Marxism-Leninism studies the problem of the military organization of the proletariat in its organic relationship with the theory of class struggle and the State.
With the disintegration of primitive communal society, society became divided into classes and its history is the history of class struggle. Since the formation of nations, the question of national oppression and national enslavement has arisen and the history of class struggle has also taken the form of national struggle. Slave owners and slaves, landowners and peasants, bourgeois and proletariat, oppressor nations and oppressed, aggressor countries and their victims, antagonistic social groups, etc., have waged unceasing struggles under various forms, the most acute of which is armed conflict or war. Since time immemorial, countless wars have taken place in class societies. They have been estimated to number over 10,000 including only those of relatively large scale and occurring within the past 5,000 years.
The army is the main instrument for waging war. Its birth is closely connected with the appearance of the State when society split up into antagonistic classes. The army is a special organization of the State, an instrument of a given class which is used to carry out its political line by means of armed violence.
The class nature of the State determines the social nature of the army and its function. The army of all exploiting States has the following basic functions: internally, to keep down the exploited masses, forcing them to submit to the order of the ruling classes; externally, to conquer other countries and to defend one’s territory against foreign aggression.
Three types of exploiting State have appeared in the course of history. Therefore, corresponding to these three types, there have been three types of army: the army of the slave-owning State, the army of the feudal State, and the army of the bourgeois State.
In the course of history, those types of army have borne various names and had various forms of organization and recruitment in accordance with the specific conditions, but their nature has been the same: an army of an exploiting State has always been an instrument of the ruling class to repress the exploited masses in the country and to plunder and enslave other countries and peoples.
However, the armies of the ruling classes have not been the only ones in existence under exploiting regimes. To counter the armed violence, the exploited masses have also built up their own revolutionary armed organizations in the course of their revolutionary struggles. Even in antiquity, in Rome, the rebelling slaves under the leadership of Spartacus — whom Marx regarded as “the most splendid fellow in the whole of ancient history. Great general, noble character, real representative of the ancient proletariat.”(1) — organized a large insurgent army hundreds of thousands strong and waged a persistent fight against the army of the slave-owning State.
In feudal times, in Europe, Asia and Africa, etc.; armed organizations of peasants often appeared during insurrections, peasant wars and liberation wars in various countries which were quite large in size and had very great combat power. During bourgeois revolutions against feudalism, during the rise of capitalism, there also existed armed formations of the peasants and even of the workers in the stage of spontaneous struggle, fighting under the banner of the bourgeoisie.
Yet those revolutionary armed formations of the exploited classes, on account of their historical limitations and their lack of a correct political, military and organizational line, were, in spite of valiant fighting and the very great victories won at times, eventually suppressed by the enemy and betrayed by their own allies.
This betrayal revealed itself most fully in the bourgeois revolution. As Engels pointed out, the workers in France were armed after every revolution; “therefore, the first thing done by the bourgeoisie in power was to disarm the workers. Thus after every revolution won with the blood of the workers, a new struggle breaks out eventually leading to the workers’ defeat.”(2)
Only with the birth of Marxism and the appearance of the political parties of the proletariat, which became an independent political force passing from the stage of “spontaneity” to that of “consciousness” and bringing a qualitative leap forward to the whole of the proletariat’s revolutionary struggle — only on that basis could the problem of the military organization of the exploited masses be completely solved in the military science of the proletariat. The appearance of political parties of the working class — Communist parties — on the political arena and their leading role in the revolution in various countries led to the birth of armed formations of a marked revolutionary and popular nature, born within proletarian revolution or bourgeois democratic, people’s democratic or national liberation revolutions led by the working class. Especially, since the success of the Russian October Revolution and of the revolutions in a series of other socialist countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America, there has appeared for the first time in the world a completely new type of armed forces. These are the real armed forces of the people, of the State of proletarian dictatorship — the most progressive State in the history of mankind.
When they defined the historic mission of the international working class as the grave-digger of capitalism and builder of a Communist society, a society without classes and without exploitation of man by man, Marx and Engels at the same time showed the proletariat the most correct way to liberate itself: the working class, under the leadership of the Communist Party and in close alliance with the peasantry, should make use of revolutionary violence to shatter the State machinery of the bourgeoisie and establish the State of proletarian dictatorship, using it as a tool to safeguard the rule of the proletariat and transform society along the principles of communism.
