Back to the future – people’s war in the 21st century

Keywords:

• Bolivia
• FARC
• Ho Chi Minh
• Che Guevara
• Lin Biao
• mass line
• Vo Nguyen Giap
• Mao Zedong
• Maoism
• people’s war
• Sendero Luminoso

This issue of Small Wars and Insurgencies focuses on the continuing importance of Maoist and post-Maoist concepts of people’s war. It has assembled a collection of papers that addresses various examples from around the world, with an emphasis on South America, where the premier illustration, that of Colombia’s FARC, was Marxist-Leninist but not Maoist, yet embraced the form and strategy of people’s war in a bid which at one point had the state in a critical situation. The collection comes in the wake of previous papers published in this journal on politically Maoist insurgent movements in South Asia, notably Mika Kerttuenen’s study of Maoist insurgents in Nepal and Prem Mahadevan’s survey of Maoist insurgencies in India and their links to organized crime (Kerttunen, “A Transformed Insurgency,” 78–118; Mahadevan, “The Maoist Insurgency in India,” 203–20). The papers confirm that people’s war remains an important analytical framework in the study of small wars and insurgencies, for some even a ‘model’ through which to understand distinct types of insurgent movements and their strategies.

People’s war as strategy for power

There is a key point on display in relation to the question of people’s war. Far from being an anachronism, much less a kit-bag of techniques, people’s war raises what has always been present in military history, guerrilla warfare, and fuses it symbiotically with what has likewise always been present politically, rebellion and the effort to seize power. The result is a strategic approach for waging revolutionary warfare, the effort ‘to make a revolution’. Voluntarism is wedded to the exploitation of structural contradiction through the building of a new world to challenge the existing world, and through formation of a counter-state within the state in order ultimately to destroy and supplant the latter. This is a process of far greater moment than implied by the label ‘guerrilla warfare’ so often applied to what Mao and others were about. In fact, it misleads as much as it illuminates.

Building a counter-state involves the same sort of military means as existing states use in times of war. Guerrilla warfare may, at one point in time, play an important role in carving out the political space necessary for the emergence of the alternative polity, but it looms large only when necessary as a weapon of asymmetry. Mao was quite explicit that ‘regularization’ was necessary if a determined foe and his military were to be vanquished. Ultimately, then, the counter-state vs. state dynamic must be assessed in the same manner as is in any inter-state conflict. What is unique is that one of the contestants must create himself from scratch, but having become a contender, the new counter-state utilizes all means available to it in its strategic quest for victory.

Victory ensures the attainment of power necessary so that the targeted populace can be brought under a new political order. Such an objective frees the strategic approach from its original Marxist-Leninist roots and makes it available to any ideology. That Marxism was integral to the emergence of people’s war stemmed from its bringing to rebellion and resistance (the traditional term applied to rebellion against a foreigner occupier) an awareness that absent structural reordering, agency would soon encounter a revitalized foe, albeit in a different time and place. That Marx’s key structural determinant was economic was demonstrated as inadequate by Max Weber, who added to that system of social stratification the political and status – again, opening the way for greater not lesser utility of what ultimately was made a systematic approach for the seizure of power by Lenin.

Lenin, it hardly needs to be emphasized, emerged in his own time and place. Mao absorbed the Bolshevik success and very much more, to include the key works of military theorists in translation, notably Clausewitz. His emphasis upon the peasantry rather than the urban working class was a logical product of the challenge that confronts any state at war: the need through mobilization to gain manpower and resources. Mao’s own trajectory, unfolding as it did even as Ho Chi Minh – once the COMINTERN representative to the pre-Mao Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – developed his own variant. For both, being Marxists first but also Leninists, mobilization was possible through exploitation of the contradictions of the old order which was to give way to the new order. Their insight was that changes in local correlations of forces would allow new worlds to emerge from the bottom, from which position these ‘liberated’ areas could gradually be joined to form a challenge sufficient to overthrowing ancien régime. With power newly gained went the opportunity to reformulate structure.

Violence was necessary for creation of local political domination, but it was only one tool among an array of possible weapons. Further, violence as with nonviolence could take different forms as appropriate to the situation. Though Mao stated the obvious – strategy for seizing power would proceed from the defensive to stalemate to offensive – the Vietnamese raised to the level of doctrine the reality that local circumstances dictated whether offense or defense dominated tactically and which form of action played the leading role. What the Chinese termed ‘political warfare’, the use of nonviolence to make violence more effective, if used properly, could make violence itself secondary. In this, the impact of Sun Tzu was evident in a manner that extended far beyond the penchant of Western analysts for displaying menus of hackneyed maxims. The same might be said for the parameters under which guerrilla war was to be executed as just one form of violence.

