will be able to mobilize its coercive methods and forces more quickly than if it had to prepare and sustain campaigns in rural areas. We will always find the enemy breathing down our necks. But the revolutionary advantages are greater. The ruling class will always be surrounded by the revolutionary masses. They will be subject to more direct attack than if the struggle were primarily in the countryside. They will have extreme problems in engaging in full scale warfare in cities which are their most important possessions. Operating in full integration with the enemy will give the revolutionary forces excellent opportunity to have complete knowledge of the plans and preparations of the reactionary forces.
All this points to the extremely high priority of developing underground skills and capabilities. As Lenin points out, “the struggle against the political police requires special qualities; it requires professional revolutionaries” (WHAT IS TO BE DONE?). Survival and victory will depend on identity papers, hiding places, etc. This is not in contradiction to the actions of the masses Quite the reverse. One of Lenin’s main points in WHAT IS TO BE DONE? is that “the active and widespread participation of the masses depends on the existence of an organization made up of professional revolutionaries, no less professionally trained than the police,” which is able to “centralize all the secret side of the work.”
The struggle will be characterized mainly by small unit operations on a constant and expanding basis, punctuated by mass uprisings. Since the revolutionary forces will be operating “integrated with the enemy,” it will be difficult, except in the final phase of the struggle, for relatively large military formations to come together. On a day to day basis the fight will be characterized by ambushes, acts of sabotage, and interdiction of supply and communication facilities, and executions by small units using their ability to quickly concentrate and disperse to harass and create havoc among the enemy. But since the revolutionary struggle is a war of the masses, and given the deterioration of the entire system, periodically the essentially guerilla character will take on insurrectionary form, with strikes, mass demonstrations, rioting, and even mass armed uprisings. As the situation becomes more desperate for the ruling class and the contradictions become more acute, the spacing between such uprisings will probably be shortened, and their development will become more generalized so as to erupt in many areas simultaneously. The week of mass uprisings in April, 1968, was an example of this.
For most of the struggle, the main emphasis in operations will be against the police, and other forms of para-military fascist formations. The use of the military by the ruling class is likely to be intermittent and confined to extremely serious or extended situations. The contradiction for them is that even under a complete system of fascism a military occupation of major urban areas will leave the reactionary forces spread thin, and will be disruptive of the economic stability and proper functioning of these areas. This contradiction will allow the revolutionary forces to initiate actions and disengage, thus throwing the state apparatus into a continual confusion. Since the military forces will be unreliable over long periods of time, because they are proletarian and multi-national, the main burden of counter-revolution will fall on the police. Historically, the police have never been able to smash revolutionary movements unless backed by the military. The development of a coordinated revolutionary surge in urban centers can tax the police to their limits, throw them into confusion, isolate them, and lead to their eventual destruction. This will be particularly true in periods in which uprisings are frequent and widespread, keeping whatever military forces can be brought to bear diffused.
In the formative and intermediary stages the main combat areas of the revolutionary struggle will be in and around Black and Brown communities, as it is the revolutionary peoples of the internal colonies who are the vanguard in the fight against U.S. imperialism, for their national liberation, and for the establishment of socialism. One disadvantage of this is that the main battlefields will often be so well defined that they can be surrounded and cut off from the rest of the urban area, both politically and militarily. This isolation must be broken by the strategy of United Front against Imperialism and the development of guerilla capabilities throughout the rest of the city, capable at first of diversionary acts.
Chairman Mao teaches us that: “Without a people’s army the people have nothing.” This statement contains the heart of a people’s revolutionary war. Small groups of even the most heroic revolutionary fighters cannot expect to win lasting victories over the ruling class, let alone overthrow the bourgeoisie and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. A people’s army expresses the military might of the masses. It is a fighting force that can take the operations of individual units and guide these in the strategy for overthrowing the ruling class.
