Strategy (73 page)

If the aim was to develop a broad coalition against the Vietnam War, these visits made little sense. Public opinion was turning against the war and did so increasingly during 1968, because it was both costly and futile. That was not the same as embracing the nation's enemies, and many recoiled from the apparent lack of patriotism and naïveté of those who did so. Yet for the activists this did not matter. They were giving up on the United States, and its docile population, in the conviction that it was bound to be left behind as the tide of history worked through the anti-imperialist people of the third world. At best they could serve as the supporters and agents of these people, gaining their revolutionary credentials by acting from within against the imperialist behemoth.
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Once Cuba and Vietnam were accepted as sources of radical inspiration, Marxism-Leninism had to be taken seriously. The old ideologies of the Left were able to stage a comeback. One radical later ruefully recalled how the Maoist faction in SDS became an “external, disciplined ingredient in our ultra democratic anarchist soup.”
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The emerging analysis linked the American poor with the whole of the third world as victims of the same system of corporate power and liberal indifference. Instead of being a hopeless minority, American radicals started to see themselves as part of a global campaign. The term “third world” had been coined in France in the early 1950s to describe countries that were economically underdeveloped and politically unaligned, keeping their distance from the liberal capitalist first world and the state socialist second world. The long-forgotten inspirational model was the “third estate” of commoners, who eventually revolted in 1789 against the first and second estates of priests and nobles. The term therefore captured an idea of a coherent group, a coalition of the disadvantaged, which might one day overthrow the established order. It came to include many states who gained independence as a result of post–Second World War decolonization. The issue of imperialism moved beyond the baleful influence of the decadent old European powers to the pernicious domination of American neocolonialism, rationalized by a crude anti-communism and driven by corporate greed. Cuba was one example of this struggle; Vietnam was another. There were more confrontations to come, and at some point imperialism would be unable to cope. This was the point which the movement within the United States must work to bring about as soon as possible.

This line of thought was validated by Herbert Marcuse, who had taken over from C. Wright Mills as the vogue intellectual of the New Left in its uncompromising late 1960s form. He had been a member of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, a base for Marxists who kept their distance from the Communist Party, which moved to New York in the 1930s. His reputation was largely as an Hegelian with an interest in Freud until the publication of his book
One Dimensional Man
in 1964. This explained why despite all the apparent qualities of Western countries—political pluralism, affluence, welfare states, access to art—it was natural to feel intensely dissatisfied. All good things turned out to be instruments of social control, preventing people from realizing their true nature and achieving genuine happiness. Even worse, notional forms of opposition had been co-opted, creating a new liberal totalitarianism through what he later described as “repressive tolerance,” which claimed to “reconcile the forces opposing the system and to defeat or refute all protest in the name of the historical prospects of freedom from toil and domination.” Because people were not free, they could not pass judgment on their own lack of freedom.

With his newfound fame among student radicals, Marcuse returned the compliment in
An Essay on Liberation
by celebrating them as agents of change, not only in the West but also on behalf of the whole world. The Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions might not survive the weight of Western repression. The “preconditions for the liberation and development of the Third World must emerge in the advanced industrial countries.” The system must be broken at its strongest link. This required resistance against both political and mental repression. This would be done without bureaucracy and organization, through small groups acting autonomously. The aim was explicitly utopian, the alternative to be developed through trial and error. “Understanding, tenderness towards each other, the instinctual consciousness of that which is evil, false, the heritage of oppression, would then testify to the authenticity of the rebellion.”
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The inspirational figure symbolizing the direct challenge to “Yankee Imperialism” was Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Che, as he was known, had been born to a middle-class Argentinean family, trained as a doctor, and then became a lieutenant of Fidel Castro in his campaign to overthrow the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Although a minister in Castro's government when barely 30 years old, he returned to the field, determined to open up new fronts against imperialism, putting into practice his theories of guerrilla warfare first in the Congo and then in Bolivia. Both campaigns were unsuccessful. The second led to his capture in 1967 and summary execution.
The poster image of him—handsome, hirsute, and determined, sporting his revolutionary beret—became, and remains, iconic.

In January 1966, he sent a message to the founding conference of the Tricontinental, or the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America taking place in Havana. He warned against allowing Vietnam to be isolated in its struggle. There should be “a constant and a firm attack in all fronts where the confrontation is taking place.” Imperialism was “a world system, the last stage of capitalism—and it must be defeated in a world confrontation.” It was therefore necessary to create the “Second and Third Vietnams of the world.” The Americans would gradually be drained by being forced to fight in diverse and unwelcoming regions. The road ahead would be hard, he warned, but the imperative was to carry out “armed propaganda” to galvanize the spirit, putting aside national differences so that all should be prepared to fight in any relevant arena of armed struggle.
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In subsequent years, his manual on guerrilla warfare and the diary of his doomed campaign in Bolivia were published (making clear his inability to win over peasants). The key concept was the “foco.” This small group of dedicated men would stimulate the insurrection by both forcing the state to reveal its inner brutality while demonstrating the availability of an alternative, more sympathetic government. In practice, Guevara's ideas were more influential among “the generation of 1968” in Europe and the United States than in the third world. Outside Latin America, revolutionaries tended to look at the quite different, and generally more successful, Maoist model.