The objective of violence in people’s war, therefore, was twofold: to carry out the normal functions of military warfighting, neutralization of the armed capacity of the enemy; but, more fundamentally, to carve out the space necessary for the political activities of (alternative) state-building achieved through mobilization and construction of capacity. The most efficacious methodology for mobilization was to minimize the local fights picked within the existing matrix of power by bringing all under a united front dedicated to facing common foes and issues. The all but unassailable issue in both the Chinese and Vietnamese cases was resistance against foreign occupation (respectively, the Japanese and the French, then the Americans). In identifying this foe, a certain ‘near enemy, far enemy’ mode of assessment was at work, because Marxist–Leninism demanded that analysis be conducted at tactical, operational, and strategic levels. Hence, regardless of the local opponent, a larger, more powerful foe invariably loomed, whether this was an actual nation-state (e.g. the US) or a reified societal form (‘capitalism’ or ‘imperialism’).

It is easy to see how such analysis could be transferred to the assessment of national space. ‘Occupation’, for Marxist–Leninists, rather than being but a matter of foreigners, was a matter of ideology. Thus ‘capitalists’ (by a variety of names due to the plethora of forms in which capital could manifest itself) existed in a state of occupation vis-à-vis their fellow citizens. Indeed, within such analysis, the oppressed were not citizens at all but subjects, who, as is well known from Marx’s exhortation, had nothing to lose in revolting save their chains. To proceed, both in terms of framing an alternative to existing oppression through narrative construction and in terms of constructing the strategy for seizing the power that would allow societal reordering, was the most fundamental task of revolutionary leadership. Their knowledge placed them in the vanguard of the effort to mobilize liberated subjects by appealing to whatever local and individual concerns galvanized action. Made overly complicated today by the ‘greed versus grievance’ discussion, this is the very essence of political action, and Mao made the ‘mass line’ central to his approach. That is, it was the central task of leaders to discern the contradictions at work, which were primary and secondary, and to come up not only with course of action but message that inspired the masses to move from passive to active participation in the political project at hand.

This volume thus begins with treatment of a premier recent case of such a project at work, Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path, but with a focus upon the role of leadership – of agency – within structural unfolding. David Scott Palmer, long a premier Senderologist, examines how a tightly knit group of Peruvian intellectuals penetrated the local world to produce a national nightmare. The Shining Path project developed the violent facets of its strategy so aggressively that ultimately the Peruvian state was also able to mobilize in developing an effective response.

Considerable irony attends the fact that a similar end befell Che Guevara, whose foco theory was in most senses the very opposite of Shining Path’s people’s war. Not only did Che tout the mobilization power of guerrilla action, but he explicitly enjoined against terrorism, for the obvious reason that it would turn the masses against the political project. As Paul Rich demonstrates, the romance of the revolutionary terrorist swallowed this commonsense advice, leaving Che dead in an obscure corner of Bolivia in 1967. More than the man, the approach died with him, for it was in fact a false representation of what had unfolded in the Cuban Revolution, as much a product of revolutionary hubris – Che joined to the French philosopher and revolutionary tourist, Regis Debray – as a coherent strategy for seizing power.

Something very similar is discussed in the three contributions that delve into the people’s war approach adopted by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC. Though an explicit embrace of the Vietnamese approach demanded that popular mobilization undergird all FARC did, Thomas A. Marks highlights that, coterminous with the promulgation of the Strategic Plan in 1982, went a formal embrace of criminality (especially via the drug trade) to generate the necessary means. This proved disastrous, as Carlos Ospina, former commander of the effort during the bulk of the first Uribe administration (2002–2006), discusses, because it destroyed the necessary legitimacy required for popular mobilization and galvanized decisive democratic mobilization by the state. Fittingly, state response unfolded in a plan termed Democratic Security. In an approach that turned insurgent reality on its head, it was the military, through its Plan Patriota, that served as the shield for democratic empowerment of the citizenry. In the process, US assistance was of considerable importance, as detailed by Carlos Berrios, in a chapter which for the first time places in the public record just what and in what amounts the US did to assist the Colombian military.

Such counterinsurgency success against a would-be mass mobilization movement caused many official actors for a time to look to Colombia for possible ‘lessons learned’ or ‘best practices’ that could be brought to the struggle in Afghanistan. This proved largely stillborn, because at heart the Afghan challenge was that which earlier had vexed the US in South Vietnam: how and where to apply external assistance in such manner as to strengthen state-building built upon fostering legitimacy. Matt Dearing looks at popular uprising in Ghanzi to examine the often very different threads that make up any popular impulse for empowerment and security. It can be argued from our vantage point that the Peruvian and Colombian cases mobilized the power of such local phenomena – both states, after all, however imperfect, were functioning democracies with federal institutions and market economies. By contrast, in Afghanistan state-building continues as an imperfect project parallel with Taliban counterstate-building. The tragic result is little of the foundation and institutional glue that proved essential for the Peruvian and Colombian successes.