The military organization of the proletariat is set up primarily in connection with this great cause of the proletariat’s revolutionary struggle. Rising up to break their fetters and overthrow the whole of the old world, the proletariat and the revolutionary masses must, of necessity, proceed to build their own military organization in the course of the revolutionary process. This is necessary because a material force can only be overcome by a material force, and only violence can help carry out the great historic mission of overthrowing the rule of the capitalists and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat. The ruling class never consent of their own accord to withdraw from the historical arena. The monarchic and bourgeois states always have large armed forces at their disposal, they ceaselessly see to the perfecting of those forces as an effective tool in repressing the toiling people in the country and carrying out plundering policies in the world. They always rely on this counter revolutionary military machinery to throttle all aspirations for freedom of the proletariat and the labouring masses and drown their revolutionary struggles in blood. Engels already pointed out that “basic characteristic” of the bourgeoisie even when capitalism was rising: “...the bourgeoisie has demonstrated to us how cruelly they can retaliate once the proletariat dare to face them, as a separate class, with their own interests and their own demands.”(3) The developments of capitalism and its deepening inner contradictions necessarily leads to growing militaristic tendencies to the expansion of the counter-revolutionary armed forces in the State machinery of the bourgeoisie. Engels wrote: “The army has become the main end of the State; the army itself has become an end: the people are only there to supply men and feed them. Militarism rules and devours Europe.”(4)
Such a situation forces the proletariat and the oppressed masses to have their own military organizations to counter armed repression by the bourgeois State, to smash their military machinery and overcome their resistance, to win and preserve revolutionary power.
Then, if the military organization is a necessity in the struggle of the proletariat to overthrow the bourgeoisie, in what form should it be built up?
This is a question that has been fully solved by the masters of Marxism-Leninism. As founders of the military science of the proletariat, Marx and Engels were the first to lay the theoretical basis for the problem of the form of the military organization of the proletariat with their famous thesis: to arm the working class, to replace the standing army by the armed people. “...The workers must be armed and organized. The arming of the whole proletariat with rifles, muskets, cannon and munitions must be put through at once... Any attempt at disarming must be frustrated, if necessary by force.”(5) This burning appeal to arms was issued by Marx and Engels in the 1850s after the bloody experience of the first great battle of the French proletariat against the bourgeoisie in 1848, and was considered one of the main demands in the revolutionary programme of the proletariat, at a time when insurrections and civil wars had become immediate tasks of the revolution in some developed capitalist countries in Western Europe.
The history of European countries from the late 18th century to the middle of the 19th century was also that of bourgeois democratic revolutions. Under the prevailing circumstances, the proletariat had to ally itself with bourgeois democratic parties against the feudal rulers and reactionary bourgeois and more often than not they had provisionally to bring those parties to power once the revolution was successful. In such a situation, Marx and Engels regarded the arming of the proletariat as an indispensable condition not only in order to smash the State machinery of the feudal class and reactionary bourgeoisie and so ensure the victory of the insurrection, but also eventually to defeat the inevitable schemes of betrayal by the bourgeois democratic parties after they had come to power. It is also an indispensable condition of maintaining and strengthening the political independence of the working class, safeguarding the fruits of their struggles, and creating conditions for the advance to proletarian revolution by using their power to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie.
Marx and Engels believed that once the proletariat was armed, it would have tremendous force. They themselves saw this force in the 1848 Revolution in Paris. Marx wrote: “It is well known how the workers, with unexampled bravery and ingenuity, without leaders, without a common plan, without means and, for the most part, lacking weapons, held in check for five days the army, the Mobile Guard, the Paris National Guard, and the National Guard that streamed from the provinces.”(6) And Engels eulogized the event as follows: “If 40,000 Paris workers were able to resist with such vigour a force four times as large as themselves, what great results could be achieved by all the Paris workers acting with discipline and as one man.”(7)
Developing the above ideas, in 1871, after a profound analysis of the experience of the Paris Commune, Marx and Engels set forth the principle that the concern of any successful revolution is to shatter the old army, to disband it, to replace it by a new army and to substitute the armed people for the regular army. Marx wrote: “Paris, the central seat of the old governmental power, and, at the same time the social stronghold of the French working class... could resist only because, in consequence of the siege, it had got rid of the army, and replaced it by a National Guard the bulk of which consisted of working men. This fact was now to be transformed into an institution.”(8)
Marx and Engels pointed out that under capitalism the standing army is the main instrument through which the bourgeoisie maintains its domination over the working people. To smash that standing army means to eliminate the material tool of bourgeois power, to eradicate the danger of resistance and counter offensive on its part. Meanwhile, relying firmly on the forces of the revolutionary masses, the proletariat must speedily build up and develop its own military organization by arming the proletariat and the revolutionary masses, regarding them as the sole armed force that can safeguard the success of the insurrection and develop the revolution. The Paris Commune has taught the world proletariat that vital lesson. “The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.”(9) Marx and Engels set great store by this experience: that it is the task of the working class to smash the bureaucratic and military machinery of the old State and replace it by a new form of State organization of the proletariat. They regarded it as a creation of great historic significance, so that later, in their 1872 preface to the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels considered it as an amendment of the utmost importance to the programme set forth by the Manifesto.
