CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE & "RESISTANCE" -A Symposium: Nechayev In The Andes
Coser, Lewis
THE EMANCIPATION of the working class is the work of the working class itself," wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. One of the tragic paradoxes of the Marxist movement has been...
...What Karl Mannheim once said of fascism seems eminently applicable to Debray's vision: At the very heart of its theory and its practice lies the apotheosis of direct action, the belief in the decisive deed, and in the significance attributed to the initiative of a leading elite...
...But it carried considerable specific weight due to its high degree of social concentration...
...Debray thinks of the guerrillas as promethean rebels, but had they any power, they would more likely become the terroristic scourges of the people of Latin America...
...Debray, like Fanon, distrusts the city...
...Self-defense," he argues, "is partial...
...The guerrillas must cut themselves loose from all sectors of the population, all of which are either hostile or lukewarm...
...He needs to be young lest he suffer from "the vices of excessive deliberation," and "a perfect Marxist education is not at the outset an imperative condition...
...Debray, in fact, is at pains to point out that the revolutionary warfare he advocates has nothing to do with the age-old tradition of peasant self-defense...
...He is a lineal descendant of that long line of Russian revolutionary terrorists and enrages from Nechayev to Tkachev, who, appalled by the weakness of the liberal bourgeoisie, the subservience of the enlightened nobility, and the primordial passivity of the peasantry, concluded that only the heroic deeds of small elites of dedicated revolutionaries could propel Russian society into freedom...
...The essence of politics is to recognize and to grapple with the demands of the hour...
...Despairing of the slow course of history, despairing also of all existent social forces, they concluded that only terroristic acts of a self-chosen few would be able to mold the resistant paste of social reality...
...Debray has a "Prussian" view of the relations between the party and the army, "The people's army will be the nucleus of the party, not vice versa...
...Debray is a follower of these Russian revolutionaries, though he seems to suffer under the strange illusion that he is a Marxist...
...Neither in the present nor in the future [wrote Tkachev], can the people, left to their own resources, bring into existence the social revolution...
...In Debray's picture, the guerrilla fighter who presumes to unleash the forces of revolution looks a bit like a caricature of a Nietzschean superman...
...The guerrilla army assumes the prerogatives of political leadership" even though it is, at least in the initial stages of insurrection, cut off from all strata of the underlying population...
...nor are they responsible to urban-based political party leaders...
...Since history was unwilling to go in the direction of their desires, they would have to rape it...
...Someone once said that everywhere else armies were the instruments of states, but in Prussia the state was an instrument of the army...
...Here again he seems nearer to fascist than to Marxist thought...
...The world is corrupt, and only a tiny revolutionary elite can be trusted...
...The city, that whore of Babylon, is lost...
...Though they may have differed as to the extent to which voluntaristic action by the vanguard elite could hasten the process of radicalization in the population, no Marxist theorist ever considered it possible or desirable to engage in revolutionary activity without the assurance of large-scale disaffection and at least an inchoate desire for fundamental change among oppressed classes...
...YET DEBRAY'S WORK is by no means without historical precedent...
...In consequence, after the bloody repression of revolutionary attempts in a few port cities, Mao Tse-tung turned to the peasantry, which was led by cadres of déclassé intellectuals, as the major revolutionary force...
...His revolutionary guerrilla units are to be "organizationally separate from the civilian population...
...Because they act, because they wield guns...
...They will function in its midst, but they will "not assume the direct defense of the peasant population...
...A young French philosopher of impeccable upper-class origin, he has turned his intellectual gifts to developing the theoretical underpinnings for Castro's political adventurism in Latin America...
...Nevertheless, what strikes one most forcefully in the book is his deep and abiding contempt for the common run of humanity...
...ALL PREVIOUS MARXIST THEORY took as its point of departure an assessment of the preparedness, or readiness for basic change, of the class or classes which were to be the targets of revolutionary agitation and propaganda...
...His book is not without its pathos...
...they cannot even trust older men, no matter what their politics or previous experience...
...They must live like perpetual nomads moving from camp to camp...
...Debray's defenders may so argue, but it is important to note that he himself does not employ this rationale...
...If he can shoot straight, he need not be burdened with theoretical baggage...
...Too much ratiocination may only cramp his style...
...One sometimes feels sympathy for this young revolutionary who is engaged in what he himself surely considers a promethean effort at liberation in the face of hard and seemingly untractable realities...
...Social ideals are alien to the people...
...That very peasantry toward which Marx had expressed his withering contempt, and that he had Since this article was written, Regis Debray has been sentenced by a military court in Bolivia to 30 years imprisonment— the maximum penalty according to Bolivian law...
...And they would prevail...
...These lukewarm incubators [of the cities] make one infantile and bourgeois...
...Lenin, convinced that unaided workingclass spontaneity could create trade-union but not political consciousness, bent all his energies to organizing a devoted sect of professionals who would become the real agents of the revolutionary transformation, even though initially they might be mainly intellectuals of middle-class origin...
...they belong to the social philosophy of the revolutionary minority...
...But why can they be trusted, why should they be trusted...
...His violent and apocalyptic fantasies are rooted in his distrust of men...
...PERSONALLY, DEBRAY MAY be a man of heroic cast and admirable virtues, but what he stands for is an evil and mischievous doctrine...
...But recourse to guns always corrupts, absolute reliance on guns corrupts absolutely, and those who make a mystique out of guns are already corrupted in advance...
...Guns will probably have to be used...
...They would take it upon themselves to break the thick cake of customary resistance, they would pit their naked will against the inert force of history...
...In China, by contrast, when the Chinese Communist party was created there was hardly an industrial working class at all...