Elena Pokalova, in dealing with the North Caucasus, takes such discussion to its logical end. If people’s war is rooted in popular mobilization, democratic counter builds upon legitimacy to produce decisive effects within the polity. Empowerment serves as self-defence for democracy. In contrast, in the case of Russia, authoritarian assessment views insurgent challenge not as impetus for reform but as spark for repression. All armed action of any sort features at some level sealing off the battle-space. In certain cases of irregular war – notably Chechnya in the case at hand, but also, say, Tibet or Xinjiang in China – this is possible, hence reducing the contest to one of raw military power.

One need not agree with the framing and narrative that propel forward an insurgent political project to recognize that negative mass mobilization within a democracy demands reform in the political opportunity structure to the extent necessary to empower the counterinsurgency. The calculation is very different in authoritarian states, where challenge identifies not systemic imperfection but the challengers themselves as those demanding ‘reform’ in the sense of elimination. In the extreme, this takes genocidal forms. Even if mass mobilization intent remains, then, an insurgency invariably will be forced back into embrace of ever more limited options. Pokalova highlights how in her case, this steady deterioration of action based in the masses to terrorism conducted by actors divorced structurally from those they claimed to represent. There is again irony that the Peruvian and Colombian insurgent cases feature similar descent into structural isolation and thus arguably terrorism as logic rather than as method.

Globalization has thrown up possibilities on both sides of this equation. On the one hand, we have now grown weary of the ‘ungoverned spaces’ trope as an explanation for the emergence of certain violent actors. What is labelled ungoverned is normally but alternatively governed. The sheer level of resources that can be leveraged through the global mechanisms of linkage, as illustrated well by FARC’s exploitation of the drug trade, regularly facilitate accumulation of means by counter-states that in an earlier era would not be viable. This allows them to challenge states, which themselves both benefit and lose from the same processes. Assuming, though, that a state plays its cards well, it has in the present global context access to power and assistance from abroad which can be decisive.

Dave Spencer and Hugo Acha Melgar conclude this volume by demonstrating the extent to which certain groups, aware of the need for mass mobilization but also the pitfalls of clinging dogmatically to the known parameters of people’s wars as they have unfolded historically, have produced a new synthesis. In the Bolivian example it proved decisive, and the insurgents now rule. This is especially significant, since the challenge achieved salience through the very narcotics industry which, in the Colombian case, served as the foundation for FARC’s defeat even as it allowed the accumulation of unparalleled resources for realization of the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary project. As demonstrated in the Bolivian case but also prominently in others in Latin America, such as Venezuela or El Salvador, subsuming Marxist analysis in a larger frame of populism serves to exploit the present global context to a far greater degree than clinging openly to the labels of the past. It is the inability of democracies to treat seriously continuing challenges to both their legitimacy and their existence that makes such an approach such a danger.

Maoist foundations

Modern analysts tend to emphasize the political context in which movements embracing people’s war operate in the contemporary global order, in contrast to the previous tendency of some civilian strategists, stretching back to the 1960s, of focusing on the techniques and tactics of Maoist-type guerrillas largely divorced from wider politics.¹ Historically, Maoist-inspired movements committed to various forms of people’s war have emerged in the remote regions of weak states where there are still distinct peasantries or landless rural populations. They have not always been linked in this way. War involving the mass mobilization of the ‘people’ broadly emerged in the aftermath of the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, while as late as the Second World War, many people in Britain considered they were fighting a ‘people’s war for a people’s peace’.² Only in the post-1945 period has ‘people’s war’ been specifically linked to revolutionary forms of warfare in states such as China and Vietnam and become a form of war emulated by radically inclined insurgent and terrorist movements across the globe.

One of the chief figures associated with this form of war has been Mao Tse-tung (or Mao Zedong in pinyin). Though the leader of the communist revolution in China in 1949, Mao has, until recently at least, been relegated to the history books in modern China, even if his portrait continues to gaze across Tiananmen Square in Beijing. He was ignored at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, and his reputation remains tarnished by the disastrous legacy of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (with a collective death toll variously estimated at anything between 40–70 million people). Officially the Chinese regime has declared that he was 70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong, but he has remained sufficiently controversial for Chinese film producers to steer clear of him, preferring other, safer historical figures, such Chou En-lai. Yet there is a growing resurgence of interest in Mao among many Chinese, confronted with catastrophic environmental pollution, endemic corruption, huge income disparities and declining job opportunities.³ Even so, the modern Chinese government avoids any debate on Maoist ideas of people’s war, given that there is, as mentioned above, a growing domestic insurgency among the Uighurs and other minority groups.

Elsewhere, people’s war continues to inspire various insurgent and terrorist formations, living on from generation to generation and constantly reinventing itself as it does so (witness Spencer and Acha Melgar’s analysis of Bolivia). Maoism as a political approach also remains extant, notably in South Asia. It is one of the major ideological constructs to survive from the Twentieth Century alongside fascism, Nazism, and Marxism-Leninism, though this has often been poorly recognized by scholars of political ideology. Maoism – as much about perceived equality as objective reality – is, for many, a romantic form of peasant revolutionary warfare, though it has emerged in situations of rapid social breakdown or transition, in which peasantries see their way of life being under threat or their control of land and livestock under attack by capitalist forms of agriculture.

