Che and Mao

[7189]

I'm doing an historical investigation into the guerrilla styles of Che Guevara and Mao Tse-Tung. I'm a bit stuck though, and the deadline is getting closer and closer. :(

Does anyone have any useful info for me? My title is 'How and why did the guerrilla styles of Che Guevara and Mao Tse-Tung differ?' (i.e. tactics and strategies).

PLEASE HELP!

[Fidelbrand]

In a very vague sense, Mao belived that the intital revolt unit may originate in any one of the following ways:

a) From the masses of the people.
b) From regular army units temporarily detailed for the purpose.
c) From regular army units permanently detailed.
d) From the combination of a regular army unit and a unit recruited from the people.
e) From the local militia.
f) From deserters from the ranks of the enemy.
g) From former bandits and bandit groups.

some websites for your further reference:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/...rrilla-warfare/ (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1937/guerrilla-warfare/)
Same stuff, different source: http://www.bellum.nu/wp/mtt/mttogw.html

For Che, you better read the "Guerilla warfare".
but as time is limited, I reckon this is a pretty good article:
http://www.sozialistische-klassiker.org/Che/Chee09.html

[7189]

Thank you, comrade.

[commiecrusader]

Who's book about guerilla warfare is better? Che's or Mao's?

[flyby]

Mao's approach was protracted people's war -- led by a revolutniary communist party.
Che's was focoism -- led by a small core of armed guerillas.

Mao was for agrarian revolution as the bedrock of third world transition to socialism.
Che was for building a crisis in the country through armed acts, and then taking power in the crisis -- often with a view toward nationalizing the land (not distributing it to the peasants)

Their approachs are very different. On almost every view:

how the struggle is led.

what its goals are.

how the people are involved. (Maoism aims to "rely on the people." Guevarism is rooted in small often-isolated armed bands. Che's final group couldn't even speak the language of the indians surrounding them in Bolivia.)

whether the liberation of women is a central part (guevarism is always heavily colored by machismo and male chauvinism)

etc.

Here is one article that digs into it:

October 9, 1967:
The CIA Murder of Ernesto Che Guevara
http://rwor.org/a/v19/920-29/927/che.htm


here is an excerpt:

How do we fight the oppressors today in a way that can actually defeat them, overthrow them and create a new liberated society?

That is the issue that confronts this new generation. The revolutionary process needs dreams of a better world and heroes that people can look up to. But it also needs a serious evaluation of historical experience. The people need revolutionary theory and strategy that can win.

Che Guevara advocated a particular path for the struggle against U.S. domination. And today, Guevarism--and the historical experience of those who followed it--needs to be critically evaluated. As a veteran communist once said, "We have to want revolution bad enough to be scientific about it."

The Cuban Road
When Che Guevara and the guerrilla fighters of Fidel Castro's July 26th Movement rode into Havana, Cuba, in 1959, people all over Latin America were thrilled. A popular revolution had overthrown the brutal, pro-U.S. Batista dictatorship--only 90 miles from U.S. shores.

The Cuban revolution had actually gone relatively easily: Castro, Guevara and a few supporters established guerrilla camps in the remote Sierra Madre mountains and carried out about 25 months of intermittent fighting. Powerful unrest had spread throughout the country, including in urban areas, and the Batista regime had crumbled.

After Fidel Castro's new government nationalized U.S. holdings, hostilities broke out between Cuba and the U.S. When Castro's forces defeated a major CIA invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, the excitement throughout Latin America grew intense. Someone had broken with the U.S. and was still standing!

The long-range survival of the new Cuban government posed even more difficult challenges: The U.S. launched an economic embargo, and then a military blockade in 1963. The CIA constantly sent teams of assassins and saboteurs to the island--trying to "destabilize" Cuba and regain their grip.

In response to such pressures, the Cuban government made a series of fateful decisions: They decided to forgo land reform. They maintained the country's sugar plantations as the foundation of the economy. And, connected to that, they entered into a deepening alliance with the Soviet Union--which promised to buy Cuban sugar and provide the food, arms, manufactured goods and other necessities that Cuba was not producing for itself. Throughout Cuban history, the domination of the island had been tied to its sugar economy. And now, after the revolution of 1959, many things had changed about how the country was organized and run--but this central link of dependency remained unbroken. The anti-American revolution in Cuba had proven to be not consistently anti-imperialist.

Che's Theory of Focoism
For several years after coming to power, the Cuban government encouraged people throughout Latin America to start their own armed struggles against pro-U.S. dictatorships. Several groups were given training in Cuba.

Che Guevara was closely associated with this call for continental guerrilla warfare. In a series of essays he argued that the Cuban experience could be duplicated throughout Latin America. This idea had a powerful influence within the new generation of fighters rising up in Latin America.

Che argued that small groups of determined armed fighters (called "focos") could take to the mountains and use armed actions to rally other forces--triggering the crisis and collapse of hated governments.