The growth of a people’s army, like the development of protracted guerilla war, must be viewed dialectically, as Lenin did. Large-scale, well coordinated revolutionary armies are not created overnight. They must come from the revolutionary struggle of the masses. In its most elemental form, the revolutionary army begins from the need of the masses to defend themselves against the economic and military terror of the bourgeois dictatorship. Two-thirds of the thousands of bombings in the U.S. in the last year were in labor struggles at the point of production. More and more people from oppressed classes and strata are seeking to arm themselves for self-defense. The qualitative change comes when the need of the masses to defend themselves becomes integrated into the practice of revolutionary organizations, so that armed struggle is no longer just a matter for individuals, but a mass question. However, even in an organized mass way, armed self-defense is incapable of completing the revolutionary task, and in time will even become less useful for defense. Once the people are armed and willing to defend themselves, and even their neighbors, friends, and fellow workers, it must be shown that the only real defense is to destroy the enemy. To destroy the enemy requires offensive action and an organized military force.
For revolutionary Communist organizations to develop fighting arms capable of defeating the enemy, two major questions will have to be answered. First, what is the precise relationship between the Red Army, which is the fighting force of the Communist organization, with other revolutionary fighting units? Second, how can a standing revolutionary army be maintained in a situation normally advantageous for only small military formations?
A people’s army is a diverse formation that may represent the combined forces of several revolutionary organizations, independent military and political groupings, with a class composition of the proletariat plus elements of the petty bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat. The uniting force is a common understanding that the bourgeois dictatorship is merciless and must be overthrown. However, among these groups there will be differing notions as to the direction the struggle should take, with the representatives of the ’revolutionary’ petty bourgeoisie and lumpen refusing to acknowledge the proletariat as the only class with the ability to carry the struggle through to its successful conclusion. Given the diffuse character of a people’s army, it must be the role of the fighting formation of the vanguard of the proletariat – the Communist Party and its Red Army – to use the strength of these other groups, which is their willingness to do battle with the forces of reaction, while overcoming their weaknesses by being prepared to give direction to the struggle.
If the revolutionary Communist Party is to be the general staff of the struggle, and its fighting arm the Red Army the main and essential force, the organization must have the following: (1) a fighting core around which a Red Army can grow; (2) a pool of military cadre that can train and give direction to other groups, fighting units, and the masses; (3) a unified political and military leadership (4) cadre among the masses, having their confidence and trust. Without each and every one of these the organization will be unable to provide effective leadership for the struggle.
As the general revolutionary struggle will unfold around an anti-imperialist united front, so will its highest political form- armed struggle – also take on the character of a united front. This united front must consist of both a strategy capable of integrating the independent actions of all classes, strata, and groupings and actual alliances among armed revolutionary groups.
A united front military strategy must be based on a thorough summation of the practice and potential role of all forces. Their strengths and weaknesses must be assessed in terms of the needs of protracted urban guerilla struggle. The areas to be considered are class background, relationship with the masses, level of organization, fighting ability (both actual and p6tential), and ideological comprehension of the character of the revolution. There must also be consideration of where independent actions by other groupings can be integrated into the overall strategy, and where such actions are likely to diverge. The central feature of this strategy must be to integrate as broad as possible a military base under proletarian leadership in all campaigns and actions.
The crucial link will be the development of a strong, class-conscious Red Army under the command of a revolutionary Communist Party fully integrated with and leading the struggles of the masses. Out of both political and military necessity, this Red Army must be able to act as an independent force. Operating within the United Front strategy, the Communist Party must be able to initiate military action at crucial times, unencumbered by the weaknesses of other groups, but must also be able to participate in both temporary and lasting alliances.
The Red Army must be the core of the people’s army in order to infuse this broad formation with the means and will to carry the struggle through to its conclusion. As the core of the fighting forces, it will attempt strategic leadership, material support, and cadre for other forces in the revolution. But for some time to come, the Red Army will be Black and Brown revolutionary fighters with various organizations. In this situation, it will be the duty of the Red Army to fully support these Black and Brown fighters by mobilizing its own forces and those of other groups. Only when the Communist Party is established with Black and Brown and other proletarian leadership, can the Red Army achieve its military leadership.
