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Title: COPEI Author: Federación Anarquista Uruguaya Date: 1972 Language: en Topics: Federación Anarquista Uruguaya, Uruguay, armed struggle, especifismo, Latin America Source: Retrieved on 2022-04-09 from https://www.redblacknotes.com/2022/04/02/copei-commentary-on-armed-struggle-and-foquismo-in-latin-america-1972-new-and-complete-translation/ Notes: Translated by Campy Sino, 2022. Translated from http://federacionanarquistauruguaya.uy/copei-1a-parte-documentos-de-fau-1972/][federacionanarquistauruguaya.uy/copei-1a-parte-documentos-de-fau-1972]] and [[http://federacionanarquistauruguaya.uy/copei-2a-parte-documentos-de-fau-1972/
Tommy Lawson, March 2022
The following is the first English translation of the entirety of
“COPEI,” an internal strategy document of the clandestine Federación
Anarquista Uruguaya (FAU) written in 1972.
COPEI is a significant document for a number of reasons. Firstly, as the
organisation that articulated the strategy of Especifismo, the works and
insights of the FAU are critical to understanding the trajectory and
development of the tendency. Especifismo being the theory of the
‘specific anarchist organisation’ employing federalist practices and
united by theoretical and strategic coherency. Especifist organisations
organise around a programme and are dedicated to class struggle and the
building of popular mass movements autonomous from capitalists and
reformist political parties. Especifismo is considered as similar to the
other anarchist tendencies known as Platformism and Dual
Organisationalism, only developed in the unique context of Uruguay and
spread across Latin America.
Throughout the 1950’s to the 1970s the FAU showed a level of strategic
sophistication relatively unknown amongst other anarchist federations.
Nuance and impressive levels of organisation were required to combine
and co-ordinate the activities of the clandestine anarchist ‘party’, the
FAU, with the above-ground mass work of the Resistencia Obrero
Estudiantil (Workers-Student Resistance — ROE), the Tendencia Combativa
(Combative Tendency) union faction and the armed apparatus of the
Organización Popular Revolucionaria (Popular Revolutionary Organisation,
OPR-33). Hence for the FAU, ‘the structuring of the Political
Organisation is a fundamental task in the stages to mold the conditions
for the insurrection.’ The structuring of the political apparatus being
after all, the key insight of especifismo as popular insurrection is the
method of anarchism.
Today, understanding the way that the armed apparatus of a revolutionary
organisation was integrated into the overall project of social
revolution is an often unstudied aspect of the revolutionary project.
Material conditions have changed in such a manner that even the
possibility of urban guerrillas are rendered redundant across much of
the world. However history is not static and we do not know what will
emerge from a world beset by new imperialisms, the collapse of
eco-systems under rapid climate change, new wars, pandemics, and ever
higher levels of inequality. The strategic dimensions that will result
from these new contradictions are as yet unknown, and it is worthwhile
revolutionaries keep an open mind studying the past.
In 1960’s Latin America, it was believed that revolutionary prospects
had been opened up by the guerrilla war in Cuba and the subsequent
overthrow of the Batista regime. Across the continent armed groups
sprung up attempting to imitate the successes of the Cuban movement. In
fact, new guerrilla wars were often sponsored by the Cubans themselves.
Che Guevara declared the need for ‘two, three, many Vietnams’ to defeat
US Imperialism. In Uruguay, a number of sympathetic groups created a
coalition called El Coordinador. The FAU were amongst the organisations
involved, alongside groups like the Tupamaros. The political line of El
Coordinador was argued through its journal, Epocha, which articulated
the use of armed struggle against the Uruguayan state and US
imperialism. While all groups involved agreed on the use of armed
struggle, the FAU disassociated from Epocha following the first action,
a raid on the Swiss Rifle Club. Within a short period all the
organisations associated with the raid would also be forced underground,
declared illegal by a regime moving rapidly towards dictatorship.
The FAU had become highly critical of the “focuista” strategy imitated
by the other revolutionary organisations in Uruguay. “Foquismo” was the
name given to the strategy developed by Che Guevara in his manual,
Guerrilla Warfare. Essentially his thesis can be broken down thus; the
objective conditions for revolution already existed in Latin America due
to the contradictions exacerbated by US imperialism. All that was needed
was a small group of revolutionaries to engage in armed confrontation
with the state and the subsequent war would encourage the subjective
conditions leading to social revolution. Importantly, in Che’s vision
the political aspects of the struggle are subordinate to the armed
struggle. In Uruguay the primary Focuista organisation were the
Tupamaros, also a focus of critique in the document.
This is the second reason COPEI is seminal. Despite supporting and
engaging in armed struggle, the FAU believed Foquismo to be a flawed
strategy. In contrast to the foquistas, who saw the guerrilla as the par
excellence of revolutionary organisation, the FAU saw ‘the function of
an urban guerrilla [as] not to achieve victory after a direct
confrontation with the army’ but as a ‘necessary preamble and
preparation for the insurrection.’ Ultimately, ‘armed actions are
conceived through a political center, and not a political center
conceived through armed actions.’ That is, the opposite of the thesis of
Foquismo. For ‘the foquista conception is interested in the masses
almost exclusively as support and cover for the specifically military
action. They are not interested in the participation of the masses as
the protagonists of the revolutionary process.’ However, in the vision
of the FAU, the revolution must be made by the workers, with the
guerrilla as one aspect of preparation for the mass insurrection;
‘revolutionary military policy will therefore be a class military
policy, which in all its stages must coincide with the interests of the
industrial working class and other working classes.’
The final aspect in which COPEI stands out as a seminal document is its
trenchant critique of reformist politics. Indeed, the whole purpose of
employing armed struggle as an aspect of the revolutionary movement is
to break with the limitations of bourgeois politics; ‘the capitalist
system will not be destroyed following the rules of the game that they
generated themselves to guarantee its continuity. The continuity of the
system is maintained by reducing action to only that which bourgeois
legality allows, only what the legality created and managed by the
bourgeoisie recommends.’ Social democratic and other reformist forces,
including the Uruguayan Communist Party at the time, were limiting the
possibilities opened up by an inevitable crisis and clash with the
capitalist state. ‘By turning the idea of the “proletarian insurrection”
into a myth, the reformists make it into a legitimating pretext for
their counterrevolutionary practice, so useful to the system. Far from
representing an alternative opposed to it, aimed at destroying it, it
becomes daily practice, in concrete and everyday events and in a way
“perfects” it, by correcting it in its most extreme and visible
manifestations of injustice.” This would become visible during the waves
of strikes that gripped pre-dictatorship Uruguay, where the Communist
party channeled everything into failed electoral efforts while the FAU
and the Tendencia did everything it could to prepare the workers for
insurrection. As Abraham Guillen noted ‘OPR-33 and ROE spurred a series
of successful strikes in the metallurgical, rubber and clothing
industries. The strike at SERAL, a footwear manufacturer, lasted more
than a year. Where the Communist controlled unions failed, OPR-33 and
ROE succeeded.’
The new translation of COPEI is part of a discovery of the depth of the
history of Latin American anarchism. A region where anarchism has
perhaps, at least as influential if not more so than in Europe.
In 2018, a partial translation was provided by Gabriel Ascui and
published on the website of Black Rose / Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation
in the United States. This new translation by comrade “Campy Sino”
provides footnotes to convey the context of colloquial Uruguayan
language and clarify military terms.
In 1967 the Uruguayan government ordered the dissolution of the
Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU), which then went underground until
1971. Its activity was restructured according to the new situation: the
development of an armed apparatus, the publication of a clandestine
weekly, the creation of a network of safehouses for operation and
advertising materials, financing and others. The OPR-33 (Organización
Popular Revolucionaria-33 Orientales) was launched and as the armed wing
of the FAU, it carried out a series of quite successful actions:
sabotage, economic expropriation, kidnapping of political leaders and
employers, armed support for strikes, factory occupations, etc. With
this document of revolutionary military strategy, they also exercise
criticism and self-criticism of the foco strategy as used by the
National Liberation Movement (MLN), the Tupamaros.
Important events have occurred in recent months. Events that introduce
significant enough variables, as to justify a reassessment of tactics,
which in turn demands an adjustment to the new context created by these
events. No doubt, one of the most important aspects has been the
repressive offensive and its effects, which are already clear enough It
seems a priority, before entering into any consideration to make a
balance, necessarily synthetic, of those effects of the repressive
campaign on the National Liberation Movement (MLN)…and this is our main
objective.
Schematically, the results obtained by the repression can be expressed
as follows:
(premises, hidden caches and guerilla engineering,[1] vehicles , etc.).
structural backbone of MLN operations have been assassinated or
detained.
This is what emerges from the information available and those are the
facts on which the reactionary propaganda insists.
But, in addition, two results of a political nature can be deduced:
revealed, making clear an example of what can be done in this matter.
disarticulated, dismantled, and reduced, in relative terms, to a much
lower level of operability and in a short period of time, if the
criteria guiding its action is not adequate.
With these results obtained by repression, the reactionary propaganda
aims to establish this political conclusion: “Armed struggle is not
viable in Uruguay, and violence — as well as crime — does not pay” …On
the other hand, the reformists chant: “Armed struggle not only does not
lead to power, but is even counterproductive, compromises mass social
insertion, and militants remain stuck in this framework.”
The selectivity of the repression that shakes up and strikes,
occasionally at reformism, but in short, “condones” it, also tends to
the following:
It spares punishment to those who move politically within the guidelines
provided by the system.
Furthermore it leaves an exit open, a legalized and controllable escape
for social tensions. By selectively striking the revolutionaries,
reformism is politically benefited.
It is in this way that the repression seems to indicate that the class
struggle must follow a process.
The ruling classes want to ensure that everyone plays by their game. An
invented game and predesigned for them, a game where they cannot lose.
That well-known game: legal parties, controlled propaganda, periodic
elections … and back to start. In that game they have a card that
“kills” all the others. It is repression. Politically speaking, the
dictatorship. To convince everyone that it is so, that it is inevitably
so, that their game is the natural thing, that it will always be like
that, is the political task of repression.
Succeeding at making all the revolutionaries ask themselves: “If they
did this so quickly with an organization like the MLN, what will they do
with others?” To facilitate the reformists and capitulators of all kinds
in the presumed confirmation of their counterrevolutionary thesis:
“violence does not pay,” “the adventurists,” while suggesting to the
hesitant, the path of “the good and the law.” Searching within the
capitalist system for the way to make it less bad … saving the system as
such. All this and much more is the “lesson” they want to be learned.
Many doubt. At the level of public opinion it is almost inevitable that
the great ebb of disillusionment will arise in the face of the alleged
failure of the armed route, from which many expected a more or less
immediate revolutionary outcome. Many are afraid and fear paralyzes
them. Many will be “burned out” by the negative experience.
All of this happens every time the revolution suffers a defeat. And what
seems to be the dismantling of the MLN apparatus is, let us say these
words well thought out and with all clarity, a serious defeat for the
Uruguayan revolution. It is an important lost battle. It is not, it
cannot be nor will it be the end of the war. It is not, it cannot be, of
course, the end of the class struggle either. It exists and will exist,
under different forms, with different levels at each moment, in each
stage, until the system collapses. This is how it will be, because that
struggle arises from the capitalist system itself, from its own
exploitative and oppressive essence. It is a product of its organization
and function. As long as that system exists, there will inevitably be
class struggle.
The defeat today is not the end of the armed struggle either. It exists
and will continue to exist as a level of the class struggle, as long as
the socio-economic and political process of our country continues to
exist within the current terms. Because that level of armed struggle
emerges as a need posed by the characteristics of the process of
socio-economic and political deterioration, of which the ruling classes
have neither found nor will find an outlet for. It is this deterioration
without exit, which raises the need for a level of armed struggle, and
as long as the process of deterioration continues, there will still be
conditions for armed activity. There will always be organizations that
assume that task for which the conditions have given.
The armed struggle will not end, in short, because there are
organizations in a position to continue it. And it will continue.
What should not endure is the mistaken conception that has prevailed
here up to now. What is in crisis, hopefully definitively, is the
concept of “Foquismo.” The defeat that the Uruguayan revolution suffers
under this orientation today is for us, revolutionaries, also our
defeat.
The path of the revolution does not take place in a flowery meadow. It
is difficult, tortuous and is paved with difficulties. Through it one
advances and in it one learns and even falls. How often? How long? There
is no crystal ball or magicians in these things that can predict the
future. Here, you also make your way by walking. The march is long, we
know. The only decisive thing is the willingness to move forward. Not to
burn for good, for the sake of blind faith. But because the conditions
in which the process unfolds make it essential and possible. We will
only abandon the path of armed action if a very important change in that
process would indicate to us that it is counterproductive for
revolutionary ends.Nothing that indicates this change has occurred. On
the contrary the process of deterioration is clearer and more serious
than ever. Nothing indicates, therefore, that we have to change the
strategy, and in that strategy, armed struggle occupies a fundamental
place.
Armed activity has been oriented until now predominantly through the
conception of Foquismo. With that conception, we have disagreed from the
beginning, we saw and pointed out its weaknesses, we did our best
because they were overcome, and we oriented our practice according to
another line. Against all appearances, over our own inadequacies, our
own mistakes, time and facts have proven us correct . We are not happy
to confirm that. In the face of so many comrades of the MLN
assassinated, brutally tortured, prisoners, with all that marvelous
construction developed over the years, and through the effort of so many
who struggled for the revolution and that today seems to be collapsing.
We can not feel satisfaction for the facts that what we envisioned years
ago being promptly fulfilled.. Those dead are our dead, those tortured
are our tortured. As well as our comrades in our organization who today
are now enduring the most brutal tortures and are paying with their
lives defending the principles, life and line of our organization.
Far from us, then, to be smug. Much further, obviously is the despicable
attitude of the reformists, opportunists and cowards, who spit now,
ostentatiously, the counterrevolutionary hatred that they hid
hypocritically when things were going better. The road is long,
tortuous, and paved with difficulties. It is almost impossible not to
stumble, nor even to fall. Especially in the complex conditions, so
particular of Venezuela.[2] But from stumbles and falls, you have to
learn. Yes, the march is long and difficult. That is why it would be
unforgivable to stumble twice on the same stone. In order to not do so,
to learn, we must analyze as objectively as possible what has happened
in these hard months, and based on the conclusions of that analysis, we
must be more precise about the technique, and expand upon it in more
detailed terms.
Like any revolutionary victory, the triumph of the Cuban Revolution had
a stimulating effect in Latin America, helping to advance the process of
struggle throughout the continent. It demonstrated the viability of
armed struggle, evidenced by the existence of conditions to initiate it.
It showed that, indeed, in certain precise and concrete conditions,
victory could be obtained in a relatively short time. That was the Cuban
experience. We do not want to expand here on the vast and varied
repercussions that the Cuban Revolution had. The revolutionaries learned
many things from Cuba. As did the counterrevolution.
Today we refer only to a conception of the armed struggle, which was
presented as based on the experience of Cuba.This concept known as
“focus theory” or “Foquismo” systematized at the time by Régis Debray,
especially in his work “Revolution in the Revolution?” pretended to be a
conceptualization of the Cuban experience. He tried to specify in some
quite precise strategic-tactical criteria, the lessons that, according
to his supporters, could be drawn from the guerrilla war in Cuba. These
strategic criteria were presented as generalizable, as applicable in
most Latin American countries. Its influence was very great, motivating
very intense polemics at the time, especially on the subject of its
formulation by Debray.
In our country it was also polemicized in this regard, where the
influence of these conceptions was strongly exerted. These conceptions
were the ones that guided, basically, the practice of the MLN. Let us
hasten to clarify that the line of the MLN was not, however, an
application in lets say a classic, orthodox, foquista criteria.
Throughout its years of activity and even from its beginnings, this
movement introduced variants and corrected or adapted the foquista
concepts. The strategic-tactical line of the MLN has not been a
mechanical transfer of the first and original foquista line. These
adaptations constitute what is original, what is the same, and what is
specific to the urban guerrilla experience (the Tactical Combat Units),
of which the MLN takes center stage in Uruguay. But nevertheless, in
spite of the great and very valuable creative effort applied to the
adaptation of Foquismo to local conditions, this effort did not alter
the basic foquista assumptions which inform the practice of the MLN.
