Guerrilla war in Iraq (2003)

From the December 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

During a recent visit to Baghdad, US hawk Paul Wolfowitz, the brains behind the US invasion of Iraq, told a press conference that the “main problem was that there were too many foreigners in Iraq”. For many in Iraq there are indeed “too many foreigners”. Over 134,000 of them are wearing US combat uniforms and their casualty rate is growing in the world’s newest guerrilla war.

The US is keen to put down the idea that this is in fact a guerrilla war, that there is real resistance to the US occupation. However, according to Iraqi sources there are some 40 plus organisations resisting US occupation, from Baathists and “Communists” to out-and-out nationalists and religious factions. Moreover it is not the work of Islamic jihadists crossing the borders of Syria and Iran in the name of Allah, but appears to be largely indigenous, comes from all levels and sections of society and is very much de-centralised – and this, military experts tell us, is the first stage of a guerrilla war

One military intelligence spokesman in Iraq has suggested there are 50,000 insurgents in Iraq. Another Washington military analyst, having received a copy of the recent internal CIA document ‘Appraisal of the Situation’, described it as a “bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger.” The report, he claims, suggests “we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course. There are thousands in the resistance – not just a core of Baathists. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that.” (Guardian, 13 November).

In early November, guerrilla forces brought down a Chinook helicopter, killing sixteen soldiers and two weeks before that successfully destroyed two M1 Abram tanks. On 12 November a suicide bombing of a military base in Nasariya left 25 dead, including 18 Italian troops. Classic ingredients of your run–of-the-mill guerrilla war.

Oil pipelines are beings sabotaged almost on a daily basis and it is becoming a full time job for the authorities in Baghdad to massage the statistics and hide the reality of the oil pipeline attacks from the outside world. Apparently it is only when a camera crew actually captures such sabotage on film that it is reported.

Robert Fisk, commented in the Independent on 7 October on the serious concerns the US has for dwindling revenues from oil flowing north, said:

“The cost of making it flow could produce an economic crisis in the US. And it is this – rather than the daily killing of young American soldiers – that lies behind the Bush administration’s growing panic. Washington has got its hands on the biggest treasure chest in the world – but it can’t open the lid. No wonder they are cooking the books in Baghdad”.

The Bush administration promised this would be a quick war and that Iraqis would be dancing in the streets celebrating their liberation. In truth, there have been far more US troops killed since the since the war “officially” ended than were killed during the combat phase itself, and those Iraqis dancing in the streets do so around smouldering US helicopters and tanks.

In recent weeks there has been a move in the US to focus attention away from the Iraqi quagmire and onto domestic affairs – whilst the latter is also a dire cause for concern, it is less a disaster than the operation to “liberate” Iraq.

Chief US civilian administrator, Paul Bremer, who heads the Coalition Provisional Authority, remarked at the beginning of November, rather pathetically it would seem, that life in Baghdad is back to normal. By all accounts life under US occupation is is at least as bad as under Saddam. There is little, if any, tangible reconstruction and mass unemployment except for the re-recruitment of Iraq’s previous Baathist security forces to help maintain law and order. According to the Ministry of Labour out of a population of 25 million, 12 million are now looking for work.

There were initially plans to bring in Indian and Pakistani troops to help police Iraq and speed up the “liberation” process, but those countries then expressed doubts and declined. Turkish troops were proposed, but the Turkish government, faced with domestic resistance to the idea, also demurred. Poland may send troops, but it is to be bore in mind that opinion polls (no pun intended) show there is much opposition to the idea. Even Italy may even reconsider its position now in light of the recent attack upon its own forces.

A present Washington strategy for the malaise is “Iraqification” (after Vietnamisation), or in other words the training of 170,000 Iraqi soldiers, police and border guards and dropping the sorry mess in their laps. But even this has its problems as such forces have already been attacked as “collaborators” and there is a tendency for guerrillas to recruit from within such security forces, making them extremely vulnerable. Furthermore, would Iraqi soldiers shoot, or detain their fellow Iraqis on behalf of US capitalism plc?