Engels also foresaw that arming the people was the form of military organization of the socialist State.
This forecast proceeded primarily from Marx’ and Engels’ principle that the victory of socialism could only be achieved simultaneously in all or most of the developed capitalist countries. Moreover by its nature, the socialist regime does not launch aggression against anyone, therefore it would be unnecessary to have a standing army. As for internal security, it could be ensured by the armed people. Engels also based his analysis on the state of the existing armies and of military art and techniques in the second half of the 19th century. At that time France, Germany and Russia were the only developed capitalist countries with large military apparatuses, whereas other capitalist countries, including England and the United States, did not yet possess important armed forces. Therefore, once the proletarian revolution was successful in all or most of the developed capitalist countries, the armed forces of the remaining capitalist states would not be very strong. In such conditions, and basing himself upon the experience of the Paris Commune, Engels believed that under socialism, and with its superiority, the people, armed, organized and militarily trained, would be able to defeat aggressor armies in self-defence wars to safeguard the socialist State.
From this analysis, Marx and Engels believed that in the process of socialist revolution, the standing army of the bourgeoisie must be replaced by the armed people.
Marx and Engels dealt with the question of arming the masses not only in the armed insurrections of the proletariat and in the military organization of the socialist State but also in national wars. Marx and Engels drew a distinction between just wars and aggressive wars and always supported just wars, wars of liberation and self-defence waged by oppressed peoples and victims of aggression. Engels made a close study of contemporary events, summing up their experience so as to point out the way by which an oppressed people should wage a people’s war and defeat the aggressors’ professional armies. In many works dealing with the history of war, Engels dwelt on the great role and effectiveness of the armed masses in just wars and self-defence wars. This idea of Engels was closely connected with the new mode of waging a people’s war advocated by him. Engels wrote: “A people who want to win back independence for themselves must not limit themselves to the conventional means of waging war. Mass uprisings, revolutionary wars, guerillas everywhere — that is the only way by which a small people can defeat a large one, a less strong army can oppose a stronger and better organized one.”(10) It is the broad masses of the armed people who are the fundamental elements for such kinds of war.
Engels praised the resistance wars waged by France (1793), by Spain (1807-1812) and Russia against Napoleon (1812), and by Hungary against Austria (1849), etc., as resistance wars in which methods of people’s war had been applied, operations by the standing army had been combined with combat activities by the armed masses, thereby bringing into full play the great forces of the nation and the country to defeat much stronger aggressor armies.
When analysing the failure of the Piedmontese in Northern Italy in their self-defence war against the Austrians, Engels pointed out, “The great error of the Piedmontese at the outset lay in the fact that they only used the standing army to oppose the Austrians, that they only wanted to wage the most conventional, the most bourgeois, the most regular war.”(11) Engels showed that the Piedmontese defeat at Novara “would have had no significance at all, if after this defeat a real revolutionary war had broken out, if the remaining part of the Italian army had at once declared themselves the nucleus of a general, nation-wide insurrection, if the conventional strategic war of armies had been turned into a people’s war, similar to that waged by the French in 1793,”(12) and if the Turin government had had the courage to resort to revolutionary war. And Engels concluded that Italy’s independence was lost because of the cowardice of the King’s administration, not because of the invincibility of Austrian weapons.
Engels drew similar conclusions when he commented on the Franco-Prussian war in 1871. France, Engels held, was fully able to turn the tables, even after the Germans had occupied one-sixth of French territory and besieged the two fortresses of Metz and Paris. He pointed out that at the time when most of the German forces were tied down in the occupied territory, on the five-sixths of the land that remained, France was still everywhere able to set up a number of armed formations to harass the enemy, cut off communications, destroy logistic bases, attack isolated detachments and so on, and in this way, force the Germans to disperse their forces, and withdraw troops from the above-mentioned fortresses to cope with the situation, so that Baden might have tried to get out of Metz while the siege of Paris would have become a “phantom”. “What,” Engels asked, “would have been the Germans’ fate, if the French people had had the same ardent patriotism as that of the Spaniards in 1808, if every city and almost every village had turned into a fortress, every peasant and every citizen a fighter?”(13)
Engels also spoke of insurrection by the armed people and of the irregular units of Asian armed formations, with their multifarious methods of waging a people’s war, as redoubtable adversaries of the European aggressor armies. He wrote: “They (the Chinese) poison the bread... wholesale, and with the coolest premeditation.... They go with hidden arms on board trading steamers, and, when on the journey, massacre the crew... and seize the boat.... The very coolies, emigrating to foreign countries, rise in mutiny... on board every emigrant ship, and fight for its possession, and, rather than surrender, go down to the bottom with it, or perish in its flames. Even out of China, the Chinese colonists... conspire and suddenly rise in mighty insurrections. What is an army to do against a people resorting to such means of warfare?”(14)
We can see that the view of the founders of scientific communism with regard to the form of military organization of the proletariat and oppressed masses was to arm the working class, to arm the people, to arm the revolutionary masses.
