I went on reddit for some reason recently and got into an argument with a Maoist. I soon revealed I had not done sufficient investigation and was mostly just curious for them to justify their differences in ideology. I repeated a trite talking point that “PPW is not universal” that I have heard many times and listed the vague arguments against its universality which I had heard. I was recommended this book amongst other things.
I read it in its entirety. It’s a theoretical debate for 2019. It opens with a Filipino communist arguing against universality, and that section left me confused. Then a Nordic guy rebuts him and had me thinking Gonzalo may have been right. Another guy comes at him with all the arguments I have heard before, sounding condescending, but rightfully so. I was pretty much convinced but wanted to keep an open mind to why the Maoists liked this. Then a new theory group finishes out with a strong sounding argument for the PCP position.
This question requires further investigation for me to develop an “all sided” perspective, and I can’t vouch for Gonzalo, but I don’t have reason to trust Bad Empanada or any rando on the internet. I must go through more source material when my ADHD compels me.
What I have taken away from the reading is the Protracted People’s War can and should probably be applied in varied situations. It is essentially years of guerrilla warfare against the capitalist state until victory is won over the exploiters. There is no other kind of successful revolution. Our strategy in the west is shit – trying to slowly protest and accumulate support. You cannot win war without practice, and no revolution happens overnight. We will not be ready if a revolutionary situation were to happen tomorrow. The Bolsheviks illegally fought their ruling class for years. European parties were most successful when forced to militarize by fascism, but stupidly disarmed.
PPW does not mean surrounded the cities by the country side. PPW is the universal Marxist element (in the works of Mao), but particularities of every situation must be studied. The IRA fought the British using urban warfare and were relatively successful before right opportunism led to compromise. More advanced theory could help a new BLA or Weathermen be successful in the US. Our ruling class is going and fascist militias are ramping up violence no matter what and we need a more systematic approach than little SRA chapters or whatever.
No, I’m not going to call myself a Maoist or whatever. There are shitty Maoists and Gonzalo did bad stuff, but the same is true of every leftist group. What matters is what works in practice, and legalist accumulationism is not working. We need to maintain ruthless criticism of all that exists and do investigations instead of resorting to dogma. Everyone has a different perspective, and we all need to realize we won’t convince everyone, so we should keep criticizing and refining. We should not seek “leftist unity” for the sake of tailing the least common denominator. We should seek the best methods (using Marxist analysis) and get people to join us in what works. No, I don’t understand all this or have all the answers, but I recommend people check out the essays. Criticize them too, as a matter of fact.
This is not a question of ideology, rather a question of strategy. Protracted People’s War is a tool that revolutionaries can and should employ when the circumstances for it are right. It’s not that it only works in some countries and not others, but that some countries are not yet at the point where this is going to be a successful strategy to employ right now. That time will come when the state and society have sufficiently decayed to the point of imminent civil conflict and when the bourgeois state openly begins to wage war on the people. Which is not a matter of if but merely when.
The key is being able to analyze the present social and material conditions correctly such that you don’t end up committing adventurist mistakes assuming that the revolutionary situation is more advanced than it actually is as that can lead to failure.
Protracted People’s War should also not be conflated with “Maoism” (which is not Mao Zedong Thought) as that comes with a lot of ideological ultra-left baggage. MLs should take what is useful from Maoist theory and practice, and discard what is not.
I agree to an extent, but the Maoists address this exact point. I advise you read it. If we do not practice war we will not be ready when the shit hits the fan. Revolutionary situations are inevitable and obviously we won’t be ready to wage war tomorrow, but we should start ASAP.
PPW is as essential to Marxist “ideology” (ie the flexible doctrine that shows what is ideal for attaining socialism) as a theory of how revolutions work as Democratic Centralism is necessary for the best party structure.
Avoiding revisionist mistakes is all about studying the material conditions to see what is the best course of action in any given moment. MLs and MLMs alike are capable of this, and are also very capable of being dogmatic.
If we do not practice war we will not be ready when the shit hits the fan.
War is not something any organisation can simply practice. At best, you might make training simulations. On the other hand, as you as you actually get involved in a real war, you will suffer casualties and have a high chance of being annihilated (if you launch the war under the wrong conditions).
Read the collection. Yeah, don’t be stupid. Study your conditions. But orgs like PSL will NOT be ready when war breaks out if they don’t have disciplined underground cadres with skills with guns and guerrilla warfare. Don’t be an anarchist just assassinating random politicians. If you study local particularities you’ll probably find that destroying arms manufacturing for example is a good thing you can start doing sooner than later. Read Mao, don’t just decide you want to do violence.
