« Reading List: Losing Mars | Main | Reading List: Days of Rage »
Wednesday, December 19, 2018
Reading List: Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla
- 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 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.
Posted at December 19, 2018 22:01