Arms and the People: Popular Movements and the Military from the Paris Commune to the Arab Spring

299 Pages·2012·2.207 MB·English

by  Mike Gonzalez, Houman Barekat

Arms and the People
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Arms And the PeoPle
Popular movements and the military
from the Paris Commune to the Arab spring
Edited by Mike Gonzalez and Houman Barekat
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First published 2013 by Pluto Press
345 Archway road, london n6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
distributed in the United states of America exclusively by
Palgrave macmillan, a division of st. martin’s Press llC,
175 Fifth Avenue, new York, nY 10010
Copyright © mike Gonzalez and houman Barekat 2013
the right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors
of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright,
designs and Patents Act 1988.
British library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British library
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IsBn 978 0 7453 3297 0 Paperback
IsBn 978 1 8496 4809 7 PdF eBook
IsBn 978 1 8496 4811 0 Kindle eBook
IsBn 978 1 8496 4810 3 ePUB eBook
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Contents
Introduction 1
Mike Gonzalez
SoldIErS and rEvolutIon
1. Soldiers, Sailors and revolution: russia 1917 11
Mike Haynes
2. an army in revolt: Germany 1918–19 35
Volkhard Moser
3. nation against nation: Italy 1919–21 58
Megan Trudell
4. Soldiers on the Side of the People: Portugal 1974–75 79
Peter Robinson
tHE PoPular ForcES MoBIlISE
5. Militia and Workers’ State: Paris 1871 105
Donny Gluckstein
6. the People in arms: Spain 1936 123
Andy Durgan
7. never ‘one Hand’: Egypt 2011 149
Philip Marfleet
GuErrIlla WarS and tHE lIMItS oF
IMPErIal PoWEr
8. People change: american Soldiers and Marines
in vietnam 1965–73 173
Jonathan Neale
9. crazy little armies: Guerrilla Strategy in
latin america 1958–90 193
Mike Gonzalez
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vi Arms And the PeoPle
countEr-rEvolutIon and tHE MIlItary
10. the Iron Fist: chile 1973 211
Mike Gonzalez
11. reaction and Slaughter: Indonesia 1965–66 232
Nathaniel Mehr
tHE cIvIc−MIlItary allIancE
12. ‘Storming the ramparts of tyranny’:
Egypt and Iraq 1945–63 253
Anne Alexander
13. the civic−Military alliance: venezuela 1958–90 278
An Interview with Douglas Bravo by Mike Gonzalez
Notes on Contributors 289
Index 291
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Introduction
Mike Gonzalez
When the tanks rolled into Tahrir Square, Cairo in February 2011,
the world held its breath. The crowd, however, saw the army – or
at least the conscripts who were its rank and file – as their allies.
‘Army and people, one hand’ was the slogan painted on walls and
banners, as well as on the tanks themselves. Since then the evolution
of events in Egypt itself and in the rest of the Middle East has
called that assumption into question. A year later, the movement
has clashed with those very soldiers across the country and the
Arab revolution continues to seek its future. Can a revolutionary
movement defeat an army? The Arab Spring offers contradictory
answers as, on the one hand, the Libyan and Tunisian regimes have
fallen, while, on the other, in Bahrain and particularly in Syria an
army still largely intact has unleashed and continues to unleash
terrible violence against its people.
This collection of essays is a review and an analysis of the
experience of those social movements across the world to have
confronted the question, in their practice, from 1871 onwards.
There are experiences common to each of them, errors committed
and warning signs unacknowledged. At the same time, each of these
experiences exists in a specific time and place. And yet the questions
and debates that arise seem to recur insistently in the arguments
at factory gates or on the barricades. The writers come to their
topic from a shared perspective – how to change the world and
transform the society we live in – and in the hope that what follows
will enrich and deepen a debate at once historical and intensely,
achingly contemporary.
The German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht, in his 1907 pamphlet
Militarism and Anti-militarism, set out the problem that concerns
us here in a famous passage:
‘[Modern militarism] wants neither more nor less than the
squaring of the circle; it arms the people against the people itself; it
is insolent enough to force the workers . . . to become oppressors,
enemies and murderers of their own class comrades and friends,
1
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2 Arms And the PeoPle
of their parents, brothers, sisters and children, murderers of their
own past and future. It wants to be at the same time democratic
and despotic, enlightened and machine-like, to serve the nation
and at the same time to be its enemy.’1