At the time, many people saw this Guevarist theory of focoism as a fresh alternative to Latin America's pro-Soviet Communist parties. These rotten parties closely followed the lead of the Soviet Union and were openly hostile to armed struggle against pro-U.S. governments. They were revisionists--phony "communists."

Focoism had the added attraction of offering a hope of relatively easy victory. People were taught that revolution was fundamentally an act of will and daring--that they could become representatives of the people's discontent without organizing new vanguard parties or carrying out the agrarian revolution in the countryside. And as for facing down the inevitable U.S. responses--people were taught that, like Cuba, their new movements would be able to turn to the Soviet Union for support and backing.

In the early 1960s, several attempts at armed focos were made--in Peru, Argentina, Venezuela and other countries. None of them succeeded.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was showing its hand in its dealings with Cuba. Soviet advisors were urging conservative methods in industry and throughout society. Fidel Castro's July 26th Movement was formally merged with the rotten cadre of the Popular Socialist Party (the old pro-Soviet party in Cuba which had even supported Batista in his rise to power.) All kinds of pressure from Cuba's new Soviet "ally" was pushing the country into a dependent role within the Soviet bloc.

Che Guevara was right in the middle of these developments. He made several criticisms of the Soviet Union--for not firmly backing national liberation struggles and for their trade policies with countries like Cuba. And he was reportedly working on a critique of other Soviet economic policies.

But these criticisms never fundamentally questioned the essential framework of the Cuban road. Guevara's criticisms of the Soviet Union stayed as "quarrels within the family"--because Guevara deeply believed that the Soviets remained a socialist country, and could be coaxed into playing a positive role in the world--through criticism, pressure and the impact of successful revolutions.

Guevara also believed that his foco strategy could be made to work in Latin America by inserting a more experienced and authoritative leadership on the ground. His response to the problems of the "Cuban Road" was to go himself to Bolivia in November 1966--to personally develop a foco there in the heart of South America.

International Struggle over the Revolutionary Road
At the same time Che Guevara was formulating his theories, intense struggle and debate was sweeping through the international communist movement.

In the early 1960s, Mao Tsetung made a startling and penetrating analysis of developments within the Soviet Union. A fundamental change of power had happened, Mao said, in 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev seized power in the Soviet Union. Capitalist-roaders within the Communist Party there had carried out a restoration of capitalism. The Soviet Union, which had been a socialist country for decades, was now a social-imperialist power (socialist in name, imperialist in essence).

Mao warned about the danger of driving the tiger out the front door while letting the wolf in the back. Relying on this new imperialist power, he said, was extremely dangerous for the masses of people. The new rulers of the Soviet Union represented a new bourgeoisie--fundamentally opposed to liberation.

Today, 30 years later, such issues may seem "a thing of the past" to a generation that lives in a world where the Soviet bloc has collapsed and the U.S. is top dog of the imperialist heap. But it is impossible to evaluate the historical experience of Che and the "Cuban Road" without understanding the nature of Soviet social-imperialism and the negative impact that alliances with the Soviet Union had on the national liberation struggles of Latin America and around the world.

The path to power advocated by Maoists was radically different from the one formulated by Che Guevara. The Maoists argued that power won through shortcuts would not be able to resist the pressures of imperialism or lead to an all-the-way revolutionary society. For that, the masses needed to be mobilized and trained in the course of a protracted class struggle, led by the proletariat. In the Third World, Maoists argued the armed struggle needed to take the form of a protracted people's war--that was waged by relying on the masses of people, surrounding the cities from the countryside and building up a new power within revolutionary base areas. Though this approach was based on the rich experience of the Chinese revolution, Mao warned revolutionaries around the world not to copy that experience but to creatively apply this strategic orientation to their own conditions.

In the beginning, Mao had hopes of possibly winning the Cuban leadership to a better path, and he personally met with Che during his 1960 trip to China. But Che Guevara remained convinced of his foco strategy and convinced that the Soviet Union should be embraced as a potential ally of the people's movements.

Many other issues were raised by this famous ideological struggle of the 1960s and 1970s: Whether to forge new, revolutionary, communist parties to lead the revolutionary struggle, the role of armed struggle in revolution and how to organize the people for revolutionary war, how to evaluate different class forces in the world--including especially the peasantry in the world's semi-colonial, semi-feudal countries--and how to continue the revolution after the seizure of power.

In this process, a new clarity emerged, based on advances in communist ideology--Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.

Today, 30 years after the murder of Che, there have been many changes in the world. Major transformations have happened--including increased "shantytownization" in the Third World--and new leaps have taken place in the linkages of the international production and world market. With these changes have come new questions of how people can liberate themselves from imperialism. But for several billion dispossessed, poor and uprooted people across the planet, imperialist development and technology is nothing but a nightmare. For them the future is either going to be desperation or revolution. And for those in the oppressed nations, the Maoist path of protracted people's war remains an urgent and practical solution to the problems of today.