It is important, first, to establish the general political context in which Maoism emerged following the communist revolution in China in 1949. As a doctrine, Maoism was poorly understood in the West until the 1960s, when work on peasant upheaval by scholars such James C. Scott and Eric Wolf facilitated a more sophisticated understanding of the Chinese peasant revolution, with a stress on its roots in earlier millenarian movements as well as a strong base in popular nationalism.⁴ This view of Maoism and people’s war was largely hidden in the West during the late 1930s and 1940s, due mainly to the domination of information flow by the drama of emerging nationalism and resistance to Japanese fascism. It could also be argued that the China lobby (of which missionaries were an important component) was salient, together with the U.S. war-time alliance with the KMT against the Japanese and the refusal of Hollywood film producers to release a film about Mao and the Chinese communist guerrilla movement, an important reason, arguably, why the eventual revolution of 1949 came as such as shock, especially to the U.S Republican right, angered over what they claimed was the ‘loss’ of China. The one group of military intellectuals who did have a clear insight into Maoist-type guerrilla warfare were the French exponents of guerre revolutionnaire, especially military intellectuals such as David Galula and Roger Trinquier, who had fought the Viet Minh in Indochina and, in some cases, been taken prisoner. Outside France, the group was not taken especially seriously, particularly when they conflated the Indochina and North African cases, and they became dispersed after Algerian independence in 1962.⁵

In its early years, the Chinese regime under Mao only partly conformed to the ‘Maoist’ label that would eventually be attached to it. The revolutionary government already had considerable experience in running whole areas of the country before 1949 in north and east China, encompassing a population estimated at some 100 million people. It proved to be relatively pragmatic during the early 1950s and conformed broadly to a Soviet style top-down model of bureaucratic management, for all its dependence upon the mass line on the way to the seizure of power.⁶ Likewise, its diplomacy proved to be quite conciliatory, supporting the partition of Vietnam at Geneva in 1954 and promoting the Maoist ‘model’ in only muted form in arenas such as the 1955 Bandung conference of non-aligned states. While proceeding domestically with a social revolution, it was willing for most of the 1950s to play second fiddle to the Soviet Union, confirming for many Cold War zealots in the West that they were confronted with a monolithic communist bloc.

Nevertheless, this was a very different model of revolutionary change when compared to that of the Soviets. Maoist people’s war had been based on at least six key conditions: peasant support, protracted war, a national appeal, strong leadership, strong organization, and a breakdown of the opposing regime.⁷ These conditions could lead to a variety of political outcomes, especially in terms of foreign relations. They could have implied an isolationist ‘China first’ strategy, on lines similar, very possibly, to those that emerged in North Korea, leading to a completely totalitarian state. Another possibility might have been to orient policy towards promoting revolution wherever possible abroad, as seemed to be the case for much of the 1960s under the influence of defence minister Lin Biao, Mao’s early heir apparent until his contrived death in a plane crash in September 1971. Finally, the Maoist model might have led from an early stage to an opening up towards the West, as would eventually occur in the 1970s following the visit of Richard Nixon in 1971 and the subsequent emergence of Deng Xiaoping in a post-Maoist regime in Beijing after 1979.

The Maoist model and ideas of revolutionary protracted war thus emerged in a changing set of political circumstances in the early 1960s, following the disastrous Great Leap Forward and the humiliation of Nehru’s India in the 1962 Border War. The Sino-Soviet split provided Mao’s regime with a growing incentive to go onto the ideological offensive in a context of rapid decolonization by European empires in Asia and Africa, two continuing wars of ‘national liberation’ in Indochina and Algeria, as well as prospects that other states too would undergo revolutionary transformation, such as Indonesia before the 1965 military coup. Maoism at this time became increasingly identified as a distinctive ‘model’ of political and military mobilization capable of being applied throughout the Third World, especially where dispossessed or radicalized peasantries seemed ready to embark on a revolutionary overthrow of regimes that were the all too obvious creations of Western colonialism and its legacy efforts. Mao himself emerged from the relative obscurity of the collective leadership of the 1950s to become the dominating charismatic revolutionary persona exerting a considerable force in radical circles around the world, aided by the Little Red Book, published in 1964 under the auspices of Lin Biao. Mao’s global revolutionary charisma never quite reached that of Che Guevara, which, as Rich suggests in this issue, best embodied the metaphor of pure revolution for many in the Western New Left in the 1960s. But the American pop artist Andy Warhol produced a huge range of prints of Mao during the 1970s, emphasizing the multiple ways that it is possible to interpret Mao’s persona, even glamming him up in one large portrait with rouged lips and blue shaded eyes and his mole transformed into a beauty spot, like a French courtesan.⁸

