Two Strategies

After the People's Republic of China had been proclaimed on 1st of October, 1949, a whole range of peoples drove away their oppressors, and gained or defended the independence of their country. Vietnam, after the flight of the Japanese, defeated two of the great powers,: France and the USA, the allied Indochinese peoples also drove out the colonialists and their puppets. Indonesia put an end to Dutch colonial domination already earlier, in December 1949; Algeria, which got rid of its French masters suffering heavy losses, was recognized as an independent state by De Gaulle in 1962. On the American continent the first free country was born on January 1, 1959, as a result of the victorious Cuban revolution, which then became the most consistent supporter of other liberation wars flaring up in various places all over the world. In the 1960s and 1970s a lot of struggles of this sort were going on in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, and most of them ended in victory, by gaining independent statehood. This happened in the former Portuguese colonies in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, on the islands of Sao Tomé and Principe, and what is more, the blows of popular revolutionary armies, which were developed from the guerrilla movements, shattered the regime in the Portuguese "homeland" too, and contributed to the overthrow of the Portuguese fascist military dictatorship in April 1974. Latin America was also stirring in these years: On the American subcontinent guerrilla struggles were taking place in Peru, Paraguay, Ecuador, Columbia, Venezuela, and Bolivia (where the guerrillas went on with war even after the martyrdom of Che!), in Brazil an urban guerrilla movement was organized, the "Tupamaros" of Uruguay by their actions created a difficult situation for the pro-USA government. In the lands of Central America, following the American intervention in 1954, the people of Guatemala were waging a guerrilla war against their oppressors, who laid waste whole Indian villages and zones; in El Salvador the national liberation front named after Farabundo Marti liberated large areas; in Nicaragua, after a fight requiring a great number of casualties the Sandinista movement gained ground, and in July 1979 it established, even if only for a transitional period, the second free country of the Americas. The local oligarchs, the Yankee "advisers" persecuted the liberation warriors by fire and sword; according to the Algerian and Vietnamese prescription they bombed and set fire to the villages, harassed the civilian population, tortured, dismembered and killed the prisoners, and from time to time they set the peoples against each other, stirring up barbarous nationalism in order to divide up the spheres of interests among themselves, or to find an outlet to social tensions. (An example of the latter was the "soccer war" between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969, the real background of which was the banishment of the Salvadorian settlers from Honduras, and the clash of interests between the oligarchs of the two countries.

Thus the liberation wars against global imperialism under US hegemony and its local agencies were going on simultaneously on three continents, assuming many times, though occasionally not without internal contradictions, the most intense forms, as was the case with the Palestinian resistance. It was this revolutionary movement extending to the areas of Asia, Africa and America, sometimes spreading over even to Europe, that is reflected and theoretically elaborated in the writings of Che Guevara, which focused mainly on Latin America, but considering their theoretical essence can still be elevated into a global strategy of revolution and have many points of contact with the thoughts of the Chinese revolutionaries about the same subject.

What are the common features of the countries of Latin America. Historically, the first is the semi-feudal system of large estates, which were not put down in any country by the wars of independence of the nineteenth century. The class of big landowners has formed an alliance with monopolies and the foreign imperialist powers – otherwise it could not survive – and this reactionary class alliance has conserved the landed property relations. The development of society has been distorted: due to underdevelopment there is a dangerous specialization in the production of raw materials. The countries euphemistically called "developing" have in fact, a colonial, semi-colonial, or dependent status, with only one important product and one important market. "One product" – writes Guevara – "the selling of which depends on one market, dictates and determines the conditions – here is the grand formula of imperialist economic domination, which is coupled with the old and yet perennially young Roman slogan of 'divide et impera' [divide and rule]."¹ As a consequence of economic backwardness wages are low, and the rate of unemployment is high and this situation conserves its cause: the backwardness. The slogan of "divide et impera" can successfully be applied just because the social tensions are extremely favorable for inflaming of passions, which are incited by separate interests, and blur the real interests of the people, as we can in particular experience in the case of the mindless nationalism. "Our countries were sometimes the scenes of such wars which were provoked by the monopolies of different nationalities, rivaling for spheres of influence": for example the Chaco war of the first half of the 1930s was the struggle between Shell, representing British and Dutch interests, and the North American Standard Oil. "In this bloody four-years' war Bolivia and Paraguay lost the best of their young people in the Chaco forests." A similar example is the predatory war for a piece of land between Peru and Ecuador, in favor of Standard Oil and Shell respectively, the series of wars stirred up by United Fruit in Central America for the banana-yielding areas, or the war of Chile, supported by the British capitalists, against Bolivia and Peru for the saltpeter beds before the invention of the synthesizing of the nitrates.² It was due to the combined effect of these factors that "the common denominator of the American people came into being from the Rio Bravo [called the Rio Grande in the U.S.] to the South Pole. This common denominator, which we properly write in capital letters, and which provides the basis of analysis for everybody thinking about these social phenomena, is the HUNGER OF THE PEOPLE.³ Hunger, misery, ignorance are everywhere, in Paraguay the epidemics are regular, leprosy is killing the population, in Peru estates are bought and sold together with the indigenous Indian workers living in serfdom, and owing labor obligation to the feudal landlord, and they are advertised in these terms in the newspapers, too. "This is such a miserable situation, which no one can imagine unless previously he has been to one of these zones."⁴ There is hunger, oppression and the ever again rising tide of hate against oppression in these countries – "the objective conditions of the struggle are given."⁵

But what sort of struggle is this that we are talking about? In the first place it is an anti-feudal, anti-imperialist struggle. This struggle – writes Che in the autumn of 1962 – "under the present conditions of Latin America cannot be started by the national bourgeoisie. The experience has shown that this class of our nations, even if its interests are contrary to the interests of Yankee imperialism, is unable to confront imperialism, because it is paralyzed by the fear of social revolution, it is frightened by the noise of the exploited masses." Thus the radical changes are not possible without a state power of socialist character. Can such a state power be established in a peaceful way? "We answer this question bluntly: in the majority of cases it cannot. The most that we can expect to achieve with peaceful means, is the formal grasp of the bourgeois superstructure of power, and the government which accesses to power in a juridical sense, within the framework of the existing bourgeois legality, will have to fight the most intense struggle against all of those who, in one way or another, want to hinder its progress toward a new social structure."⁶

The opinion of Guevara about this question was the same as that of Fidel Castro, who expressed his view in February 1962 thus: "It is neither right nor proper to delude the peoples with that vain and enchanting illusion that from the ruling classes, who entrenched themselves in the most important offices, who held in their hands the monopoly of education and the great information media, who dispose over inexhaustible economic resources – to delude the people that they can – in legal ways, which do not exist, and have never existed – take the power away from these classes, the power which will be defended by the oligarchies and monopolies by fire and sword, with the force of their police and armies." One year later, in one of his speeches Castro declared: "We do not deny the possibility of peaceful transition, though for the time being we are just waiting for the first example of this, and we do not deny it only because we are not dogmatic." The statutory conference of the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS), held in Havana in the summer of 1967, made clear in a resolution: "The main line of the revolution in Latin America is the armed revolutionary struggle. All other forms of struggle have to serve and not to impede the development of the main line, the armed struggle."⁷

The motivation of this declaration was underlined by Che's descriptions of bourgeois parliamentarism and democracy. "We must not permit the word 'democracy,' which in the apologetic use means the dictatorship of the exploiting classes, to lose its conceptual deepness, and to be identified with some beneficial civil rights given to the individual citizen. To fight only for the restoration of some degree of bourgeois legality, without raising the problem of revolutionary power, means to fight for the restoration of the dictatorial order predetermined by the intentions of the ruling classes, it means fighting for a lesser iron ball on the foot-shackles of the galley-slave."⁸ This objective, of course, is by no means a realistic one. "The Yankees will intervene with all their forces, avenge the resisting with their devastating arms, they do not permit the revolutionary power to consolidate itself, they endeavor to divide the revolutionary forces, to strangle the new state by economic means." The only chance is to set the unity of the popular forces against the unity of the oppressive forces. The opportunists, however, object with narrow-minded formulas to this strategy and tactics: "electoral struggles of small importance, some electoral progress here and there, two representatives, one senator, four mayors, a great popular demonstration, which is scattered by shots, an election lost with fewer votes than the earlier one, one victorious strike, and ten defeated ones, one step forward, ten steps back, one victory in one sector, ten defeats in another one. And at a certain moment the rules of the game turn out to be changed, and we must start everything again from the very beginning." "It shows the intelligence of reactionary forces that they have succeeded in making these minimal defensive positions accepted by their class enemy as fundamental objectives." Where such terrific mistakes are made by the revolutionary forces, there the masses of the people year after year go to struggle for conquests which require enormous sacrifices, and are still of no value at all. They are little mounds which are constantly under the enemy's fire. A mound of parliament, a mound of legality, the mound of legal economic strike, the mound of rising wage, the mound of bourgeois constitution, the mound of the setting free a popular hero... And the worst of it is that to achieve these positions we must join the political game of the bourgeois state, and to gain its permission to take part in this dangerous game we need to show that we are good, that we are not dangerous, we will not attack either barracks or trains, we will not destroy the bridges, we do not press either the hounds or the torturers closely, we do not go up to the mountains, we do not utter, with a strong and resolute voice, the one and powerful oath of America: the pledge of fighting to the utmost for its liberation."⁹

