[KurtFF8]

Some have claimed that Guerrilla warfare is an ineffective way of organizing class conflict in favor of the working class.

This makes me wonder if those same critics also believe in the vanguard party theory. If a political organization can be formed to represent the working class, why would a militant organization be unable to capture power via this specific tactic of warfare to establish a worker's state?

I thought of this in thinking of the Cuban revolution, where a small band of rebels (of course they were not alone in any sense) helped liberate the island slowly from the Batista military. As they went on, they worked with peasants and workers and gained their support as the rebels were representing their interests instead of the interests too.

It seems then that guerrilla warfare (at least when being used by leftists) also requires an adaptation of a vanguard theory as guerrilla warfare is generally not a mass movement (as those tend to be "instant" revolutions).

I think that Cuba demonstrates where the vanguard theory and guerrilla warfare can be fused to form a workers state (although many will argue the nature of Cuba's socialism, which I suppose is quite important).

But one thing that Cuban Revolution does demonstrate is that the vanguard theory of orgnizing and gureilla warfare can gain mass support and represent the working and peasant classes, and while the nature of what type of state arises from it, this method of abolishing the previous state has shown to be effective.

And for those who point to the flaws of the Cuban state and thus their causes as the revolution itself, we can perhaps rethink the way in which the post-revolutionary state itself is organized as the problem, but perhaps we shouldn't be too hasty in writing off that method of getting rid of the previous ruling class.

[FallenRaptor]

A guerrilla army can be the vanguard of the working class if it has a deep connection with the masses. The problem is that guerrilla warfare usually takes place in the countryside while the majority of the workers are in urban areas. Guerrilla warfare makes a lot of sense in agrarian-based countries, but not so much in industrialized ones.

[Vladimir]

Yes, "traditional" guerrilla warfare is a peasant war with largely anti-colonial national bourgeois overtones. The 20th century, being an era of peasant wars is now history; today, the peasant masses are extinct and transformed into urban slum-dwelling proletarians (the number of whom is fast approaching 1/2 of the world's population), and a small section, stemming from former guerrilla leaderships (who were all with wealthy kulak heredity) has transformed into the bourgeois ruling class. The remaining peasants, the number of whom is dropping weekly by the million, are a marginalised group whose means to life is under siege from all directions: from the state, from agricultural concerns, from rich farmers. This process will inevitably lead to a total extinction of peasantry from the global class system.
The question of a guerrilla war is therefore a historic one from the era of bourgeois colonial revolutions, not a current one. The current one is of urban worker councils, industrial action groupings and slum militias.
I don't really see a potential in your suggestion, KurtFF8. Such a strategy can only be employed by peasants against the processes undermining their existence as a class, but since the process can’t and shouldn’t be reversed (being historically progressive), movements such as the Zapatistas can be classified as bourgeois uprisings (as they aim to change the land property ownership statuses of various peasant groups) and not revolutionary in the slightest bit. The works of subcomendante Marcos, for example, are misleading in their hostility to commodification and property, since the Zapatistas uprising was in fact based on property and their claims to land. For Marcos, commodification is only negative when it is done by large concerns, but fine if it’s done by the Zapatistas themselves. I think we should be careful not to fall for pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric of bourgeois uprisings such as the Zapatistas, or in fact Castro’s uprising that you mention.

[Tainari88]

Vladimir that was a fine distinction you made between the revolutionary uprisings and the ones who are not revolutionary in nature because they too are attached to concepts of private property or semi-private property, and you are very right about the peasantry being under attack from many areas and dwindling.

The future is in the urban areas of the world with the working poor and the slums who are always filling up with displaced rural people from all over the world. Urban antrhopology deals with that very well. I really like the analysis of a neo-Marxist by the name of Manuel Castells regarding the trends in urban populations, and how the bourgeois are becoming increasingly isolated, and paying for 'privacy', and living in gated and apart communities. In fact, Castells thinks in the future in major metropolitan areas of the world--there will be entire communities in which people can 'pay' to live without ever having to interact socially with the poorer people, and the middle classes. It is interesting. I don't know if that kind of society will be viable over time. People are too interconnected but it is nevertheless an absorbing subject.

The future of revolutionary movements, and class conflicts, will definitely come from urban areas. In fact, I think urban areas are easier to organize, and for the working classes, and marginal classes to organize, and pressure the elites, and the bourgeois into conceding and giving up many 'power' issues over time. It is a trend that is inevitable. The farming communities are now almost entirely agri-businesses and not small plots of land worked by individual families. The family farm is shrinking as a method of making a decent living for many all over the world.