The growth of a people’s army, like the development of protracted guerilla war, must be viewed dialectically, as Lenin did. Large-scale, well coordinated revolutionary armies are not created overnight. They must come from the revolutionary struggle of the masses. In its most elemental form, the revolutionary army begins from the need of the masses to defend themselves against the economic and military terror of the bourgeois dictatorship. Two-thirds of the thousands of bombings in the U.S. in the last year were in labor struggles at the point of production. More and more people from oppressed classes and strata are seeking to arm themselves for self-defense. The qualitative change comes when the need of the masses to defend themselves becomes integrated into the practice of revolutionary organizations, so that armed struggle is no longer just a matter for individuals, but a mass question. However, even in an organized mass way, armed self-defense is incapable of completing the revolutionary task, and in time will even become less useful for defense. Once the people are armed and willing to defend themselves, and even their neighbors, friends, and fellow workers, it must be shown that the only real defense is to destroy the enemy. To destroy the enemy requires offensive action and an organized military force.
For revolutionary Communist organizations to develop fighting arms capable of defeating the enemy, two major questions will have to be answered. First, what is the precise relationship between the Red Army, which is the fighting force of the Communist organization, with other revolutionary fighting units? Second, how can a standing revolutionary army be maintained in a situation normally advantageous for only small military formations?
A people’s army is a diverse formation that may represent the combined forces of several revolutionary organizations, independent military and political groupings, with a class composition of the proletariat plus elements of the petty bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat. The uniting force is a common understanding that the bourgeois dictatorship is merciless and must be overthrown. However, among these groups there will be differing notions as to the direction the struggle should take, with the representatives of the ’revolutionary’ petty bourgeoisie and lumpen refusing to acknowledge the proletariat as the only class with the ability to carry the struggle through to its successful conclusion. Given the diffuse character of a people’s army, it must be the role of the fighting formation of the vanguard of the proletariat – the Communist Party and its Red Army – to use the strength of these other groups, which is their willingness to do battle with the forces of reaction, while overcoming their weaknesses by being prepared to give direction to the struggle.
If the revolutionary Communist Party is to be the general staff of the struggle, and its fighting arm the Red Army the main and essential force, the organization must have the following: (1) a fighting core around which a Red Army can grow; (2) a pool of military cadre that can train and give direction to other groups, fighting units, and the masses; (3) a unified political and military leadership (4) cadre among the masses, having their confidence and trust. Without each and every one of these the organization will be unable to provide effective leadership for the struggle.
As the general revolutionary struggle will unfold around an anti-imperialist united front, so will its highest political form- armed struggle-also take on the character of a united front. This united front must consist of both a strategy capable of integrating the independent actions of all classes, strata, and groupings and actual alliances among armed revolutionary groups.
A united front military strategy must be based on a thorough summation of the practice and potential role of all forces. Their strengths and weaknesses must be assessed in terms of the needs of protracted urban guerilla struggle. The areas to be considered are class background, relationship with the masses, level of organization, fighting ability (both actual and potential), and ideological comprehension of the character of the revolution. There must also be consideration of where independent actions by other groupings can be integrated into the overall strategy, and where such actions are likely to diverge. The central feature of this strategy must be to integrate as broad as possible a military base under proletarian leadership in all campaigns and actions.
The crucial link will be the development of a strong, class-conscious Red Army under the command of a revolutionary Communist Party fully integrated with and leading the struggles of the masses. Out of both political and military necessity, this Red Army must be able to act as an independent force. Operating within the United Front strategy, the Communist Party must be able to initiate military action at crucial times, unencumbered by the weaknesses of other groups, but must also be able to participate in both temporary and lasting alliances.
The Red Army must be the core of the people’s army in order to infuse this broad formation with the means and will to carry the struggle through to its conclusion. As the core of the fighting forces, it will attempt strategic leadership, material support, and cadre for other forces in the revolution. But for some time to come, the Red Army will be Black and Brown revolutionary fighters with various organizations. In this situation, it will be the duty of the Red Army to fully support these Black and Brown fighters by mobilizing its own forces and those of other groups. Only when the Communist Party is established with Black and Brown and other proletarian leadership, can the Red Army achieve its military leadership.