Links: Critique of the Politico-Military Strategy, Part I

["Les Schaffer" <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[ bounced > 30 kB from "Alan Bradley" <alanb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Part I ]

The following article appears in Issue #17, January to April, 2001, of
Links, "International journal of socialist renewal".  Links is
published in Australia, but has a broad Editorial Board, and a range
of contributing editors, including Dale McKinley from South Africa,
Boris Kagarlitsky from Russia, Manning Marable from the US, Budiman
Sujatmiko from Indonesia, and many others.

It's website can be found at:  http://www.dsp.org.au/links

This article is fairly long, and contains a great deal of material
that is of no particular relevance to many comrades on the list, but
it also contains a good deal of material about the socialist movement
in the Philippines, plus material on Marxist tactics and strategy that
is relevant on a much broader scale.  It also, IMO, approaches the
tasks of the Marxist movement in a militant manner depressingly rare
amongst the international left, especially in the imperialist states.

Alan Bradley
alanb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
------------------------------------------

Critique of the Politico-Military Strategy
by Sonny Melencio and Reihana Mohideen

(Sonny Melencio is the chairperson of the Socialist Party of Labour
(SPP) in the Philippines. Reihana Mohideen is a member of the
Executive Council of the SPP.  This article is part of a longer paper
by the author entitled "On Strategy and Tactics", which provides
polemical support to the SPP's discussion of strategy and tactics in
its program, The Continuing Revolution in the Philippines (1999).)

A number of party formations in the Philippines, such as the PMP
(Workers Party of the Philippines), RPM (Revolutionary Workers Party),
PMLP (Party of Marxists-Leninists in the Philippines), adopt the
politico-military ("pol-mil") strategy as a reaction to the protracted
people's war strategy of the Communist Party of the Philippines
(CPP). It is defined as a combination of political and military
struggles, with the military struggle playing a secondary or
subordinate role to the political struggle.

"Pol-mil" usually means the creation of a small group of armed units,
mostly in the urban areas, that undertakes special armed operations
such as assassination of individual representatives of the ruling
class, bombings, sabotage, "expropriations", and other punitive acts
on an individual or limited basis.

For these groups, "pol-mil" has been elevated to the level of
strategy.  Some of the groups also trace their strategy to the
Vietnamese model. It is about time that we clarify the context of
Vietnam's combination model.

Vietnam's Pol-Mil

Leaders of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) regarded pol-mil not
as a strategy but as a "fundamental form of revolutionary violence"
during the wars of national liberation in their country.

According to Truong Chinh, a politburo member of the VCP:

......... the Vietnamese revolution has always used both forms -
political struggle and armed struggle - to stage insurrection and win
power ... Armed forces combined with political forces, armed struggle
combined with political struggle - such is the fundamental form of
revolutionary violence in our country.(1)

For the VCP, revolutionary strategy consists of determining the enemy,
the motive force of the revolution and the allies of the proletariat
at each strategic stage of the revolution. Pol-mil, on the other hand,
is a form of struggle (or a combination of forms of struggle) that is
usually associated with the question of tactics.

The point here is to be able to draw a difference between a party's
strategy and tactics. For if one elevates a form (or a combination of
forms) of struggle to the level of strategy, one runs the risk of
excluding or denigrating other related forms of action that are as
crucial to the development of the long-term goals of the party (the
major concern of strategy). Propaganda and party-building, for
instance, are as crucial as the pol-mil forms in building and
developing the revolutionary capacity of the party.

But even if we take Vietnam's pol-mil as a strategy, there are two
things that we must clarify at once:

1.Vietnam's "pol-mil strategy" is not the Maoist "protracted people's
war [PPW] strategy" that the CPP always made it out to be. It is not
the strategy of 'encircling the cities from the countryside',
'building Red bases' in the countryside until the revolutionary armed
forces are ready to capture political power in the main cities, the
'principal area of struggle is the countryside' etc.

