In the last couple of days I've received 100s of new hits. To celebrate I'm posting a serious review about revolutionary strategy. I'm not deliberately trying to alienate people, honest. I really think these questions matter, so I'm excited when I read writers who share that sense of urgency. I hope I can impart a little of it, at least!

Pierre Rousset has some interesting lessons to share from his decades-long activist career. He combines experience from Europe and the Philippines, including some harrowing stories of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and their descent into murderous orthodoxy. But he still feels Marxism is a viable, necessary project, providing it’s open to change and questioning.









Pierre Rousset

On revolutionary violence

Self-defense remains the only source of legitimacy of revolutionary armed action. When necessary, armed struggle aims at protecting and helping mass organizations and mobilizations; not the other way around. Politically, armed struggle is a subordinate form of struggle.

Rousset downplays violence from a necessity to a tactic. But he doesn’t rule it out. This is important. I’m all for peace; but violence is often a condition imposed upon struggle. Some leftists make the mistake of fetishizing it, claiming a struggle is only revolutionary when it’s violent; this is wrong, because violence can lead (and has led) to revolutionary elites using their military power to subjugate others. The point, however, is to analyze violence materially.

Where does armed struggle come from?

With the violence of class domination (national and international) and its consequences (militarization) as background. With armed struggle as framework (control of arms and money allowing the emergence of a new power structure). And, like in previous processes, with social uprooting as one key mechanism changing the very fabric of an organization. But we need to go much deeper in the analysis if we want to understand what happens. Armed struggle is, most of the time, not a “free choice” but an act of self-defense faced with the violence of the dominant classes (this is what gives it legitimacy).

That doesn’t make it always right, strategically or morally. It’s a tactical question. Self-emancipation, which Rousset shows is the main task of socialism, is often destroyed by violence. Military tactics elevate those who have the guns, and Rousset details the awful purges of the CPP in the 1980s, when 1000s of cadre were tortured and shot. However, to refuse violence at the outset, in the face of the massive violence of the state and capitalism generally, is to dodge the question of power: who has it, how do you get it. I’ll post a wonderful quote from Victor Serge on the topic, when I can find it.


Is this self-defence? - Nepali Maoist

On vanguardism

OK, it looks like I'm still interested in the topic. Rousset has learned from hard experience that vanguardism - leadership - is not authoritarianism. He says:

Party is not governance. It cannot substitute itself to representative people’s organizations.

Revolutionary parties have a specific (and evolving) role. They are not and must not become the leading faction of society (see below on this question).

The role of the political party was not to rule on such issues, to impose its own norms, but to contribute to create the conditions of individual free choice, of self-realization.

That's a beautiful way to say it - all the more so because the consequences of dictatorship are scary:

The CPP ruled, in a very moralistic way (I bet that the presence of so many priests in the movement played its part, here). More than this, it organized courtship, married and continuously intruded into inter-personal relations. Doing so, the party went far beyond the role of a political organization. It took over the function of the state, the church and the enlarged family! It is through such mechanisms that a party (leadership) begins to view itself as a leading faction in society (something which goes far beyond “vanguardism”).

Real vanguardism is about guidance, suggesting the best ways forward, winning battles in practice. It’s not about micro-managing people. Even the best insights on the application of political principles to one’s personal life must be made through education, not diktat.

OK... but which ones support self-emancipation?

Today, the pressing tasks of the left include challenging the emptiness of formal democracy (choosing every few years for someone to oppress us.) Revolutionaries have to be flexible in their tactics, accept the presence of different revolutionary traditions and work with them to the greatest extent possible. This doesn’t mean abandoning Marxism:

This does not mean to “water down” Marxism and class analysis. My friend Daniel Bensaïd, with regard to the rise of anti-Marxist theories in the name of “modernity”, claimed its right to an “open dogmatism”: to defend basic lessons of Marxism while opening it to a wide range of realities.

Capitalism is still a class society based on the exploitation of poor & oppressed people. That’s a broad outline, and it needs filling in. That’s where we can learn from history – what other socialists and progressive movements have done – and what’s going on in the world, today.