Imput on Guerilla Theories

[Maybe-not]

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[gilhyle]

I would only make this point - Guerrilla warfare is the same as all warfare, the key to success is either a) the quick victory or b) logistics.

The basis for successful guerilla warfare is a secure supply chain - whetherr that is the Ho Chi Minh trail, the water the fish swims in or a logistical support system across a border (ETA, IRA)

[Maybe-not]

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[gilhyle]

I understand.....but make your way through all the relevant cases Tupamaros, Red Brigades, Che in Bolivia, ANC, ZANU-PF, MPLA, whatever. The lesson of both urban and rural guerrila warfare is that you can survive without mass support as long as you have good supply lines. Look, for example, at the IRA in IReland or Hamas in Lebanon - the key in both cases is supply lines. Hamas pay huge attention to this and it pays off. Some 50% - 70% of the IRA organisation worked on supply. Contrast their fate with that of the INLA, who had completely inadequate supply lines - in the same environment - and suffered the same fate as the RAF, Marighella, Japanese Red Army - no supply lines: defeat. Look at the Taliban: secure Pakistan supply lines: survival.

[Maybe-not]

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[black magick hustla]

marmot's guide foer guerrlla warfare

1) be a college dropout (preferably from the humanities/sociology department

2)find other bopred colelge dropouts (also preferably dfrom the humanities department)

3)have an internet avatar with an ak 47


4)go to montana its full of hillbillies and they give out hguns like candy

5) write a flowery communiqyue talking a lot about poor people (you dont need know about poor people just talk a lot about them)

6)dont forget the poor people

7)poor people

8)your organizations name must have the word popular, or peoples (because they evopke images of poor people) and revolutionary in it

9)use guns it doesnt matter against who just besure you can justify it with revoilutionary rhetoric (in the name of poor people)

10)if you manage to survive become professoir of some univwersity

if you follow my recipe step to step you will succeed in yoru endeavours

[Maybe-not]

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[black magick hustla]

"It is the duty of every revolutionary, to make the revolution"
Comandante Che Guevara.

[black magick hustla]

By the way, guerrilla warfare has nothing to do with class violence, if you didn't get it.

[Maybe-not]

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[black magick hustla]

small substitutionist armed bands most of the time inevitable degenerate into gangsterism.

[gilhyle]

Did Sendero Luminoso have popular support - dont think so, they survived for quite a while without it. Did the islamic guerrillas in Algeria succeed because they had popular support - no. Sendero had supply lines. the Islamic guerrillas in Algeria were defeated because terror destroyed their popular base. With good supply lines they could have defended their supporters.

Let me try to put it another way that might make more sense: a certain degree of popular support provides a necessary basis for success in most potential guerrilla environments. But why ? because it provides an environment suitable to the development of good supply lines. BUT, naive guerrilla movements can fail to take advantage of this to build good supply lines - in which case they will fail. Equally in certain circumstances e.g. a border to a friendly state, a guerrilla movement can survive without local popular support.

[Maybe-not]

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[bcbm]

You should post your writings.

On number 2, do you mean democratic as in bourgeois elections, etc?

[gilhyle]

Military victory isn't the sole objective of a guerrilla force. People's common liberation should be.

Also, Urban Guerrillas do not depend on supplies to the same degree - each supply isn't needed, every type just opens a new type of assault.

There is a widespread perception that that urban guerrilla warfare does not depend on complex logistical support because food and lodging and medical supplies are readily available. But this is not how it works out in practice over the longer term. IN practice, you need to put in place medical treatment resources which are entirely insulated from operational units. In practice, operations do not rely only on close-up small arms fire, so people need to be able to shoot straight with rifles and that requires practice. In practice arms will be shipped in for operations, they will not be held in the combat zone for security reasons. In practice people become specialists and have to be moved around from here to there - more logistical issues of transport. In practice urban guerrilla warfare is quite ineffective without a supply of explosives and that means (in practice) bulky home made stuff put together far away from the combat zone and transported there (and then boosted). More logistical issues.

And by the way before this all begins to sound too romantic and blanqui-ist, I should say that my underlying point is to bring out one of the key elements (with the security measures required to deal with modern counter-guerrila tactics) causing the bureaucratization of guerrilla warfare - particularly urban guerrilla warfare - and the inherent consequential tendency for political degeneration to accompany (and in fact be caused by ) practical engagement with the military issues particular to guerrrila war. You asked for views to engage with and that is mine.

I assume your reference to 'common liberation' is the old foci/liberation zone idea or is it something else ?

[Maybe-not]

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[Kropotkin Has a Posse]

I think it's hard for guerilla fighters to be held accountable to the people, and easy for them to be alienated from the people.

It seems like when guerilla fighters take over the result is more of a coup than a social revolution.

[Labor Shall Rule]

It's but one tool in a whole box of methods that can be taken by revolutionaries.

Most often, guerrilla warfare is used when it is necessary.

[gilhyle]

It's but one tool in a whole box of methods that can be taken by revolutionaries.

Most often, guerrilla warfare is used when it is necessary.

Unfortunately, I think it has more often been used when it has, instead, been necessary to learn how to work in new ways and, instead, parties instigate guerrila action to avoid that threat to their own power.

Clearly the idea that the Marxist conclusion from the 1860s onward that the working class could not face professional armies any longer itself seemed no longer true by the 1960s, mainly because of anti-imperialist struggle. But the course of that struggle itself since the 1960s has instead shown that guerrilla warfare is virtually incompatible with popular struggle - the military logic of military struggle dictates the political logic of the movements on behalf of whom it is supposedly conducted - and dictates the abandonment of internal democracy within the anti imperialist movement, dictates political subordination to supply lines - be that to Stalinist states or cocaine-fueled funding and so on.

The course of guerrilla struggle has been a sad but clear lesson.

[Labor Shall Rule]

That's not necessarily true. In the Cuban Revolution, there was vast urban networks that worked within the trade unions, and in late December 1959, there was a massive general strike that ultimately crippled the Batista regime. In Nepal, the Maoist-led general strike, combined with an expansion of attacks of several RNA bases, threw the U.S.-backed monarchy out of power.

[Awful Reality]

Most often, guerrilla warfare is used when it is necessary.


That would be my idea of when to use something.

Well, Guerrilla Warfare is best used as a revolt against an engaged opponent- The revolution was able to triumph in China because of the war with the Japanese.

In a peacetime economy, urban warfare is more efficient- it engages the enemy in an angle that is still able to divert it- in this case between the insurrectionary fighters and the non-militarist people. This is the reason urban guerilla warfare has been so successful in, say, Iraq. It blurs not the line between the government's enemies, but their allies.

[gilhyle]

Iraq, hmmm, supply lines again: Iran and the dumps left to the Baathist army.