Guevara’s heresy was by no means the only one on the Maoist world of the 1960s and 1970s, an arena that has so far escaped much serious attention by students of International Relations. One far more serious heresy was that of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, who were also exponents of people’s war even if their championing of an extreme variant of the Cultural Revolution led them eventually to engage in a war against the Cambodian people in the regime led by Pol Pot in the late 1970s before its eventual overthrow in 1979 by Vietnam. This is, perhaps, an extreme version of Maoism, though one that needs to be seen alongside Mao’s own war in China a few years previously. It remains all the more noteworthy for the vigor with which contemporary Maoists, such as those in Nepal, deny that the ‘autogenocide’ ever even occurred, so damning are its implications for those who fervently embrace Maoist tenets.

Mao and Maoism are thus capable of multiple interpretations in postmodern global cyberspace, though it remains difficult, perhaps, for a younger generation fully to grasp the degree to which Mao attracted some figures on the Western radical left in the 1960s. Richard M. Pfeffer, for instance, in 1971, welcomed Mao’s attack on the Chinese Communist Party in the Cultural Revolution, seeing it as nothing less than the ‘radical in power, perhaps the first radical in history who substantially retained his radical purity after being in power for over a generation’.⁹ Unlike Guevara, Mao was a figure who was in command of a state ruling over a huge Asian population. It appeared as if, briefly, the Cultural Revolution might breathe life into Marxism-Leninism and give it a populist turn on Rousseau-like lines, driving forward a new purified model of revolution that could be applied throughout the post-colonial world. In the event, it proved but another bloody diversion from the realities of governance.

This was to detach ‘revolution’ from people’s war, which had been the way that Mao had come to power in the first place. It supplied a narrative that overlooked the realities of power, which is another way of looking at Mao Tse-tung’s career. The 2005 biography of Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Holliday stirred debate among China specialists by suggesting a far more Machiavellian and power-obsessed interpretation of Mao, whom they saw as a figure centrally concerned with the accumulation of power and willing to make massive tactical retreats in pursuit of this objective, though some suggest the biography remains compromised by its extensive use of unobtainable sources. Chang and Halliday posit, nevertheless, that Mao was effectively allowed to retreat in 1935 by the Kuomintang at a time when his son was being held captive by Stalin in Moscow and he had a mere 10,000 men.¹⁰ This implies that a Mao myth was being constructed even before the outbreak of the Second World War by sympathetic outside observers such as Edgar Snow in his influential book Red Star Over China (1937), at a time when Mao was little more than a relatively minor regional warlord. Porch is probably correct when he observes, ‘Mao may only have become a footnote in history had not Japanese intervention into China prevented Chiang from finishing off the Chinese communist movement when it was weakened after the Long March in 1935’.¹¹

Mao’s eventual success was due to the victories of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the latter stages of the civil war in the late 1940s. The theory of protracted war was premised on the virtues of guerrilla war in the early stages of conflict, but the inevitable need for escalation to the conventional level if power was to be seized.¹² The three-stage theory of protracted war was one that most guerrillas would recognize, though the actual pace and escalation could obviously vary, based on the wider political and military context in which the war was being fought. The theory was both a rationalization of present weakness and the application of a Marxist teleological outlook promising inevitable military victory. It was a strategic framework of a kind but failed to identify exactly how military victory could be achieved or the precise circumstances in which the conflict needed to be escalated from the guerrilla to the conventional level.

Mao is usually seen as dominating discussion about people’s war in the post-war period, even though the Chinese military was undergoing a transformation in the 1950s and 1960s into a more conventional military formation. One of the major factors behind this was the war of the Viet Minh in Indochina against French rule in the years before Dienbienphu in 1954. This first phase of the war is inextricably linked to the Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap, (who died in 2013), whom Lawrence Freedman has described as Mao’s ‘most assiduous follower’.¹³ Giap certainly borrowed some of Mao’s concepts of people’s war, in the sense of mobilizing where possible the huge labor power of a peasant population to overcome shortcomings in weaponry. But he did not start publishing his own approaches until the late 1940s, alongside those of his fellow military strategist Truong Chinh. O’Dowd has observed quite correctly (and as noted above) that Vietnamese military doctrine started to emerge much earlier under the major influence being Ho Chi Minh. In fact, as early as 1938, Ho visited Yenan before later making Hengyang his base. It was here that Ye Jiangying (Wade Giles, Yeh Chien-ying), later Chief of Staff of the 8th Route Army, formed a guerrilla warfare school, mainly to train troops of the Kuomintang. Ho joined the faculty of the school for several months, and it is fair to assume this experience was crucial in his own text on guerrilla warfare, which has been published in this journal.¹⁴