This constitutes an undoubtedly original and specific variant of
Foquismo. For this reason, given the great importance that movement’s
activity has had in the process of the struggles in our country, it is
useful before analyzing its performance, to make an evaluative balance
of the criteria that constitute the foquista conception of armed
struggle, such as they were formulated by their theorists, especially by
Debray.
Our Organization disagreed with Foquismo since its emergence as a
concept. We understand that the failures experienced today by the MLN
and with it the Uruguayan revolution, correspond to the fact that the
weaknesses of the foquista proposal was not overcome by the MLN in a
timely manner. This largely occurred because their efforts pointed to an
adaptation of Foquismo and not a break with it. This leads us in the
first place to briefly express the characteristics that we understand to
be the most salient of the foquista approach.
These are:
there are certain economic and social conditions that make it viable. It
was assumed that these conditions were met in almost all Latin American
countries (Debray said that Uruguay and Chile were the exception, that
in both countries these conditions did not exist), as a consequence of
their underdevelopment and backwardness.
conditions”) would develop as a consequence of the activity of the armed
“focus”(foco). From there, the existence or not of revolutionary
political parties was considered as secondary and certainly not a
priority. The sympathies aroused by the military activity of the foco
should be framed in organizations whose function was, almost
exclusively, to contribute to the effort and military victory. More than
parties, properly speaking, what was sought were support organizations
and support of the military effort, with tasks of coverage,[3]
logistical support and propaganda, recruitment, etc., focused on the
development of the operational potential of the armed foco and its
expansion. The development of the struggle would be measured in terms of
growth in operational capacity; success in terms of military success and
the victory was the military victory in the war. The expectation and
confidence in that victory, which would emerge from armed action, was
the achievement and the essential requirement on the ideological plane.
the rural environment, under the protection of suitable geographical
conditions (mountains, jungles, etc.) that would make possible the
concealment of the guerrillas and the tactics of “hitting and
disappearing” by always moving, characteristic of the rural guerrilla.
In its classic, original formulation, Foquismo denied the viability of
the urban guerrilla. By definition “always in the presence of the enemy”
always achievable by the latter, the urban guerrilla, it was said, was
condemned to a rapid annihilation. The armed and urban activity would
only fulfill a complementary function to the rural guerrilla, which
would be the protagonist of the confrontation and who through many small
and partial victories,would conquer the final victory by reducing the
opposing army to impotence.
each action, each operation of the foco would cause a generalized
replication, a response of repression. To the extent that the guerrillas
were operating with greater intensity, at higher levels, repression
would harden and would be generalized. Insofar that the harsh
generalizing repression affects an increasingly broad sector of the
population, the greater the sympathies that the foco would arouse and
the greater, therefore, its possibilities of development. In this
ascending dialectic of action-repression, socio-politico conditions that
are ever more favorable to military action would be generated, until
culminating in an ideal situation in which important sectors of the
population, supporting the guerrillas, their armed vanguard, would
impose the fall of the despotic government,supported only by the
privileged minority and the repressive apparatus, defeated in its
efforts to militarily suppress the guerilla.
The generation of this dynamic — in short, the central core of Foquismo
— would emanate from the armed successes.These would generate the
prospect of victory capable of attracting the masses in the framework of
increasing political repression. The activity of the guerrillas and the
repressive response that it would inevitably produce, would close all
the doors to the masses, all the ways that were not the route of armed
struggle, necessarily turning the people to the side of the revolution.
Thus a short, simple and direct path would proceed to the
“politicization of the masses,” its nucleation[4] behind the armed
guerrilla vanguard. From this point of view, the importance of all mass
activity (trade union, propaganda, public politics) not directly aimed
at favoring the war effort was underestimated. Mass activity supposedly
distracts forces in aspects considered secondary or even negative,
insofar as they could open expectations and perspectives that would
compete, eventually, with the path of armed struggle. For the rest, it
was based on the premise that every organization, every public activity,
would be quickly swept away by repression once the action-repression
mechanics triggered by the guerrilla foco has been set in motion.
The time that has elapsed, the intense, rich and often painful
experiences produced from these years by the Latin American
revolutionary movements have clarified the fatal errors of Foquismo.
and especially to carry out the armed struggle.This subject, vast and of
defining importance,obviously deserves a particularized consideration,
which goes beyond the framework of this brief reference. It involves the
analysis of the relationships between the conditions of the economic
level, of the class struggle, and the political and ideological levels
(subjective conditions of the same and the consideration of the role of
armed activity in relation to them).Furthermore it delineates between
the reformist currents, and leads necessarily, to elucidate theoretical
points of view and to the critique of the social and ideological roots
of the Foquista conception itself.
conditions, do not derive from guerrilla activity in the rather
mechanical terms foreseen by Foquismo. The activity of the armed foco
has not been shown as an adequate substitute, not even as a possible and
viable substitute for party activity. This insufficiency is plain to see
as the struggle is prolonged. The political responses, both of the
dominant classes as well as the dominated, do not conform to the overly
schematic and rectilinear[5] forecasts of Foquismo. It is evident that
an overly simplistic perspective of the structure and functioning of the
political and ideological levels weighed on this conception, the
importance of which was notoriously underestimated. On the other hand,
the possibility of forcing a change of the political conditions, as well
as the mentality and beliefs of the people through armed activity was
notoriously overestimated. The delay in the advance of the so-called
subjective conditions continued to weigh on their activity, frequently
producing the isolation of the rural foco, and thus creating the
conditions of its annihilation.
exclusivity reclaimed for the rural guerrilla is judged by the facts.
There has been and there is extensive practice of urban armed struggle.
However, it is conspicuous that the latter has been acquiring further
development in Latin America and even worldwide.
would lead to a favorable polarization of forces, generalizing and
isolating the repression, and developing and taking root in the foco,
does not usually occur. Repression has learned to maintain its
selectivity, the ruling classes can and do take countermeasures that
hinders and reverses this dynamic. In its strategy, the
counterrevolutionary activity of reformism and the handling of the old
ideological myths of bourgeois liberalism (elections, legality, etc.)
have played an important role that Foquismo did not foresee.
Most of the failures experienced in the years after the triumph of the
Cuban Revolution can be attributed to the influence of Foquismo. It was
not the armed struggle that failed, what clearly failed was the
short-sighted expectations that Foquismo entails. In the midst of these
failures, it is undeniable — nevertheless — that the widespread practice
of armed struggle decisively contributed to modifying the patterns and
characteristics of political action in Latin America.
Armed practice radically modified the way of perceiving and facing the
problems of the revolution. It caused the reconsideration of it in
concrete and precise terms.It brought to the table with pressing reality
and urgency, the issues related to concrete ways to achieve with
violence, the destruction of bourgeois power. Since then there has been
an unavoidable problem regarding which methods to employ, in order to
develop the armed route to the revolution. The problem of revolutionary
military strategy. All this entailed a revaluation of the utilization,
at all levels, of revolutionary violence.
For several decades, the revolution has been repeatedly talked about in
these countries. But for a long time, little was concretely done for it.
Nothing was raised regarding the concrete ways in which the
revolutionary process would take shape. In general, the void without a
foreseeable solution that this problem left, was filled with the myth of
the so-called “proletarian insurrection,” conceived in terms of a
generalized popular uprising, with people leaving en masse to the
streets, barricades, etc. This myth was inherited from the last century,
the Paris Commune of 1871, the Soviet October, or the Catalan July
18^(th), concretizing it with realities and helping to keep it alive in
the imagination of the people.
It is not that insurrections of this type cannot be carried out. Nor are
they, under any conditions, impossible. The “Cordobazo” of May 69’ and
similar uprisings in Rosario, Tucumán, and other cities, sufficiently
show and with very close examples, that the era of widespread, popular
street insurrections are far from over. The problem is that the
insurrection becomes a myth, a comfortable myth, opportunistically
manageable, if it is isolated from concrete, habitual, and daily
political practice. And that is what reformism has been doing for many
years. That is what the social democracy of the old socialist parties
did first and ended up by expressly renouncing violence, insurrection,
and revolution.This is what the neo-socialists of the communist parties
did and continue to do, who still talk about revolution while doing
everything possible to prevent it from coming.
Reformism places the insurrection in the sky of unattainable ideals. By
verbally exalting it, they try — in fact — to prevent it from being
prepared. In this disagreement, in that incoherence between their
counterrevolutionary political practice and their verbalism about a
final insurrectionary outcome, they seek to base their eternal
affirmation that “conditions are lacking,” whenever there is an attempt
to advance the process of political struggle, applying means not
included in their very limited recipebook.This is basically limited to
two things: a) at the economic level of the class struggle, wage action,
developed with the utmost respect for bourgeois and therefore peaceful
“legality”; b) at the political level, parliamentarism, electoralism, as
a way to capitalize politically on the results of the economic struggle.
By confining its practice at all levels within the increasingly narrow
frameworks of bourgeois legality, reformism creates the conditions for
its ever greater integration into the system. It obstructs and tries to
prevent the development of the conditions for its destruction.
It is obvious that if the design and the revolutionary project are not
present guiding the daily practice of the struggle at all levels, the
conditions for a revolutionary outcome will never be rendered.The
capitalist system will not be destroyed following the rules of the game
that they generated themselves to guarantee its continuity. The
continuity of the system is maintained by reducing action to only that
which bourgeois legality allows, only what the legality created and
managed by the bourgeoisie recommends. That is why only ever greater
reformism can emerge from the reformist line and an ever greater retreat
from the famous insurrectionary outcome that they postpone until an
indefinable “opportune moment.”That is why they can not formulate, nor
do they want to, any strategic-military guideline.
By turning the idea of the “proletarian insurrection” into a myth, the
reformists make it into a legitimating pretext for their
counterrevolutionary practice, so useful to the system. Far from
representing an alternative opposed to it, aimed at destroying it, it
becomes daily practice, in concrete and everyday events and in a way
“perfects” it, by correcting it in its most extreme and visible
manifestations of injustice.
It is important to insist on this, because the myth of an
incomprehensible future insurrection, suddenly and miraculously arisen,
without anyone preparing it, as the paradoxical end of an ultralegalist
practice, is the counterpart of another rooted myth: of the
invincibility of repression. “The revolution will be possible when there
are conditions” say the communist parties and with them all the
reformists add “the day of the revolution will arrive.” “But those who
violate the laws before that day, wielding weapons, will be fatally
defeated,” they say. And from there they always condemn those as
“putchists,” “adventurers,”and “free-loaders” who do not resign
themselves to transit through the electoral impasse,waiting for that
hypothetical day when the revolution miraculously descends from the
idealistic sky in which it is confined by the cheap chatter of the
capitulators.
This absurd conception, disguised with pseudo-scientific phraseologies,
was for a long time the predominant one on the left. Faced with each
failure, faced with each defeat of the revolution,they are once again
rehabilitating it as an inviolable dogma. Faced with each triumph of the
revolution they are adopting it and inventing pseudo-demonstrations
attempting to show that in reality, the revolution advances when
applying the doctrines …of the reformists.
But despite their inexhaustible “polemical” resources, the reformists
can not and will not destroy the facts. And it is in the terrain of
facts that the viability of armed struggle has been demonstrated and
already definitively incorporated into the political strategy of the
revolutionary organizations.
The prevailing problem concerns the precise characteristics that this
strategy must cover in each social, national or regional formation.
A polemic concerning the adoption of the urban or rural guerrilla as
exclusive or excluding forms is not what is being offered.The core of
the useful analysis which can be made regarding the experience of past
or current armed struggle does not lie there. Rather, the central theme
is the analysis of the foquista conception, which in its primary and
orthodox formulation held up the rural guerrilla as a priority and
exclusive form, but which later was also adapted to urban guerrilla
forms . It is this foquista conception, in all its variants that is in
crisis and not armed struggle, which maintains its validity. We conceive
of armed struggle as a fundamental aspect of the political practice of a
clandestine party that also acts at a mass level, based on a harmonious
and global strategy. It is this correct conception of the struggle,which
is reaffirmed by the collected experience.
The development of the struggle in recent years has totally changed the
terms by which the struggle in Latin America traditionally arose. It
meant overcoming, surely definitively, a long stage in which that
struggle had been conceived according to two patterns:
union, with vindicating content, primarily concerning wages and
processed via traditional methods (stoppages, strikes, events, etc.)
practiced within the framework of bourgeois legality.
parties with their traditional methods (public venues, events,
propaganda, publications, ideological diffusion, etc.) aimed decisively
at obtaining electoral results.
The way to reach power (falsely identified with the government) was the
vote. Obtaining increasingly numerous parliamentary representation
signified stages towards that outcome. Violence at both the economic and
political levels of the class struggle, they said, was negative since it
implied putting up obstacles, “pretextual” obstacles to the electoral
path.Conceived as the only possible path to reach “power” and this being
the cardinal problem of political practice, everything had to contribute
to keeping this path open. In other words: if it is politically decisive
to obtain power by the electoral route and the elections meant something
“legal,” you had to be within the law to be able to vote … and thus be
able to come to power.
This has been and is the core of the reformist, electoralist political
approach. Based on that approach all violence should be rejected because
it endangers the elections, and therefore, the possibility of coming to
power. This “argumentation” is complemented by identifying legalism with
the possibility of carrying out any type of mass activity. Even at the
union level, “contact with the masses” can only be maintained by acting
“legally.” Violence only gives “pretexts” for repression, repression
that fatally “isolates,” and thus part of the reasoning that reformists
make. At the level of the economic struggle, violence acts as a
“pretext” for repression, isolates and harms mass activity and is even
offered as a pretext for the reaction to hinder the only way —
necessarily electoral and therefore necessarily legal — to reach power.
It would then be “infantilism” and “spontaneity” and the reformists prey
on the errors of anarcho-syndicalism, accusing it of subordinating,
effectively, the political level to the economic level of the class
struggle; by not proposing a clear solution to the problem of the
destruction of bourgeois power, it offers too easy of “a gift” for
criticism by the reformists.
For years on our part — we have repeated it for the doubters — we
maintain that the objective of violence at the level of the economic
struggle, IS NOT ONLY and NOT even principally the obtaining of economic
demands in themselves. Rather, the violence in the economic struggle has
as a function to contribute — let it be clearly understood, TO
CONTRIBUTE — to raising the level of those struggles to a political
level. To contribute (together with the other means: propaganda,
ideological struggle, public and legal struggle or not) to elevate the
economic struggle, as much as possible, to the level of political
struggle. To contribute toward raising the union awareness of economic
interest that animates the economic struggle. To contribute, as we say,
to elevating it to political consciousness, of political interest, which
is the consciousness necessary to destroy bourgeois political power —
the bourgeois state — the ultimate objective of all revolutionary
political practice.
Destruction of the capitalist state, destruction of bourgeois power,
that is necessarily violent and cannot be achieved by (assuming that it
can be …) traversing through elections to occupy certain official
positions (in the Chambers or even of the Presidency), as those are only
some elements and not even the most important ones, through which
bourgeois power operates.And as it is impossible and has never been
seen, nor can anyone sensibly claim that the capitalist state is
“extinguished” to make way for socialism, nor that the bourgeoisie will
“peacefully” donate its properties to the people, or will peacefully
renounce its domination and its power, they must be destroyed by force.
Only those with bourgeois shamelessness, knowingly lying, speak of
capitalism as having changed in its essence. That it is now “capitalism
of the people” as the Yankee and Korean ideologues say here, with Rafael
Caldera repeating them. Only the wise guys — or simpleton — reformists
believe that they will change it, little by little, with “wise”
parliamentary laws. Or that there may be a “good” capitalism, led by a
“national bourgeoisie,” which some people invent whenever things get
half ugly …
The affirmation of that necessity for revolutionary violence, the
necessity for revolution, and the theoretical-practical overcoming of
petty-bourgeois reformism (nationalist or democratic, “populist,” as
they say) or worker (social-democratic, Trotskyist, or communist ,
“Marxist,” as they say) has been the fundamental contribution that the
armed organizations of Latin America have made to the ascending process
of the struggles of our peoples.
An organization is only truly revolutionary if the problem of power is
really posed and resolved and the problem of power is solved only with
an adequate line on the practice of violence, that is, with an adequate
military line. The demonstration of which is that there will only be
socialism with revolution, that is with the violent destruction of the
bourgeois state. That there will only be violent destruction of the
state, of bourgeois power, with an adequate political-military practice,
are all contributions made in these years by the armed organizations of
the continent. In other words,no organization is truly revolutionary
until it addresses and solves the problems of the violent, military
aspect of its political practice.