Marx and Engels laid the theoretical basis for this question in the insurrection to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the war to defend the socialist State and even in liberation wars and self-defence wars waged by oppressed peoples and countries under bourgeois rule which had been victims of aggression.
This is obviously a very fundamental view. It is a splendid success of Marx and Engels in applying the viewpoints of historical materialism regarding the classes, the masses and revolutionary violence to the building of the military organization of the proletariat and oppressed masses. It is a model of the correct appraisal of the decisive role of the masses in armed insurrection and revolutionary war. The great value of this thesis lies in the fact that, for the first time in the world, it shows the proletariat and oppressed peoples the direction and most correct way to create their own organization, of a completely new type, born of the proletariat and working people fighting for the people and for their class. With a correct revolutionary line, and when the revolutionary party firmly relies on the revolutionary masses, on the workers and peasants to build up and develop its armed organization, it can create an invincible revolutionary armed force.
This view has become the theoretical basis for building the armed forces in the military theory of Marxism-Leninism. It is an extremely powerful weapon of the proletariat and all oppressed peoples in the world; it gives them wings in the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the old world and create a new one.
The Russian Marxists, headed by the great Lenin, applied these theses of Marx and Engels to the new historical conditions, when the socialist revolution and the bourgeois democratic revolution are carried out in the period of imperialism.
It was at a time when capitalism was passing into the stage of imperialism that Lenin set forth his famous new thesis that socialism cannot be simultaneously successful in all countries but it will first succeed in one or a certain number of countries. At the same time, with the new theory on the leadership of the proletariat in the bourgeois democratic revolution and the transition from this revolution to the proletarian revolution, Lenin and the Russian Bolshevik Party worked out the military programme of the bourgeois democratic revolution and the socialist revolution in Russia. Lenin underlined the necessity of building up the military organization of the proletariat in the new historical conditions:
“A bourgeoisie armed against the proletariat is one of the biggest, fundamental and cardinal facts of modern capitalist society.... Our slogan must be: arming of the proletariat to defeat, expropriate and disarm the bourgeoisie. These are the only tactics possible for a revolutionary class, tactics that follow logically from and are dictated by, the whole objective development of capitalist militarism.”(15)
From the early years of the 20th century, while assuming the leadership of the 1905 Revolution and the Great October Revolution in application of Marx’ and Engels’ principle Lenin and the Russian Communist Party advocated replacing the standing army by the armed people, by the militia force. It was one of the main tasks of the programme of the bourgeois democratic revolution as well as of the socialist revolution.
Lenin pointed out that in Russia as well as in many countries in the world, the (bourgeois) standing army was used mainly not for combating foreign aggressors but for repressing the labouring people and waging aggressive wars to enslave other peoples. Lenin wrote: “Everywhere the standing army has become the weapon of reaction, the servant of capital in its struggle against labour, the executioner of the people’s liberty”.(16) This army, by its nature, cannot be the mainstay of the people. To abolish it is a condition for the victory of the revolution, to save the revolution from all the schemes of restoration by the reactionary force, to save the colossal expenditures needed for its maintenance. And instead there should be the arming of the people primarily of the workers and poor peasants. Under the prevailing historical conditions Lenin affirmed: “No power on earth will dare to encroach upon free Russia, if the bulwark of her liberty is an armed people which has destroyed the military caste, which has made all soldiers citizens and all citizens capable of bearing arms, soldiers.... Military science has proved that a people’s militia is quite practicable, that it can rise to the military tasks presented by a war both of defence and of attack.”(17)
Under Lenin’s leadership, during the time before the October Revolution, and together with the building up of the political army of the revolution, the Russian Communist Party and working class did their best to put this slogan into effect. They stepped up propaganda work among soldiers and set up Party organizations within the Tsarist army with a view to undermining its units and winning them over to the Revolution; they promoted the study of military science in the Party and actively propagated military knowledge and military training among the masses; they gave weapons to the workers and revolutionary masses; they established and strengthened the leadership of the Communist Party in all military formations; they organized workers’ militia and fighting units to serve as nuclei for the revolutionary armed forces; they built up a revolutionary armed force in which the workers and peasants would be united with revolutionary soldiers, a revolutionary armed force made up of three components; a) the armed proletariat and peasantry; b) the organized vanguard units made up of representatives of these classes; c) army units which had rallied to the side of the people. Thanks to this, the revolution was able to build up an armed force made up mainly of the masses of armed workers and peasants fighting under Communist Party leadership as a shock force for the revolutionary onrush of the masses. It was this force that played a decisive role in the victory of the February Revolution and later the October Revolution.