There are many today, among the youth in the U.S. and Latin America, who have been attracted to Che Guevara--because they see in him a symbol of self-sacrifice, armed struggle and internationalism in the fight against U.S. imperialism. For all those motivated by deep love for the people, it is extremely important to dig deep into the historical experiences, to seriously struggle to grasp the differences between different lines and roads. Today, this is a life-and-death issue. It has everything to do with whether we can turn our revolutionary dreams into reality.

[1949]

Awsome post, flyby.

My only question is about this part:


(guevarism is always heavily colored by machismo and male chauvinism)
Where in Che's writings does he express male chauvinism? I've read a small excerpt of the section of his book on guerilla warfare on the role of women and saw nothing male chauvinist about it.

Here is a post someone made on 2changetheworld.info before it went down, which I posted elsewhere:


I agree, you have raised some good points here.

Che Guevara has become a beloved symbol to people, especially young people, who hate this system. But you have to analyse his theories, you can't get anywhere by just saying so and so is great. Basically the foco theory as advocated by Guevara only succeeded in Cuba. This was mainly because the US imperialists did not intervene and the 26th of July movement never really faced any sustained, powerful attacks from the Batista military.

The foco theory definetly has nothing to do with people's war, more to do with some saviors coming and saving the masses, rather than the workers and peasants liberating themselves.

All you have to do is read Che's book on guerilla warfare, and compare it to the Maoist military line.

Che said there was no nead for a vangaurd party, no need to do any preparation with propaganda, organizing among the masses before the armed struggle begins, no need for base areas, he says actions in cities such as selective annihilation and bombings should not be used.

I once read the Bolivian dairy of Pombo (Harry Villegas, one of Che's comrades) and it shows how the foco theory got Che and all but 5 of the ELN killed. Almost at every turn they were informed on by the peasants. The peasants should not be blamed for this because they didn't even know anything about the ELN. There was no propaganda work prior to and during the armed struggle to tell the masses about the need for revolution, the objectives of the armed struggle, etc.

The combatants wrote out a few communiques to the Bolivian people but I don't think they ever got out to be published. So as you would expect, when the army came, the ELN was isolated from the masses, like a fish out of water.

Then compare this to the people's war lead by the PCP. In 1983-1984 they faced a terrible genocide by the Peruvian army, it is estimated that the army killed about 10% of Ayacucho's population. But because they party had deep roots among the masses they were able to survive.

[7189]

I've just finished reading Guerrilla Warfare by Che, and On Guerrilla Warfare by Mao, and the strategies both seem raaaather similar.

Che has a 4 phase plan:
- Analyse enemy's strategies
- Harass enemy, while building up resources and support
- Establish a strong base of operations (column)
- Unite multiple columns into army and defeat oppressor in orthodox combat.

Mao has a 3 phase plan:
- Create bases
- Harass enemy + gain resources and support
- Defeat oppressor in orthodox combat

Hmmmmm, this information is worrying.

I need to find differences between their styles. Of what I've read though, they are almost identical. I can't find any mention of Che's foco theory in Guerrilla Warfare...

EEEK PANIC!!!! HEEEELP!!!!!!!

[1949]

7189, I believe the posts flyby and myself made have already answered your question.

[flyby]

Let me help:

first of all, the works by che on "guerilla warfare" were mainly technical and tactical manuals -- and that flowed from his view that the issue of revolutin was mainly military, not strategic.

The guevarist foco theory was elaborated best by Regis Debray -- who came to visit Che in bolivia, and wrote down his strategic thinking.

the short book Debray wrote "Revolution within the Revolution" is the foremost compilation of Guevarist strategic thinking.

By contrast, Mao's theoretical is not mainly about the tactics of guerilla war -- but about the politics of mobilizing the masses to wage a war of the people (not a war of isolated guerilla bands) -- rooted in agrarian revolution (against feudalism) and national liberation war (against imperialism).

The key books by mao are "on protracted war" and also "On New Democracy"

The best place to read about this is the first chapter of Bob Avakian's book: "Mao's Immortal Contribution" (because the theoretical synthesis and summation of Mao's work is also done looking at his life and work as a whole).


the difference is not in the mechanics of battles -- but in how the revolution is conceived.

Maoists call for new democracy -- a form of proletarian revolution based on carrying out the bourgeois democratic revolutin against feudalism, and the national liberation struggle against imperialism UNDER THE LINE AND LEADERSHIP OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PROLETARIAT AND ITS PARTY.

Guevarism seeks to have a shortcut to a "one stage revoltion" that sets up a state capitalist society where people are quickly put back to the grindstone and a few "heros of the revolution" are promoted as the only ones moral enough to rule.
Instead of "land to the tiller"that actually mobilizes and unleashes the peasantry in the revolution -- the guevarists (and the Cuban revolution) envisioned immediate turn to big state farms -- so plantations owned by feudalists, became plantations run by the new state capitalists (and the masses of peasants were never turned loose, liberated, and brought onto the collective road through their own volutnary experience).

There is much more to sum up -- but the differences are stark, and have real implications for how the revolution is started, led, conducted etc.