There is no revolutionary politics without revolutionary theory. There
is no revolutionary politics without a revolutionary military line. All
of this has become clear and clarifying this has been an invaluable
contribution. It has advanced the class struggle at all levels.
But reality is dialectical. When certain findings have been made, new
problems arise from these findings. When you have reached a higher,more
elevated level of comprehension, practice, and experience (and
understanding — except for coffee house charlatans — always indicates
experience and practice) new problems, also at a higher, finer level ,
they require our attention and must be resolved.
Our country has not been, as some predicted, an exception in the process
of advancing the Latin American revolution.Here we have also largely
lived those experiences. Here there has been and continues to be a vast
and prolific political-military practice. To analyze it, delve into its
content, and really understand the causes and the meaning of its
advances and setbacks, is a decisive task of today that we can not
escape.
The practice of urban guerrilla warfare in our country by the UTC of the
MLN meant, from the beginning, the introduction of variants in the
schema of orthodox Foquismo. The most obvious being: the urban character
of the guerrilla, which at the time many had denied as viable.
But the guerrillas basically reframe two political problems:
guerrilla warfare, includes the link between the guerrillas and the
masses as well as the policy to be developed in relation to this.In
other words, the problem of the concrete modalities according to which,
when the guerrillas act in an urban environment, they politically
capitalize on the popular sympathy that can promote their action;
repressive apparatus will occur through urban guerrilla practice, a
prerequisite for the destruction of bourgeois power.
The mere formulation of these two questions clearly leads us to ask two
preceding questions, because the answers that are offered will depend on
the type of solution we give to the two problems raised above.
The two questions are: (1^(st)) What is the guerrilla for, what are its
objectives, its program? (2^(nd)) When does the guerrilla struggle begin
and when does it end?
(1^(st)) What is the guerrilla for, what are its objectives, its
program? There have been guerrillas whose objective was only the
conquest of national independence. Putting it into class terms, this
independence means substituting direct political domination by the
imperialist metropolitan bourgeoisie, exercised through the bourgeois,
metropolitan state apparatus, substituting it, we say, for the
domination exercised by the local bourgeoisie, through a local,
“national” bourgeois state apparatus.The national bourgeoisies in the
current, imperialist stage of capitalism are-we know-dependent
bourgeoisies and the states they create are only half sovereign.
We do not want to downplay the importance of these processes of struggle
for political independence, nor deny the possibilities of revolutionary
action that they can enable at certain junctures. We simply want to pick
apart, from a class point of view, the essence of an issue around which
there is more hubbub and confusion.
Wars for independence were those that were spearheaded by, for example,
the IRA in Ireland, led by the bourgeois nationalist De Valera; the
IRGUN ZVAL LEUMI led by the Jewish fascist Menahem Begin in Israel; the
EOKA led by the Greco-Cypriot fascist Colonel GRIVAS in Cyprus. All of
those guerrilla wars for national independence were anticolonial and
against English domination. They were not wars of liberation in a
socialist and anti-bourgeois sense.
The English imperialists did not want to leave, of course. The
guerrillas in the three cases cited, almost exclusively urban, waged
relatively brief wars against them. We will not give details here, but
brief and journalistic information, sufficient for our purposes, is
found in books such as “The War of the Flea” by Taber.
England — a decadent empire like France-resisted to some extent. When
the balance of economic and — fundamentally — political costs was
clearly causing a deficit, they left. Because the colonial armies can
leave. The “national” armies of the dependent national bourgeoisies, on
the other hand, when the revolutions are social and anti-capitalist,
resist to the end.They must be defeated militarily and destroyed. This
forced military task puts to the fore, from the outset, an essential
difference between bourgeois revolutions for political independence and
the revolutions of the dominated classes for their national liberation.
Of the three anticolonial revolutions that we mentioned before, the
respective urban guerrillas had the essential task to generate political
conditions that oriented compromise solutions between the ruling classes
of their countries and those of the imperialist countries. In Uruguay,
where formal independence is already achieved, the function of the urban
guerrilla is to contribute toward overthrowing the power of the local
ruling classes, allied to imperialism. Therefore, its political-military
task is much more complex and essentially different. Hence, it is not
possible for us to simply collect as a “model” the experiences of those
anti-colonial urban guerrillas, a temptation to which those who meditate
or write about these issues do not always evade.
The objectives of the revolution condition all revolutionary politics,
not excluding its military aspects. Hence, it will prior to any other
consideration in defining objectives, or in general terms, the nature of
the revolutionary process in which political-military practice will be
entered into.
In the wars for independence, the cause is “national,” which means that
it is the cause of the local ruling classes, assumed in general at the
level of concrete militancy, by the small local bourgeoisies, imbued
with the ideology of those ruling classes. This point needs to be made
since it is impossible to conceive of an idea of a nation, of a
“patria,”absent of class content. The nation is nothing more than the
bourgeois nation, where the bourgeoisie dominates, when this concept is
handled by the bourgeoisie. From a class perspective, the only
acceptable concept of a nation is one which involves the disappearance
of capitalism, ie: socialism. Thus the “national interest” of the
bourgeoisie has nothing in common with the national interest of the
working classes. But in anti-colonial revolutions it is generally the
bourgeois nationalist ideology that predominates and unites the entire
population behind the local ruling classes. The reality of the class
struggle is then obscured, behind “patriotic” ideology. In that case it
is easy to mobilize all the people, without distinction, behind the
guerrillas. It quickly obtains “national” support for a “national” war
…a bourgeois war. If the war is not anticolonial but social — and this
will be the case in Uruguay — there will be as many “patriot-isms” as
social classes are able to generate ideological tendencies.There will be
a bourgeois “nationalism” that will be the ideological cover for the
real imperial dependence. And there will be a worker and popular
nationalism of socialist theory and the ideological content founded on
it, that will be projected at the level of the national question.
The urban guerrilla will never have the support of “the whole nation”
here, no matter how much it proclaims itself nationalist. It will only
have the support of those classes that are interested in socialism.This
is the way it will happen because our revolution will be social and not
anticolonial. Because it faces and will face a bourgeoisie that, in
reality, no matter how dependent it is, economically, politically and
ideologically, it formally has already completed political independence
and has already structured its state as a “sovereign” state. Thus it is
useful to retain the conception that a national, anti-imperialist
struggle is not possible here on the margins of the class struggle. Put
another way: the central and overriding priority is the revolution
against the dependent national bourgeoisie and only through it will the
real struggle for the national cause of the people develop.
Any revolutionary military policy will therefore be a class military
policy, which in all its stages must coincide with the interests of the
industrial working class and other working classes. It is useless,
therefore, to try to arouse the support of bourgeois sectors around a
revolutionary policy, no matter how “national” it may be. The tasks of
the Uruguayan revolution are aimed at a transition to socialism and the
national aspect of these tasks is inevitably subordinated to that, at
its core-content.
There have been guerrillas whose objective has been to simply achieve
changes at the political level (to overthrow a military dictatorship,
for example) and to carry out certain socio-economic reforms (such as
agrarian reforms). This was the case of the guerrillas in Cuba in its
characteristic guerrilla stage of the Sierra Maestra. The guerrillas did
not start there with socialist objectives, although there were already
militants acting within its ranks from the beginning who were, without
doubt, socialists like Che.
The ideology of Fidel in his plea “History will absolve me” after the
attack on the Moncada barracks, is the ideology of a petty bourgeois,
both liberal and reformist. No more. The economic program of the “26 of
July” movement, under the influence of economist Felipe Pazos, was
developmental and postulated as a national capitalist development
program that included, as always in these cases, and as ECLAC advised,
measures of agrarian reform and diverse social reforms. The political
objective was to overthrow Batista’s military dictatorship in order to
restore parliamentary democracy… as bourgeois liberal democracy. The
socio-economic objective was the reform of land ownership, the fight
against foreign monopolies, “national” capitalist development,and
capitalist… “social justice,”
Tribute was paid to the petty-bourgeois utopia of an independent
capitalism, without the “injustices” and “abuses” of foreign monopolies.
A pre-monopolist and “humane” capitalism with the worker…
With this program and faced with a corrupt dictatorship, they applied
for the first time in Latin America, the strategy of a rural guerrilla
foco and the guerrillas grouped around themselves all the people in a
short time, including the Cuban colony, to send funds to the movement of
“Doctor Castro” that came out, without problems, with photographs on the
covers of “Life.”
What had imperialism been expecting? At first they supported Batista.
When they saw that he was spent they abandoned him. The “Marines” did
not land there as they would do a few years later in Santo Domingo. They
resigned themselves to the fact that “Doctor Castro” — after all a
ultimately young and inexperienced Liberal guerrilla, they thought —
would overthrow the military dictatorship. Later, the bourgeois
political trips to that little neighboring island would see to it that
things were put back on track democratically…in favor of imperialism and
its dependent bourgeoisie.
These Yankee forecasts seemed to be fulfilled at first. A bourgeois
lawyer, Dr. Urrutia, received the presidency from the hands of the
victorious Fidel. Miró Cardona was prime minister and respectable
figures formed his cabinet. It took some time after Batista fell that
the radicalization of the Cuban Revolution began to occur,with its rapid
turn towards new objectives: towards socialist objectives. We are not
going to describe that process, as it would take us away from our
subject. Suffice it to say that Urrutia had to resign, that Miró Cardona
fled to Miami,and that several ministers from this early period joined
the counterrevolution …
Imperialism and the bourgeoisie expected a mere replacement of
government personnel and came out of it with a change in the social
system. Never again would they be exposed to such surprises in Latin
America. Every revolution, henceforth, would count on foreign
intervention backed by the local bourgeoisie. In the Uruguayan case,
when bourgeois domination is ever in danger, an intervention will occur.
According to what can be predicted now, it is most likely that the
bourgeoisie of Brazil will intervene. This is another element that is
important to remember.
To recap, If we are to refer to either the historical experiences of
victorious urban guerrillas or to the triumphant experience of Latin
American foquista guerrilla warfare in answering the question from the
beginning: what are the guerrillas to be used for and what are their
objectives?, we must answer: they have been for the political
independence of colonies or to restore bourgeois-liberal democracy.
(2^(nd)) To the second question: when do the guerrillas start and when
do they end? We are already, of course, in a position to answer this.
The anticolonial guerrilla begins when there is maturation of a local
dependent bourgeoisie, who operating under the protection of a favorable
international conjuncture, launches a national movement. It ends when
formal political independence is achieved. The anti-dictatorial,
democratic guerrilla begins when the dictatorship, losing its social
base, becomes “unbearable” for the majority of the people, including
important sectors of the bourgeoisie. It ends with the restoration of
bourgeois democracy.
In Uruguay, when did the guerrillas begin to operate: Was there a
colonial situation? NO. Was there a situation with a dictatorship? NO.
But if it was neither anticolonial nor democratic, what was the point,
what was the character, and what were the objectives of the armed
struggle that was beginning? Responding to these questions involves
explaining the errors and successes of the MLN in solving two basic
problems that we cited at the beginning: a) that of the link between the
guerrilla and the masses and b) that of the military destruction of the
repressive apparatus.
In Uruguay, when they began to operate the foco, there was no colonial
situation. Uruguay is, of course, a dependent capitalist country but it
is now perhaps one of the countries where the action of imperialism is
exercised through less visible mechanisms for the masses. Imperialism
exists, but it is much less visible than elsewhere. It would therefore
not be an anti-colonial war.
There was no dictatorship. There was of course — and continues to be —
bourgeois class dictatorship, common to all capitalist countries, but
exceptionally well veiled here by the bourgeois-democratic state form.
Democratic liberalism is deeply rooted, as an ideology in the
consciousness of the people, including in the working class. The
traditional parties, the petty-bourgeois and worker’s reformism
(embodied especially by the Communist Party) invariably contribute to
consolidate the influence of the bourgeois ideological tendency within
the dominated classes. Meanwhile, workers’ reformism, which continues to
designate itself, however, as “Marxist-Leninist,” is becoming
increasingly integrated into this trend.
But if it is not anti-colonial, nor “democratic,” what is the nature of
the war that the Foquista guerrillas started?? In general terms, what is
the character of the armed action in Uruguay, at least in its initial
stage and for an extended period of time?? It has and will have for a
long period, a decisively social character, a class character. It will
have, therefore,a clearly socialist imprint and will be perceived as
such by the ruling classes who, starting with Cuba, see any armed
popular action as a danger, no matter what they say. The armed struggle
began and will continue to be fought in the interest of the dominated
classes against the interests of the ruling classes. It will represent
the interests of the working class, of the working petty bourgeoisie, of
the agricultural proletariat and also — in a stage at least — of the
traditional urban petty bourgeoisie (owners of the means of production)
and of the poor petty bourgeoisie and even the average landowner[6]
(smallholders, small and even medium-sized owners and tenants, etc.) .
The working classes are beneficiaries of a socialist regime with which,
of course, they have no objective contradictions. The petty-bourgeois
sectors do not have to have antagonistic contradictions, immediately
with the revolutionary process. Yes, the ruling classes do. The big
landowners, the commercial fraction of the importing and exporting
bourgeoisie, linked to imperialism, the industrial bourgeoisie
associated or linked to imperialism, the imperialist monopolies, the
financial fraction of the bourgeoisie, etc. In short, the entire
bourgeoisie which here, as in all of Latin America, is increasingly
dependent, and the imperialism on which it depends. All of them are and
will be counterrevolutionary.
The guerrillas and the war in our country, therefore, cannot start being
“patriotic” or “democratic.” Although it may become, in its development,
“national” and eventually, “democratic,” it was born socialist and in
the end, it will be its dominant trait. Therefore, it will be
confronted, from the onset by all the ruling classes. It has the
character of a class war even though it acquires, at an advanced stage,
a character of a national war as well, because if the process advances,
the bourgeoisies of neighboring countries will intervene.
This armed struggle is the highest level of a gritty and crude class
struggle, where no possibility of alliances with “national” bourgeois
sectors can, in essence muddy things, and not even at the stage when it
becomes a national war.
We enunciate all this here, in a tone that provisionally can be
schematic,but we only bring it up to situate, primarily, the
conditioning factors within which the foquista practice was driven. This
involved a particular understanding and a peculiar interpretation of
these conditioning factors, as we shall see.
Armed action thus expresses the highest level of the class struggle and
in Uruguay, as we say, it cannot express anything else. At least
initially.
But what has been the level reached by that class struggle here? At an
economic level and in certain sectors, this has had a wide expansion and
a relative deepening in recent times. There is a trade union movement
that is quantitatively important and capable of acting, at times, with
enough combativeness for demands of a preferentially wage type, although
it also asserts important political objectives, linked above all, to the
preservation of the autonomy of the trade unions as class organs
(struggles against union regulations or other attempts to integrate them
institutionally into the state). But at the political and ideological
level, the working classes are, to a great extent, prisoners of the
influence of the ideological tendency of the ruling classes. They
continue to conceive of political action in the terms proposed by
bourgeois ideology. The Communist Party, as the most important
gravitating force in the leadership of the workers’ movement, through
the coherently reformist strategy and tactics it has imposed on the
class struggle, both economically and politically, does nothing more
than consolidate the predominance of the bourgeois ideological trend.
And yet, the Communist Party itself becomes pliant to it, “importing” it
into the workers’ and popular movement, and at the same time it
increasingly sees itself as a prisoner of it.
The weight of the bourgeois ideological predominance in the masses,
reinforced by the workers’ reformism of the Communist Party, has muddled
in the eyes of some revolutionaries, the viability of a revolutionary
mass line. They identified the reformist modalities of economic action
of the class struggle with the economic struggle itself. This concealed
the perspective of a revolutionary practice even at the economic level,
the most elementary of the class struggle. Meanwhile, trade union action
seemed politically unprofitable, too limited or useless to some
revolutionaries, impatient with the slowness with which the working
class processes its rise from the level of economic struggle to the
level of political struggle. They did not evaluate that this transit can
be postponed further and may not even occur, if the economic struggle is
directed by reformism. They did not see that the economic struggle,
without ceasing to be so, but under revolutionary leadership, is the
primary foundation of the development of class consciousness, which is
political consciousness, the awareness of historical class interests.