The victory of the Russian October Revolution led to the birth of the first Socialist State in the world, one which was subjected to hostile encirclement by imperialism. This victory ushered in a new era in human history and shook the whole capitalist world. Therefore, just as Lenin had foreseen, imperialism was bent on smothering the proletarian State at birth. This danger of aggression immediately laid the Soviet State under the clear obligation of arming to defend the socialist Fatherland against imperialist aggression and reconsidering its form of military organization.
Lenin’s great contribution lies in the fact that he not only confirmed Marx’ and Engels’ principle of arming the people but also developed their ideas by setting forth the principle of the necessity of building a regular standing army of the Soviet State on the basis of arming the people, a new-type army of the working class and labouring people.
Lenin showed that in face of the extremely great danger of aggression, if the Soviet Republic did not want to fall an easy prey to imperialism, it needed a powerful regular standing army, well equipped and well trained, with strict discipline, centralized and unified command. Lenin pointed out that, in conditions when the capitalist countries had big armies with proper training and modern equipment, when the armed forces of the Soviet State were increasingly equipped with modern materials and the soldiers needed more training time to master the use of equipment along the rules of modern military art, when the imperialists were always in a position to launch surprise attacks, the armed forces of the Soviet State could not be maintained in the form of people’s militia but had to become a regular standing army. Lenin affirmed “Today the regular army must be put to the fore...”(18) It was a regular army qualitatively different from the bourgeois army. It was a new-type army, a people’s army, a revolutionary army, a socialist army.
Considering the requirements of modern warfare, the standing army has obvious advantages as compared with the militia system: it has greater mobility as it is not tied to any region; it is equipped with modern weapons and technical materials; it can undergo intensive training for a long period of time in a systematic way according to the requirements of continually developing military techniques and art; it has well-trained and experienced professional officers; on account of all this, it has great combat power and high combat readiness, etc.
Facing a completely new problem and in conditions of great difficulty, relying on the support and creativeness of the people, while disbanding the old army, Lenin and the Russian Communist Party gradually and successfully solved a series of problems regarding the principles of building a new-type regular army of the proletarian State — the worker-peasant Red Army. Lenin defined the function and tasks of the Red Army, the revolutionary and popular nature of the army of the proletarian State, the system of Party organization, political work and the close leadership of the Communist Party in the Army, the lines and policies regarding the training and forming of cadres, the principles of organization, equipment, education and training for the Soviet army, the Soviet military art, etc., as well as many other aspects of the Red Army’s life.
In the course of building the Red Army, Lenin had to carry on a determined and persistent struggle against all erroneous tendencies. Lenin shattered the schemes of the Menshevik, social-revolutionary and anarchist elements who misused the slogan “arming the people” to launch a frantic opposition to the Party’s policy and line of building the Red Army. At the Party’s 8th Congress, Lenin and his comrades-in-arms also defeated the “military opposition group” within the Party who opposed the heightening of discipline, the centralized and unified command, etc., i.e. the very principles of building a regular Red Army.
After the end of the Civil War, once again the problem of the form of the Soviet State’s military organization was put to discussion. The Communist Party headed by Lenin resolutely rejected the Trotskyist tendency which demanded that the Red Army be disbanded and wholly integrated with the system of people’s militia.
Revolutionary practice has demonstrated that Lenin’s thesis was extremely clearsighted and accurate. The victory of the Soviet State in defeating the armed intervention of the imperialist bloc in collusion with internal counter-revolutionaries in an attempt to smother the Soviet State at birth, the great victory of the Soviet Union in the patriotic war of 1941-1945 which defeated German fascism and Japanese militarism were indissolubly linked with that correct thesis of Lenin. It is known all over the world that, during the Second World War, it was the Soviet Red Army, the powerful regular army of the first Soviet State in the world that played the decisive and direct role in defeating the aggressor armies, over ten million strong and equipped with ultramodern weapons, of German fascism and Japanese militarism, driving the aggressors out of the Soviet Fatherland and making a direct contribution to the liberation of many countries in Europe and Asia; it pursued the German Nazis and destroyed them in their very hideouts, saving mankind from the fascist peril.