If you study local particularities you’ll probably find that destroying arms manufacturing for example is a good thing you can start doing sooner than later.
Sabotaging arms manufacturing is a great thing, but it is not practice for geurella warfare.
It’s practice in secrecy and illegal work. I know it’s not guerrilla warfare, but “ML” parties seem to just do silly legal things. Prepare for revolution. Read the book.
You’re completely right. And i fully agree that we should make every effort we can to be prepared for the inevitable, which is why we absolutely should be studying and learning from the struggle of the resistance forces in and around Palestine, because once things get serious our state will eventually employ the same methods against revolutionaries as the Zionists are using against the resistance.
I’d be curious how their position compares to Che’s (which, in spite of my username, I’m no expert in). My understanding is that, after witnessing the success of the Cuban revolution, he thought similar tactics would be widely applicable elsewhere.
The method was essentially:
- Start a small scale guerrilla war
- Earn support and recruits from nearby
- Use this to expand the war
Unfortunately, history showed things were not so easy. Che’s efforts failed in Congo, and led to his death in Bolivia.
(FWIW, I’m drawing this from my memory of Anderson’s Che Guevara.)
Sadly, using the example of Latin America, fascists have perfected the counter insurgency tactics against guerrilla warfare with the aid of the USA which is the main country funding fascists dictators and/or bloody counter insurgency. From my standpoint, guerrilla tactics will only work where the US imperialism is the weakest(ex the Sahel).
An important, perhaps the most important, aspect of guerrilla warfare is the destruction and disruption of the enemies supplies and industrial base. Its hard to wage a war when your weapons factories are being blown up. The US became the manufacturing base for fascist regimes at war with their people and so it was impossible for those people to actually disrupt the industry of their enemy. The best you could do is try to intercept shipments, and disrupt freight but that only goes so far.
When there is no longer a massive outside power providing endless supplies things should start to tilt in the favor of guerrillas again.
And that’s why sooner than later we imperial core residents should start blowing up arms factories and stealing guns.
To defeat a global empire the revolution must be global. As long as the working class in the imperial core is complicit in the oppression of our comrades elsewhere it will be very hard to defeat the empire of the west. The best strategy sans western working class comrades joining the fight is to simply bunker up and try to wait it out. Which is what you see many AES nations doing to varying degrees.
? Trying to wait it out? Sure China’s interests may be chilling while the west declines, but we are in a decent position to sabotage things from the heart of the beast. Yeah, we won’t convince all the petty bourgeois jerks and fools but we can organize national minorities and anti-imperialist solidarity. China won’t save us. We need to save us.
i think you misread what i posted. I never said people in the west should wait it out. I said AES states have to. They are basically in survival mode. China also isnt the best example since its so powerful itself and is a better position. Other smaller nations like DPRK, Cuba, etc really have no choice but to just try and hunker down and survive for now.
Of course, I agree.
Exactly this! If fascists have a strong support from the imperialist through extensive weapon manufacturing, they can outlast any guerrilla in the region unless the guerrilla have a strong backing from another power such as the case of the DPRK during the Korean war where Mao’s son died or invasion of Vietnam.
If we take the conditions now, there are very few regions where the guerrilla can defeat the local capitalists. However, that is not the case for plenty of regions of this world(ex latin america).
It’s weakening everywhere. Mao says that the early stage of the guerrilla war is when help is most important to both sides to be helped by outside aid. At a certain point if either side is strong enough they will probably win. Plenty of guerrilla movements have lasted a long time in spite of powerful state suppression: another point made in the piece.
Will that due respect, (at least in Latin America) it is not weakened enough to allow guerrilla warfare. As evidence of this, you can see the strategies of the SOUTHCOM in the region and how countries like Perú(with Dina Boluarte, which is a product of a coup), Ecuador(with the american citizen Daniel Noboa that is pushing to bring US troops into the country again), Argentina(Javier Milei) and Chile are constantly using the drug war as an excuse to oppress indigenous people with the aid of US dollars. Peru recently even bought new F-16 aircraft from the USA.
Once again, guerrilla warfare is not a good choice if the region’s local capitalists are still experiencing a strong imperialist backing. If we use Mao as an example, he even made the choice to fight alongside the Kuomintang to repel the strong japanese imperialists that were storming the region. That’s why it is important to analyze the principal contradiction and how to successfully resolve it with a pragmatic point of view.