But under reformist leadership, this process of maturation can be slowed
down, distorted, and frozen for long periods.
Even at the level of political struggle, the ideological backwardness of
the dominated classes, their stubborn adherence to bourgeois ideology,
electoralism and to the bourgeois parties in the elections, operated in
the same direction. What is there to do then?
Faced with this question, the armed struggle appeared to many
revolutionaries, as a shortcut that would shorten the process and
abbreviate it, by skipping stages. The disappointment about the
possibilities of political development of the masses set the stage for
the adoption of the foquista conception of the guerrilla and contributed
to their belief that two aspects of the same political practice were
contradictory. These two aspects, which are valid only if they are
dialectically united are: armed action and mass action.
Here is a clarification that we believe is just and useful to make:
underestimating the importance of a mass line, underestimating the
possibilities and the vital political necessity of an organized work
among the masses, the comrades of the MLN did not nevertheless negate
ANY role to the masses in the process. Nor is it fair, it seems to us,
for the accusation of “putchism,” of “blanquism” that was leveled at
them by reformists, before, in a low voice and from the sidelines and
now openly. The MLN tried not to be a society of conspirators who, with
a surprise coup, would take power. The MLN sought, from the beginning,
to arouse the sympathy of the masses. In this aspect their errors were
of another type which consisted: 1^(st)) In the way in which they
conceived of obtaining the sympathy of the masses and in the tactic
which they set up in order to try and obtain it. 2^(nd)) In the role
that they assigned within the process to the masses whose sympathy they
were gradually obtaining. Both errors reflect, of course, the weaknesses
of the conception of Foquismo.
A just revolutionary political practice in Uruguay today must integrate
armed action and mass action. But what is central, what is the priority,
and what is the main aspect to which the others should be subordinated?
The MLN underestimated the possibilities of a revolutionary political
practice among the masses. As a result of this, they underestimated the
political activity organized within the unions and the public activity
(legal or not) of political organizations. They denied the necessity of
centering political practice at all levels (trade union, public
politics, clandestine political-military, and theoretical-ideological)
from a clandestine party. They believed, paradoxically, that it was
possible to centralize the orientation of the masses from a solely
military core, from the guerrillas, understood according to the
conception of foquismo. And thus they wanted to put a military mind
toward the masses, yet did not recognize the degree of development
necessary to make a viable trade union, ideological and political line,
revolutionary at that level, which is the level of the masses. Social
unrest, ultimately rooted in economics, was not considered sufficient to
make a revolutionary line of masses, it seemed to them, while on the
other hand, they felt it was sufficient to enable the support for a
military practice that logically supposes the existence of a quite
elevated level of conscience.The political-ideological backwardness of
the working class, it’s only “economist” conscience, its “syndicalism,”
was invoked in order not to “burn” the few available forces initially
available by having them promote revolutionary mass work there. But at
the same time as they were demeaning them, the conscience demands, the
level reached by the economic struggles, and the combativeness
demonstrated frequently by them, was invoked repeatedly as proof of the
need to create a guerrilla foco that translated that combativity at the
political level into an alternative of power. The MLN hoped to overcome
this contradiction through ideological revulsion constituted in the
exemplifying use of violence.
As we said from the beginning, the foquista conception of activity of
the masses suffered from a contradiction which was never properly
resolved despite different variants in the foquista line.This entailed
that, on the one hand, organized activity in the masses was
underestimated, based on a very pessimistic evaluation of their
possibilities. On the other hand, it was assumed that the same masses
had the necessary political aptitude to accept and sympathize with an
armed activity conceived as a parallel to popular struggles.
To reiterate, it consisted of simultaneously considering that the
working class was too “green” to accept a revolutionary mass line, but
“mature” enough to accept an urban guerrilla military practice, parallel
to the struggles of those same masses. This military practice would be
parallel and neither coincidental or convergent with the workers’
struggles insofar as what was involved was the preparation of a
clandestine armed apparatus capable of disputing bourgeois power. All of
the mass politics of the MLN was subordinated to the achievement of this
objective. The sympathies of the masses would be obtained through armed
actions. In this way, a peculiar version of propaganda of the deed was
developed (“sympathetic” armed acts), complemented by periods with forms
of armed propaganda. There are positive and erroneous elements in this
criterion.
Revolutionary violence can and does have, here and today, a positive
scope of promoting class consciousness at the mass level. It does this
through violating the bourgeois “order,” demonstrating in deeds the
possibility of fracturing it, of challenging it…By demonstrating the
possibility of frontally opposing it and of lasting for a long time, on
the margins and against the bourgeois law, the armed practice becomes a
powerful element of disintegration to the system both at the political
and ideological level.
Capitalism is today more than ever, in need of unanimous acceptance of
the rules of its game. Tangentially in crisis in all its aspects, it is
generating a system of domination increasingly more rigid and closed. It
is its way of defending itself, of trying to endure.To the extent that
the contradictions inherent in the system deepen, it must apply an
increasingly coercive policy, more repressive at all levels. Since the
capitalist state is the place where all the contradictions are reflected
and condensed, it is the bourgeois state apparatus that assumes the
leading role in this increasingly tense effort to coercively slow the
outcome of these contradictions; their solution.
The Uruguayan social formation is an exemplary case of this. From a
process of economic deterioration, whose roots lie in the dependent
capitalist structure of our country, there is gradual deterioration at
the political and ideological level. The forms, the traditional
institutions at both levels, are no longer functional to guarantee the
rule of the dominance of the bourgeoisie within the framework of the
process of deterioration ultimately generated at the economic level. The
ruling classes can not resolve the contradictions that the functioning
of dependent capitalism generates. Resolving them would imply their
death as ruling classes. The contradictions that slow down and set back
development at the economic level can be resolved within the framework
of a socialist organization, but this would imply a profound social
change: a social revolution.
The ruling classes can not accept it and since — in our social formation
until now — they have not found a way out, a model, a capitalist project
that allows them to get out of the process of deterioration, their only
visible perspective is to repress. In other words, to try to coercively
prevent the contradictions of its system from finding a true and
definitive solution.
Why? Because that solution implies socialism. Because that solution is
outside the capitalist system, outside the system in which it dominates.
That is why the bourgeoisie seeks to change politically and
ideologically, to try to avoid change at the economic-social level. And
the political and ideological change, which takes the form of a
political-ideological crisis, is in a sense, regressive. It seeks the
return to political and ideological forms already superseded by their
own prior deformed and dependent capitalist development.
On the other hand, the regressive process, in itself, is not free of
contradictions. It does not have the more or less linear and fluid
character with which the reactionaries used to imagine it. The process
of deterioration is reflected and has repercussions in a particular way
within the different classes and fractions of classes…and even in the
different sectors of the bourgeois state apparatus. But to consider
these aspects would take us too far from the central subject.
The fact is that the process of deterioration (for which there is still
no solution in sight within the framework of dependent capitalism)
imposes the need for a monopoly of violence by the repressive apparatus
of the state. It further imposes an attempt to restore the predominance
of the reactionary ideology of the ruling classes in the ideological
state apparatuses.
In the context of the crisis of dependent capitalism in our country, the
violence from below, this anti-capitalist and out of control violence is
already intolerable for the system.
Accessing the scope of armed action, organizing and developing it,
definitively demonstrating its viability in Uruguay, forcing the
unmasking of the ideological myths of liberalism, and contributing to
the unmasking of the hidden levers of the real class dictatorship, are
historical merits of the MLN, whatever its final destination as a
movement.
How did the MLN achieve those clearly relevant results? It can be said
that they achieved them almost exclusively on the basis of carrying out
armed actions. These created facts, which for a long time, explained
little or nothing in their own sense, but were merely exhibited in a
brief but shocking reality. They gravitated by their own surprising
existence, in a medium so alien to the validity of armed actions. These
reached a dimension such that the advertising mechanisms of the system
for a long time not only could not hide them, but even amplified them
publicly. Through this peculiar version of the propaganda of the deed,
the MLN attracted popular sympathy. Time would reveal that the manner
and methods in which they obtained these sympathies had clear
limitations and even entailed serious risks.
The recruitment mechanisms of a revolutionary organization cannot be
confined to the sustained production of shocking armed acts. Proceeding
in this way, the entire political practice, the entire revolutionary
dynamic, is subordinated to the possibility of operating sustainably.
And if the sustained operations do not generate a fast outcome, if it is
necessary to operate sustainably for a long period of time, and the
dynamics, the development, and the progress, depends on the
effectiveness and the psychological impact of the operations, you will
be forced to vary the type of operations. If the situation is prolonged
further, it will have to increase its dimension and it will be necessary
to raise the operational level. If the possibilities of increasing the
political influence of an organization lie decisively in its ability to
generate a linear and ascending dynamic of armed operations, sooner or
later it falls into the trap of a strategy that is too rigid, and
therefore exposed to serious risks.
It is the importance, granted practically exclusively by the MLN to the
armed operations, which defines its foquista character. It is not, as we
said before, that they applied a Blanquist or “putchist” conception. It
was not that they wanted to create a secret organization of conspirators
that one day, by a coup d’état, would seize power. Foquismo — and the
MLN in this case — do not totally and radically deny the role of the
masses in the process. The characteristics of that role attributed to
the masses, the function attributed to them, is precisely what
characterizes Foquismo.
The foquista conception is interested in the masses almost exclusively
as support and cover for the specifically military action. They are not
interested in the participation of the masses as the protagonists of the
revolutionary process as they underestimate and even deny the need and
possibility of this happening. Foquismo therefore denies the need for
political work or for a coordinating line of work among the masses as
well as tasks which could politicize and develop their class
consciousness. It denies the need to organize and lead the struggle at
the different levels (economic, political, ideological) in which the
class struggle takes place. Nor does it consider having an open and
public political practice aimed at the masses. It thus denies the need
for a political organization, for a party. It underestimates the
political importance and the possibility of developing a revolutionary
line at the level of economic struggle and the need to intervene in the
orientation of union activity from the party with its own line. This is
a consequence of their disregard of the function of the party: if there
is no public political practice, what would be the point of acting in an
organized manner at the union level? In short, Foquismo denies the need
for a mass line, for work with and in the masses. It seeks instead to
capture the sympathies of the masses and their adherence, decisively
through their military actions and the psychological impact that they
produce.
Foquismo implies, in this sense, a total alteration of the terms in
which political action has always been conceived. It has thus far been
aimed toward a gradual and patient conquest of the consciousness of the
masses, the gradual processing of the development of class consciousness
from the elementary level of the economic struggle. In order to avoid
stagnation at that level, for the development of class consciousness to
be processed, the economic struggle should be under the political
direction of the revolutionary party. This revolutionary ideology
“mattered,”[7] as well as the awareness of class political objectives,
conscience, the knowledge of their own historical interests, of class,
within the working class, which was incapable of rising spontaneously to
its understanding based only on experience in the economic level of the
class struggle. Because even the perception of one’s economic struggle,
as a primary level of the class struggle, requires the prior acquisition
of class consciousness. Only the worker who understood that their class
has historical interests antagonistic to those of the bourgeois class,
only the worker, we say, who has already acquired class consciousness,
is capable of perceiving the economic struggle as what it is: as a level
— the primary level — of the class struggle.
Otherwise, if the worker does not acquire class consciousness — which,
according to what has been said, is political and ideological
consciousness, which does not arise spontaneously — they will be able to
make a thousand strikes for wages, large and even combative strikes — as
there are have been so many times in the USA — without ceasing being
prisoners of bourgeois ideology. They will carry out those strikes —
which occurs frequently now — with a conscience similar to that of their
employer: with the awareness of claiming an increase in the price of the
merchandise they sell. For that matter, an increase in the price of
their labor power, an increase in their salary… and not a change in the
social system that would entail the disappearance of property and thus
the disappearance of wages, the only way for the worker to stop being
exploited. They will demand less exploitation, but not that exploitation
disappears. Because in order to demand that exploitation disappears,
they have to present another type of society — socialism — and
understand their status as exploited. To understand why and how they and
others are exploited. And that already implies class consciousness.
The revolutionaries — rightly or wrongly — have always applied
themselves to this, to produce that qualitative leap from the economist,
sindicalera,[8] “trade unionist” consciousness and class consciousness,
to the political conscience. A leap that implies breaking with the
bourgeois ideological tendency, which is the dominant one because it is
the ideology of the ruling class, and accepting the revolutionary and
socialist ideology that expresses the historical interests of the
working class. That is, in the capitalist mode of production as the
dominated class. Foquismo as a conception intends to skip that stage. It
pretends that, as in Cuba, class consciousness is acquired later when
the revolution is already in power. Because it intends to come to power
not through a process that involves the prior maturation of
revolutionary class consciousness, but through a detour, let’s say, that
skips this stage.
Foquismo does not conceive of the revolution as a process of struggles,
where the masses through the experience of their participation in these
struggles and fertilized by the political-ideological action of the
revolutionary party that guides them, develops their revolutionary class
consciousness, until destroying bourgeois power through a revolution.
Rather Foquismo conceives of the revolution as a process of military
struggles, parallel to the struggle of the masses, with which it has
little or nothing to do with. A process through which an armed minority
generates, simply by operating, junctures which end up cornering the
masses regardless of their will, until they are obligated to accept a
revolutionary outcome that would put that armed minority in power.
The armed practice tends to generate political junctures that would
close all doors and close all the ways for action of the masses, other
than the way of the armed practice itself. The revolution is not
conceived as the culmination, the coronation of a process through which,
with their struggle, the masses open a path while developing and
maturing their revolutionary consciousness. For Foquismo, the revolution
is an outcome, practically independent of the political will of the
masses, with whom it is not necessary to confront, but also whom it is
not essential to win. The revolutionary outcome can then come about
without previously modifying, in depth, the political and ideological
consciousness of the masses. The only thing that would be required is
not to face them, not to arouse their hostility. It will suffice to
obtain their more or less superficial sympathy, or at least their
neutrality. At no time will their active participation be required from
the beginning of the process. This is so — and it is a fundamental
aspect for Foquismo — because, the cause of pushing the masses to the
side of the revolution, is, more than the revolutionaries…the
counterrevolution itself.
The function of the foco is to arouse and provoke, with its sustained
activity, a process of political reaction that suppresses all other
expectations and possibilities, while cornering and pushing the masses
towards the revolutionary path and victory. To the extent that this
takes place, there will be a crescendo of mass support to the foco,
which will result in the amplification of military action of the foco
itself. In other words, the foco that it tries to generate — is clear in
the MLN and which allows it to be characterized as foquista — is a
dialectic of armed action-repression. Each operation produces a
repressive response. Everything consists in being in a position to
survive and to carry out a counter-response, a major — or different —
operation from the previous one. Why greater or different? Because in
addition to provoking a response, every operation tends to produce a
psychological impact on public opinion. This dramatic effect is vital
because in the absence of presence in the masses, it is what can signify
and give political relevance to the foco. The frequent demonstration of
the bravery, audacity, and effectiveness of the guerrillas, is the only
thing capable of keeping on the table, the existence and validity of a
political practice that does not seek another form of externalization.
On the other hand, persistence and the operational dimension create the
prospect of victory, of success capable of producing the necessary
recruitment to broaden the foco. This would be locked in a military
practice only and lived on the basis of the successes that it obtained
in the military field.
When we began this series of notes we pointed out that the experiences
of urban guerrillas (Israel, Ireland, Cyprus) had developed within
struggles for political independence. Cuba, an inspiring experience of
the foquista conception, offered the example of anti-dictatorial
guerrillas undertaken for the restoration of the institutions of
bourgeois democracy. We have said that neither of these two situations
occurred in Uruguay when the foco began to operate: it is formally, at
least, an independent and “democratic” country. The emergence of the
foco was therefore based on reasons of a social nature.
A contradiction could then appear between the chosen method — the foco —
and the — social — objectives of its action. A contradiction that
emanates from the fact that social (socialist) objectives impose the
need for mass participation — which implies a mass politics — conceived
in terms differently from indiscriminate “multi-class” popular support,
which the non-socialist objectives (national or democratic) of the other
guerrillas could arouse. Especially when-as we have already seen — after
Cuba, the dependent bourgeoisies of Latin America have tenaciously
opposed any fracture of the bourgeois “order.”
This contradiction imposed various adjustments on the MLN’s conception
of Foquismo. It was based on the premise that if the guerrilla action
could be given an ascending continuity, if it managed to produce more,
more frequent, and greater impacts, it would also produce increasingly
harsh and widespread repressive measures. Before each important
operation the supporters of the MLN waited for the military strike or
the blow given by the MLN itself. To avoid the hostility of the masses,
the MLN took care for a long time to choose “friendly” targets and where
possible tried to perform bloodless operations without confrontation:
expropriations, destroying equipment, propaganda or obvious reprisals.
The alternative emerged clearly: if institutional normality persisted,
the repression appeared to be rather inefficient. Once a certain degree
of development had been reached, the foco generated a dynamic of growth,
maintained of course, based on a “crescendo” of operability.This growth,
while compromised by eventual tactical errors, seemed not to stumble for
some time with decisive obstacles in the framework of a “democratic”
regime. The other possibility was that democracy would give way to more
authoritarian, even dictatorial forms, which although they could be more
effective in repression, would generate more favorable political
conditions for the foco to extend its influence. Within the democratic
framework, repression was ineffective; outside the democratic framework,
a political situation of the type that traditionally consolidated
guerrilla armed struggle was created. Faced with a dictatorship, the
guerrillas would then go on to embody the struggle for lost democracy,
generating a situation of the Cuban variety. The MLN seems to have moved
within this perspective for a long time. As a result of this function,
the underestimation of the ideological and political struggle was
consolidated.
Any form of public activity, they said, was “wasting”[9] militants and
sympathizers, feeding a future in which only those who were able to
organize themselves for combat in the strictest secrecy would subsist.
Therefore, they said, it was negative to “give a face” by holding a
political line in public or participating in union political activity.
Politics was then, it was said, the patient preparation of a clandestine
armed apparatus capable of contesting the power of the bourgeoisie. With
slight variations, this line was applied until the end of 1970, when the
proximity of elections posed a difficult problem to Foquismo.
During the entire period from 1966–1970 in the expectation of the
dictatorship that would sweep all forms of political activity and even
public unions, the MLN shied away from any controversy with reformism.
Reformist positions were only discussed and confronted around particular
events in specific places. This was all the easier to do because, by
virtue of its own foquista conception, the guerrillas lacked “visible
representatives” at the public level of the masses and did not even
postulate a line or criteria for work at this level, which was generally
considered negative.This then created a well-known and characteristic
situation of parallel action without interference between the urban
guerrillas of the MLN and the Communist Party, which, without clashing
with it, continued to develop its reformist practice at the mass level.
When throughout Latin America the guerrillas were splitting with the
Communist Parties, in Uruguay both coexisted peacefully without
attacking or interfering. Each one simply left on record their disbelief
in the other’s methods and entrusted themselves to an indeterminate
future, to negotiate that “tactical” difference on which they did not
even insist.
The guerrillas could then grow without questioning or compromising the
reformist predominance at the mass or union level, all the while under
the cover of the abandonment that Foquismo proclaimed with respect to
mass action. Of course, in reality, the reformist practice and the
guerrilla practice were contradictory. The “agreement” and the
distribution of zones of influence could only be transitory. All
revolutionary practice is objectively contradictory to any reformist
practice. In those sectors — the students, certain unions — where the
sympathies for the MLN took on more or less organized forms, the clash
with the reformists inevitably occurred. Only the efforts of the leaders
and the weight of their authority based on the prestige of the military
apparatus, allowed that clash, implicit in the reality of things, not to
become generalized or acquire the dimension of controversy, of
ideological struggle along anti-reformist lines.
Of course, the leadership of the MLN reconciled to this compromise based
on the notion of its transience. Because it was thought that, within a
short period, the action of the foco would generate the death of
democratic forms of bourgeois “legality.” And with it, the death of
reformism. Since the subsistence of legality is vital for the Communist
Party, once legality disappeared, the Communist Party would be out of
the game and would be — what was left of it — forced to fall in line
with the MLN, the only organization that, due to its characteristics,
would have been in a position to survive operating under the harshest
political and repressive conditions. The MLN under these conditions,
would polarize — as had happened in Cuba — all anti-dictatorial opinion
and vanguardize the struggle for democratic restoration. Arms gave them
the possibility of leading a struggle of which it would be the military
and political vanguard. The embodiment of a military practice, then
fully validated, would be inevitably shared by all, since the
dictatorship would have closed all other doors and would have blocked,
by its very existence, all other avenues. Thus, by generating a
qualitative modification with its armed practice at the political level
(the dictatorship and a foco of armed resistance to it) the guerrillas
would find themselves, after acting against the grain of the situation,
a period of “introduction” in a situation of being socially validated at
the mass level. This would occur at the level of the entire people,
arousing multi-class support, since — as in Cuba — the anti-dictatorial
struggle would be of multi-class interest. The guerrillas then,
disentangled from the reformist or any other type of “competition” by
the dictatorial repression would thus, without “sterile polemics,”
without “theoretical talks,” without “divisions,” almost without the
need to speak, except with their actions and without ever ceasing to be
foquista guerrillas,would thus acquire the leadership of the masses.
This would follow since it would be the only thing left standing and
with a military aptitude then totally “functionally” transformed within
the conditions of the anti-dictatorial struggle.
Reformism, for its part, bet on the survival of democratic forms,
avoiding everything within reach which generated situations that could
compromise its validity. Relying on foquista disregard, it clung to its
leadership of the mass movement, carefully trying to remove it from any
activity that could compromise the observance of the laws. They
refrained from publicly criticizing — although they conducted an
incessant ideological campaign surreptitiously — toward the guerrillas,
to which they even dedicated, sometimes, very discreet smiles. The
leadership of the Communist Party trusted that the repression would
crush the foco before it could generate a volume of armed operations
sufficient to question the “institutional legality,” which their
reforms, — and all reformisms — need to live.
The absence — by virtue of the foquist conception — of a political
practice at the level of the masses, converging with the revolutionary
military activity of the guerrillas, enabled this policy, since in this
way, the existence and development of the armed foco did not come to
interfere nor question its control over the leadership of the mass
movement. Where the supporters of the MLN organized and acted with their
own criteria, they were harshly attacked by the Communist Party. But
since this happened only occasionally and in limited sectors, it was not
necessary for the Communist Party either, to launch a generalized
polemic specifically against the MLN. This is how this curious
parallelism could subsist for years, this “peaceful coexistence” between
guerrillas in ascension and a Communist Party that has predominance in
the leadership of the mass movement.
But from this situation, it was deduced that the Communist Party still
had a considerable advantage. Those who in the revolutionary field tried
to develop a revolutionary line at the level of the masses, those who
tried to make the two aspects of revolutionary political practice, the
military and the masses converge, found themselves pressed and
surrounded between two forces that that did not mutually interfere, but
rather developed in parallel without facing each other. Those who
postulated the need for armed action now, but simultaneous and
convergent with mass action, obviously suffered at the same time from
the attacks of reformism at the mass level and the competition at the
military level of the foquista action which channeled, decisively since
1968, the sympathies of the sectors most disposed to revolutionary
action. The polarization of the greatest revolutionary forces towards
the MLN and its conception of foquismo, which would not play in the
struggle against reformism, notoriously weakened the revolutionary line
at the level of the masses and ensured the subsistence of the reformist
predominance at that level.
It is true that the action of the MLN developed the forces of the
revolution. But its foquista conception did not allow a sufficiently
strong revolutionary position to be developed at the mass level for the
political-ideological reach of the reformist line of the Communist Party
be sufficiently clarified at a general level. That is the ambiguous
political result — a predictable result on the other hand — of the
foquista development in our country. What would certainly grow would be
the military potential of the MLN, the foquista guerrilla. Would that be
enough?
In April we can approximately locate the moment in which the noted
weaknesses of the foquista conception caused a crisis within the M.L.N.
This crisis was even recorded in internal documents captured and
publicized and had been reflected in the very clear visualization by the
leadership of the MLN of two problems to which we had alluded when
starting this series of works.These two fundamental problems are:
1^(st).) The difficulties that are presented to the urban guerrillas
when attempting the destruction of the repressive apparatus through the
guerrilla military practice exclusively. 2^(nd).) The problem of
widening the circle of popular sympathies aroused by the guerrilla
action. Based on the findings from that date (and always, according to
published documents) the MLN leadership considered that it had already
politically capitalized on the sympathies of those sectors who, by
possessing a greater politicization, would be in a position to be
captured through the foquista military practice. Of the two issues, one
had a “technical” appearance, the other more ostensibly political. The
pressing validity of both problems showed that the foquista practice was
beginning to reach the limits of its development possibilities. As such,
these two problems are intimately linked. They are two aspects, on
different planes of the same political problem for which the foquista
conception cannot offer, under any circumstances, a definitive solution.
Let us begin with the first aspect, which is the more specifically
“technical” problem, constituted by the difficulties that the urban
guerrilla (or any urban guerrilla) faces in achieving final victory
through an exclusively guerrilla practice and within the framework of a
struggle that is neither anti-colonial nor “democratic.”
In previous work we had pointed out that urban guerrilla practice, as it
occurred in international experience, — we have appropriately cited the
cases of the IRGUN in Israel, the IRA in Ireland, and the EOKA in Cyprus
— had the fundamental objective of obtaining national liberation or
national independence through anti-colonial struggles. We then added —
and repeat it now for the benefit of recap — that in other situations,
the urban guerrillas also had as their political objective, the struggle
against dictatorial situations. In other words, in some cases, it was
about obtaining formal national independence and in others, about the
restoration of bourgeois “democratic” regimes. When we insist on raising
the difficulties of the urban guerrilla as a form of military action
that is capable of achieving a final victory, we are referring to those
cases such as the MLN, in which the urban guerrilla action does not have
as its fundamental objective, either independence or “democracy,” but
profound social transformations. We believe that the specific military
difficulties that arise for urban guerrilla action, to the extent that
it is oriented towards social transformation objectives, are real and of
a general nature. In our opinion, the difficulties in obtaining military
victory over the bourgeois repressive apparatus while operating as urban
guerrillas, are not exclusive to Foquismo, but rather have a general
scope and validity. We think that whenever the urban guerrilla activity
has goals of profound social transformation, the specific forms of armed
action embodied by the urban guerrilla practice is insufficient, by
itself, to achieve victory, that is to say, the destruction of the
repressive armed apparatus.
In the aforementioned cases of anti-colonial struggle, the urban
guerrilla habitually operated as a factor of political pressure rather
than as a decisive factor in the military field. The urban guerrilla in
Israel, in Cyprus, and even in Ireland, only operated as a contributing
element toward obtaining a compromise solution, always feasible, insofar
as the objectives pursued, that is the attainment of national
independence, did not compromise the foundations of the capitalist
system. In other words, obtaining independence in all these countries
appeared to be compatible with the existence of the capitalist system in
them. A colonial power represses and resists independence movements
until the balance of costs (military costs and above all political costs
and costs to prestige) outweigh the advantages. At the moment when the
military and political costs of preserving the colony is greater than
the advantages derived from it, the colonialists negotiate and — as in
the cases cited — they leave.
Why is this possible? Because normally those who acquire power and who
exercise domination after obtaining formal independence are the local
ruling classes, the local bourgeoisies, that in a way achieve a “modus
vivendi” even with the previously dominant imperialist powers. There is
no rupture with the previously dominant capitalist system there. There
is no rupture with the capitalist system there. There is only, shall we
say, a readjustment within it. This does not imply underestimating the
importance of anti-colonial struggle movements for independence, nor the
possibilities that they generate. But it is useful to clarify the true
scope of the objectives pursued by these movements, because they
condition the possibilities and validity of the urban guerrilla as a
form of armed action. And since we are talking about the Uruguayan urban
guerrillas, we always refer to the examples of anti-colonial struggle
based on this methodology of military action.
In the case of dictatorships, that is, of political regimes located
outside of bourgeois “legality,” a somewhat similar phenomenon occurs.
Dictatorships resist as long as they can, but if the situation of armed
conflict sustained by the guerrillas is prolonged, that is, if the
dictatorship proves ineffective as a factor in restoring “order,” the
ruling classes finally end up abandoning the dictatorship and negotiate
the restoration of liberal-democratic forms. This is also possible, as
in the previous case, insofar as the dictatorial collapse and the
“democratic” restoration do not imply profound social transformations.
Such is the case exemplified by the Cuban Revolution throughout its
entire first stage, ie: in the guerrilla stage. As is well known, the
process of radicalization and deepening of the Cuban Revolution occurred
after the arrival of the guerrillas to power, that is, after the
collapse of the dictatorship and the liquidation of its repressive
apparatus. The radical character of the elimination of the repressive
apparatus was precisely what made the subsequent process of
radicalization feasible. It is well known that usually these
bourgeois-democratic revolutions stumble, in short, with the obstacle of
a persistent organized structure of the repressive apparatus in the
dictatorial stage. The fact that this has not happened in Cuba does not
change the bourgeois-democratic character of the Cuban Revolution in its
initial stage. It is well known that it took on a social, radical
reformist and ultimately socialist turn, throughout a process that
spanned a couple of years after the collapse of the Batista
dictatorship.
In short, if the foquista rural guerrillas could gain power in Cuba, it
was because the objectives that it postulated, even in this case, were
incompatible with the capitalist system and the country did not have a
deeply ingrained reformist character that made the objectives non-viable
within the framework of the capitalist system.
The guerrillas, urban or rural, as a form of armed struggle, will have
the possibility of obtaining victory insofar as the objectives that they
propose are not incompatible with the validity of the capitalist system.
We understand victory as the achievement of the objective pursued. In
other words, we understand that the anti-colonial urban guerrilla
obtains victory to the extent that it achieves independence, which is
the end that is formulated. Whereas the guerilla of democratic
restoration — let us call it that — obtains victory insofar as it
achieves the collapse of the dictatorship, which is the end that is
proclaimed.
What happens with the repressive apparatus? In the first case, in the
case of the colonial wars, the colonial occupation army leaves for its
country. Because the occupying army CAN leave the occupied country. In
the second case, in the case of the “democratic” guerrilla, the army
changes leadership or demobilizes, as in Cuba.
What both processes have in common is that the capitalist system is
still standing. The capitalist system does not appear questioned by the
guerrilla action and that is precisely where the possibility of victory
lies, through the concrete form of military action involved in guerrilla
activity.
What happens instead if it is a revolution of clear social content? What
happens if the profound change of the social system is implicit in the
activity of the urban guerrilla, if what is at stake is the system
itself? The ruling classes in this case can not yield. In Latin America,
especially from the Cuban experience, it has become very clear, both for
imperialism and for the local ruling classes, for the local
bourgeoisies, that there is no longer any room to negotiate. The ruling
classes cannot, in effect, negotiate their disappearance and cannot even
negotiate, at this point in the process, changes that are too radical
within the social system, even if they do not immediately imply the
disappearance of the capitalist system as such.
The possibility of the system to “digest” reforms in the
economic-political context of the continent is extremely limited. The
alternative, therefore, for the Latin American ruling classes and
imperialism, is to resist any type of armed movement that questions
their domination until the end. As a result, the army that depends on
these classes cannot leave their country.This army of the local
bourgeoisies can not take ships and planes and leave, they have to
fight, succeed, or capitulate. Nor can it accept that the “seditious” of
yesterday be the rulers of tomorrow. Those local armies will resist.
Their defeat will be the end of the system and therefore they will
resist until the end.
It is worth crudely asking: Can the urban guerrillas alone achieve the
destruction of the repressive apparatus within the military sphere? In
other words: Is the urban guerrilla a militarily suitable form of
consummating a revolution with objectives of radical social
transformation, toward a socialist revolution? Of course, also in the
case of a social revolution, the central purpose of the urban guerrilla
is to set in motion the political conditions that lead to the collapse
of the armed apparatus of the ruling classes; a collapse that would not
occur as a result of a military defeat in a direct military
confrontation, mano a mano, let’s say, with the guerrillas. Everything
seems to indicate that its function is not to look for victory in such a
confrontation with the army. Its function is to generate the political
conditions that enable this victorious military decision. But to arrive
at that victory it is necessary to develop other forms of struggle,
which are no longer of the guerrilla type.
In short, if it is a question of social revolution, the urban guerrillas
seem to have the ideal function of preparing the leap, the qualitative
transition to another form of struggle, through which decisive victory
can be achieved within the framework of war in the urban areas, which is
the insurrection.