The Red Army not only proved itself absolutely superior to the enemy in politics and morale, but also turned out, in the course of the war, to be superior to the enemy in both numerical strength and quality of men, in quantity and quality of modern weapons and equipment, in combat techniques and the art of command. It was that powerful force that enabled the Red Army to launch counter-offensive and offensive operations on a very large scale, annihilating tens of enemy divisions in a single campaign, breaking through their defensive lines, liberating large areas of territory, creating decisive turning points in the war and eventually leading it to great victory.
Lenin’s thesis on building the regular Soviet Red Army was a further development of Marx’ and Engels’ theory on the military organization of the socialist State under new historical conditions, when the socialist State was faced with a hostile encirclement by the capitalist world. The great value of this thesis lies in the fact that it has pointed out to the proletariat that in the imperialist period, when imperialism, with its extremely warlike nature, has under its command huge aggressive armies, equipped with ultra-modern weapons, it is essential that the socialist State, to safeguard its security, should have a powerful regular standing army and not only the armed people. Relying on the superiority of the new social system, on the ever developing material and technical basis of socialism, and using its State machinery, the proletariat in power is perfectly able to build such an army quickly, a new-type, modern regular army, as a firm mainstay for the national defence of the socialist State.
The question then is: when the socialist State has built up such a powerful regular standing army, what about the problem of arming the people?
Lenin held that it was necessary to build the socialist Red Army on the basis of arming the people. At the third Congress of the All Russian Soviets of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers, Lenin told the story of an old Finnish woman who met a Red Army soldier when she was gathering firewood. Instead of seizing the wood as the Tsarist soldiers would have done, the Red Army soldier helped her to gather more. From this Lenin concluded that the people had voiced a different view of the soldier, the Red Armyman: “...They are saying that from now on they should not fear a man with a rifle, for this man will defend the labouring people and relentlessly smash the exploiters’ yoke...”(19) This was a real revolutionary army, a people’s army. Lenin went on to deal with the relations between the Red Army and the armed people: “This is what the people have felt, and that is why when the ordinary people without education say that the Red Guards are doing their utmost to fight the exploiters, this propaganda is an invincible force. It will penetrate millions and tens of millions of people and lay a firm foundation for the work that the French Commune in the 19th century began to build, but only for a short period of time as it was defeated by the bourgeoisie. This propaganda will build up the socialist Red Army on the basis of arming the people, a thing which all socialists have dreamt of.”(20)
In the 8th Congress of the Bolshevik Party, when insisting on the necessity of concentrating efforts on building up the Red Army, Lenin also pointed out that the Party continued to maintain the system of people’s militia. The programme adopted at the Congress also set forth the task of giving military training to all labouring people and building close relations between reorganized troops and State enterprises, trade unions, organizations of poor peasants, etc.
In the Soviet Union, right after the victory of the October Revolution, the armed forces of the revolutionary masses, the guards, the guerilla detachments of workers and poor peasants already played a very important part in the struggle against the rebellions by counter-revolutionaries. When the Worker-Peasant Red Army was newly set up, it was the “red guards” that constituted its core.
Before the Red Army grew into a million-strong force, the guerilla detachments in the various regions of the country were one of the main forces in the people’s fight against the foreign interventionists and white guards. During the civil war, hundreds of thousands of guerillas fought in the enemy’s rear, in close coordination with the Red Army. Many units and columns of the regular army were built up from guerilla detachments in the civil war.
After the victory of the civil war, parallel with the reduction of the numerical strength and the heightening of the quality of the Red Army, the system of people’s militia was maintained for many years under various forms suitable to the specific conditions of each period.
During the great patriotic war of 1941-1945, under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union headed by Stalin, the formations of guerillas, militia and fighting workers, etc., also played a great role in defeating German fascism in their Fatherland, in coordination with the Red Army.
In areas temporarily held by the Germans, a million guerilla fighters organized by the Communist Party in the course of the war conducted a very heroic fight. They annihilated millions of enemy troops and immobilized one-tenth of the total strength of the German land forces. Even on the main fronts, the armed people fought side by side with the Red Army, defending every inch of the Soviet motherland. During large-scale campaigns, tens of militia divisions together with the people fought in co-ordination with the Red Army to achieve immortal exploits in combat and ancillary services.
The close fighting coordination of the standing army of the Soviet State and the armed people in the great patriotic war, with the Soviet Red Army playing the essential part, was a vivid picture of people’s war in modern conditions.