Of course invading armies have met such resistance throughout history – whether it be the British, French or Americans. The attacks upon US troops in Fallujah in recent weeks are no different to those suffered by the French at the hands of Algerian guerrillas and the US conscripts in the jungles of Korea and Vietnam. The US response at the moment is to retaliate with heavy air strikes and armoured assaults on suspected guerrilla targets, a move that some fear will only heighten support for the insurgency and further destabilise the region.

If anything, these past seven months since Bush announced his victory in Iraq have revealed that oil is not priced in US dollars, but in human blood. It casts its shadow of death indiscriminately, sparing none – women and children, UN worker and Red Cross worker, Iraqi policeman or US soldier alike. Washington believed the US take-over of Iraq would be easy and that the petro-profits would soon be flowing stateside. What they did not count on was having to fight a drawn out guerrilla war to secure Iraq’s black gold.

John Bissett

Death (in prison) of a guerrilla (2021)

From the November 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

In September the ex-Maoist guerrilla leader Abimael Guzman died in a prison in Peru where he had been for nearly thirty years. He has been portrayed by the Peruvian and world press as one of the most criminal and brutal ‘Marxist’ leaders in the world, blamed for the death of more than 80,000 people and the destruction of private and government property

He was the founder of ‘Gonzalo Thought’ (after ‘Mao Zedong Thought’) and he created his own cult of personality, seeing himself as one of the ‘four swords’ of Marxism, after Marx, Lenin and Mao. He travelled to China in 1966 and 1967 during the Cultural Revolution and was part of a split from the Communist Party of Peru (Red Flag). Mao’s Little Red Book became his Bible. When he returned to Peru, he formed a guerrilla group called Shining Path with some of his professors and young students who came from peasant families,

The name Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) was taken from José Carlos Mariategui, a Peruvian Marxist-Leninist who had founded Peru’s first Communist Party in 1928 and who advocated a peasant/indigenous people’s ‘socialism’. His maxim was: ‘El Marxismo-Leninismo abrirá el sendero luminoso hacia la revolución’ (‘Marxism-Leninism will open the shining path to revolution’). Many political movements were inspired by his writings including the Tupamaros in Uruguay and Evo Morales’ indigenous peoples’ movement in Bolivia. Three ex-leaders of these guerrilla movements later became presidents in Latin Americas and allies of the ruling class and the corporations.

Was Guzman really a communist? Was he a Marxist? Were Mao and Lenin genuine Marxists and socialists? Are Leninism and Maoism valid socialist/communist currents? Can the crimes that were committed by Guzman and Shining Path be blamed on Marxism and socialism?

The Socialist Party and the World Socialist Movement have said for decades that Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism have never been Marxist or socialist conceptions; that, instead, they were representative of an economical current described by Engels as State Capitalism; that the concept of a violent uprising was a tactic created by Lenin and the Bolsheviks to overthrow the government of Russia, an idea borrowed from the French Blanquists. It was not a Marxist conception. Shining Path’s first action was to attack a polling station and burn it down, in defiance of Marx’s insistence on the political education of the working class, the revolutionary use of the ballot, and universal suffrage among the working class.

In Latin America Maoism was a complete failure from the first, having been adopted by several organisations that had abandoned Castroism. It sacrificed the lives of many young people who became members of the urban guerrillas and infiltrated themselves into workers’ unions, or went to the mountains or jungles of several countries in Latin America and were assassinated by the police or the armed forces, along with many peasants and members of the workers’ unions, university teachers, and young professionals.

Maoism’s failure in Latin America is a clear indication that a minority group of individuals will not liberate the working class and humanity. It suggests that Marx was correct when he wrote that only the working class can liberate itself. Maoism was a tactic, earlier criticised by Engels, of a conscious minority acting in the name of an unconscious majority. But socialism cannot be established without a class-conscious working class

Mao Zedong Thought attracted many young people in different countries in Latin America including the Caribbean islands as an ideological replacement for Castroism, but in essence it was the same adventurist programme advocated by Regis Debray who had been in Bolivia with Che Guevara. The main attraction was the concept of ‘anti-revisionism’ started by China and Albania against the ‘Khruschevites’. It claimed to be a restoration of true socialism and true Marxism, but it was just a variety of Leninism and Stalinism. Maoism was Chinese nationalism, just as Castroism was Latin American nationalism.