The urban guerrilla, we therefore believe, is only legitimized as a
necessary and essential preamble and preparation for the insurrection.
Of course the insurrectionary process can take different forms, but it
always involves a certain volume of participation of mass sectors. In
fact, it is impossible to conceive of an insurrection without mass
participation. The criterion that must underpin this matter will not be
found in a plebiscite, nor is it electoral. Although this may seem
obvious, it should nevertheless be clarified, because often, perhaps due
to the weight of the electoralist ideology itself that the ruling
classes introduce into the proletariat, there is a tendency to assume or
conceive of an insurrectionary process as a kind of plenary
mobilization, or slightly less, of the masses. This is what is
frequently translated through popular statements that are usually heard,
such as “go out into the street,” “something is going to happen here,”
etc.
An insurrectionary process, of course, can include mass demonstrations
on the street, but clearly that is not what is substantial. Like all
armed action, an insurrection is mainly decided by operations, by armed
combat and not by demonstrations on the street. Therefore, when we refer
to the necessary participation of the masses in an insurrectionary
uprising, we are referring to a series of mass actions at different
levels with the understanding that the most dynamic sector of the masses
participates.
If we start from the basis that the direct participation of the majority
of the population or the majority of the working class, even, is
necessary, there would never have been an insurrection with those
characteristics. It is assumed that, when speaking of the masses, the
most conscious, most combative sectors are alluded to, that is, those
sectors of the masses that effectively, due to previous political work
developed by the party, are in a position to take an active part in a
movement of that type. Mass participation is what happened in Spain in
1936, it is what there was in Santo Domingo. By mass participation, it
is understood to mean the participation of a section of the masses, not
necessarily half plus one of the members of the population or of the
working class.
Another insurrectionary possibility that in no way can be ruled out in
Latin America, such as the case we already cited of Santo Domingo, is
one that can open a path toward confrontation between military sectors.
This could occur where one of them has been won politically, through
deliberate political work or through a situation which drove them into
power for the popular cause, for which they received and admitted the
support of the masses and eventually the support of the urban guerrillas
themselves.
To our knowledge, any form of insurrectionary action necessarily
presupposes prior military practice and the existence of a previously
organized clandestine military apparatus with sufficient operational
capacity and experience to channel, frame and bring an insurrectionary
process to a successful outcome. This should be pointed out because the
balance of experiences of urban insurrections carried out in previous
periods leads to surprising findings. To that end, it is worth referring
to books such as, “The armed insurrection” by A. Neuberg, edited by “The
armored rose” in Argentina.The balance of urban insurrections carried
out in the the 20’s, for example by the communist parties in Europe and
China, then animated from the Comintern by a revolutionary orientation,
shows that one of the fundamental factors of their failure has been the
limited prior preparation. In other words, the scarce prior development
of a specific military apparatus, professionalized, let’s say, in
military practice before the insurrection. Although the participation of
the masses evidently appears as an indispensable requisite, essential
for the success of an urban armed insurrection, the balance of
accumulated experience clearly demonstrates that the development of a
clandestine armed apparatus is another no less essential requirement for
success. This is valid even in the case that support is obtained from a
more or less important sector of the bourgeois army itself.
Of course a third element that must permanently be taken into account —
we hope to develop all of this more extensively on another occasion — is
the essential need for a political work about the repressive apparatus
of the ruling classes.
We can define three requirements as indispensable for the success of an
urban armed insurrection: 1) The participation of important sectors of
the masses through actions in different levels; 2) The previous
existence of a clandestine armed apparatus with already acquired
military experience, who are at the vanguard of the process; 3) The
existence of prior political work concerning elements of the repressive
apparatus. These three requisites obviously presuppose the existence of
detailed prior political work, which can only be carried out by the
party as an organization capable of developing, promoting and
harmonizing these diverse activities from a common center of decision
making.
This conception of the armed insurrection leads, once again, to the
conclusion that the structuring of the party is the fundamental goal in
the stage of processing the conditions for insurrection and not vice
versa. In other words, the armed action is processed through a political
center and the political center is not processed through armed action.
Allow us to be more precise, because when we talk about insurrection we
run the risk that this term will be a little lacking in content. Since
its inception, armed struggle in Latin America has been so steeped in
the notion that its fundamental and almost unique form is guerrilla
warfare, that in the general mentality, the term insurrection says and
evokes little. Or what it evokes is precisely the idea of crowds taking
to the streets, etc. When we refer to urban armed insurrections, we
refer to them as “Bogotzo” types, the “Cordobazo” type, or the Santo
Domingo type, with active participation, further, of an armed apparatus
developed earlier, all under the leadership of a revolutionary party.
We understand that in Córdoba, in Bogotá, in Santo Domingo, the
conditions existed for mass participation in the insurrection. What did
not exist in Córdoba, what did not exist in Bogotá, what did not even
exist in Santo Domingo (where that role was assumed by a fraction of the
army) was the prior organization of an armed, experienced apparatus,
capable of directing the process and in a position to include in the
process of mass actions the specific military operations that would have
had a critical significance. Of course, we will temporarily leave aside
the problem of stabilizing an insurrectionary situation in Córdoba as an
example. We are raising the issue and trying to frame it within certain
patterns. It is more than questionable, in effect, whether a regime
established through an insurrectionary process in the city of Córdoba
could be sustained. But we are referring to a specific stage of a
process of armed struggle trying to confront other hypotheses from the
foquista conception on the subject.
Perhaps it would be useful, to clarify this approach definitively, to
compare this conception with what constitutes the so-called “people’s
war,” also called the “Asian model,” which was applied in China and now
in Vietnam, originally theorized by Mao and subsequently adapted by Giap
to the Vietnamese environment. This conception is centered, like the
original foquismo, on the decisive importance of the rural guerrilla and
supports the need to convert it, through reversible stages, into a
regular army. The people’s war, the “Asian war,” as described by its
theorists, is neither more nor less than the process through which the
urban guerrilla, conceived of in terms quite similar to those posed in
Cuba, is transformed into a revolutionary army. It theorizes how the
guerrilla type action is passed to the open campaign, to classical
warfare, and to field warfare, through a flexible process, staggered in
reversible stages. Given the conditions of the war in Indochina, Mao,
and even more so Giap, insists a lot on the necessary preservation of
the possibility of retroverting, of reconverting the regular army into
local militias and of reconverting even the militia echelon into
guerrillas again, if the correlation of forces is too unfavorable. On
the other hand, this is what happened in Indochina, at a time when the
massive intervention of North American troops led the Vietnamese
commanders to return, for a relatively long period, to guerrilla
warfare. In the previous stage, when they were mainly fighting the
Saigon puppet army, the classical warfare stage had already passed.
In our days the development from the rural guerrilla to the rural war
has been reproduced again. Combat is already occurring again in a
classic campaign war because of the correlation of forces, and through
the process of fighting, it has become favorable again.The Vietnamese
war brilliantly exemplifies the degree of flexibility, of malleability
which is necessary in all kinds of protracted warfare. Malleability and
flexibility that is only possible, naturally, on the basis of a deep
level of politicization, not only of the personnel, but of the masses
themselves. It would have been impossible for the soldiers and for the
Vietnamese people in general, to “digest,” without serious
demoralization, the need to restructure the regular army (which by 1963
was already operating in field warfare) into guerrillas when the massive
North American intervention began, if there had not been a solid
political preparation work at all levels: at the level of the armed
apparatus and at the level of the civilian population itself.
All protracted war, regardless of the form or methodology that it
entails, requires the intensive politicization of military cadres and an
effective political work at the mass level, so that the turns and
changes that are necessarily involved are properly understood and
assimilated. Only from a narrowly short-term perspective could the
importance of political work at all levels be underestimated. Only from
a short-term perspective can the importance of a party be
underestimated, definitively, as the only suitable instrument to carry
out this political work.
We thought it useful to make this statement about the basic criteria of
the so-called “people’s war” to make manifest the fundamental difference
between it and the concept of war in urban settings that we are obliged
to develop in our setting. These materials we are presenting have no
other aspiration than to be a first approximation to enable discussion.
Consequently, the fundamental core concept of people’s war, is the
military outcome and victory within this framework is located on the
same plane as classic war. The military outcome of the people’s war is
sought through the confrontation between regular armies, through
campaigns of field warfare.
The formation of guerrillas, of bases of support with occupation of
land, the intermediate steps of local militias, all presuppose and point
toward a culmination in the formation of a regular army, capable of
defeating the enemy and its regular army in classic pitched battles. The
Mao-Giap theory shows, in short, how a regular revolutionary army can be
formed, on the margins of the bourgeois or colonial state apparatus, and
how it can come to victory in a people’s war, in a field war against the
bourgeois or colonial army. Mao’s protracted war ended. as is known in
the 1948 campaign, the year when the communist army “conquered” all of
China by defeating Chang Kai Sheck’s army in regular warfare. The war
against the French in Indochina, ended with the military defeat of the
colonialists in Diem Bien Phu, a defeat that turned the French command’s
calculated balance scale decisively negative and pushed France to
negotiate. In the so-called “people’s war,” therefore, one begins with
the rural guerrilla (as in the orthodox Cuban foquista conception) to
end with the people’s army, which is a field army.
Can this conception be transferred to the conditions of Uruguay where
the objectives of armed action are primarily social? Can an army be
properly structured within cities on the basis of urban guerrillas? This
seems to us extremely difficult at the very least. From a level of armed
action in the city, with characteristics of urban guerrillas, one can
get to an intense harassment of the enemy forces, but the decisive
factor is made through a popular urban insurrection.
The final stage of the protracted war conceived of in terms of “people’s
war,” or the “Asian model” consists of a military campaign within more
or less classical guidelines, that is a regular war between regular
armies. The final phase of the war that we need to develop in our
environment, starting from urban guerrillas, ends in an insurrection
that is also fundamentally urban.
We are referring of course to the terms in which this problem arises
within the framework of Uruguayan social formation. Of course, if we
project this problem to the general dimension of Latin American, the
position of the People’s War is not a priori ruled out, although it
would have to be subjected to a rather meticulous critique based on the
fundamentally true assessments of the “People’s War” formulated by Régis
Debray in “Revolution in the Revolution?” He pointed out that even in
Latin American rural areas, the situation is far from equivalent to that
of Asian countries, due to a series of specific circumstances: low
population, local establishment of a repressive apparatus, peculiar
characteristics of the social structure of the peasantry, etc.
It is evident that the fundamentally urban nature of the struggle in our
midst, both in its initial stage of urban guerrilla warfare and in the
phase of its insurrectionary resolution, gives it a more grave
importance, more decisive if possible, than in the Asian “people’s war”
to the political dimension of military practice. The military action in
urban environments makes the link with the masses decisive in the sense
that from the beginning, the operation of the armed apparatus must be
guided by a criterion of action by and for the masses.The urban
characteristics of the war politically condition it much more than any
other type of revolutionary military tactic, because the development of
the clandestine armed apparatus does not constitute, militarily
speaking, an end in itself, but rather a means of helping to promote a
political development of the masses.The successful insurrectionary
outcome entails the idea of this previous political work.
The insurrection can only be victorious insofar as this action of prior
political preparation (within which the activity of the urban guerrilla
is a fundamental element), has been fully developed. This happens
because, ultimately, the insurrectionary outcome will not depend
centrally on the prior military-technical development of the armed
apparatus, but rather on the efficiency with which it has managed to
insert itself and gravitate at the level of those masses, with whom it
will be possible to obtain a decisive victory through insurrectionary
means. The effectiveness with which the urban guerrilla has successfully
managed to insert itself will depend more on the correctness of its line
and its political action than on its technical development. Without
implying, of course, completely underestimating the need for specific
technical development of the armed apparatus. As we previously stated,
this constitutes an indispensable factor for any insurrectionary success
to the extent that they are the protagonists who spearhead[10] the armed
actions which determine the success of the insurrection. The correctness
of the work in the masses by the armed apparatus of course presupposes
the existence and action of a party that directs the whole process and
whose political practice widely exceeds the limits of an exclusive
military practice. The justness of that mass action, we say, depends on
the possibility of developing the conditions for the insurrection.
Some questions could be directed at the hypothesis that it is, if not
impossible, at least enormously difficult, to form an army (with regular
characteristics) based on urban guerrilla warfare. Thus we are
elaborating further in the hypothesis that the urban guerrilla as such,
can not obtain an open war military victory over an army in an urban
environment. In other words, what we are seeking to substantiate is the
assertion that the urban guerrilla can only rise, as a superior form to
an insurrectionary outcome and cannot be superior (at least without
extreme difficulty),to the formation of a regular army for decisive
action in the urban environment. That is, through a military victory in
a regular war.
Starting from rural guerrillas, it must necessarily go through an
intermediate formative stage into a regular army capable of developing a
classic warfare campaign, as a precondition to the military outcome.
Whereas, from the urban guerrilla it is not possible to constitute a
regular army and it would be necessary to pass directly to the
insurrection. Between the rural guerrilla and victory there exists a
regular war.
Between the urban guerrilla and victory there is only an insurrection.
Hence the extreme delicacy of the insurrectionary moment, since to a
great extent the insurrectionary experience is irreversible. An
insurrection either ends in victory or serious defeat. On the other
hand, the intermediate stage between the rural guerrilla and the
victory, constituted by a period of regular war, does not have as much
gravity as a political choice toward an insurrectionary juncture.
As a result, the urban guerrilla is condemned, let’s say, to be just
that, a guerrilla, an urban guerrilla, up to the moment, necessarily
very well chosen, of a generalized insurrection. It would be long and
surely untimely to state here all the technical reasons, which in our
opinion in Uruguay, decisively impede the conversion of an urban
guerrilla into an army capable of disputing victory with enemy in open
action, that is, in formal combat. Of course, when we refer to open
action, to formal combat, we are not referring to the insurrection that
we defined as the necessary culmination of the process of urban
guerrilla struggle, but to a kind of previous stage that in the foquista
conception of the MLN was intended to be defined as “war.” A kind of
intermediate stage, inserted between the strictly guerrilla activity and
the armed outcome. The insurrectionary hypothesis, never formulated in
precise terms by the MLN, could be implicitly assumed to be the
culmination of the process it defined as “war” or a “campaign of
harassment.”
It would seem clear that between the guerrilla and the insurrection, the
MLN glimpsed the possibility of a period of frequent, but relatively
important operations, which would become the equivalent, in an urban
environment, of the period of regular rural war conceived in the “Asian
People’s War.” This hypothesis is corroborated by the clear attempt to
extend military operations to the countryside. It could be considered
that what the MLN tried to put into practice as of April, was an
operational modality roughly similar to the one developed by Grivas and
EOKA in Cyprus. In other words, an intense urban activity paralleled by
the action of operative groups, quite numerically restricted, in the
countryside. Of course, this operational stage was not sufficiently
defined by the MLN leadership. Thus the terms in which things happened
do not allow a clear idea of the modalities and the objectives that the
M.L.N. leadership intended to achieve in their evaluation of this
operational intensification as “warfare.”
It seems quite clear from the published documents and from the facts,
that in April, the MLN leadership was considering a qualitative change
of the levels of action carried out until then. This would have
signified a responsive jump in terms of the dimension of the operations
that were being carried out. The fact that these operations did not have
the opportunity to be carried out, due to the development of events,
does not prevent us from considering that they were aimed at
incorporating the defense of “legality” as part of their objectives.
Thus, the MLN conceived that it would become the vanguard of a broader
popular movement that could eventually adopt the banner of democratic
restoration.
If the military repression had been overcome as the police repression
had been overcome before, it would have created a very difficult
situation for the Uruguayan ruling classes and for its already openly
dictatorial government. As such, the MLN policy could have resulted in a
foreign intervention. If this were to happen, they would have fallen
into the hands of the MLN, which in addition to the banner of the
defense of liberal “democracy,” would also raise the banner for the
defense of the nation. Such an event would have ended up ultimately
transforming the social cause into a national cause, with the consequent
expansion of the political possibilities of the Movement in the masses.
The guerrillas, initiated by social objectives, would thus be converted
to the extent that they endure and overcome the repression of the army
in the struggle for democratic freedoms and defense of sovereignty.
Since if it overwhelmed the army as it had before with the police, the
only recourse left to the ruling classes would be to open the way to
foreign intervention.
