Guerrilla Warfare

Guerilla Warfare was a short article written by Lenin on the Marxist attitude towards guerrilla warfare. Written on September 30, 1906, and published in Proletary, issue No. 5, September 30, 1906. The Chinese translation is included in Vol. 14 of the second revised edition of Complete Works of Lenin.

Although the December armed uprising in Moscow in 1905 was cruelly suppressed by the Tsarist government, the revolutionary armed struggle continued nationwide under the leadership of the Bolshevik party. The people learned from the experience of an armed uprising in Moscow in December and used guerrilla tactics to fight against the Tsarist government. This aroused the concerns of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Mensheviks strongly opposed the armed struggle, denied the role of guerrilla war, and tried to eliminate this new form of struggle. To draw lessons from the experience of guerrilla warfare, criticize the mistaken views on guerilla warfare, strengthen the party’s leadership of guerrilla warfare, and welcome the arrival of a new revolutionary climax, Lenin summarized the experiences of the armed uprising in December and the mass struggle after that in this military thesis.

This article consists of four chapters. Lenin gave a comprehensive account of the Marxist attitude toward guerrilla warfare and emphasizes the need to strengthen the leadership of the proletarian party with regard to guerrilla warfare.

Lenin put forward two principles that Marxists should follow when considering this form of struggle. In the first place, Marxism differs from all primitive forms of socialism by not binding the movement to any one particular form of struggle. It requires a careful approach to the ongoing mass struggle, because with the development of the movement, as the masses become more aware, and as the economic and political crisis intensifies, gives rise to newer and more varied forms of defense and attack. Therefore, Marxism will never reject any form of struggle. In the second place, Marxism demands an absolutely historical examination of the question of the forms of struggle. At different stages of economic evolution, depending on differences in political, national-cultural, living and other conditions, different forms of struggle come to the fore and become the principal forms of struggle; and in connection with this, the secondary, auxiliary forms of struggle undergo change in their turn. To attempt to answer yes or no to the question whether any particular means of struggle should be used, without making a detailed examination of the concrete situation of the given movement at the given stage of its development, means completely to abandon the Marxist position.

On the basis of these two principles, Lenin discussed the different attitudes of the Social-Democratic Party towards strike and barricade struggle in different times and situations. In the 1870s, the Social-Democratic Party did not recognize the general strike as an effective way to solve social problems. However, it now fully recognizes the mass political strikes as a necessary means of struggle under certain conditions. The Social-Democratic Party acknowledged the barricade struggle in the 1840s and later denied it according to the certain situation at the end of the 19th century. However, with the experience of Moscow, it expressed its full willingness to modify the view of denying the barricade struggle.

Lenin mainly discussed the political background of the emergence of the guerrilla struggle. He first reviewed the historical evolution of the forms of revolutionary struggle in Russia and the repressive measures taken by the Tsarist government against the Russian revolution. Lenin mainly pointed out that the armed struggle was carried out by individuals and a small group of people, some of whom participated in revolutionary organizations and some of whom did not participate in any revolutionary organization. It is important to distinguish two different purposes of armed struggle: one is to assassinate individual figures; the other is to confiscate governmental and private money. This form of armed struggle developed and became popular only after the uprising in December 1906.

One of the important reasons for this kind of struggle is the sharp political crisis during the period of armed struggle, especially the increase in poverty, hunger, and unemployment in rural and urban areas. Lenin criticized the social accusations against the guerrilla struggle and corrected the prejudices against it in the party. In response to the social view that guerrilla struggle is anarchist, Blanquist, a means of terror of the old-time, an individual action detached from the masses, which corrupts the morale of the workers, alienates the population at large from them, and jeopardizes the revolution, Lenin pointed out that the new armed struggle, guerrilla struggle, is linked not only to the sharpening of the economic crisis, also to the sharpening of the political crisis. The old Russian terrorism was an affair of the intellectual conspirator; today as a general rule guerrilla warfare is waged by the worker combatant, or simply by the unemployed worker. It is only scientific to analyze guerrilla warfare in relation to the environment of the uprising. Some people in the Party argued that guerrilla activities have damaged the mass movement and led to the deterioration of customs and discipline. Lenin considered this as an argument of the liberal bourgeoisie, not a Marxist one. He used the destruction of the Russian social-democratic workers’ movement in 1906 to prove that the guerrilla struggle was only a product of the current historical period, that it arose from the conditions of the uprising, that it was a form of struggle that was inevitable during the long interval between the “two great battles” of the civil war when the mass movement had, in fact, reached the point of uprising. Lenin pointed out that the destruction of the movement was not due to guerrilla activities, but to the weakness of the party and its inability to master such activities. It is not guerrilla warfare that corrupts discipline, but the lack of organization, order, and party spirit in guerrilla action.

Lenin also discussed the relationship between guerrilla struggle and other revolutionary struggles. Lenin pointed out that in the era of civil war, the ideal of the proletarian party was to become a fighting party. The party of the proletariat cannot at any time consider guerrilla warfare as the only means of struggle, but this means should be subjected to the other means of struggle and should complement the main means of struggle; it should be transformed into a higher means through the educational and organizational influence of socialism, and the social-democratic party should use different means at different times and set strict ideological and organizational requirements for this purpose.

Lenin analyzed the characteristics of the Russian Revolution and proposed to strengthen the party’s leadership in the struggle. Lenin pointed out that the Russian revolution was characterized by a great variety of forms of struggle. As struggles sharpened, they became increasingly organized, they took the forms of large-scale armed struggles and skirmishes. Those armed struggles that occurred at intervals were inevitable. The Social-Democratic Party should present itself with the task of building organizations capable of leading the masses in the big battles and in the skirmishes, of cultivating and training its own structures; in this period when the class struggle has become so acute that a civil war is taking place, the task of the Social-Democratic Party is that it should not only take part in this civil war but that it should play a leading role in this civil war.

This short article affirmed the flexibility of the guerrilla warfare form and emphasized the Party’s leadership of guerrilla warfare, which has important guiding significance for the Chinese revolution.