Horror of horrors for the CPP: the VCP's strategy is insurrectionary!
- although it combines the political struggle and the military
struggle in both rural and urban areas.  According to Truong-Chinh,
this combination "should as a matter of course combine political
struggle (for instance, general political strikes, school strikes,
market strikes, office employees' strikes, political meetings and
demonstrations, armed demonstrations for a show of strength, etc.) and
armed attacks" in rural and urban areas.(2) For Vietnam, the
revolution's insurrectionary character is clear.  Insurrection caps
its pol-mil combination. Thus: "One must raise the combination of
military and political struggles to a fairly high level: combination
of actions before, during and after the insurrection; during the
insurrection for winning power just as in the war for liberation; in
rural and urban areas as well as between rural areas and urban areas;
on the operational, tactical and strategic planes in the war of
liberation.  The highest form of combination is that of general
offensive with general insurrection."(3)

2. Vietnam's "pol-mil strategy" does not mean the combination of the
two forms in all instances. For Truong-Chinh, 'From 1936 to 1939, in
the face of the danger of fascism and of aggressive war by the
fascists, and preparing for favourable opportunities to fight the
enemy, our Party took as a basis for action the building of the
masses' political forces". It means the skilful combination of legal
and illegal actions, "including the use of 'Chambers of the people's
representatives' and 'Colonial councils', etc., to trigger off a
seething movement of political struggle from urban to rural areas".(4)

Thus, it was only during the prelude to the second world war that
armed insurrection began to be posed in Vietnam. From there on,
Truong-Chinh said:

Our Party advanced from political struggle to the mobilization for
armed struggle, from the masses' political organizations to the
building of paramilitary forces of the people (self-defence units for
national salvation, self-defence combat units, guerrilla units of the
National Salvation Troops and the Liberation Troops). It properly
combined the two forms of political and armed struggle during the
years of preparations for the insurrection, during the
pre-insurrection period and right in the course of the August 1945
General Insurrection.(5)

In Vietnam, the combination of the two forms of political and armed
struggle was raised during the national liberation war of 1939-1945
(and was capped by the victorious August Revolution). And then the
combined forms were waged again during the French colonialist
aggression of 1945-1954. In this period, Truong-Chinh said, "The
people's revolutionary violence was embodied in the combination of
armed and political struggles, with armed struggle predominating."(6)

Thus it was clarified that although the combination of political and
armed struggles constitutes the fundamental form of violence in the
Vietnamese revolution, "either of them [predominates] according to the
concrete situation prevailing in each period or each region."(7)

The VCP was very specific in the periods when the pol-mil combination
became the main revolutionary form. Pol-mil was waged during the war
of resistance against the French colonisers (which led to the
liberation of the north) and during the US imperialist aggression in
the south. The VCP noted that the "strategy" developed not only with
the combination of the political and military struggle, but also with
the development of the diplomatic struggle.

The proper time to initiate the armed or military struggle was
clarified further by the VCP leader:

In the course of the revolution, one must absolutely mobilize the
masses to wage political struggle in many forms, thereby educating,
encouraging and organizing them; develop the Party and the masses'
political organizations (to build a "mass political army"). Only at a
certain point, when conditions are favourable, should one build the
people's revolutionary armed forces and trigger off an armed struggle.
The masses' political organizations form the basis of the people's
armed forces.(8)

The Philippine pol-mil

Hence, the "pol-mil strategy" being advanced by a number of left
groups in the Philippines (actually more in word than deeds by some
groups) differs substantially from the Vietnamese model.  It shows
once more the penchant of some groups for creating a schema or
"universalising" a form of strategy without consideration of the
situation or the context in which such a form was successfully
initiated.

The Philippine version of pol-mil strategy involves the formation of
urban guerilla groups that undertake "single combat" operations
against individual representatives or institutions of the ruling class
in the form of assassinations, bombings, sabotage, "expropriations"
and other punitive acts.

At best, the purported aim of these acts is to assist or stimulate
mass actions, although there have been a number of actions staged for
dramatic impact, such as the RPM's admitted bombing of oil companies
at the height of an oil price increase, or as a "lesson" or "advanced
deterrent" to the capitalists and police who harass and violently
attack the workers, such as most of the operations of the Alex
Boncayao Brigade (ABB) in the industrial areas of Metro Manila.
("Expropriation" is another thing, as its sole aim is to collect funds
for the revolutionary movement.)