If this is really what was sought, it implies a serious lack of
perspective, a very erroneous evaluation of the military situation, of
their own possibilities and that of the enemy, of the correlation of
forces. Also, of course, an inadequate evaluation of the political
situation. That is, of the possibilities of the system to “digest” very
high levels of violence, without being forced to decisively break the
ideological veils that conceal its dictatorial essence and that allow it
to maintain the ascendancy and hegemony over broad sectors of the
masses.
This is not the fundamental aspect that we are interested in analyzing
now, but rather in insisting about the specifically military face of
this policy that the MLN intended to undertake in April. We believe that
the analysis of the characteristics of this change is verified by the
enormous difficulties that an urban guerrilla faces to reach higher
operative levels, those approximately equivalent to a regular war. In
other words, how the urban guerrilla is to a certain extent condemned to
be a guerrilla until the moment of the insurrection and can not properly
convert into an army.We will necessarily discuss this schematically,
because otherwise we would go too far into some of the reasons that
determine this.
In the first place, the quantitative development of the effectives
appears quite clearly as inversely proportional, say, to the degree of
security of an urban armed apparatus, which by definition, is always in
the presence of the enemy and exposed in conditions of dispersion to
repressive action. We think that one of the determining reasons for the
rapid collapse suffered by the MLN lies precisely in having exceeded the
limits compatible with security, in terms of the quantitative
development of its effectives.
This reasoning explains the small dimension that we systematically see
attributed to urban guerrilla movements. To that end, we refer to the
description of EOKA troops, for example, which is done in “The war of
the flea” and given by Grivas in his book “Guerra de guerrillas”; as
well as the description of the IRA troops in the same “War of the Flea”
and “The War of Ireland” by Vicente Talón. Similar references by Menahem
Begin were given on the IRGUN of Palestine in “Rebellion in the Holy
Land.” In general terms, it could be said that practically all the urban
guerrillas that have operated throughout history have had extremely
small numbers of effectives, measurable in quantities of no more than a
few hundred combatants. And never more than that. We reiterate that one
of the reasons that seems to us to significantly accentuate the
vulnerability of the MLN was their violation of this kind of saturation
law.
Another notorious circumstance is that the urban guerrillas lack a
rearguard, they do not dominate space, therefore they lack a safe are of
retreat on the ground. In the urban environment, the enemy is obviously
in possession of the entire territory and the only retreat that remains
for the urban guerrilla is the infrastructure that it generates.
The quantitative development of the effectives mentioned above
necessarily puts pressure on the availability of infrastructure, whose
development in turn, tends to be much slower and more difficult than the
recruitment itself. The growth of the combatant personnel inevitably
leads, at a certain point, to a “bottleneck” in the field of
infrastructure and related facilities. This seems quite clear to us and
is what the whole experience indicates. It is much more difficult,
especially when reaching a certain rate of operation, to obtain
safehouses and the assembly of facilities corresponding to a clandestine
organization, rather than in the recruitment of fighters. The experience
of the MLN also supports this assertion since, although there was a
powerful development of infrastructure, the availability of effectives
far exceeded their possibilities. On the other hand, in terms of
repression, what has been lost and lost without remedy are the
safehouses, which can not move, let’s say. And heavy equipment prevents
you from relocating with agility. What can most easily evade a
repressive action is obviously what can move and in this world what can
move the most are people.
At the end of the day, the scales dip to the side of the infrastructure
and the deterioration of the facilities correlative to the collapse of
the safehouses. It is precisely there in general terms, where the most
vulnerable flank of any clandestine organization opens up and it is that
vulnerability which grows in the same measure that the number of people
in these organizations spreads or increases.
In another aspect, even though the urban guerrillas are numerous,
because they always operate in enemy territory, it presents enormous
difficulties in concentrating sufficiently to be decisive in major
confrontations. As a result, it is an operational law to avoid this type
of confrontation. It is well known that for long periods, especially in
the initial periods, it is normal in all guerrilla activity to avoid
encounters with the enemy as much as possible. But it happens that
without confrontation, without “battles,” let’s say, there is no
possibility for the military destruction of the enemy army. By avoiding
confrontations, a decisive armed situation cannot be reached. The urban
guerrilla can achieve great political effects on the enemy, but the
function of this characteristic that we are noting, shows that it is
very difficult for it to achieve important military victories. The
difficulty in concentrating, an effect of always operating in enemy
territory, determines that in direct confrontations, the urban guerrilla
is normally weaker than its opponent, which entails the need to avoid
these confrontations altogether and therefore the technical
impossibility of achieving the destruction of the opposing army.
In short, the urban guerrilla, until the insurrectionary moment, is
confined to the strategic defensive, however much it may
circumstantially take the tactical offensive. It can only hit the enemy
sporadically, waging a war without a territorial dimension and therefore
without fronts and sustained actions. While the enemy doesn’t have
stable fronts either, since these are created and disappear in each
action, they nevertheless control the terrain and have the strategic
offensive permanently in their hands.
Military victory requires, in a way, going on the strategic offensive.
The impossibility for the guerrillas to move toward a strategic
offensive transfers the “effects” of the offensive to the political
sphere. The only decisive military offensive in an urban setting that
can achieve the destruction of the repressive apparatus is the
insurrection, which in turn is an irreversible eventuality. Either the
final victory is obtained or it means a serious defeat at the military
level.
Ultimately, the urban guerrilla seems to be necessarily confined to the
strategic defensive. The possible strategic offensive for the urban
guerrilla consists in the insurrection. Since the strategic offensive is
an indispensable requirement for victory and since insurrection is its
only urban form, only through an insurrection can victory be achieved.
To this end, the insurrection, as we stated before, presupposes three
conditions: the availability of a clandestine armed apparatus previously
organized and experienced; the support of the masses or mass sectors
sufficiently important to gravitate toward the insurrectionary act while
participating actively in it; and a previous political work that allows
the demoralization or disintegration, as widely as possible, of the
repressive apparatus. Of course, an insurrectionary action presupposes a
careful evaluation of political factors and it is absolutely impossible
to deduce it from a voluntarist decision of the armed apparatus, however
important it may be. An insurrection isolated from the masses is totally
inconceivable. A campaign of harassment, such as the one proposed by the
MLN as of April, to the extent that it does not point to an
insurrectionary outcome, will not be capable, by itself, of bringing
about the liquidation of the bourgeois armed apparatus. Harassment, no
matter how intense, remains locked within the strategic defensive
characteristic. Only the insurrection presupposes overcoming the
strategic defensive and the passage to the stage of a strategic
offensive.
The obvious political implications of an insurrectionary process totally
exclude the possibility that it could be addressed from a foquista
approach. The insurrection requires the prior existence of a party and
the development of its own armed apparatus capable of operating for a
long period as urban guerrillas. The success of an insurrection can not
rely on the spontaneity of the masses and can not rely on the
voluntarism of the armed apparatus, operating isolated or more or less
isolated from the masses. The insurrectionary conception of the
destruction of bourgeois power demands work at two levels: at the level
of the masses to create the political conditions of the insurrection;
and at the armed level to create the apparatus that, prior to the
insurrection, structures its cadres and is the element of shock, of
rupture toward the insurrectionary process.
In the concrete conditions of our social/national formation, it cannot
be proven that a victorious insurrectionary process is enough in itself
to establish popular power in Uruguay. We must start from the basis that
the destruction of bourgeois power in our country is only the opening of
a new stage of struggle against foreign intervention. It would be absurd
to conceive of “socialism in one country” in Uruguay.
From the destruction of bourgeois power in Uruguay, the struggle is
internationalized outward and becomes national inward, in the sense that
foreign intervention is practically inevitable given the geopolitical
situation.The political intervention of the bourgeoisie of neighboring
countries or directly from imperialism, necessarily turns the social
revolution into a revolution in defense of national independence. At the
same time, it transfers the effects of the Uruguayan revolution to
neighboring countries. To the extent that the revolution triumphs in
Uruguay, it will not by itself, be able to establish itself here alone,
but it will be capable of initiating a stage of internationalization of
revolutionary political effects. Then begins the 2^(nd) period of
prolonged struggle against foreign intervention, a period in which the
fate or destiny of the region is involved and not only of our country.
According to this conception, Uruguay would not be playing for the fate
of the country alone, but the fate of the revolution in the region.
Uruguay constitutes the point of greatest vulnerability in the regional
imperialist chain, to the extent that it is a country lacking viable
bourgeois openings. The Uruguayan bourgeoisie has been unable to
formulate a project, a development model that allows it to escape from
the process of the growing socio-economic deterioration that it has
suffered for decades. The tendency toward deterioration in all spheres,
far from weakening, is steadily increasing.The deterioration gradually
moves from the economic level, the ultimate determinant, to the
political and ideological levels. The real capacity of the Uruguayan
ruling classes to confront the revolution diminishes to the same extent
that the deterioration deepens.
The dominant classes, we insist, have not been able and do not seem to
have the means to formulate a project to overcome this situation. Their
only response has been to intensify the repression, which although it
has earned them success in the military sphere, undoubtedly constitutes
a politically invalid response fraught with risks for the future. The
polarization of the struggles in Uruguay, due to this circumstance, that
is, to the lack of a bourgeois solution, is practically inevitable
insofar as the process of deterioration continues. Nothing suggests, day
by day, its halting, nor even its stagnation. On the contrary, for
periods it acquires a greater velocity. Going forward, it is this
situation that fully legitimizes the validity of armed action in our
country.
The viability of an insurrectionary outcome must also look to the
internal as well as the global situation in the region.The most
dangerous aspect of this is rooted in the bourgeois development of
Brazil. The inevitable internationalization of the Uruguayan revolution
as an armed process, that is to say, the fact that it inevitably ends in
foreign intervention, seems to suggest the relevance of a very prolonged
stage of guerilla struggle before reaching an insurrectionary outcome
whose situation must be very precisely chosen.
It is clear from what is stated here, that within the framework of our
strategic conception, there is also room for a “national moment” of the
revolutionary process, which can establish an apparent similarity with
the foco. However, we believe that the moment of struggle for national
independence is also subsequent in time to the social moment, that is to
the initial social stage, the stage of social motivation of the
guerrilla struggle. It is evident that, given the particular conditions
of our country, it is practically inconceivable to establish a
socialist-type regime, or the realization of profound social
transformations without counting on the intervention of the neighboring
bourgeoisie. On the other hand, our country is fully immersed in a
regional integration process, which is nothing more than the realization
of the general integration process, correlative to the stage of
penetration of monopoly capitalism in Latin America. In other words,
what is happening is that Uruguay, through various means, is becoming
increasingly integrated into the economic environment of neighboring
countries. It can and does constitute, of course, a zone of friction
between the dependent bourgeoisies of these neighboring countries.
Undoubtedly, everything seems to indicate that bourgeois Uruguay would
not be viable in the long term. Bourgeois domination in our country,
therefore, is largely associated with the prospect of a dependent
integration with respect to the bourgeoisie of neighboring countries.
The destiny of Uruguay as an independent country under bourgeois
domination does not seem to be viable. Bourgeois domination and the
persistence of real political independence emerge as contradictory
terms. In time, the country is going to lose more and more of its real
independence notwithstanding the maintenance of formal independence,
whose invalidity in the sphere of reality will be increasingly evident
to all. If, in the context of its deterioration and growing monopolistic
regional integration, bourgeois Uruguay is predestined to integrate with
neighboring countries and lose its independence, the only viable way for
this independence to last and become a reality is to overcome the
bourgeois structure in our country. Within the framework of the
capitalist system, Uruguay is destined to gradually lose its
independence. Only by ceasing to be capitalist can it preserve its
status as an independent nation. In this way, socialism and nationalism
truly arrive at a final convergence.
Every conception of a nation is inseparable from a class perspective.
The homeland (patria) according to the bourgeois notion is the homeland
for the bourgeoisie. The nation in the proletarian conception is only
the socialist nation and therefore the claim of national independence
and its consecration through a process of armed struggle is identified
with the struggle for socialism. Uruguay will be independent if it is
socialist or it will not be independent. Capitalism and growing
dependence are inseparable terms. Political independence is incompatible
with the validity of capitalism in our country, because it leads
inexorably to a growing dependency, not only to Yankee imperialism, but
rather to the bourgeoisies of neighboring countries who are also
dependent, of course. The Uruguayan bourgeoisie will necessarily be
dependent on bourgeoisies that are themselves dependent. On the one
hand,this process will be all the faster, the greater the neighboring
dependent bourgeoisies are developed. It will also be greater, more
acute, and irreversible as a product of the socio-economic deterioration
to which dependent bourgeois domination drags down the country. A real
national independence therefore demands the overthrow of bourgeois power
in the country.
Guerrilla warfare based on social motivations at a certain moment will
meaningfully acquire national connotations. A socialist insurrection, or
at least one aimed at radical changes, will undoubtedly also be an
insurrection for national ends.
We understand that associating socialist values with nationalist
ideological values is an important element to expand the sphere of
ideological action of the revolution. To this end, we do not want to
introduce ourselves here in a theoretical analysis regarding the content
and scope of “patriotism” as an ideology. We only want to formulate the
hypothesis of its implementation as an ideological element, without
implying a denial of the need for adjustments to place it in the general
socialist conception. It seems to us that the difference is, since we
are already in this, is the assessment that should be made of the
liberal-democratic ideology. We have already said more than once, that
the operational scheme of the foco supposed the initiation of military
activity based on social motivations, then later prolongable towards the
rehabilitation of liberal democracy (after this same action had
generated sufficient and prolongable repressive factors) and also toward
the defense of the national cause, only insofar as it motivated an
outside intervention. Regarding the link between the social motivations
of the armed struggle and the national struggle, we have suggested
something else above.
With respect to the link between social motivations and
liberal-democratic ideological values, we think that behavior should be
different. We do not believe that liberal-democratic institutions under
any circumstances can be vindicated as a goal of the struggle. We think
that an authentically revolutionary movement has to be proposed from now
on, and objectives of political organization different from the
traditional bourgeois-state to the extent that this is possible and
compatible with the level of popular understanding. The bourgeois state
structure must be denounced and fought on the ideological plane from now
on. Therefore, we do not share at all the perspective of a
pro-democratic struggle, as the foco would posit. The Uruguayan
revolution will be socialist and national, but it must not be
liberal-democratic. It must postulate a totally different power
structure. This implies the work of conceiving forms of popular power,
and the systematic criticism of the juridical-political levels of
organization of the dependent bourgeois state, and criticism of the
political ideology that sustains and informs this dependent
bourgeois-state structure.
Trying to sum up the military aspects of the foquista practice, let us
enunciate the following points: Foquismo in the MLN version postulates
the criterion that armed activity alone can generate the political
conditions of the revolution. But what does the generation of these
political conditions consist of? In the first place, the initial
activity of the foco polarizes the opinion of the most politicized
sectors around it. The sustained activity of the foco would generate
repression, and this would sooner or later lead to the alteration of the
democratic institutional framework. Following the existence of a
dictatorship, the struggle against it would polarize around the foco,
the whole of political opinion that was not already revolutionary, not
simply the left, but even liberals.To the extent that the foco was
sustained, always operating at higher levels, this would end up
generating foreign intervention. Such an external threat would then
unite the foco with the whole of the country. In political terms, the
guerrilla war initiated by social motivations, would later acquire
democratic political content and eventually, in the final stage, the
content of a national war. The foco would thus generate, starting in
reverse, lets say, the political conditions that traditionally (such as
in the Cuban case) generated the dictatorship. Instead of being a
response to a dictatorship or a stark colonial situation, the foco would
generate them. Instead of being a response to open dictatorship, the
focus would bring on the dictatorship. Rather than being a response to
direct foreign domination, the foco would attract direct foreign
domination. By virtue of this, the foco would capitalize without the
need for prior ideological struggle, that is to say, without the need to
smash bourgeois ideological structures. Rather, it would capitalize on
the very values of bourgeois ideology: liberal democracy and
nationalism.The foquista strategy pretends to be a shortcut precisely
for that reason: because it would be an attempt to quickly channel the
bourgeois ideology itself towards the revolutionary cause.
How would these political effects be achieved? In order to achieve them,
impactful actions are needed. The psychological impact requires a
“crescendo” of a gradual and sustained intensification of actions. If it
returns to already exceeded operating levels, the effect of impact
decreases or disappears. The political effects of operability will then
become volatile if it does not follow a sustained upward course.