Of course you want to be pragmatic. If conditions are too bad to even start waging war you may do other things while imperialist power worsens. Still it is necessary, if difficult. I still need to research the PCP but they faced a significant amount of repression and were relatively successful before ultimately losing. The Peruvian government sterilized thousands of indigenous women with the explicit intent to prevent people who would become guerrillas from being born.
Yes, the Mao informed position is that nationalist alliances against imperialism may be practically necessary.
Idk, but here’s an interesting passage:
If that’s true then the Gonzalites might have something on Che.
I noticed that’s from the NYT, so I’d take that with a barrel of salt. They have every reason to misdirect us towards methodologies that don’t actually threaten imperialism.
Have you seen Prolewiki’s translation of The CIA’s Shining Path? https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_CIA’s_Shining_Path:_Political_Warfare#INTRODUCTION
(This isn’t to say there’s absolutely nothing to learn from their organization or perhaps specific tactics. But we need to be very careful about doing so, making sure we don’t attribute “bloodshed” a mystical revolutionary power. The history of failed revolutions should thoroughly undermine any such conception.)
This fanatical violence is not the historical violence seen in Tupac Amaru and hundreds of rebel leaders against Spanish colonialism. It is not of the same nature as the violence that confronted opposing interests in the independence war of the last century. Nor is it the violence of a homeland’s resistance war against invaders, much less the violence of a modern national liberation war, anti-imperialist and popular opposition to foreign domination. The violence exercised by Shining Path is not, therefore, a genuine expression of the deep internal contradictions of Peruvian society.
We discover, then, that it is an exogenous violence that seeks to insert itself into these contradictions, not to achieve a dialectical solution releasing internal productive and creative forces, but to stimulate destructive social forces to the maximum through the concrete execution of “strategically highly centralized and tactically decentralized plans.”
Until now, the insane violence of Shining Path has been characterized particularly by a very specific execution methodology, which it has been applying in Peru since 1980, when irregular combatant teams assumed the mission of “disrupting the productive process” of this “feudal society” and “bureaucratic capitalism.”
The thing with sources like the NYT is that it makes sense to trust what they admit which would be against their interests. They want the US to be able to look unstoppable and crush such movements with a stroke of a finger, but if that’s not the case they’d want to fear monger and tell people what is threatening their power. If congress had to meet to figure out what to do about the situation that lends credence to the claim that the revolutionary forces were on par with the imperialists.
That said, I have more research to do and am kind of playing devil’s advocate. I already intend to read that work and more that opposes it.
I would be open to hearing about what “success” was for them. Was it that they managed to take over territory especially quickly? Or did they also succeed in building up anything that actually threatened imperialist interests?
In other words, what makes them different from “marxist” purveyors of violence like the Khmer Rouge?
Quoting again from The CIA’s Shining Path:
Carlos Iván De Gregory’s studies (2) published between 1985 and 1987, are a thorough and substantive investigation of the geo-economic environment and socio-political opportunities for the Shining Path’s growth. He candidly denounces the “errors and limitations” of the Shining Path’s “people’s war” and considers the organization as a “pre-classist response” to the “destructive advance of capitalism”, similar to the Guardians of Islam and the Khmer Rouge.
Idk but I was given this: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16bue8TQo-knWAKlkpuNBnePOs7j7KDh11aDoNa_dPO0/edit
That document is an unorganized mess of quotes. But one thing I got from a quick skim was a claim that they provided security patrols to new slums. This apparently earned them the support of the residents, who were otherwise vulnerable to both criminals and the state. Putting aside the question of whether these claims are true or not, tactically it would certainly make sense and be a good means to build up support.
I echo what @cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml wrote and would like to add some of my own thoughts as well.
I checked the book you linked out and was surprised by Sison’s argument, in that he said:
the term “people’s war” may be flexibly used to mean the necessary armed revolution by the people to overthrow the bourgeois state in an industrial capitalist country. But definitely, what ought to be protracted is the preparation for the armed revolution with the overwhelming participation of the people.
I find this interesting and will need to check more of him out. I can’t read the entire book right now but looked through a bit of the initial arguments (Sison - Kinera - Belissario).
Sison’s argument in this portion is basically that PPW starts at the point where organization for it is made. In this way any revolutionary act is an act of PPW. That’s usually different from what most Maoists seem to think of when they say PPW and that’s why I found it interesting.