Devoid of any clear political impact and divorced from the mass
movement, these actions, however, have a tendency to be ultra-left and
can be seen more as desperate measures rather than as subsidiary parts
of the political struggle.

Pol-mil strategy here - or more precisely the military component of
such strategy - refers to the individual acts of terror designed to
destabilise the stae, create dramatic impact, give "warning" or
"lessons" to individual capitalists and the police and exert pressure
on the ruling class (or its individual representatives) to change
policies with regard to the masses or the mass movement.

Terrorism and terror as tactics

The military component in this pol-mil strategy means the use of
terror as a form of revolutionary violence against the reactionary
violence of the state and representatives of the ruling class.
Marxists understand the need for revolutionary violence and are
therefore not opposed to the use of terror (or guerilla actions) in
the urban and rural areas if the situation warrants such action.  But
we should also be clear about the conditions and requirements that
permit such action.

First, we need to clarify our view regarding terrorism or acts of
terror elevated to the level of strategy.

In the Philippine setting, we can cite as an example the strategy
instigated by the Light-a-Fire Movement, a social democratic group,
during the Marcos dictatorship period.  The strategy - pursued through
escalated acts of arson, bombings and the like - aimed to destabilise
and paralyse the martial law regime "since peaceful protests are not
feasible within the system".  This type of terrorism is not a
proletarian but a petty-bourgeois, individualist and elitist mode of
action.  Like liberalism, it expresses a fundamental lack of
confidence in the potential of the masses to achieve political or
social change through their own actions.  Terrorism as a strategy has
no place in the revolutionary socialist or Marxist movement.

Second, on terror as a tactic.  Can a Marxist movement adopt terror as
a mode of action even if it is secondary or subordinate to the
political struggle (precisely what our pol-mil strategists here say)?

If being "secondary" or "subordinate to the political struggle" means
that the aim is to stimulate or inspire the mass struggle, here is
what Lenin said during his running debate with the petty-bourgeois
Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) in 1902.  Lenin criticised them for
the assassination of tsarist official Sipyagin (even if he
acknowledged the action as a popular act that drew the sympathy of "at
least all politically conscious workers").  Lenin clarified his
opposition:

Without in the least denying violence and terrorism in principle [for
we do not reject the use of acts of terror in principle - SM], we
demanded work for the preparation of such forces of violence as were
calculated to bring about direct participation of the masses and which
guaranteed that participation."(9)

Lenin argued that this SR type of "single combat" action has the
"immediate effect of simply creating a short-lived sensation, while
indirectly it even leads to apathy and passive waiting [of the masses]
for the next bout".(10)

Trotsky, who became commander of the Red Army during the Russian
Revolution, assessed it in these terms:

Individual terrorism is inadmissable precisely for the reason that it
loweres the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to
their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great
avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his
mission. (11)

He added:

The proletarian party does not resort to artificial methods such as
burning warehouses, setting off bombs, wrecking trains, etc., in order
to bring about the defeat of its own government.  Even if it were
successful ... the military defeat would not at all lead to
revolutionary success, a success which can be assured only by the
independent movement of the proletariat.  (12)

(Some groups may find our quoting Trotsky reprehensible and a proof of
our being "Trotskyites" - a slander being circulated against us by the
CPP.  Suffice it to say that we know our Trotsky. We are highly
critical of the latter's views on "permanent revolution" while we
acknowledge his immense contribution to Marxist theory in such works
as History of the Russian Revolution and The Revolution Betrayed.)

It is also instructive to note that between a heroic military
operation (of a "single combat type") and a political demonstration,
Lenin considers the latter as a "genuinely revolutionary act" compared
to the. former. During a strike in Rostov on Don (1902) in which six
workers were murdered and their funeral served as the occasion for a
political demonstration of the workers, Lenin had this to say against
the claim of the SRs that the workers merely died in vain:

[The SRs said that] It would perhaps have been more "expedient" if the
six comrades had given their lives in an attempt on the lives of
individual police tyrants ... We, however, are of the opinion that it
is only such mass movements [the political demonstration-SM], in which
mounting political consciousness and revolutionary activity are openly
manifested to all by the working class, that deserve to be called
genuinely revolutionary acts and are capable of really encouraging
everyone who is fighting for the Russian revolution.(13)

When terror is admissible

If Marxists reject terrorism as a strategy and even reject terror as
tactics, when is the use of acts of terror admissible?