The modern army is no longer the armed citizenry of the levée
en masse, a ‘people in arms’. The shape of such a people’s militia
could be seen in the Commune of 1871 or in the anti-fascist
committees and armed units of the Spanish Revolution. How to
arm and organise the working class has rarely been addressed as a
concrete question in this century of revolutions, though Venezuela,
as Douglas Bravo discusses, was an exception in the 1950s and
1960s. Yet the focus of debate on the left, then and now, has been
first and foremost how to divide and break the armed forces – what
Mike Haynes calls ‘the battle for the soul of the army’.2
The simplistic cliché suggests that soldiers are ‘workers in
uniform’. That is obviously true. A quick survey of the dead in
Afghanistan will demonstrate that most of those who have fallen
are young working-class men, their origins in poor working-class
neighbourhoods obvious to anyone who knows the countries they
came from. They are privates and sergeants. It is rare, by contrast,
to hear mention of officers dying in the field. When they do, it is
newsworthy and their obituaries leave no doubt as to how different
is their class background. So, in that sense it is true that the bulk
of the military are workers. The assumption that flows from this
is that, in the event of an uprising of their class, their loyalties will
automatically lean towards their own and ‘go over’. From Chile
and Indonesia to Syria today, it is clear that this is not necessarily
the case. Many other factors intervene – loyalties, divisions, fears.
And where it has happened, a series of particular circumstances
have combined to make it possible, as each essay in this volume
clearly shows.
Liebknecht describes, with his customary passion, how a modern
army cajoles, seduces and imprisons its recruits:
‘Militarism must bend the will by moral and psychological
influence or by force; it must entice or compel it. The principle
of the carrot and the stick is applicable here. The true “spirit”
required by militarism, in respect first of all of its function against
the external enemy, is chauvinistic pig-headedness, narrow-mind-
edness and arrogance; second, in respect of its function against
the internal enemy, it is a lack of understanding and even hatred
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IntroductIon 3
of all progress, of every undertaking and endeavour which might
in any way threaten the power of the class dominant at the time.
This is the direction in which militarism must guide the thoughts
and feelings of the soldiers, in so far as it wants to lure with the
carrot those whose class interests are opposed to all chauvinism
and for whom progress should appear as the only reasonable
goal until the time when the existing social order is overthrown.’3
The process of induction, as Hollywood has shown us, is a series
of humiliations and dehumanisation, the systematic breaking of the
soldier’s will and his isolation from his own world:
‘First of all, the proletarian in uniform is sharply and ruthlessly
cut off from his class comrades and his family. This is done by
taking him away from his home, which is systematically done
in Germany, and especially by shutting him up in barracks.
One might almost speak of a repetition of the Jesuit method of
education, a counterpart of monastic organization.’
At the same time there is a corresponding ideological assault,
reinforced by internal training and external media. Military
discourse is rooted in an assumption that a national army exists to
serve and defend the state against external enemies, and historically
it is true that imperialist armies have been built to expand the
dominion of the state, to colonise and control. Yet they exist also as
an oppressive internal force, though the discourse does not change –
the ‘enemy within’ is described in sinister and shadowy terms from
one age to the next. As the pre-war situation in Germany showed,
for example, the high command was equally and simultaneously
concerned with both. And in the aftermath of 9/11, George W. Bush
proposed the suspension of the Posse Comitatus, the legal principle
that restricts the use of the military for domestic purposes, and the
military have been deployed within the country since then.
To speak of workers in uniform is to address both objective
and subjective factors. It is possible to have been born into a
working-class family, to have grown up in a working-class area, and
yet not to see yourself as part of a collective life, to be objectively a
worker yet not to live that reality as part of your own consciousness
and understanding. The argument about solidarity or the strength
of the collective is not an abstraction, but a generalisation from
experience, a recognition of how workers can defend their interests
as individuals and as a social force. The training of soldiers,
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