The Soviet people and Red Army fighters are very proud of the tremendous power of the people’s sacred war against German fascism in 1941-1945. This pride was reflected in these lines of a Soviet song, very popular among the people:
“People’s war,
The sacred war”.
It was a victory of Soviet military science, of the Marxist-Leninist line of people’s war; it was also the victory of the principle of building up military organizations worked out by Marx, Engels and Lenin which the Communist Party of the Soviet Union applied in new conditions.
During and after the Second World War, the revolutionary movements of the people in various countries were developing tempestuously; many insurrections and revolutionary wars broke out everywhere from Europe to Asia. The great victory of the Red Army over fascism, the great victory of the revolutionary struggles of the world people led to the birth of a series of socialist countries forming a world system. The struggles of the world people for socialism, national independence, democracy and peace have given rise to a revolutionary high tide which is continually attacking imperialism.
It was in the flames of the armed insurrections and revolutionary wars since the October Revolution, during and after the Second World War, that the birth and rapid development of the revolutionary armed forces of the people of the socialist countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America took place. Owing to different specific conditions and historical backgrounds, the revolutionary armed forces of the socialist countries have different histories and levels of development and different organizational structures, but most of them were born from the guerilla movements against internal reactionaries and against fascist aggressors; they were organized into armies while including armed formations of the masses under various forms.
In Asia, in the process of long and arduous revolutionary armed struggles against imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism, the Chinese people organized the worker-peasant Red Army, carried out the “mobilization of the whole people, arming the whole people”, and achieved a great victory. The Vietnamese people successfully carried out armed insurrections and revolutionary wars; the armed forces of our people are a typical example of success in the creative application of the Marxist-Leninist theses on arming the masses and building up the army; we shall deal with that in later chapters.
By various forms of struggle, many colonies and dependent countries have also won independence to a varying degree.
Many have won independence through armed struggle. They have become nationalist countries. During the armed struggle as well as after victory, several of them, actively anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist, have striven to build up their armed forces by organizing the armies of the nationalist State power, while arming the people to some extent.
At present, the people in many countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America who are conducting armed struggles to win power and national independence are applying these lessons of experience for the organization of the revolutionary armed forces in their own specific conditions.
Subjected to attacks from several directions and suffering defeat after defeat, imperialism, with US imperialism at its head, has resorted to very perfidious and cruel policies to oppose the revolutionary movements of the world people, in an attempt to maintain its privileges and interests. The imperialists strive to increase the defence budgets, intensify the arms race, develop weapons of mass destruction, build military bases everywhere, set up military alliances, continually launch armed interventions, “special” and “limited” wars of aggression, and prepare for a new world war.
To defend the socialist fatherland, to defend world peace and to defeat the war schemes and manoeuvres of imperialism, the socialist countries are trying hard to strengthen their defence capacities at the same time as continuing the work of economic construction and scientific and technological development. Relying on the superiority of the socialist system and on the results achieved in the building of the material and technical foundation of socialism and communism, the socialist countries are concerned with building up the revolutionary armies along modern lines to a different degree according to their specific conditions. They unceasingly heighten the revolutionary nature of the socialist armies, and equip them with ever more modern weapons and means including both nuclear weapons, missiles and conventional arms.
While building up a modern army, many socialist countries pay great attention to arming the popular masses — workers, collective peasants — on a large scale with forms of organization and equipment suited to their needs, so as to develop to the maximum the force of the masses and of the socialist system in strengthening national defence and defending the country.
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From the theoretical and practical basis outlined above, what conclusions should be drawn? We may conclude that:
Arming the revolutionary masses in combination with building up the revolutionary army is the comprehensive principle of Marxism-Leninism regarding the form of military organization of the socialist countries’ defence system, and of wars of liberation, national defence wars and revolutionary wars by the peoples in our time. This principle is developed from Marx’ and Engels’ thesis on arming the people to Lenin’s thesis on building up the revolutionary army on the basis of arming the people.
Marx, Engels and Lenin thus brilliantly summed up the lessons of experience in building up the military organizations of the proletariat and oppressed peoples in the course of their protracted revolutionary struggle to seize power and defend it. To some extent, it is also a continuation and creative development of the experience of organizing the armed forces of the revolutionary classes and the victims of oppression and aggression in the historical periods before the appearance of Marxism.