That essay itself displays considerable familiarity with Chinese guerrilla tactics and could very broadly be considered ‘Maoist’ in orientation. That it is concerned principally with tactics rather than strategy, though, suggests that guerrilla units which remain constantly on the defensive will very likely end in failure.¹⁵ Generally-speaking, there was little in Ho’s text that would not have been understood by any mobile military formation engaged in sudden hit and run attacks, whether these be Caesar’s legions or the wartime SAS and U.S Army Rangers. The text compares well with The Art of Guerrilla Warfare by Major Colin Gubbins of the British wartime SOE, though Gubbins at least stressed the need to distinguish between ‘friendly’, ‘hostile’, and ‘neutral’ populations.¹⁶ Ho stresses the importance of good intelligence, coherent planning, and appraisal of the ‘enemy situation’. He has little to say about ‘people’s war’ as such, beyond a few brief remarks on the need for ‘close ties’ between guerrillas and people, ‘because the guerrillas fight the French and Japanese troops to protect the people’.¹⁷

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Giap applied to fighting the French in Vietnam his own variant of the Maoist three-phased approach. He saw the war starting, first, with the retreat, retraining, and reformation of the Viet Minh; followed, second, by an offensive against the French posts in Tonkin (with Chinese assistance); and then, finally, the destruction of the French army.¹⁸ The strategy was broadly Clausewitzean, in the sense that the Viet Minh was fighting, first and foremost, an anti-colonial war aimed at defeating the French military, rather than Mao’s more complex dual struggle against the Japanese and the Kuomintang in China. The Viet Minh lacked the huge terrain of China to retreat into, while there was also a pressing sense that time was not necessarily on their side in the 1950s, with fears that undue delay might prompt the US into direct intervention in support of the French.

Giap proved willing, at points, to discard Maoist principles in favor of a ‘blitzkrieg’ strategy aimed at forcing the French into fighting a longer war than they would have otherwise have wished and one that they lacked the political and psychological means to fight over an indefinite stretch of time.¹⁹ Given his Napoleonic aversion to protracted war and eagerness for escalating conflict where possible to conventional levels, it is hard to see Giap providing much of a guide to Maoist people’s war. As Douglas Pike warned in the 1960s, it is important for military analysts to avoid a ‘Mao Giap’ cult developing that clouds serious analysis of actual military and strategic achievements.²⁰ Giap was an impatient strategist, prone to taking risks by escalating the conflict to near conventional levels. He placed a rather greater emphasis than Mao on the psychology of the enemy he was confronting, the French in the first instance followed later by the Americans. He appears to have recognized that domestic opinion in both these counties would eventually ensure that the war could not be prolonged indefinitely, a strategy that eventually bore fruition with the Tet Offensive in 1968 and the decision to embark on ‘Vietnamization’ by the incoming Nixon administration.

Conversely, another figure incorrectly associated with people’s war, Che Guevara, had few such psychological insights, though he lives on in popular memory and has re-emerged as a revolutionary icon fifty years after his ignominious death in Bolivia (again, see Rich in this volume). Unlike Mao, Che remains a figure who embodies the idea of pure revolutionary commitment, though this is disconnected from his military strategy of the guerrilla foco, which became increasingly promoted in the mid-1960s as an alternative to the dilatoriness of Soviet-dominated communist parties and the demographic demands of the Chinese and Vietnamese people’s war models, based on huge pools of peasant labor simply unavailable in most parts of Central and South America. Guevara, too, was a quixotic adventurer, seeing the foco as a kind of quick do-it-yourself version of Maoist people’s war. Guevara abandoned protracted warfare in favor of a select group of focoist armed missionaries, who would galvanize the peasantries of South America into revolutionary struggle in a manner different from their suspicious Asian counterparts. In the event, Guevara failed to use proper intelligence to check beforehand the situation at the local level, an omission made all the worse by his group being unable to speak the local language or understand the transformative impact of the Bolivian government’s policy of land reform.

It is thus Mao Tse-tung who is inextricably at the centre of the study of people’s war, along with post-Maoist types of insurgency and terrorism. People’s war has emerged from Twentieth Century history as a mix of political propaganda, guerrilla tactics that can be taught at staff colleges, and a strategic ‘model’ debated and categorized by academic analysts since the 1960s. Taking propaganda first, Maoist agitprop is now a rarity in the West, though only a few months ago, a Labour Shadow Chancellor (to widespread laughter) quoted from Mao’s Little Red Book in the House of Commons.²¹ Some long-standing Maoists can still be found among far left political groupings in the West, invariably engaged, any search of the internet will reveal, in elaborate doctrinal debate not with rival Trotskyites and Stalinists but with other, ever proliferating, Maoist splinters. The antique quality to this sort of Maoism should not distract from serious engagement with the ideology in various part of the developing world such as South Asia, especially in Nepal and parts of India where the Naxalite insurgency continues to seek the support especially of marginalized tribal peoples in peripheral but often mineral-rich areas, as well as some other states such as the Philippines.

