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The years 192835 are famous in Comintern history as the Third Period, the
period of class against class, of social-fascism, and of the all-out struggle of
Communist Parties in Europe and the USA to overthrow democratic and fascist
bourgeois states in complete isolation from any other political forcesa
struggle which proved disastrously unsuccessful everywhere. When the line
shifted to that of the Popular Front at the Seventh World Congress, all the
Parties of Europe seem to have murmured Never again. Since 1935, the
slogans and strategies within which the Communist movement has conducted
the struggle against capitalism have been defensive: the Popular Front, the
Anti-Fascist Alliance, Advanced Democracy, the Struggle for Peace and
Socialism, Peaceful Co-existence, etc. Whether the Peaceful Road to Socialism
was explicitly advocated or not, the logic of the policy always postponed any
violent seizure of the bourgeois State to an indefinite future, the immediate
struggle being an economic one between the socialist world and the capitalist
world; the role of the masses in the capitalist countries was essentially that of
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But this geographical shift from rural peoples war to urban guerrilla is
not just a tactical shift to cope with the different conditions in capitalist
states; it also implies a fundamental change in the strategic concepts
themselves, one sometimes, but not always, acknowledged by the
advocates of urban guerrilla activities. This is the shift from peoples
war to armed propaganda. Even in the special case of Vietnam, where
the popular forces have no stable bases in the country, the NLF does
organize the whole people at night into a different social system:
popular power is exercised by the masses, proletarian dictatorship is a
fact. This is even more true in the cases of Cuba and China. But the
urban guerrilla, even at its highest pointsprobably the Casbah in
1958 and Caracas in 1963suffers from the problem of all terrorist
organization: the imperatives of internal security dictate a structure
incapable of organizing the masses, whose activity, even where they
closely identify with the guerrilla, which is not always the case, is
reduced to passive resistance.3 Even a theorist as acutely aware of the
distinction between armed propaganda and peoples war as Pierre
Vallires of the FLQ does not provide an analysis of the transition
between the two.4 Armed propaganda arouses and expresses the
masses hatred of their oppressors and can provide them with a sense of
solidarity. But it does not furnish the organization essential if this
ideological gain is to be translated into a political conquest of State
power. And the social and psychological difficulties of clandestine
3
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of ineffectiveness, and the Governments only response was the repression of workers and peasants, including a show trial of 149
Communists. Despite the repression, the working class was in an
aggressive mood and ready for civil war, while many peasants, urban
petty-bourgeois and soldiers sympathized with the proletarian cause.
The next section discusses the military preparations for the insurrection.
The Communist Party initiated these in the Spring of 1924, organizing
three-man self-defence squads which coalesced into groups of ten and
then into companies and battalions as the year went on. Four hundred
men were in arms by December 1924, though their arms were poor and
ammunition scarce. Loyal government troops in Reval itself were
reckoned at only eight hundred men; many of the rest, it was hoped,
could be persuaded to come over to the revolutionary side. Several
years of thorough agitation in the Army had done its work, though the
effects had been weakened by a recent turnover of troops. The Party
decided to launch the insurrection by surprise on December 1st, without any mass agitation or general strike until the strong-points in the
city had been seized by combat squads. The three battalions were
assigned their tasks: 1) disarming the officer cadets, seizing the arms
depot and the railway station; 2) disarming the police reserve, winning
over the tank and airborn division stationed just outside the city, and
the 10th Regiment; 3) capturing the administrative centres, the telegraph office, the parliament house, the Baltic station and releasing
political prisoners. The next section is a detailed account of the course
of the insurrection. For reasons of secrecy, the orders for insurrection
were not given until one hour before it was to begin. But it proved
impossible to assemble many more than half of the men in the combat
squads in time, or to brief them adequately on their complex tasks. The
result was that the first battalion failed except for the capture of the
railway station, and its surviving members dispersed. The second
battalion succeeded in taking the headquarters of the 10th Regiment,
but could not bring the troops over to the insurrection, as the combat
squad involved was completely unknown to them. The airborne division
was quickly overcome and agreed to join the revolution, but instead of
leaving immediately for the city centre, the combat squad waited at the
airfield for orders until it was too late. They were then surrounded and
captured by counter-revolutionary forces. The third battalion captured
the parliament building but missed the prime minister through
ignorance of its internal geography. The attacks on the War Ministry
and the jail were failures.