1. According to Lenin, when it is "calculated to bring about direct
participation of the masses and guarantee that
participation". Meaning, when it is a minor military action
supplementing mass action, when it is subordinated to and absorbed by
popular action or by mass struggle. When it is in fact almost a part
of the mass movement, or when the act itself is beginning to acquire a
mass character. For Lenin:

Terror is one of the forms of military action that may be perfectly
suitable and even essential at a definite juncture in the battle,
given a definite state of the troops and the existence of definite
conditions. But the important point is that terror, at the present
time [listen, all those who profess the pol-mil strategy!-SM] is by no
means suggested as an operation for the army in the field, an
operation closely connected with and integrated into the entire system
of struggle, but as an independent form of occasional attack unrelated
to any army.(14)

It is in this sense that Lenin recognised and called for the
implementation of guerilla actions in 1905-1906 (i.e., during the
height of the "First Russian Revolution"). But even then, Lenin
recognised these as "partial, secondary, and auxiliary to the main
forms of mass struggles" (which took on the character of mass
mobilisation) such as the political strike with local barricade
fighting, mass barricade fighting and armed uprising, peaceful
parliamentary struggle, partial military revolts and partial peasant
revolts.(15)

In criticising the populist SRs (who were building "autonomous and
clandestine armed groups" that carried out military operations in the
cities), Lenin said that only when the RSDLP (the Russian
revolutionary socialist party of Lenin) was directly leading the
masses could it go over to armed steet struggles.(16)

For Marxists, it is clear that acts of terrorism (or guerilla actions)
should be subordinated to and absorbed by the mass struggle. As such,
"terrorism" here is no longer the same thing. The difference is quite
fundamental when it becomes part and parcel of the radicalised mass
movement.

2. During periods of the "openly revolutionary phase", i.e., during
periods of insurrection, uprising or civil war. This condition becomes
the main qualifier in instigating minor military actions that
supplements mass action. Otherwise the act is divorced from the mass
struggle and can only be the outcome of the desperation of a small
group or a few individuals, i.e., ultra-left in its political
character. Such an act does not advance but merely obstructs the
development of mass struggle.

The Vietnamese experience is instructive in that it tells us that the
pol-mil combination by the VCP developed only during the
insurrectionary period instigated by actual imperialist aggression
(through direct invasion and occupation). The Russian experience where
Lenin and the Bolsheviks called for guerilla actions in the cities
occurred at the height of the 1905 revolution (Lenin maintained the
call in 1906 because he thought the uprising would continue). The call
for guerilla actions, however, remained secondary to the mass struggle
- political strikes, mass barricades and even parliamentary struggle
that drew in mass participation.

If an insurrectionary mood among the masses is the requirement for a
pol-mil struggle, a civil war situation is the condition for it to
thrive and prosper.  Civil war is a war, and has its particular
laws. In civil war, bombings, sabotage and other forms of terror are
inevitable. Civil war is a situation of mass struggle of the most
profound kind, and is usually characterised by a cornbination of
spontaneous uprising at the local level, a bloody coup by
counter-revolutionary forces, a revolutionary general strike, an
insurrection for the seizure of power and others.

Civil war is a situation of heightened mass struggle, involving not
simply a pre-revolutionary situation but a fully revolutionary one in
which the question of seizure of state power is actually posed to the
masses. Thus we can outline a range of situations pertaining to the
level of the mass struggle, or the level of its breadth and militancy:
a non-revolutionary situation is one in which the mass struggle is
still at its incipient stage; a pre-revolutionary situation is when it
rapidly gains breadth and militancy (the period of "upsurge"); and a
fully revolutionary phase is when the seizure of state power becomes
sharply posed to the masses.