Latin American Maoism was basically a nationalist/patriotic movement, and all the so-called Communist parties that were created were nationalist parties of the countries where they were formed. None of them had a socialist programme; their programme was for reforms, statism and the nationalisation of natural resources.

It was mainly a movement among young people and university students. It never had any support among the industrial working class. Although many Marxist-Leninist parties sent their best cadres to work with the peasants, it never became a peasants’ movement; it was capitalist governments that provided the peasants with what they wanted – land reform, agricultural equipment and supplies. They confronted a force which was stronger than them, the forces of the capitalist state, and suffered the consequences.

When China openly opted for state-run capitalism and collaboration with Western powers and Western corporations, all these organisations collapsed and disbanded themselves. Some of their leaders were killed or deported; others later became government ministers. The USA wanted them to leave and provided visas for them to emigrate, but they were no threat to capital and to capitalist society; they were anti-imperialists, but they were not anti-capitalists.

The new government of Peru refused to bury Abimael Guzman’s body, citing so-called national security. So his body was cremated and the ashes scattered at a secret location. Maoism and Shining Path are no longer popular within any section of Peruvian society nor a threat to security. At first they had some support within the peasant class, but then the peasants were caught in the cross-fire between the Maoist guerrilla fighters and the government’s armed forces and many were killed. Maoism is a dead movement in Peru today. Most of the members of Guzman’s group became part of some gang or drug trafficking.

Many of the deaths blamed on Shining Path and Guzman were not committed by them. The police, the paramilitary and the armed forces should be blamed for most of the killings, like most of the killing committed in Colombia in the fight with the Maoist/Castroist guerrillas known as the FARC – another group which is not socialist or Marxist, as the media alleged. Being connected to and armed by Cuba does not make a group socialist. Nor were the Tupamaros in Uruguay a socialist or Marxist movement (one of their ex-leaders later became president) but were more like a Robin Hood movement, taking money from the rich to give to the poor.

Maoism in Latin America showed its terrorist and anti-working-class nature, and was a total negation of the revolutionary nature of Marxism and socialism. It was only the capitalist press and the anti-communists who labelled Guzman and those like him ‘Marxist’, just as they did with FARC.

Maoism could not have been applied in developed capitalist countries like the USA, Britain, or Germany. It was basically a theory for a peasants’ movement, similar to the Russian anti-Tsarist Narodniks who, similarly, had no support among the peasants and ended up using terrorist tactics. It could only be applied in Third World countries, but even so was a complete failure in all the economically backward countries where it attempted to take control of the nation and the state apparatus. It turned out not to be a shining path to anywhere.

Marcos

Rear View: Oh No, Not Again! (2019)

The Rear View Column from the October 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Oh No, Not Again!

‘’Colombia was on edge on Thursday as the top peace negotiator for the country’s Marxist guerrillas announced that he was resuming armed conflict, promising to re-start the Western hemisphere’s longest-running civil war three years after a peace deal was signed’ (telegraph.co.uk, 29 August). Socialists welcomed the end of the five-decade-long war, which killed more than 220,000 and displaced millions, as well as the mendacious mass media calling FARC Marxist. But, bringing an end to one such conflict in a capitalist world where war and misinformation are endemic is like a murderous game of Whack-A-Mole. ‘Farc was formed in 1964 as a Che Guevara-inspired Marxist group claiming peasant land rights’ (op. cit.). FARC declare themselves to be Bolivarian and call for ‘Colombia for Colombians, with equality of opportunities and equitable distribution of wealth and where among us all we can build peace with social equality and sovereignty’, rather than for Marx’s call for workers of all lands to unite for the overthrow of all existing social conditions. Marx during his lifetime was implacably opposed to political terrorism. Marxist socialists oppose terrorism, individual, group or state, guerrilla ‘armies’ and so-called national liberation struggles. Instead we organise for and propagate worldwide common ownership, democratic administration, control of the land, means of production and transportation and the abolition of the wages system.


