Fifth Congress of the
Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores
Resolutions on Dynamics and Relations of Our Revolutionary War
Character of the Revolutionary War
In correspondence with the characteristics we have noted the revolution will take on in our country, we can define our war as a revolutionary civil war which from the beginning, given the semi-colonial character of our country, will be around anti-imperialist slogans. The revolutionary civil war will proceed to transform itself into a national anti-imperialist war both because we will be fighting against the bourgeoisie as well as an invading enemy, and because the battle will be waged by the workers and the popular sectors as a whole. At that moment the slogans we raise will tend to neutralize the upper strata of the petty bourgeoisie, the middle bourgeoisie, and even sectors of the repressive forces; at that point our war will assume a patriotic significance. While it is necessary to point out the lines along which our war will develop, it should be clear that it will always be led by the proletariat and that it will remain essentially a revolutionary civil war throughout the entire process.
In this sense, we can say that the revolutionary civil war has begun in our country, developed by sectors of the vanguard. The working-class vanguard, sections of the proletariat and popular sectors will take it up, until finally it will become a struggle led by the working-class vanguard, the working class and the popular masses against the bourgeoisie and imperialism.
For many of the reasons already explained in “El Unico Camino . . .” [”The Only Road”], our war will be a prolonged one.
Our party should not for one moment forget the Vietnamese experience which shows us that in the current stage of the world revolution it is impossible to take and hold power in a single country in isolation. Power can only be taken and held in the context of the worldwide crisis of imperialism.
From this it follows that our revolutionary war will assume a continent-wide, international character.
For all the reasons presented above, the Revolutionary Army has to start off small, going from the most simple to the most complex actions, seeking to achieve firm links with the masses, seriously toughening up our forces and educating our armed detachments in a multitude of actions.
Dynamics of the Revolutionary War
When we take into account that the vanguard sector of the working class is made up of the industrial proletariat, concentrated in Tucum�n, Córdoba, Rosario and Buenos Aires, and that the vanguard is increasingly sympathetic to revolutionary positions and, as a whole, is inspired by deep hate for the dictatorship, then we must conclude that these are the regions where armed struggle will basically take shape, both in its rural and urban form. This overall situation is developing in particular ways in each region, and the level of radic1ization in the vanguard and the working class likewise differs. Within this context the sugar workers continue to hold their vanguard position, although as a result of the widening economic and social crisis, there is less of a gap today between them and the rest of the workers.
These particular regional situations affect the ways in which the armed struggle will develop. For example, in Tucum�n the vanguard sector is made up of sugar workers who are directly linked to the rural proletariat and through them, to the poor peasantry. Added to Tucuman’s geography, these facts mean that the strategic axis of armed struggle in this area will pass through the initial forms of rural guerrilla warfare. Prior to the rural struggle, there will be a phase of tactical and operational actions in urban and suburban warfare. But these will become secondary once the strategic level (rural guerrilla warfare) has been reached. For particular reasons it is impossible to organize strategic military units in the city of Tucum�n, and risky to form military operational units. In the area of urban warfare we can foresee activity by tactical military units in Tucum�n, completely subordinated to operational and strategic needs of the countryside.
The fundamental task will clearly be taken up in building logistics apparatuses: recruiting, intelligence, communications and liaison, provisioning, etc. Most armed actions will be oriented towards defending these apparatuses (for example, protecting the guerrillas’ channels of communication and guarding fugitives hiding in the city, as well as shops, clandestine hospitals, etc.), and toward playing a role in agitation among the masses. But this does not rule out actions that divert the enemy and back up guerrilla war, such as sabotage, the destruction of communications channels, liquidating oppressors, and harassing units that have been pulled back for rest or which are being kept on base.
In the other three regions the armed struggle will be urban and suburban; and the military actions, as well as the party’s armed wing, will develop on tactical, operative and strategical levels. Moreover, the armed forces in these areas will carry out military and logistical tasks aimed at strengthening armed struggle in rural zones. During this first stage these tasks will be confined to Tucum�n, but later they will be extended to the entire North until they link up geographically with areas in the vicinity of urban regions, like Córdoba and Rosario (Santiago del Estero, Catamarca, Chaco, Formosa, northern Santa Fe, etc.).
Countryside-City Relationship
The method of pigeonholing reality into subjective schemas is something common to the entire left wing here and everywhere. On the basis of such plans “strategies” are drawn up in which reality has all the dynamism of a slab of concrete, with the dialectics existing only in the minds of the framers. We are no exception. Ridding ourselves of these habits means taking a big step toward the revolution, and we believe that our party is taking that step; but vestiges of such schematism remain. The well-worn problem of the city-countryside relationship is an aspect that we still have to clarify within the party. With the right wing expelled, and the centrists isolated and on the way out, the party we now have represents the consolidation of the proletarian and combative sectors and the end result of the battle that has been waged since the Fourth Congress against Morenoist excrescences. But the party that we represent today was not a spontaneous development but the product of a process whose advances and errors make up our subjective reality. This is how the countryside-city question, instead of being realistically analyzed for what it is—the dialectical interrelationship between two aspects of the same situation has been transformed into a contradiction with two antagonistic poles.