Starting from scratch in their revolutions to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie, imperialists and feudalists, the proletariat, the labouring people and oppressed peoples could not, naturally, have an army at the outset. In the course of the revolution, when the question of armed struggle and armed insurrection arose, the proletariat, labouring people and oppressed peoples had, necessarily, to set up their own military organization. As a rule, its initial form was the armed masses, and the revolutionary army was gradually built up on the basis of arming the masses. In insurrections the armed masses usually played the main role; sometimes the role of a shock force was played by a revolutionary army. As the insurrections developed into revolutionary wars, the position of the army became increasingly more important and the revolutionary armed forces included both the army and the armed masses.
The question of building up a regular and standing revolutionary army in the strict sense could only be tackled when the proletariat and labouring people had seized power and had a state. The form of military organization of the socialist State, the people’s democratic State, which is able to develop to the maximum the combat power of the people and the new regime, consists in a combination of building up a regular modern revolutionary army with arming the revolutionary masses intensively and on a large scale. The armed masses and the revolutionary army are two component parts of the armed forces of the State, in which the standing army is the core force and the armed masses the extensive force. That is why attention should be paid to building up the army while developing the forces of the armed masses.
The close combination of the above components in the armed forces of the socialist State is one reason for absolute superiority of the socialist regime over the exploiting regimes.
Under the State regimes of the exploiting classes, as the interests of the ruling classes and those of the labouring people are completely opposed, there is a fundamental opposition between the popular masses on the one side and the State and its standing army on the other. The ruling State regards the armed revolutionary people as a danger to its existence. The reactionary rulers would often rather have the motherland lost to the enemy than arm the people. As Engels once observed they will compromise with their cruellest enemy who has the same origin as theirs rather than ally themselves with the people. There have been instances when the feudal and bourgeois classes, still playing a progressive role in history and still animated by nationalism, proceeded to arm the people so that the latter could fight the aggressors alongside the standing army. But even in those cases the arming was limited.
Under the socialist regime, the situation is quite different. The exploiting classes have been overthrown, the system of exploitation of man by man abolished, the system of national and collective ownership built up, and the collective mastery of the labouring people established. The function of the socialist armed forces — the main instrument of violence of the State of dictatorship of the proletariat — is to suppress internal and external enemies, to defend the new regime, to defend the interests of the labouring people. It is this high political and moral identity in the new society, together with the ever developing material and technical forces of socialism, that constitutes the most solid basis for building up the new-type modern revolutionary armed forces and for bringing to new heights the combined combat strength of the revolutionary army and the armed masses. The armed forces of the socialist State are the first ones in history to include workers and peasants who are really masters of their own destinies, having high political consciousness and ready to sacrifice everything for the socialist and communist ideal. They are invincible armed forces.
(1) “Letter to Engels”, February 27, 1861. Marx-Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, p. 123.
(2) F. Engels: Preface to the “Civil War in France”, K. Marx-F. Engels, Selected Works, Su That Publishers, Hanoi 1962, Vol. I, pp. 756-717.
(3) F. Engels: Preface to “The Civil War in France”, op. cit., p. 758.
(4) F. Engels: “Anti-Duhring”, Su That Publishers, Hanoi 1959, p. 286.
(5) Marx-Engels: “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League”, Selected Works, Vol. I, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow 1958, p. 113.
(6) K. Marx: “The Class Struggle in France”, Vol. I, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow 1958, p. 161.
(7) K. Marx — F. Engels: Selected Works, German Edition, Book VII, part I, p. 134.
(8) K. Marx, “The Civil War in France”, K. Marx — F. Engels: Selected Works, Vol. I, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow 1958, p. 519.
(9) K. Marx: “The Civil War in France”, op. cit., p. 519.
(10) F. Engels “The Defeat of the Piedmontese”, F. Engels, V. Lenin, J. Stalin: On People’s War, Su That Publishers, Hanoi 1970, p. 27.
(11) F. Engels: “The Defeat of the Piedmontese”, op. cit., p. 27.
(12) Ibid, p. 29.
(13) F. Engels: “The Defeat of the Piedmontese”, op. cit, p. 155.
(14) F. Engels: “Persia and China,” Marx on China, Lawrence and Wishard, London 1965, p. 48-49.
(15) “Military Programme of Proletarian Revolution”, V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 23, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1964, pp. 80-81.
(16) V.I. Lenin, “The Armed Forces and the Revolution”, Collected Works, Vol. 10, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1965, p. 56.
(17) V.I. Lenin: “The Armed Forces and the Revolution”, op. cit., p.39.
(18) V.I. Lenin: Collected Works, Russian text, 3rd edition, Vol. 24, p. 750.
(19) V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, French text, les Editions Sociales, Paris and Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1958, Vol. 26, p. 484.
(20) V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, French text, op. cit., Vol. 26, p. 484.
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