However, a similar effect to intensifying or expanding the magnitude of
the operations is achieved by varying their nature. Thus the two ways to
persist in the achievement of psychological impact is to vary the type
of operations and increase their level in those branches or operational
variants already made. Such a psychological impact generates sympathy.
In the expectation that the democratic and national revolutionary
objectives are achieved by this method, they consequently are not
interested in developing this sympathy toward an ideological conversion,
so to speak, of a profound modification of the ideology of the people,
since this would not be necessary.
The whole process is conceived, of course, as brief, though it does not
rule out a period of some years. What is decisive is the operational
activity. The only thing that matters substantially is the development
of the armed apparatus. The political capitalization can be done in
terms of mere sympathy precariously organizable in a mass movement,
conceived basically as a fish tank where they can fish, as a place of
recruitment with recurrence to obtain the necessary support for the
armed apparatus.
The political channeling of the obtained sympathies does not take the
form of a party. This implies that the corresponding movement lacks a
clear line in political and ideological matters as well as regarding the
masses. The foco in reality dismisses a policy for the masses and rules
out the organization of a party, the only way to develop this policy at
the mass level. It also rules out deep ideological modification, even of
its own militants. Why? Because it is assumed that the armed activity
will generate a dynamic, which we described before, that makes all this
complex process, (visualized in the foquista conception) as preventable
and too cumbersome. The armed struggle abbreviates, it allows the
bourgeois’s own ideological values to capitalize for the revolution.
That is why there is no need to argue, not even with reformism. This is
unnecessary, since the dynamics generated by the armed operations will
drag reformism to the terrain of the revolution where it will be a
caboose or it will be destroyed by repression. In reality, the political
function in the foquista conception is deposited in the hands of the
reaction. It is repression that is in charge of persuading the people of
the advantages of the revolution. For this to be possible and easy, it
is necessary that the revolutionaries do not present the people with
complex options, ideologies, and problems.
It is necessary that the revolutionary foco sustain an extremely broad
ideological position which does not hinder anyone joining, since it is
foreseen that the adherents will be massive, in the quantitative sense
and massive regarding the ideological level of the adherents. The cause
is first social, then democratic and then patriotic. And everyone must
be able to enroll in it. The form of propaganda should not have
theoretical or ideological complexities, it should be accessible to all.
Folklore is the obviously most effective form for this type of
preaching. The propagandistic content is emotional, not rational. The
rational limits the possibility of adherence and is complicated; the
emotional reaches everyone. The theory is of course dispensed with. It
is the facts that define.
Fundamentally, it is about sustaining the morale of the movement and the
revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses through actions. That is why the
actions have to be constant, sustained, and increasingly important. It
is the ever growing importance of the actions that signifies the advance
of the revolution. It is the constantly increasing importance of the
actions or changing the terrain on which they are made, which sustains
the morale of the movement. Recruitment is defined around the propensity
to perform these actions. While the propensity to carry them out is
defined in terms of sentiment and emotional feelings. The feelings in
turn are generated through the actions. This ideology is viable,
obviously, as the engine of a movement conceived in short-sighted terms.
It is functional in a movement that is based on the premise that its
path will be made up of constant successes, since the possibility of
always operating in an upward direction implies permanent success.
Having a line sustained on the basis of always operating in an upward
direction also implies an underestimation of the enemy, one which is not
supported by any analysis of the situation. The facts have shown the
ruinous scope of this criterion.
From this short-term conception, follows the relevant need to constantly
expand the number of effectives. In order to create a clandestine army
as soon as possible. If the political juncture can be forced, let’s say,
from armed actions, it follows that the greater the armed actions and
the bigger the armed apparatus, the easier and faster the political
situation will be forced. The voluntarist conception is implicit in this
criterion. Also linked to this, is confidence in the multiplying effect
of the armed actions. Any type of social, political, or economic
structure can be deformed and modified with weapons, in the sense that
those who wield those weapons voluntarily wish it.
Political activity becomes for Foquismo, a subjective decision of an
operative group and not the product of a global process of society. The
decision of a more or less isolated group weighs more than the behavior
of social classes. This attitude fits in perfectly with the ideological
posture of certain petit-bourgeois sectors, in particular the educated
petty bourgeoisie (the so-called “intelligentsia”) which operates in our
country as a social force quite apart from the fundamental social
classes, largely as the product of the delayed level of consciousness of
the working class. It is difficult to specify at times, to what extent
this behavior of petit-bourgeois groups really responds to the interests
of the working class or rather to preoccupations of opening a path into
the current social hierarchy.
Be that as it may, this foquista conception militarily implies the need
to create a clandestine army. The need to create a clandestine army
poses a low level of requirements for recruitment. When we say a
clandestine army, we are of course not referring to an armed apparatus
of considerable quantitative dimension such as the MLN. A low level of
requirements for recruitment, coupled with a low level of requirements
in terms of the political-ideological training of the cadres,
accentuates their vulnerability in the face of repression. Politically
ill-trained cadres are particularly vulnerable to this repression. The
short-term conception underestimates the need to compartmentalize.
Meanwhile, the security aspect is underestimated to the extent that the
replacement of lost cadres is considered easy and the period of the
struggle is considered short.
We believe that these circumstances are at the root of the defeat of the
MLN as of April. It is very difficult for a movement that develops
within the framework of the foquista conception to be able to overcome
these weaknesses, which are only surmountable based on a long-term
approach. Even the open betrayals recorded at the leadership level in
the MLN, apart from their anecdotal aspects, show the underestimation of
the necessary political homogeneity at the leadership levels. Nothing
that has happened is too strange if one starts from the content of the
foquista conception. It is politics that should direct the arms and not
the arms that direct the politics. War is not just a technical problem.
It is — neither more nor less — than politics by other means.
Under what conditions could an armed apparatus by itself successfully
carry out a revolutionary action? Answering this question implies, to a
certain extent, defining the chances of success of possible new foco
attempts. These would be viable as soon as the material living
conditions of the masses have experienced a very marked decline, while
the bourgeois ideological predominance begins to seriously break down.
It would be viable when the channels enabled by the system, that is, the
union struggle, electoral action, public propaganda action, are
obstructed, or even being open, are of obvious ineffectiveness for the
masses.This of course would have been objectified in that situation, in
dispositions, and concrete acts of repression. In short, an armed
apparatus could develop political activity on its own, without a party,
when the spontaneous evolution of the process generated widespread,
intense, and highly pressurized social unrest. Foquismo would only be
viable in the context of great desperation of the masses who did not
find political channels to express themselves.
Foquismo would be viable, in short, when social motivations had a much
greater dimension and depth than they currently have. This would permit
it, in the name of these social motivations, to generate a dynamic of
massive popular support for the foco. It would make it possible to
effectively massify the process of armed struggle in a short period of
time. Only under these conditions would Foquismo achieve an insertion or
effective political capitalization of the masses. The configuration of
these conditions may still require a more or less prolonged period; this
will depend on the speed that the process of socio-economic
deterioration is acquired and the effectiveness with which this
deterioration at the economic, social, and political level hardens the
forms of political domination; and on the ideological plane in breaking
the bourgeois ideological hegemony over the masses.
None of these conditions was generated when the foco began to operate as
such, nor have they been generated at the moment. Nor will they be
generated with adequate characteristics if the process only works
spontaneously. This makes political action necessary in the structuring
of a party that operates at a public level, at a mass level, and
clandestinely as a military practice. Non-foquista military practice, of
course, since the conditions for the foco are not created. Naturally, to
the extent that these conditions of social desperation of the masses, of
hardening of the political structure, of deterioration of the
ideological influence of the bourgeoisie, are generated and accentuated,
the military aspect of political work will acquire greater and greater
relevance, to the extent of clearly predominating over the aspect of
public action, not militarily, but at the level of the masses. The
military aspect of the work will grow to the extent that the situation
at the level of the masses has conditions that are increasingly
favorable to a revolutionary outcome. However, at no time will action at
the mass level, the public action, the specifically political action of
the party, be expendable and cease to be necessary. In the perspective
of an insurrectionary outcome, this is obviously indispensable. As we
have said, insurrection means the active participation of an important
sector of the masses. It means carrying out prior political work within
the army, especially of course, in its lower echelons of troops, as an
essential requirement, in addition to the prior development of a
relatively important armed apparatus.
There is one aspect that we do not want to omit. In April the leadership
of the MLN considered one of the main obstacles leading to stumbles in
its action. It consisted of the so-called “anesthesia” of the masses in
the face of the impact sought by the actions. An armed apparatus can not
fix its strategy with the need to always perform actions in a linearly
ascending sense or by varying its field. A prolonged conception of
struggle implies the acceptance, as in Vietnam, of different levels of
operability, always reversible. A strategy that presupposes the
foreseeable increase on the part of the enemy becomes unadaptable to the
political situation of society in general. Even within the framework of
a process of socio-economic deterioration and deterioration at all
levels, this process has different rhythms. It can even go back in its
development. Situations temporarily favorable to the bourgeoisie can be
created. And an armed apparatus that operates on the assumption of an
ever-increasing level of operations is not in a position to relax its
military practice in response to these facts. Therefore, receptiveness
in the masses can be difficult or even inadequate.
The military practice inevitably implies at a certain moment, or at a
certain level of its development, the usage of “unpleasant” actions. The
acceptance of unpleasant actions supposes the previous modification of
the ideology in increasingly broad popular sectors. Only then will they
be in a position to accept the unpleasantness that inevitably results
from military practice at a certain level of their development. It is a
basic error of Foquismo to assume that military actions can become
unfailingly sympathetic, if the ideological conquest of the masses is
dispensed with, if the ideological conquest of the masses is
disregarded, at a certain moment they become unsupportive. But the
ideological conquest of the masses supposes the activity of a party, and
the acceptance of a long-term struggle.
The creation of a party, that is, the existence of a public political
practice linked to the activity of the armed apparatus, supposes
ideological definitions, it supposes sooner or later the adoption of
theoretical positions. It supposes of course the public confrontation
with hostile ideological currents. It supposes, in short, everything
that involves a public political practice. And this is incompatible, as
such, with the political ideological conception, which is what enables
the possibility of joining armed practice with the predominant ideology.
The attempt to reconcile a revolutionary practice with the bourgeois
ideological hegemony, materialized in the search to revolutionarily
channel the democratic-liberal and national conditions of the masses.
How to avoid the “anesthesia” generated sooner or later by operative
persistence? How to avoid the negative repercussions of unpleasant
actions? The MLN never found another solution to this problem other than
an increase in the operational level and the success of this alleged
solution meant that, given the increase in the level of operation,
certain responses of a political nature were going to be given by the
enemy. The collapse of the MLN lies largely in that the enemy’s
responses were not as predicted. Made vulnerable by its own quantitative
development, the foquista armed apparatus, however, was not able through
its military practice to produce the expected political changes. Like
the numerous clandestine army that it was, it was left gradually
isolated from the masses, enduring the vulnerability of its inadequate
dimension, without however reaping the necessary mass support. Using
torture, the repression hit the MLN where it was weak, at the level of
training of its militant cadres, in the lack of homogeneity of its
political leadership, which was fissured at the intermediate levels, and
and at its head by betrayal. Through the effects of torture, the
infrastructure was also quickly dismantled. The inadequate quantitative
dimension then demonstrated its danger. The mass arrests of militants
proved this
Acting as an enormous impediment, the immense equipment accumulated by
the MLN with a view to a “war” defined in specific terms of harassment,
ended up being one more factor of weakness. The fall of large numbers of
safehouses and large depots of arms and ammunition impacted morale in a
negative sense and accentuated the bad effects of the deficient
political training of the militants. After receiving a few blows, the
climate of demoralization won over the movement and hastened its
defeat.The decompartmentalization then manifested its disastrous
effects.
The precariousness of the political framing achieved for supporters of
the foco makes evident its limited utility. It even became impossible to
orchestrate a sufficient public campaign against the torture. A great
paradox occurred where in the totally inadequate ideological framework
of the MLN, a repressive action with characteristics similar to those of
Brazil or Algeria could be surreptitiously experienced, without this
provoking a public reaction of sufficient importance. A movement of
sympathy does not equate to a political party. An ideologically
amorphous movement of sympathies, lacking in short, another strategy and
tactic other than mere sympathy with the armed actions and the emotional
adherence to them is not enough. A political party is something else.
The foquista conception accepts the framing of sympathies in movements
of sympathizers with military action. The foquista conception does not
tolerate the existence of a party, which is incompatible with it. But
the movement of sympathizers demonstrates its inefficiency as a form of
public action. It is still valid that Foquismo continues to exclude a
public political practice despite the appearances that it came to have
in its Uruguayan version. Only a true political party with insertion in
the masses and with public action, is capable of assuming at the mass
level, the responsibilities inherent to its link with military practice.
An amorphous movement of sympathizers is not capable of properly
assuming those responsibilities.The Uruguayan experience proves this
conclusively. The failure of this kind of public action of the foco
necessarily correlates with the foquista conception in the military
level. Despite its adaptations, which we have accounted for throughout
this series of works, the Uruguayan version of Foquismo conclusively
demonstrated its error, its invalidity, both in the military sphere and
in the sphere of public action. Both failures are just the two sides of
the same coin. Failure in both spheres will continue to be inevitable to
the extent that Foquismo does not thoroughly review its conception. To
the extent that it does not stop being foquista, no revolutionary
movement will be able to effectively channel the efforts of the
Uruguayan revolution. On the contrary, it will contribute toward
conditions capable of endangering the whole process.
Foquismo, the validity of the foquista conception, can only contribute
to aborting the development of the Uruguayan revolutionary process. Of
course, this does not prevent the recognition of the motivation and the
revolutionary nature of the activity of the comrades who, sharing the
erroneous foquista conception, developed the MLN. Wherein does the
recognition of these comrades as revolutionaries lie? They definitely
validated the military practice they introduced in Uruguay. Their
attitude implies a profound and definitive rupture with the current
power structure. They attacked it in the most sensitive sphere, in the
sphere of questioning the monopoly of force by the bourgeois state. They
contributed to some extent, partially and indirectly, to deteriorate the
bourgeois ideological hegemony over the masses, even acting from a
non-proletarian, petty-bourgeois perspective. Are the comrades who have
participated in the foco activity revolutionary? Yes. Is Foquismo an
effective revolutionary conception? No. Foquismo is an erroneous
revolutionary conception and as such negative and dangerous for the
revolution.
[1] informal Uruguay
[2] This is referring to the series of coups in Venezuela, particularly
the 1948 one which overthrew the elected Center-Left government.
[3] Coverage tasks: a term widely used in the political-military
organizations of the time (especially the South American ones) and
occurring repeatedly by the FAU. It refers to specific tasks of the
armed front. “Coverage” can be both a task of distraction (“fun” they
also called it) in the middle of a military operation, it can be a
political cover (it became mythical that when the Tupas put together the
great escape from Punta Carretas, “The abuse” , groups of militiamen and
collaborators set up barricades and threw Molotov cocktails in
neighborhoods such as Cerro to distract the repressive forces and
journalistic attention there). A “cover” can also include setting up a
legal mechanical workshop in a space belonging to a local supporter as a
front to retain Molaguero, for example. Something that is “covered,” it
is masked from something else but it fulfills a tactical-strategic
function.
[4] Nucleation is the first step in the formation of either a new
thermodynamic phase or a new structure via self-assembly or
self-organization.
[5] rectilinear: contained by, consisting of, or moving in a straight
line or lines
[6] Small rural owners/tenants, quite common in the Pampean and Río de
la Plata areas of national capital who, often “could”(with lots of
quotes) enter into contradiction with the big landowners and
latifundistas (allied to international capital) and carry out some
“progressive” tasks in a popular strategy, especially in the tasks of
“national liberation.”
[7] This refers to the Leninist concept of the external implantation of
socialist consciousness in the labor movement. A conscience that they
believed should be “grafted” from outside the trade union organizations
(from the revolutionary party, the professional revolutionaries, an
enlightened layer, etc) since it is not something that the experience of
the working class itself could develop. This conception is shown to
strategically differentiate class anarchists from the Marxist-Leninist
currents).
[8] “Sindicalera” is a somewhat derogatory way of referring to a
syndicalist
[9] The literal word used here was “burned”
[10] Direct translate is vanguardize