Che's romantic model was based on a misreading of the Cuban revolution. Castro had presented himself as a liberal and leader of a wide anti-Batista coalition, not as a Marxist-Leninist—an affiliation that was only announced after the seizure of power. Castro claimed that the major influence on his concept of irregular war was Ernest Hemingway's novel on the Spanish Civil War,
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. He was careful to work hard to gain sympathy from Americans. Just as Mao had used Edgar Snow to burnish his image in the 1930s as a moderate, “Lincolnesque” and with a “lively sense of humor,” so Castro used
New York Times
reporter Herbert Matthews, who reported back on the idealism, probable anti-communism, and strength of Castro's force. At the time it was probably about forty men, but by talking of “groups of ten to forty” and having an aide deliver a message about a non-existent second-column, Castro conveyed an illusion of numbers.
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This helped bring in external funding, notably from sympathetic Americans. Castro's importance had grown because his rural base allowed him to survive while the key figures in the urban leadership
were killed. At first the urban aspects of the struggle and the support of key elements of the middle class were acknowledged, but postrevolutionary politics and Castro's own shift to the left led to the systematic distortion of the “lessons” of the revolution.
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Castro and Che rewrote the history of the revolution in order to stress their own role and play down the importance of the urban working class and its leadership.

In 1961 Che presented the three key elements of his theory:

Popular forces can win against the army.

It is not necessary to wait until all the conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them.

In underdeveloped America the countryside is the basic area of armed struggle.
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The question of preconditions went to the heart of revolutionary theory. To be a revolutionary at a nonrevolutionary time could be intensely frustrating, but the risks involved in acting as if the conditions were latent and could be brought to the surface by dramatic action had led to many futile campaigns in the past. If discontent was present but inchoate, then it was possible that it could be turned by some spark into mass anger, but the professional revolutionaries tended not to be the source of the spark. Rather, they came in after the event. Mao, for example, understood the importance of political education and action to create mass support and never claimed that guerrillas could take on an army by themselves. Che claimed that it was possible for a revolution to be Marxist in character without this being recognized by the participants. This meant playing down the political context, and thus failing to take it properly into account. When Che wrote a prologue to Giap's
People's War, People's Army
, he reinterpreted the Vietnamese experience as fitting in with his theory, as if Giap had started in Vietnam with a “foco” and had paid no attention to the politics of the struggle.
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The foco substituted for the vanguard party, and the fighters generated support through their military courage and by provoking the regime into atrocities, turning opinion against it. Che at first acknowledged the importance of democratic institutions in giving legitimacy to a regime and so rendering it less vulnerable. By 1963, democracy was dismissed as representing the dictatorship of the ruling class. The doctrine was further transformed by its internationalization, exemplified by the Message to the Tri-Continental, according to which the revolutionary struggle could and should be conducted without regard to geographical boundaries. Che may have been an audacious and brave commander, but he lacked political nous and paid a high price for his simplified theory. He never forged effective political alliances and did not
appreciate the need for a strong local leader to be the public face of a revolution. Rather, he believed in his own mystique, as if the presence of such a famous fighter would inspire courage and confidence.
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Nonetheless, Che had a significant influence on Western radicals. First, and not to be discounted, he looked the part. Second, he provided a theory for the defeat of U.S. imperialism that did not depend on the efforts of those living in its midst. Last, for impatient young radicals who could not face the hard grind of building a mass movement with such unpromising materials, here was a theory about the difference a small group of committed revolutionaries might make if only they could find a way of unleashing the revolutionary potential of the masses. Che's ideas were most effectively spread by a young French intellectual-cum-journalist Regis Debray, whose book title
Revolution in the Revolution
captured the erroneous idea that the Cubans had hit upon a way of modernizing the very idea of a revolution.
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Debray's book was actually sponsored more by Castro than Guevara. Che only saw it when Debray visited him in Bolivia, a journey that accelerated his defeat, especially after the Frenchman was picked up by the Bolivian authorities and confirmed that Che was in the country. Che was critical of Debray for simplifying his theory, focusing on a “micro-level” of the foco and, most importantly, failing to give due note to the Tricontinental aspect of his “macro-strategy.”
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Another Latin American, Carlos Marighela, picked up for a short time where Che had left off. He was a veteran communist politician in Brazil, into his fifties when Che was killed. He attended the Tricontinental in Havana in 1966. In 1968, he broke with the Communist Party, which he considered ossified, and announced his support for urban guerrilla warfare. The urban element was his main divergence from Che. Largely as a result of the Bolivian failure, Marighela believed the guerrilla should operate in familiar terrain. He was most familiar with the city. Until he was shot dead by police in late 1969, Marighela's group carried on a number of actions, including kidnappings and seizure of railway stations. Most notably he was famous for the
Mini-manual of the Urban Guerrilla
, circulated in Havana after his death.
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Although Marighela looked forward to a popular army after a campaign designed “to distract, to wear out, to demoralize the militarists,” his methods for getting the revolution underway were essentially terrorist. They relied on a version of “propaganda of the deed” to attract the mass media. Terrorism's “most conspicuous effect,” he supposed, was to provoke a “violent counterattack that may be so offensive as to drive the populace into the arms of the insurgents.” As was often the case, the effect was the opposite.

In December 1967, the issue of the legitimacy of violence was addressed at a forum in New York. The panel on the topic included Hannah Arendt and Noam Chomsky. Arendt argued against the “mirages of violence,” warning that this was a weapon of impotence and not power, a means that could overwhelm the ends it was supposed to serve. It was not hard for fellow panelists to provide examples where violence was justified and effective, but the most striking intervention came from the floor. Tom Hayden (“a thin, pale young man whose untied tie flapped loosely as he spoke,” according to the
New York Times
) observed how in Cuba violence had been “amazingly successful” when used by a small group to create the “political foundations.” He argued that people in the ghettoes “getting mattresses and clothes and a supply of liquor for the winter is a constructive and revealing form of violence” and then decried the failure of democratic procedures: