- Marighella, Carlos.
Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla.
Seattle: CreateSpace, [1970] 2018.
ISBN 978-1-4664-0680-3.
-
Carlos Marighella joined the Brazilian Communist Party in 1934,
abandoning his studies in civil engineering to become a full
time agitator for communism. He was arrested for subversion
in 1936 and, after release from prison the following year,
went underground. He was recaptured in 1939 and imprisoned
until 1945 as part of an amnesty of political prisoners. He
successfully ran for the federal assembly in 1946 but was
removed from office when the Communist party was again banned
in 1948. Resuming his clandestine life, he served in several
positions in the party leadership and in 1953–1954 visited
China to study the Maoist theory of revolution. In 1964, after a
military coup in Brazil, he was again arrested, being shot in the
process. After being once again released from prison, he broke
with the Communist Party and began to advocate armed revolution
against the military regime, travelling to Cuba to participate
in a conference of Latin American insurgent movements. In 1968,
he formed his own group, the
Ação Libertadora Nacional
(ALN) which, in September 1969, kidnapped U.S. Ambassador
Charles Burke Elbrick, who was eventually released in exchange for
fifteen political prisoners. In November 1969, Marighella was
killed in a police ambush, prompted by a series of robberies and
kidnappings by the ALN.
In June 1969, Marighella published this short book (or
pamphlet: it is just 40 pages with plenty of white space
at the ends of chapters) as a guide for
revolutionaries attacking Brazil's authoritarian regime
in the big cities. There is little or no discussion of the
reasons for the rebellion; the work is addressed to those
already committed to the struggle who seek practical advice
for wreaking mayhem in the streets. Marighella has entirely
bought into the Mao/Guevara theory of revolution: that the
ultimate struggle must take place in the countryside, with
rural peasants rising en masse
against the regime. The problem with this approach was that
the peasants seemed to be more interested in eking out
their subsistence from the land than taking up arms in
support of ideas championed by a few intellectuals in the
universities and big cities. So, Marighella's guide is addressed
to those in the cities with the goal of starting the armed
struggle where there were people indoctrinated in the
communist ideology on which it was based. This seems to
suffer from the “step two problem”. In essence,
his plan is:
- Blow stuff up, rob banks, and kill cops
in the big cities.
- ?
- Communist revolution in the countryside.
The book is a manual of tactics: formation of independent cells
operating on their own initiative and unable to compromise
others if captured, researching terrain and targets and planning
operations, mobility and hideouts, raising funds through bank
robberies, obtaining weapons by raiding armouries and police
stations, breaking out prisoners, kidnapping and exchange for
money and prisoners, sabotaging government and industrial
facilities, executing enemies and traitors, terrorist bombings,
and conducting psychological warfare.
One problem with this strategy is that if you ignore the
ideology which supposedly justifies and motivates
this mayhem, it is essentially indistinguishable from the
outside from the actions of non-politically-motivated
outlaws. As the author notes,
The urban guerrilla is a man who fights the military
dictatorship with arms, using unconventional methods. A
political revolutionary, he is a fighter for his country's
liberation, a friend of the people and of freedom. The area
in which the urban guerrilla acts is in the large Brazilian
cities. There are also bandits, commonly known as outlaws,
who work in the big cities. Many times assaults by outlaws
are taken as actions by urban guerrillas.
The urban guerrilla, however, differs radically from the outlaw.
The outlaw benefits personally from the actions, and attacks
indiscriminately without distinguishing between the exploited
and the exploiters, which is why there are so many ordinary
men and women among his victims. The urban guerrilla follows
a political goal and only attacks the government, the big
capitalists, and the foreign imperialists, particularly
North Americans.
These fine distinctions tend to be lost upon innocent victims,
especially since the proceeds of the bank robberies of which the
“urban guerrillas” are so fond are not used to aid
the poor but rather to finance still more attacks by the
ever-so-noble guerrillas pursuing their “political
goal”.
This would likely have been an obscure and largely forgotten
work of a little-known Brazilian renegade had it not been
picked up, translated to English, and published in June
and July 1970 by the
Berkeley
Tribe, a California underground newspaper. It
became the terrorist bible of groups including Weatherman, the
Black Liberation Army, and Symbionese Liberation Army in
the United States, the Red Army Faction in Germany, the Irish
Republican Army, the Sandanistas in Nicaragua, and the
Palestine Liberation Organisation. These groups embarked on
crime and terror campaigns right out of Marighella's playbook
with no more thought about step two. They are largely
forgotten now because their futile acts had no permanent
consequences and their existence was an embarrassment to the
élites who largely share their pernicious ideology but
have chosen to advance it through subversion, not insurrection.
A Kindle edition is available from a
different publisher. You can
read
the book on-line for free at the
Marxists Internet Archive.
December 2018 