The insurrection started at 4 a.m. By 11 a.m., counter-revolutionary
troops had completely crushed the last pocket of resistance. Neubergs
last section is entitled Reasons for the Defeat. He outlines six organizational and tactical errors: 1) over-estimation of the demoralization of
the garrison and of the strength of the Partys military organization; 2)
the plan went far beyond the men available, a smaller number of targets
should have been selected; 3) the squads were unable to respond to
victory or defeat in their tasks; 4) the squads were not always able to
handle their weapons; 5) reconnaissance was inadequate; 6) liaison was
inadequate. But he argues that many of these errors, or all of them, are
to be expected in an insurrection (the confusion and incompetence of the
October insurrection are well known). The real mistake was elsewhere:
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What played the decisive role in the outcome of the insurrection was
the fact that the small groups of revolutionary workers who were
militarily organized remained isolated from the mass of the proletariat
after they had launched the insurrection . . . The Reval working class, as
a mass, was a disinterested spectator during the fighting. This was the
decisive factor. This isolation was not the result of the backwardness of
the masses, on the contrary, it was created by the Partys deliberate
choice of tactics. The Party had exaggerated the importance of the
military factor in insurrection and under-estimated that of the mass
revolutionary movement (p. 78). This error affected even the details of
the insurrectionary tactics. To illustrate this I shall give a quotation
which exemplifies the precision and concreteness of the discussion, and
supports Wollenbergs contention that this study, like most of the
others in this book, is based on eye-witness accounts: It was nave to
think that the men of the 10th Regiment, without communist soldiers,
would actively join the insurgents at the behest of nine unknown
workers. Imagine the scene: it is 515 a.m., still dark, the men are
asleep. They are awoken by an unimpressively small group of men
whom nobody knows; these men assure them that the insurrection has
broken out, and invite the battalion to take the side of the insurgents.
The soldiers cannot see this insurrection, the streets are empty, there
are no workers. They know nothing of any preparations for an insurrection. What could one expect them to do? The men of the
battalion, as should have been expected, remained neutral until they
could get more information (p. 74).
Hamburg, Canton, Shanghai
In Hamburg in 1923, the errors were the reverse of this: the insurrection in Hamburg itself was relatively successful and had active mass
support, but the Party did not try to extend it to the rest of Germany;
after a few days it called off the Hamburg insurrection itself. If the
leadership was to remain faithful to Marxism, it was not permissible for
it, once the insurrection had broken out and had achieved a number of
significant successes, to sound the retreat. This was all the more
impermissible in that the insurrection had been launched on orders
from the Party. One does not play with insurrection (p. 102). Canton
was different again: In Canton it was possible to seize power . . . thanks
to the negligible size of the counter-revolutionary forces present. But
this was only true for Canton. In Kwangtung province as a whole, the
balance of forces was decisively unfavourable to the insurgents (p. 126).
The first two Shanghai insurrections were technical failures, but in the
third, Marxs thesis that insurrection is an art was put into practice
in the most exemplary fashion. This victory of the Shanghai proletariat
was purchased at the cost of two previous defeats. The masses learn by
experience. The experience of the previous conflicts had shown the
necessity, long before the insurrection, of preparing carefully and
systematically for the decisive battle; the necessity of ensuring that this
battle will be directed solely by the party of the proletariat. In the third
Shanghai insurrection, the Chinese Communist Party made excellent
use of this experience (p. 147). But after the successful insurrection,
Chiang Kai-shek carried out a counter-revolutionary coup and destroyed
the workers government of Shanghai. Although it followed a basically
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Throughout Neubergs book, these tasks are attributed to the Communist Party. The Party both prepares and organizes the masses for the
insurrection and conducts the insurrection itself. But a Bolshevik Party
can never claim to organize the oppressed masses as a whole. Precisely
because it represents the interests of the proletariat as a whole in its
struggle against capital, it cannot organize the whole of the proletariat,
let alone the other oppressed classes, in a bourgeois or pre-bourgeois
political system. The bourgeois State, whether fascist or democratic, is
precisely designed to prevent the direct representation of the interests
of the proletariat and the oppressed. There is no arena in bourgeois
society where the representatives of the interests of the oppressed
masses can be the representatives of the organized masses themselves.
The Bolshevik Party can only claim to organize the vanguard of the
proletariat. Hence the conduct of the insurrection has an anomalous
location within a bourgeois or pre-bourgeois State. In so far as it is a
technical problem (an art, in the famous phrase), it falls to the Party as
the instance with the clearest perception of its necessity. But it cannot
be politically initiated directly by the Party. The Party has to fight for the
adoption of the tactic of insurrection by the masses of the people. This
is what happened in Russia in October 1917. The insurrection was not
conducted by the military bureau of the Bolshevik Party, but by the
Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. Of course,
this body, originally established by Mensheviks before the Bolsheviks
had a majority in the Petrograd Soviet, was staffed entirely by Bolsheviks by October, and the planning of the insurrection was carried out
by Bolsheviks. But the insurrection itself was an act of the Petrograd
Sovieti.e. of the people of Petrograd. This reveals the concept
absent from Neubergs book: the existence of proletarian State institutions simultaneously with the bourgeois State which has to be overthrowni.e. dual power.10 State institutions in which the masses of the
people are directly represented are a precondition for insurrection. In
Russia in 1917, dual power took the form of Soviets, and the insurrection was the relatively bloodless culmination of a period of Communist
agitation in these Soviets. In the shattered feudal State of China, on the
contrary, dual power was only possible by the construction and defence
of armed red bases in the countryside, so the process of insurrection
was enormously extended, continuing throughout the period of dual
power. But the same principle applies. It was this different form of dual
power that Mao discovered in Hunan in 1927.
10
It surfaces once, when he criticizes the German Party for its failure to call for
soviets in Hamburgbut only after the insurrection had already been launched
(see p. 103).
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