What kind of forces will take part in the struggle? "In our countries the underdevelopment of industry is coupled with agrarian relations with a feudal character. For that reason, however barely supportable the conditions of the urban workers may be, the rural class lives under still more horrible conditions of repression and exploitation and, apart from exceptional cases, it constitutes the absolute majority of the Latin-American population, here and there with a rate over 70 percent… this great mass of people lingers as day-laborers in the estates on the most miserable wages, or they cultivate the land under such conditions of exploitation that they cannot but feel envy for the peasants of the medieval era. It is on account of these circumstances that the poor rural population may constitute a great potential revolutionary force in Latin America." But the peasantry is a class which, because of being uneducated and the isolated way of life forced upon it, needs the revolutionary and political guidance of the working class and the revolutionary intelligentsia – without this, they themselves would not be able to go into struggle, and to gain victory".¹⁰ The horizon of the peasant is limited by the land register, "he struggles, because he wants land, for himself and for his sons, to cultivate it, to sell it, to get rich from his own work." But despite his petty-bourgeois nature, he soon understands that he cannot satisfy his land-hunger without breaking down the system of large estates. "The struggle of the Latin-American peasantry against feudal structures is getting more and more explosive," and joins the struggle of the workers, who "support the demands set against the large estates." "So the course of the revolution unites the workers and the peasants." "The great thinkers of the working class discovered the laws of society, it is on the basis of the ideology of this class that the peasant class of America is to field the great liberating armies of the future, as it did in Cuba."11

"America is a volcano today;" – wrote Che Guevara in 1962 – "in many of its countries the revolution is unavoidable," and this is an objective fact, "it does not depend on anybody's will."12 But the just as necessary subjective factors of the revolution are an open issue. According to Guevara there are two subjective factors which are of first importance which complement and deepen each other in the course of the struggle: the awareness of the necessity of change, and the certainty that the change is possible."13 A living example of this certainty is the Cuban revolution which, being a Latin-American country, as it is, can by no means be considered as an exception, for the social conditions of pre-revolutionary Cuba were essentially those of any other country of Latin America.14

Guevara summarizes the most important historical lessons of the Cuban revolution for the revolutionary movements of Latin America in three points: "1. The popular forces can win the war against the regular army. 2. In many cases it may not be necessary to wait for the full ripening of all the conditions of the revolution, the center of the rebels can create these. 3. In backward America the potential area of the armed struggle is mainly the countryside." Of these three theses the first two are directed against a quietist attitude of revolutionaries and pseudo-revolutionaries, who always try to justify themselves and their passivity with the excuse that there is no chance against the regular army, and they simultaneously attack those as well who wait idly for a mechanical rise of all the necessary objective and subjective conditions without promoting in any way their process of maturation… Speaking about the conditions of the revolution, we cannot expect, of course, the revolutionary center to be able to create all of them with one impulse. We have to be aware in each case that without a minimal degree of ripeness of the conditions the first revolutionary center cannot be established and consolidated."

"Where the government, even if only through fraud, has came to power by some sort of popular support and holds at least the appearance of constitutional legality, we cannot form the germs of the guerrilla movement until all the possibilities of legal struggle have exhausted themselves." Reality must give proof to the people that it is impossible to assert the social demands within the framework of legal struggle.

Two Strategies by Ervin Rozsnyai will be continued in the next issue of NSC, with references from the writings of Che Guevara.

Footnotes will be included with the complete article.

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