Fighting the wrong war

‘Of course, there are other reasons why the West cannot get any of its adversaries to kneel. One is – that the toughest ones are left. Russia, Cuba, China, North Korea (DPRK), Iran, Syria and Venezuela are not going to run away from the battlefield’ (Suddenly, Western “Regime” Changes Keep Failing, off-guardian.org, 28 August). Andre Vltchek’s and others of his ilk continuing support for one group of capitalist countries is no doubt of great comfort to the imprisoned trade unionists in Iran, for example. Sadly it comes too late for the many thousands who have already been executed, including minors, under a theocratic dictatorship where those convicted of adultery, alcohol consumption, blasphemy, burglary, homosexuality, pornography and prostitution, along with, of course, political dissidence, as well as many other ‘crimes’, can pay the ultimate price. We must not forget the state sanctioned use of juveniles as troops during the mass slaughter that was the Iran-Iraq war or oppression of women. Add chronic corruption plus obvious class division and we can say the 99 percent certainly did not vote for this. No war but the class war!


In Space as on Earth

‘Donald Trump: New Space Command will “ensure US dominance” of final frontier. Space has become a focus for the Trump administration due to concerns over the vulnerability of US satellites to China and Russia’ (news.sky.com, 30 August). Long before the first aeroplane flew or mining the Moon’s riches left the realm of science fiction, British politician Joseph Chamberlain made this candid comment with regard to war and its economic causes: ‘All the great offices of State are occupied with commercial affairs. The Foreign Office and the Colonial Office are chiefly engaged in finding new markets and in defending old ones. The War Office and the Admiralty are mostly occupied in preparations for the defence of these markets and for the protection of our commerce’ (from a speech to the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce in 1890). Time and time again evidence has demonstrated that war stems from capitalist struggles for markets, trade routes, sources of raw materials, and places of strategic importance.


Ferengi-free future

If we want a future that is more Star Trek than Star Wars, we must first replace capitalism with socialism and bring about a world where war, wages and want have been eradicated. Given this it is somewhat surprising to find a Financial Times journalist describing Star Trek: The Next Generation as ‘. . . optimistic, moving and wise’ (ft.com, 28 August). Whether or not you prefer the post-capitalist society of Trek or Iain Banks’ Culture over the bucolic, craft-industry-based utopia of William Morris’ News from Nowhere (1890), our first concern should be the making of socialists. Morris put it well: ‘one man with an idea in his head is in danger of being considered a madman; two men with the same idea in common may be foolish, but can hardly be mad; ten men sharing an idea begin to act, a hundred draw attention as fanatics, a thousand and society begins to tremble, a hundred thousand and there is war abroad, and the cause has victories tangible and real; and why only a hundred thousand?’ (Art Under Plutocracy, 1883).

Castro, Guevara and Revolution (1968)

From the October 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his study of the guerilla campaign in Cuba Régis Debray assessed its relevance for other theatres of activity, especially elsewhere in Latin America. What he emphasised was the impotence of the left-wing ideologues who argue that every national liberation struggle must conform to the Bolshevik tradition. How, he asked, can you impose a network of party cells and trade unions on a peasant economy or Indian community which dates back to Mayan or Incan times? Even the methods adopted by the Chinese and Vietnamese are of limited value in the South American context, suggested Debray. Thus, while Mao and Giap—the ’classical' exponents of guerilla warfare—are committed to 'democratic centralism'. [1] Castro's conclusions are quite different:

Who will make the revolution in Latin America? Who? The people, the revolutionaries, with or without a party.

Debray's thesis was that it is the guerillas who are the vital factor, who play the vanguard role. “The guerilla force is the party in embryo’’ and, more than that, it alone can guarantee the construction of a socialist system.

(In Cuba) the advance towards socialism was undertaken as quickly as it was after taking power because Fidel from the first day demanded, won and defended hegemony for the rural guerillas.

It was all this that led Régis Debray to choose his iconoclastic title—Revolution in the Revolution? For him, men like Castro and Che Guevara were revolutionary innovators, leaders who had devised a whole range of new techniques for advancing to socialism. Certainly, for anyone accustomed to thinking in Bolshevik patterns, this might be a reasonable conclusion to draw—but it is one which socialists do not accept.