It was probably the centrists playing down of the rural side of the struggle that served as a cover for their non-proletarian fear of fighting. For this purpose they resorted to vague theoretical phrase-mongering around the tailending notion that the crisis “had shifted” to the urban centers. This was one of the elements that contributed to increasing confusion and causing touchiness in the party.
The oversimplification of two important experiences in revolutionary warfare—the Chinese and Cuban—together with a lack, or at times, deliberate concealment of information, has created situations like the one we are now dealing with within the continental revolutionary movement. It is not worthwhile in this work to specify (although we will have to in others) the most vulgar distortions of the Chinese and Cuban experiences. Instead we will attempt to focus in on our reality, adapting the experience of the world proletarian struggle to it (rather than the reverse procedure of trying to make our situation fit in with other patterns). Moreover, for understandable reasons resulting from lack of communication, we have only been able to partially examine the new contributions of the South Vietnamese comrades.
The Fourth Congress pointed out that Argentina as a whole was in a pre-revolutionary situation. Reality confirmed this day by day and today we are witnessing something even more concrete: the revolutionary civil war has begun. Given this reality, it is useless for us to begin discussing in what geographic area we are going to initiate a war that already began more than a year ago and in which we are already involved up to our necks. Likewise, we do not need to discuss where the party will begin fighting when more than half the party is already underground and fighting, not to mention a great number of comrades who have been imprisoned and tortured. This fact can not be ignored by the party.
The problem that faces us is the following: In the first place, why is the party’s military activity unevenly developed and what has to be done to get the fight going everywhere? In the second place, what kind of military structure is suited in each region where the party has a foothold, to our real strength and the social conditions? And lastly, how do we coordinate all the party’s military activity so as to overcome the present unevenness and involve the entire party in the war?
Just as it is difficult to conceive of a revolutionary militant separated from the masses or from political work, in a war situation we cannot have party activists or sections of the party not involved in waging the war on the level that is realistic in their region or area of work. A combat party is distinguished precisely by the fact that it fights: And in an Argentina at war, political activity is fundamentally armed activity. Therefore in those places where the party is active among the masses, members must promote military actions. They must fight, form the army through practicing armed struggle. Anyone who does not fight does not exist politically. Our revolutionary war will not be and is not (as it has already begun) a regional war. It is a national war, a popular war of the masses that will develop wherever there are masses, adapting itself to the concrete forms demanded by each region.
We can predict that the revolutionary war will be based on two main military elements—armed struggle in the countryside, first assuming the characteristics of guerrilla warfare and then taking the form of popular movements; and armed struggle in the large cities, beginning with expropriations and resistance, will go over to operations of annihilating the enemy. That can be said for the particular; in general, both processes’ lead to a struggle to wear down the enemy’s forces (moral, human, and material, in this order), breaking their offensive power in the countryside by forcing them to disperse their strength and by bottling them up in the cities. This will further be achieved by mobilizing the masses and involving all of the popular sectors in the war. Strategic military units will have to be created in the countryside as in the city, furnished with enough firepower and supplies to wage battles designed to annihilate the enemy. This will culminate in a general urban insurrection as medium-sized cities near the rural operational zone are surrounded and liberated. Both processes are concurrent, interrelated and inseparable.
Another fundamental example of this countryside-city interrelationship is given by the crucial support that the guerrilla group receives during the initial stage from urban combat organizations. This means not only logistical support, although that is obviously very important, but the help of operational units in urban areas whose actions compel the regime to keep important sectors of the repressive forces concentrated in these areas. This process, which we consider of vital importance, has not been fully analyzed. As an example of its importance we point to two concrete cases. In Brazil the spread of urban operations has forced the repressive forces to station 40,000 of its best counterinsurgency troops (paratroopers, marines, etc.) in the Rio de Janeiro-Sao Paulo-Bello Horizonte area. In our country, large police contingents are already tied down in the big cities (Córdoba, Rosario, Buenos Aires) and the probability that they will be used in anti-guerrilla operations is slight.
Finally, we believe that the party will have to find a practical solution to the very concrete problem it faces when all the conditions exist in the region (which from the standpoint of the development of the mass struggle, the party’s strength and prestige, and the terrain, constitutes the weakest link of bourgeois rule) but the party has still not been able to achieve the fundamental task of getting the war going, which would enable us to make a leap in improving the quality of the party and its prestige in the eyes of the masses and the other revolutionary forces.