People’s war as a strategic approach, with its integral popular recruitment and mobilization, is still worth looking at in detail, both at staff colleges and in courses on counter-terrorism. The tendency to dwell on the tactical minutiae misses the profound insights into the construction of the counter-state which are the heart of the approach and its literature. The Vietnamese made this systematic in a way which produces nothing short of astonishment at the fact that their contributions remain completely ignored in Western warfighting (much less political) circles. The approach, though at heart a populist variant of Marxist-Leninism, moved far beyond the Bolshevik strategy of the urban putsch led by select groups of revolutionary soldiers and militant party followers. That the Maoist narrative was driven by Chinese internal politics to the point of hagiography, focused on the heroic myth of the ‘Long March’ to Yenan, should not obscure the power of what is contained in Mao’s various works. Therein, he spelled out not only the specifics with which Western observers are so besotted but a sophisticated political approach to the building of counter-state challenge and the projection of its power so as to vanquish the state.

This is not to confuse mobilization with democratic empowerment. Mao’s mass line was a feedback mechanism for exploitation of popular desire for justice and self-defence. Even some sympathetic Western observers, such as the Marxist historian V.G. Kiernan, recognized that there was a ‘gigantic feat of sleight of hand’ in Mao’s project, in the sense that mobilizing the peasant masses was intended as the first stage in a guided transition towards a very different type of society.²² Maoism was also a distinctive model of social revolution, aimed at other Third World societies, especially those that had experienced the full ravages of Western imperial rule or capitalist exploitation. In the 1950s and 1960s, this revolutionary guerrilla model was one that the Chinese regime was keen to try and export to revolutionary insurgencies across abroad as a way of offsetting the influence of the rival Soviet Union as well as the focismo of Che Guevara and Regis Debray in Central and South America.

A shift to post-Maoism?

Thus, we return to our final chapter. In the last few years, several analysts have begun to identify a phase of post-Maoism that includes some of the new jihadist insurgent formations in regions such as the Middle East, Afghanistan, and South Asia. This journal, in a recent contribution by Marks, has spoken directly to the matter.²³ It is possible that we have reached a historical turning point in the Maoist impact on global politics, identifiable as four main phases over the previous 75-odd years from the mid-1930s, when Mao emerged as the undisputed head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the aftermath of the Jiangxi debacle (Chiang Kai-shek’s Fifth Encirclement Campaign), to the peace agreement signed in November 2006 between Kathmandu and its arguably victorious Maoist challengers. The first phase pivoted around the Chinese Revolution of 1949 and ran from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. It included Vietnam and the first period of war against the French that ended in 1954 after the defeat at Dienbienphu. The second phase pivoted around the Guevarist heresy rather than pure Maoism and ran from 1959, the start of the Cuban Revolution, to the late 1970s, when it expired with the victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, a movement that had started with a focoist strategy but gravitated to a broadly based strategy of popular insurrection. The third phase started in 1980 pivoted around Sendero Luminoso in Peru. The movement was as much a terrorist as a Maoist one, though it emerged from a long tradition of rural discontent and marginalization in the Andes. Its defeat by the early 1990s, following the 1992 capture of its leader Guzman,²⁴ led to a fourth phase that has pivoted around exploitation of political negotiation and democratic politics rather than the violence line of effort of protracted people’s war. As noted above, it is exemplified by the processes of political accommodation in Nepal and Colombia, but perhaps nowhere more so than the Bolivian case treated here.

The four phases suggest a trend within global Maoism away from protracted guerrilla war towards a more complex mix of strategies including selective guerrilla attacks, urban terrorism, protracted negotiations, as well as alliances with other powerful actors, such as drug lords. This is not particularly surprising when the peasant base of Maoist movements is taken into consideration. There are few classic peasantries left in the modern global system as were present in China and Vietnam. Decades ago, Farideh Farhi had already recognized the analogous role played in Iran of the previously rural masses that had taken up residence in urban space.²⁵ Most countries today have rural communities that have become increasingly linked to the towns and urban areas by modern transport and communications. Isolated rural peasant communities have largely become things of the past while modern methods of counterinsurgency, including satellite surveillance and drones, have led some analysts such as Joes to conclude that Maoist-type insurgencies and the creation of secure base areas are increasingly problematical.²⁶ As David Kilcullen, among others, has argued, insurgencies in the future are increasingly likely to take an urban form, picking up arguments that were initially developed in the Latin American context in the 1960s by revolutionary theorists such as Carlos Marighella. This urban guerrilla warfare, though, is likely to take an increasingly transnational form, with coastal cities (such as Mumbai in India) vulnerable to coastal attack. ²⁷