...That an elderly man should be proven militant—and possess revolutionary training—is not, alas, sufficient for coping with guerrilla existence, especially in the early stages...
...The guerrillas "are the foreigners, lacking status, who at the beginning can offer the populace nothing but bloodshed and pain...
...The emancipation of the working class, Lenin believed, could never be accomplished except through the Bolshevik party...
...Defenders of Debray's doctrine might contend that he proposes guerrilla activity in Latin America not because he is drawn to such solutions in principle but only because, given the reality of Latin-American dictatorships, other methods are not available...
...Only we revolutionists can accomplish this...
...He makes no distinction whatever between political activities in relatively democratic countries, such as Venezuela and Chile, and in military dictatorships such as Bolivia...
...revolutionary guerrilla warfare aims at total war by combining under its hegemony all forms of struggle at all points within its territory...
...But to Debray the party counts for very little, because ideas and ideologies count for very little...
...One hopes his defense that he was only a journalistic observer will be accepted and that he will simply be deported to his native France...
...In Lenin's day the Russian working class was numerically small, almost drowned in a sea of peasants...
...As THESE LINES are being written Che Guevara has just been killed after his guerrilla band was discovered by the Bolivian military And Debray faces a military court which accuses him of having been a participant in guerrilla activities...
...He would force them to be free at the point of a gun...
...Its program was 43 LEWIS COSER the intellectual distillation of the movement's philosophy and ideology...
...In the meantime it ought to be said without equivocation: those of us who sympathize with the Latin-American masses, and are moved by the misery and oppression in which they now live, must hope that they will not fall prey to the sick adventurist fantasies of Debray and his ilk...
...One of the tragic paradoxes of the Marxist movement has been that impatient revolutionaries—appalled by the sluggishness of history and the apparent unwillingness of the working class to be concerned in its alleged interest—have ever since been in search of substitute agents of historical transformation...
...History is made neither by the masses, nor by ideas . . . but by the elites who from time to time assert themselves...
...For all Marxists the forging of a revolutionary party was always a sine qua non, because the party and its program embodied the theoretical and ideological thrust of the movement...
...What has been reported about the proceedings of the court does not give one the impression that it acted with anything resembling judicial impartiality...
...But the end is not yet...
...Debray breaks with that tradition...
...42 NECHAYEV IN THE ANDES The guerrillas are not responsible to the peasants among whom they fight...
...He offers the same terroristic solution for all of them—and hence shows quite clearly that he has only contempt for democratic methods and alternatives...
...In other words, they will not feel responsible if this population is subject to reprisal by virtue of nearby guerrilla actions...
...It is perhaps harsh to say so, yet I cannot help but feel that Debray's view of the matter has more affinity with the rhetoric of fascism than with that of classical Marxism...
...C. judged to be incapable of concerted action due to its isolation from the major centers of political and economic power, became the basis for the second major revolution to call itself—such are the ironies of history— "Marxist...
...He is basically unconcerned with the wishes and desires of the people...
...Not only can the armed units of youthful adventurers operating in the remoteness of the hinterland not trust the city...
...Eventually, the future People's Army will beget the party of which it is to be, theoretically, the instrument: essentially the party is the army...
...it softens and corrupts...
...There is a close tie between biology and ideology...
...How can you consult the masses, they might argue, if they are gagged by a military regime...
...International pressures should be brought upon the Bolivian junta to induce it to expel Debray from the country rather than impose so severe and vindictive a sentence.—L...
...This idea of history as an intelligible scheme disappears in the face of the irrationality of the fascist apotheosis of the deed...
...His is a politics of despair, a politics that has lost all belief in the political capacities of ordinary human beings...
...parties, being city-based organisms, are inherently suspect...
...Physical aptitude is the prerequisite for all other aptitudes...
...There is no doubt in my mind that the liberation of Latin America from internal and external oppression will be a prolonged ordeal...
...It would be foolish to expect that this will not be accompanied in many situations by violence and bloodshed...
...The Monthly Review, the organ of Paul Sweezy, a man who thinks of himself as the upholder of Marxist orthodoxy in the United States, has recently published a special issue, (July–August 1967) presenting a full translation of Regis Debray's book Revolution 41 LEWIS COSER in the Revolution, in which it is argued that neither the working class nor the peasantry, neither professional political revolutionaries nor city lumpen, but armed guerrillas made up of students and revolutionary intellectuals will "initiate the highest forms of class struggle...
...Or: "When a guerrilla group communicates with city leadership or its representatives abroad, it is dealing with 'its' bourgeoisie...
...And in due course, the party substituted itself for the working class...
...Mao taught that the guerrillas should remain unnoticed, living in the midst of peasant sympathizers "like fish in water," but Debray thinks this impossible under Latin-American conditions...
...Whatever the Andes need, it is not Nechayevs from Paris...
...Debray and Sweezy thus have come full circle in their distorted form of "Marxism...
...Nowhere is Debray's distrust of reason and his elitist anti-intellectualism more apparent than in his discussion of the relationships between the guerrilla units and the revolutionary party...
...Ideology and organization, it would appear, all grow out of the barrel of a gun...
...the emancipation of the working class is now to be the work of declasse intellectuals...
...In our day a significant theorist of revolution in the underdeveloped countries, Frantz Fanon, created a powerful myth according to which, the proletariat having been corrupted and softened by the exploiting colonialists, only a pure and uncontaminated peasantry allied to the lumpenproletariat of the city—that lumpenproletariat Marx had thought incapable of any constructive political initiative—would constitute the motor force of revolutionary transformation...
Vol. 15 • January 1968 • No. 1
