Fifth Congress of the
Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores
Resolution on the Relationship Between the Party and the Army
1. “For what reason has our army, though still young, already an extremely glorious history, scored resounding feats of arms and made a major contribution to the success of our people’s revolutionary endeavor? Because it is a people’s army, led by our Party. The Party’s leadership is the decisive factor of all the successes of our army.” is a people’s army, the army of the toiling people, essentially, of the workers and peasants, and led by the Party of the working class.”
“The most fundamental principle in the building of our army is to put it under the Party’s leadership, to ceaselessly strengthen the Party’s leadership of the army. The Party is the founder, organizer and educator of the army.” (People’s War People’s Army, Giap, pages 100-101, 104, Bantam paperback, 1968.)
The quotation from Giap, which corresponds to the conception of the Red Army expressed by Lenin and Trotsky, and by Mao Tse-tung in the case of China, clearly puts forth the Marxist view of the revolutionary army and its relationship to the party. According to Marxism, the army and the party are two different organizations with separate and complementary tasks. The army is the armed wing and the military force of the working class and popular sectors, and is the instrument of the revolutionary masses in the armed struggle against the bourgeois army. The party, on the other hand, is a wholly proletarian organization and on a qualitatively higher level, that is built as the revolutionary political leadership of the entire people, in all fields of struggle, both in the military as well as in the economic and political fields, etc.
2. The crisis of Marxism in Europe and Latin America, whose scope and causes do not have a place in this analysis, gave rise to a militarist conception completely foreign to Marxism. Debray was its theoretician. This conception, which was based on making virtues out of the deficiencies and particularities of the Cuban experience, holds that the revolutionary party is constituted by the guerrilla group and that it is the guerrillas who should lead the political struggle.
The Cubans waged the war without a Marxist party. In the course of the hostilities the leadership embraced Marxism, and only after the triumph of the revolution went on to form the party. Because of this, during the war the rebel army fought together with petty-bourgeois and bourgeois political currents and it was necessary to make them comply with the army’s revolutionary objectives. From this experience Debray draws the conclusion that it is always the army that must lead the party, because the mountains are proletarian and the lowlands are bourgeois.
This militarist conception has greatly harmed the Latin American revolutionary movement, among other things because it has been of magnificent service to reformists, offering them a pretext for using “Marxist” arguments against armed struggle.
Aside from not having any immediate practical meaning and causing confusion in the organization, the point of view that the party and army are one, which is in the same family as Debrayism, contains the two-sided danger of a sectarian and opportunistic line. It is sectarian because by equating the party and the army, it would tend towards a strict selection of fighters, making it impossible for us to take in non-Marxist elements. This approach is opportunistic because it would bring people into the party who are good fighters but politically immature. Our short experience has shown us that by maintaining clarity on this question and explaining it clearly to all, we can achieve a better defined relationship with new fighting elements. Our experience also tells us that they will quickly learn that fighting is not all there is to it but that the political line is the most important thing in revolutionary war, that “the party commands the gun,” and, seeing this, they will evolve politically to take a place in the party.
3. At the March 1969 Central Committee meeting our party adopted and began to apply the Marxist view of this question. The Rosario and Córdoba sections that applied this in the firmest and most consistent way have achieved highly satisfactory results. So, we have seen a demonstration of how to succeed in involving in actions all those elements that are prepared to take up arms against the regime, whatever their degree of political maturity, while at the same time, channeling these people into the revolutionary war on the basis of the party’s line and maintaining, and even raising the quality of the party organization. It is vitally important and a matter of principle in fact to persevere in the course adopted at the March 1969 Central Committee plenum. It is essential that we steadfastly and uncompormisingly uphold and apply the Marxist approach to the question before us, not only for immediate practical reasons but also because of a problem in educating the party.
4. Now that we have clarified the difference between the party and the army, let us go on to the fundamental question of the relationship between both organizations. We are referring to the party’s leadership of the army and the means of assuring this. Such leadership must be effective on all levels. At the base of the pyramid, this can be achieved through the combat cells that form the leading nucleus of these units. On the command level, this task is carried out by the military leaders and the party’s military committee, which are appointed and supervised by the party’s Central Committee and executive committee and form the leading nucleus of the general staffs of the armed forces. The leading bodies of the armed forces—the general staffs—can also involve elements from outside the party on the condition that their number does not surpass 20 percent of the members of each. Finally, the system of placing political commissars in all units of the armed forces will guarantee that the army is politically educated and that a mass political line is applied in military operations.