The guerilla war in Cuba was launched towards the end of 1956 when Fidel Castro and his tiny army of 82 disembarked from the yacht ‘Granma’. They were immediately spotted and attacked by Batista’s forces, with the result that only twenty men got through to the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. [2] Then began the long process of building themselves up, of gradually extending their operations to the lowlands and finally of taking power at the end of 1958. What has been generally overlooked is that, far from representing a novel approach to socialist revolution, the guerilla campaign was fought in the classical style of Latin American insurrections. In Cuba itself the numerous unsuccessful uprisings against Spanish rule in the nineteenth century invariably started with a group of exiles on the American mainland plotting to liberate the island. Having collected arms and supporters they would cross to Cuba's eastern coast (the region farthest from Havana — Castro landed at Belie) and then take to the Sierra Maestra, which they would use as a base for their forays. It was in the last of these rebellions that José Martí, Cuba's national hero, was killed in 1895.

But, far more than the poet Martí, the man who really inspired the fight against the colonial powers in South America in the nineteenth century was Simon Bolivar. In many ways he epitomised everything that distinguishes the bourgeois revolutionary. He was outraged by the ignorance and poverty which he saw throughout the continent and identified this with Spanish oppression. In its place he hoped to establish independent republics which would be based on universal ideals of justice and liberty. As a member of the educated, land-owning class he looked to this minority to play the vanguard role in the rebellions. Known as the Liberator, he was idolised as the romantic man of action (Byron is said to have named his boat 'Bolivar' and to have considered emigrating to Venezuela). The similarities between Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and their nineteenth century forerunners are thus painfully obvious. Both Castro and Guevara came from land-owning families and, being isolated from the peasants and workers, both thought in terms of 'going to the people’ and emancipating them. Certainly this is why they have become heroes. Professor Gerassi, of the San Francisco State University, has written about Guevara:

  . . .  he was an idealist, a man who lived . . .  for other people, for people he had never met, for the poor, for the exploited, for the alienated, for those who feel, perhaps only instinctively, that they are merely tools in their society, tools of greedy and powerful men who do not really care about human beings.

But Cuba's apologists have more sophisticated arguments than those of Gerassi. Many of Castro’s defenders will concede that he started out with the mental equipment of a “middle-class reformer”, but then go on to suggest that objective conditions have forced him to take the first steps towards establishing a socialist system in Cuba. They maintain that, while Bolivar had no reason to go beyond the limits of his reformist ideas, Castro was brought into conflict with American imperialism and therefore by “basing himself on the workers and peasants, he was forced to carry through the expropriation of Cuban and foreign capital". In the same way, the fact that the guerilla bands in the Sierra Maestra had no understanding of Socialism and, come to that, not even a programme of state capitalism is dismissed by Régis Debray with the bland comment that any persons who raise such objections “are not yet liberated from the old obsession; they believe that revolutionary awareness and organisation must and can in every case precede revolutionary action." Socialism, he suggests, was being built in Cuba long before it was consciously recognised and long before the leaders formally adopted the term.

What lies behind these various lines of thinking is that in 1959, with Castro in power, a struggle with American interests in Cuba rapidly escalated. It started with the American government cutting its import quota of sugar and the new regime nationalising certain American enterprises in retaliation and ended with Russia stepping in and offering to take the cancelled sugar orders while Castro nationalised virtually all large-scale industry. All that this demonstrates, however, is that the erection of a state capitalist economy in Cuba had nothing to do with ideology and that it was only in retrospect that Castro and his supporters discovered that they had been 'communists’ all along. Far from the basis of Socialism having been constructed in Cuba, what has been achieved is merely that the means of production have been concentrated in the hands of the state. The workers continue to work for wages, as in any other capitalist country, while a new ruling class of party bosses and bureaucrats has consolidated its power.