Revolutionary war, popular war, is based on two fundamental concepts: progressive growth beginning with small actions and the involvement of the masses through a dialectical process. Nothing illustrates its character better than these two concepts. Each stage of this process shows that they are interrelated and that the intensity and extent of the war are directly related to involving increasingly broad sectors of the masses in their dynamics. The military objective of the struggle is secondary to the political objectives. What is sought in every armed action is to mobilize and educate the masses, organizing and involving them in the struggle and, if our forces permit, defending them when the enemy attacks.
Proletarian military science recognizes three levels —the tactical, operational, and strategic. In contrast to bourgeois military science, these levels are related only in a rather loose way. What is decisive is the political content and the effect of these actions in developing the process. For example, a unit of five or six fighters in the revolutionary army (which by its numbers and firepower objectively constitutes a tactical military unit) is carrying out a strategically important action when it expropriates a large sum of money, liberates heavy arms, or attacks a repressive body. A guerrilla detachment of barely fifteen or twenty fighters is playing a strategic role, when operating in a certain zone, they are able to force two to three thousand repressive forces to disperse, circle, comb, and take up patrols and guard duty, without even having to fight them. This undermines the morale of the troops and destroys their capacity to fight. Although this detachment is only an operational unit by our scales, because of its number and firepower it is barely the smallest tactical unit on the scale of a classical army.
This relationship of forces comes about as a result of the political side of the war, but if we were to let ourselves be guided only by military criteria, the situation could arise where a guerrilla detachment could be defeated in a head-on confrontation with a squad or unit of the repressive army because of the technical superiority of the enemy. In the same way, the wiping out of a patrol of the repressive army, a minor feat during a conventional war, becomes national news during revolutionary war, and once learned by the masses, moves them and mobilizes them; and the blow dealt to the enemy’s prestige is out of all proportion to his miniscule human and material losses. On the material side, the terms are reversed qualitatively for the guerrilla army. A loss of fifteen FAL rifles does not materially affect the repressor army, since this may represent only one ten thousandth of its firepower, but for the guerrilla army capturing these weapons may mean a hundred percent increase in firepower.
We have another interesting example in the ability of urban commandos, composed in the first stage of a few dozen fighters, to tie down tens of thousands of enemy soldiers and police.
But within these three levels there are also grades of quantitative growth and rise that not only mark the progression from one level to the next, but also determine the number and the rate of increase of actions on a given level. These quantitative advances influence the scope of the process and the continuous development of this progression in which the concepts of growing from small to large actions and involving the masses in the war become interrelated, bringing about a change in the relationship of forces. For example, during the early stages a guerrilla column of thirty to forty fighters is a strategic military unit similar to a brigade in the city; but in the final stages of the war at the moment of general insurrection and liberation when the cities are surrounded, each one of the strategic military units of the revolution numbers several thousand fighters. The first strategical military unit of the Vietnamese People’s Army was a propaganda detachment of about forty men. Ten years later, four divisions with auxiliary forces took part in the Dien Bien Phu campaign, on the level of an operational action that had strategic political and military results. They totaled about 80,000 men.
The people’s war does not allow itself to be confined by schemas, all the traditional patterns are shattered by its revolutionary methods. We have seen how the classical relationships—numbers, firepower, strategy and tactics—are transformed; but there is still another element we have to think about, as not developing it leads to lack of understanding and error. It concerns the problem of destroying the enemy.
The classical concept of annihilating the enemy was very clearly expressed in bourgeois military science by Clausewitz. His phrase, “Blood is the price of victory” implies that the enemy will be destroyed only through bloody confrontation between contenders and by using all available arms. For the classics, then, annihilation means killing or capturing the enemy forces; but modern military science and proletarian military science to a greater extent, have gone beyond this concept of physical annihilation. A military force can be destroyed not only through confrontation; it is evident that it is quite possible to destroy such forces by wearing them down through smaller scale harassing actions, or by isolating them through cutting off their supply line. But we maintain that annihilating them by political means is still more effective than by the aforementioned methods. During revolutionary war the objective is not to physically destroy all of the enemy forces. At most we might want to destroy some of the leading cadres because, taken as a whole, the ranks of the enemy are made up in their majority of recruits who are from the same class background as our own forces. The objective is to destroy the enemy’s morale through political-military actions and to paralyze them by robbing them of their operational capacity, either through tying them down or through forcing them to disperse their forces. Thus we can say: Troops that don’t fight are as good as not there.
This does not mean that during revolutionary civil war there is no confrontation of forces, physical destruction of the enemy or use of massive means of destruction, but we maintain that these features take on a secondary importance by comparison with politics and ideology. These are the weapons that enable us, changing the classical meaning of destroying the enemy, to concentrate all the power of the masses in the war and to apply our revolutionary proletarian concept of annihilating the enemy on all fronts and with different types of military units.