Kinera seems to confirm my initial thoughts as he basically says that PPW is when you take up weapons. To illustrate that he points to various imperial core groups:
The Red Brigades of Italy was active from 1970 up to 1988. The Red Army Faction of Germany was active from 1970 up to 1998. Japanese Red Army was active from 1971 to 2001. The Weather Underground was active in the US from 1969 to 1977. The Black Liberation Army was active in the US from 1970 to 1981.
That all failed. They all got killed or captured. The previous sentence right before he lists them is “It is simply not true that an armed group must be overwhelmed by “the huge army” (!) as soon as it acts.”
But what does it matter that the huge army becomes overwhelming 20 years later rather than 6 months later? The point of fighting is to succeed.
That’s about all I can say about the book at this time anyway before I read it fully. But it leaves me at an impasse. It just leaves the taste in my mouth that Maoists want you to pick up a weapon and die to the bourgeoisie for martyrdom at your earliest convenience.
Palestine is waging PPW. Vietnam waged PPW. The Incas waged PPW. Revolutionary war doesn’t have to be communist, certainly. But the impasse it leaves me at is that by making it universal, then it’s not PPW, it’s just war, and the word has no reason to exist and be debated as if it’s something unique or different. I think Belissario talks about this in the third article:
Take note that in his two articles, Kinera sometimes uses the term “protracted people’s war” and at other times simply “people’s war”. But it’s clear, especially when he argues vs. Sison, that he treats the two as interchangeable terms in the context of the theory’s “universality.” This is a crucial weakness in Kinera’s arguments, since the protracted character of the people’s wars that liberated China and Vietnam has a precise socio-economic context and political-military meaning for agrarian or semifeudal countries that are oppressed by imperialism as colonies or semi-colonies. It is not merely expressed in numbers of years that armed revolutions in industrial countries could quantitatively measure up to.
It starts at a semantic distinction but it does lead to establishing differences. If PPW is not simple people’s war, then it has material differences that warrant it being called protracted people’s war specifically. And the universality of these conditions that make it specifically PPW is what must be debated. In that way I don’t think Sison is making a particulary Maoist argument, and this struck me as soon as I read him; he’s basically saying “as soon as you prepare for revolution then you are waging revolution” and being revolutionary is not something Maoism owns, even if western Maoists like Kinera seem to think so.
So even in saying that Palestine, China and Vietnam waged PPW I don’t feel entirely confident. They waged war mainly against foreign occupiers for national liberation, not against their own bourgeoisie. And yes I know the history of the CPChina, I wrote about it too.
Interested to read at least the first three papers in the book though. Maybe it answers my question above.
Also, you might be interested in this book if you’re delving into the topic of Maoism: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_CIA’s_Shining_Path:_Political_Warfare
I found the rebuttals to those points most compelling, I suggest you read on.
PPW is not simply guerrilla war, but Mao’s relevant theory helps it be successful.
I was looking for that book before. I will have to read it as well as oppositional material to develop an all sided view.
I live in the UK. It’s effectively an island of Karens. Anyone causing trouble or causing a fuss would be considered an enemy no matter how fascist the government is getting. As long as the state maintains decorum and the King is on the throne telling everyone to behave, a massive chunk of the British proletariat aren’t gonna do shit and will rat out any people’s army.
It’s also a country with very few places for guerrillas to hide. There’s no hills and mountains to the extent somewhere like Italy has. No vast countryside with lots of forests and jungles. Apart from the Scottish Highlands it’s not practical terrain for it. It’s very urbanised and there’s cameras everywhere. Maybe we could operate out of one of the more rundown cities idk. Or it would have to be some super elaborate thing with thousands of sleeper agents spread all over the country.
Best we can probably hope for is economic crisis leading to balkanisation leading to the formation of at least one long term commune, council communist situation or socialist state forming. Short of that, some other, more radically inclined nation on the mainland having a revolution and invading and forcing in a communist government from above like the USSR did to eastern europe.
The UK’s pretty economically screwed. I wouldn’t discount its ability to get bad enough for something to have to give soon.
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“Maoists” are the only ones advocating it properly. I’m not convinced that Gonzalo was all bad, and even these guys know RCP/CRCPUSA, etc were bad and study why they failed. Like I said, labels are silly and Gonzalites can be dorks, but I’ve seen many more poor “Marxist leninists.” What matters is that we stick to criticism and Marxist analysis and any faction can fall into dogmatism. The text jabs too at “Mao Zedong Thought” followers who still fall prey to revisionism.
passages worth screenshotting