The martial law dictatorship of Marcos in the Philippines was clearly
a civil war period, a war initiated by a faction of the ruling class
itself.  The condition then was developing towards an inevitable
showdown of class forces (which was derailed by the liberal
bourgeoisie taking the lead in the Edsa uprising of 1986). We are
concerned here, however, with the viability of a guerilla war that had
been waged by the New People's Army (NPA) of the CPP even before the
martial law or civil war period, i.e., in 1968.

During such a period of civil war, the inevitability and necessity of
guerilla war are posed sharply - not only in terms of a PPW strategic
scenario, but also of a pol-mil or insurrectionary scenario. The
"necessary minimum" for conducting guerilla activity exists, as Che
Guevara said.  (Contrary to the "romantic image" of Che, this
exemplary revolutionist had written that there was a "necessary
minimum" for conducting guerilla activity. He referred to a situation
of civil war, where "people ... see clearly the futility of
maintaining the fight for social goals within the framework of civil
debate" or "when the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves
in power against established order", and "when peace is considered
already broken". He added, "In these conditions, popular discontent
expresses itself in more active forms. An attitude of resistance
finally crystallizes in an outbreak of fighting, provoked initially by
the conduct of the authorities."(17))

It is no wonder then that the guerilla activity of the NPA reached its
peak during the Marcos dictatorship, especially during the 1980s or
the latter period of the regime, when popular discontent acquired more
active forms in the cities and in the countryside. It was also during
this period that guerilla activity in the countryside begun to spill
over to the urban areas (the "sparrow units" in Mindanao, and the ABB
in Metro Manila). The guerilla activity was being fueled by a growing
mass resistance to the dictatorship.

But in today's conditions, even Che's "necessary minimum" is sorely
lacking.  Che said:

Where a government has come into power through some form of popular
vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of
constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted,
since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been
exhausted.(18)

1986 was a turning point in the Philippines. The "Edsa Revolution" was
a people's uprising cum military rebellion. It was a political
revolution only in the sense that a new faction of the bourgeois class
took over. The civil war situation ended with the Cory Aquino liberal
faction of the bourgeoisie assuming state power. They turned the
developing revolutionary explosion into a counter-revolutionary one,
by simply dismissing people's power and reimposing the old pre-martial
law order complete with its old trimmings (Congress and a bourgeois
constitution). Partly to be blamed for the victory of the
counter-revolution was the CPP's PPW strategy itself, which ignored
the gathering mass struggle and the insurrectionary situation in the
cities by holding on to the scherna of liberating the countryside
first.

A new situation has unfolded but it took more than a decade again for
the revolutionary left in the Philippines to take note of the changes
in the political arena. A re-examination of the CPP's strategy led to
a myriad of views on how the revolutionary movement can respond to the
changed scenario.  For the CPP itself (or what's left Of it following
the splits from 1992 onwards) the failure in strategy is merely rooted
in the flawed policy of "regularisation" of the people's army and the
"insurrectionism" of some party units in the cities.

For those who left the CPP, some groups and former party personalities
such as the popdems [popular democrats] under Boy Morales and company
have moved further to the right while adopting the liberal and
fashionable (among NGOS) "civil society strategy". A number of those
remaining in the Marxist-Leninist framework, however have, started to
advance the so-called pol-mil strategy.

One reason being advanced for the pol-mil strategy in today's context
is the instability of liberal bourgeois rule given the authoritarian
tendency of the Estrada regime and the increasing divisions between
factions of the ruling class (with some even threatening to stage a
coup d'etat or to impeach Estrada). But even today, when a
'governmental crisis" (not a state crisis) is forming, when the
clamour for Estrada's resignation or ouster is gaining ground, we
cannot say that a pre-revolutionary situation is right around the
corner.  The "crisis" at this stage does not indicate a rise in the
class struggle or a prelude to an open revolutionary phase in which
the mass struggle starts to pose the state question (the mood of the
revolutionary left is of course a different matter).

To sum up, as Marxists we are not opposed to the use of acts of terror
(or guerilla actions) under conditions of insurrection or civil
war. However, we are opposed to terrorist acts-whether as a strategy
or tactics-i.e., acts carried out outside the context of an
insurrectionary situation or civil war or acts carried out by
individuals or small groups separate from a mass armed struggle.

[ to be continued ]