Post-Maoism, by contrast, stretches the Maoist categorization into the arena of contemporary jihadist global insurgency and terrorism. Mackinlay has suggested that the ‘globalised insurgent’ and the ‘post-Maoist’ are the same type, though post-Maoist insurgencies are ones that overlap with the previous Maoist era, even if those fighting in them are no longer local or regional peasantries but insurgents drawn from the ‘global community’. These post-Maoist insurgents seem, to Mackinlay, to be engaged in a new type of protracted war even if its long-term objectives are ‘unrealistic or intangible’, while the insurgents fighting them span a range of global cultures and nationalities. Most importantly, the new post-Maoist global insurgency has no clear military centre of gravity making its defeat difficult and problematic.²⁸ In any case, Mackinlay suggests, the campaigns being fought by post-Maoist insurgents are as much in cyberspace as on the battle field, though they might well have the capacity to federate or form alliances with more conventional Maoist-type movements, locally or nationally.²⁹

This reformulation of Maoist warfare for the modern age is certainly innovative and suggests that people’s war is increasingly likely to be global in orientation, with battle sites in cyberspace as much as the local level. For many analysts, the theory is not fully supported by the evidence. ‘The people’ at the global level remains a nebulous concept and may in practice consist of an interlinking network of groups with varying forms of ideological commitment to global jihad. Equally, the relationship between global insurgents and local movements is also somewhat fractious, though much might be derived from looking at how some of these evolve over the years ahead. Mackinlay’s designation of ‘Maoist’ is also broader than the category adopted in this collection, which is anchored on movements constructed around Maoist ideological and organizational precepts. Other insurgencies, though, of a non-Maoist type, might still ally themselves with the post-Maoist global jihad even if their various understandings of the end-state may well ultimately conflict. It will be hard for any would-be global insurgency to impose (so far at least) a global ‘mass line’ on its followers, though we should not presume that this will be impossible at some time in the future.

More likely, though, are the sort of post-Maoist movements illustrated by the Nepali and Bolivian cases, both of which have been mentioned several times over here, with the latter included in this volume. These are viable and dangerous precisely because they are grounded in objective consideration of the past and explicit consideration for leveraging the changed context of the twenty-first century. Their decision to emphasize what certainly were ‘supporting forms’ at one point in the Maoist trajectory has generally left states counter them either clueless or simply befuddled. Nepal survived in its democratic form due to a serendipitous combination of circumstances; Bolivia did not. Therein lies continuity with the past and a warning for the future.

Disclosure statement

The views and opinions expressed by author Marks in this article are his own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any agency of the U.S. government.

Notes

1. Freedman, Strategy, 191.

2. Calder, The Peoples War, 1992.

3. Anderlini, “The Return of Mao.”

4. Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power; Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, 103–55.

5. Some retired, others embarked on a second career as mercenaries in Africa; and a few others served as advisors to military regimes in South America, eager to develop their own draconian forms of counter-insurgency. Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare from Indochina to Algeria, remains an indispensable guide. For the influence of French advisors on South American military regimes see Robin, Escadrons de la Mort.

6. Teiwes, “The Chinese State during the Maoist Era,” 107.

7. Girling, People’s War, 50.

8. Gewirtz, “How Andy Warhol Explains China’s Attitude Toward Chairman Mao.”

9. Pfeffer, “Mao Tse-tung and Revolution,” 281.

10. Chang and Halliday, Mao; see also Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies, 77.

11. Porch, Wars of Empire, 201; a point which likewise suffuses the argument of Thomas A. Marks in his Making Counterrevolution: Wang Shheng and the Kuomintang. London: Frank Cass, 1998.

12. For details see the early chapters of Marks, Maoist People’s War in Post-Vietnam Asia.

13. Freedman op. cit., 186.

14. O’Dowd, “Ho Chi Minh and the Origins of the Vietnamese Doctrine of Guerrilla Tactics,” 564 (in 561–87).

15. Ibid., 569.

16. Gubbins, The Art of Guerrilla Warfare, 32–4.

17. O’Dowd, 567.

18. Colvin, Volcano Under Snow, 86.

19. Ibid.

20. Pike, Viet Cong, 50.

21. Mason, “John McDonnell Under Fire for Quoting Mao Tse-tung in Commons”; for discussion of the book itself, see Cook, Mao’s Little Red Book.

22. Kiernan, Marxism and Imperialism, 160.

23. See Marks, “Terrorism as Method in Nepali Maoist Insurgency, 1996–2016,” 81–118.

24. Mandatory for appreciation of this entire period is the film, The Dancer Upstairs (20th Century Fox, 2003), directed by John Malkovich and based upon the novel of the same name by Nicholas Shakespeare (1995). Whatever its allowances to artistic licence to provide a compelling plot, the film is masterful in creating the atmosphere of sheer disorientation and helplessness that was engendered by Shining Path terrorism.

25. Fahri, States and Urban-based Revolutions.

26. Joes, Urban Guerrilla Warfare, 5.

27. Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains.

28. Mackinlay, The Insurgent Archipelago, 160–1.

29. Ibid., 162.