For all that, the Cuban leaders came to power on a wave of popular discontent and—like any other ruling class—they now have to defend their privileged position with an ideology. Up to his death Guevara was prominent as one of their foremost 'theoreticians' and his skilful mixture of Marxist and nationalist ideas has found a ready audience in left-wing circles. He could be outspokenly critical of Russia and the East European countries, at times referring to “their tacit complicity with the exploiting nations of the West" and inferring that the industrialised, state capitalist countries were “in a way, accomplices of imperialist exploitation". What especially aroused him and Castro to fury were negotiations such as those between Russia and the right-wing Brazilian regime in 1966 when Russia signed a $100 million credit agreement, making Brazil the leading recipient of Soviet ‘aid' in Latin America after Cuba. Coupled with this was Guevara's emphasis on going forward to a new society, of creating a system where people would work voluntarily because they enjoyed it it (the so-called “moral incentive”) and would be able to take freely whatever they wanted, without any restrictions in the form of money or rationing. Echoing Lenin, he talked about “our sons who will live communism".

None of this ought to surprise anyone. Friction between “fraternal, socialist lands" is a commonplace these days, although Castro—because of his extremely vulnerable position and heavy dependence on Russia—is shrewd enough not to push his criticism of other state capitalist countries beyond acceptable limits. At the same time, Guevara’s idealistic yearning for a new social system is the sort of hangover from the revolution which one would expect. Bourgeois revolutions are normally characterised by a belief that a just society is being created and this is inevitably used to encourage the working class to greater efforts. In fact, for each of Guevara’s references to the future communist society, he made at least a dozen pleas urging the Cuban workers to increase production.

  . . .  what I wanted to stress is that the working class is not putting forth its full effort (Television speech, 1961).
  . . . by working on the proletariat’s sense of responsibility, we hope to greatly improve the quality as well as the presentation of industrial products. (Article in Cuba Socialista, 1962). The perfect revolutionary, the member of the ruling party, must work every hour and every minute of his life, during these years of very hard struggle that lie ahead of us. (Speech to textile workers, 1963).

This is not to imply that Guevara consciously set out to trick the working class. There is no reason to doubt that he honestly believed that, by a combination of hard work and sacrifice, Socialism could be constructed in Cuba. But the fact is that, within the framework of a state capitalist economy, his slogan of ‘work now—Socialism later’ functions as a cover for the accumulation of capital by (he ruling class. 

This is not to overlook the important and far-reaching reforms which the Castro regime in Cuba has introduced since 1959. Illiteracy has been virtually wiped out, for example (there were 1,250,000 illiterates under Batista) and at present something like 5.3 per cent of Cuba's national income is being diverted to education. It would be foolish to underestimate the value of this for the working class. Such a gain, however, will better equip the working class for understanding what Socialism entails. The battle for a socialist society has yet to be fought in Cuba, let alone won.

The problem remains, then, what can socialists do today under Latin American conditions? At present the tactics being adopted by those who claim to be interested in establishing Socialism vary from the guerillas—advocating a particular form of direct action—to the pro-Russian Communist parties at the other extreme. Typical of these latter is the Venezuelan C.P. which was legally recognised up till 1962. was then prohibited for its support of the local guerilla forces, but has now renounced guerilla activity. In the current presidential elections it has offered to throw its weight behind the candidate with the most attractive reform programme, the one who will “promise to put an end to repression". Both these strategies are useless for advancing to Socialism. The job of revolutionary socialists, wherever they are, is to make the world socialist revolution and this boils down now to the immediate task everywhere of spreading socialist ideas among the working class. The Socialist Party of Great Britain recognises that the difficulties of doing this in many countries, including the South American dictatorships, are extreme and that, until the working class in such areas have gained sufficient strength to capture the limited democracy which has been won in Western Europe and elsewhere, the efforts of socialists must be severely hampered. There is, however, no alternative.

This would be a more solid contribution to the building of a world socialist community than is agitating for a capitalist state such as Cuba. To try to dodge the issue by talk of a “revolution in the revolution’ ’is mere escapism.

John Crump

[1] “Politics directs the gun" (Mao). The first fundamental principle in the building of our army is the imperative necessity of placing the army under Party leadership, of constantly strengthening Party leadership." (Giap)

[2] The exploits of the guerillas have been surrounded by such a collection of myths that it is now difficult to check simple facts such as these. The number of men to reach the Sierra Maestra has been reported at various times as 7, 12, 13 and 20.