Studying urban trends for sociological changes is very very interesting. It is highly dynamic.

Here is an interesting excerpt of how urban life is being shaped according to Castells:

Manuel Castells and The Network Society

According to Castells, networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies.[4] When interviewed by Harry Kreisler from the University of California Berkeley, Castells said "...the definition, if you wish, in concrete terms of a network society is a society where the key social structures and activities are organized around electronically processed information networks. So it's not just about networks or social networks, because social networks have been very old forms of social organization. It's about social networks which process and manage information and are using micro-electronic based technologies."[5] The diffusion of a networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power, and culture. For Castells, networks have become the basic units of modern society. Van Dijk does not go that far; for him these units still are individuals, groups, organizations and communities, though they may increasingly be linked by networks.

The network society goes further than the information society that is often proclaimed. Castells argues that it is not purely the technology that defines modern societies, but also cultural, economical and political factors that make up the network society. Influences such as religion, cultural upbringing, political organizations, and social status all shape the network society. Societies are shaped by these factors in many ways. These influences can either raise or hinder these societies. For van Dijk, information forms the substance of contemporary society, while networks shape the organizational forms and (infra)structures of this society.

The Space of Flows plays a central role in Castells' vision of the network society. It is a network of communications, defined by hubs where these networks crisscross. Élites in cities are not attached to a particular locality but to the space of flows.

Castells puts great importance on the networks and argues that the real power is to be found within the networks rather than confined in global cities. This contrasts with other theorists who rank cities hierarchically.

It is interesting Vladimir. Because from what I have read of some of your thoughts I do think you will find some correlations with Castells.

[Le Rouge]

Guerrillas are not the vanguard of the working class. The vanguard of the working class is operative in all branches of working class activity because it is merely that collection of individuals that perpetually agitate for the interests of the international proletariat. These can be guerillas, trade unionists, community activists, workplace leaders, etc. Guerilla warfare can be used as a means of overthrowing the power of the bourgeoisie. However, it is always dependent on the mass activity of non-guerrillas.

[Goldberk]

If a political organization can be formed to represent the working class

Can a single organization be formed to represent an entire class, in all its variants.

as guerrilla warfare is generally not a mass movement

But can be a military form of a mass movement.

and while the nature of what type of state arises from it, this method of abolishing the previous state has shown to be effective.

I'm not sure that the Cuban revolution can show any radical change in the essential nature of the Cuban state.

This process will inevitably lead to a total extinction of peasantry from the global class system.

A positive event, yes?

movements such as the Zapatistas can be classified as bourgeois uprisings (as they aim to change the land property ownership statuses of various peasant groups) and not revolutionary in the slightest bit.

The Zapatistas can and should be understood as revolutionary because they offered a form of political organization radically different from state based models.

[ingliz]

Can a single organization be formed to represent an entire class, in all its variants.

No, but what does that matter?

Authority and autonomy are relative things whose spheres vary with the various phases of the development of society. If the autonomists confined themselves to saying that the social organisation of the future would restrict authority solely to the limits within which the conditions of production render it inevitable, we could understand each other; but they are blind to all facts that make the thing necessary and they passionately fight the world.

[Goldberk]

No, but what does that matter?

Because the organisation cannot claim to represent the class.

[ingliz]

Because the organisation cannot claim to represent the class.

Realpolitik - It can claim to represent whomsoever it pleases, and if it gains power it will, whether they like it or not.

[Goldberk]

Ok it can claim what ever it likes, but cannot actually represent, in power it will represent its own interests not the interests it claims.

[ingliz]

Of course, they represent their own interests and those of their constituents.

If "revolutionaries" had to represent everyone's interests, even traitors to their class, those in cahoots with the bosses and working against their own class interest, the unions or the anarchists for example, how could there ever be a socialist revolution nevermind a socialist state?

[Goldberk]

how could there ever be a socialist revolution nevermind a socialist state?

But it is for that very reason why a socialist state is an oxymoron, the imposition of a minority view/interest on a majoraty cannot be socialist. During the time of the hague congress of the first international, marx and his followers finally and for good departed from the socialist lineiage, the embracing of state power and parlimentry means is and was in direct contrast with socialost thought, this is why marxists are not socialists.

[ingliz]

Petty-bourgeois socialism is the oxymoron not the Marxist socialist state. Why would you think economic individualism, mutualist small producer capitalism, is socialist?

[Goldberk]

Why would you think economic individualism, mutualist small producer capitalism, is socialist?

I don't, it's a false dichotomy to present that as the only alternative to marxist statism.

[ingliz]

it's a false dichotomy

However you cut it an anarchy retains the market, competition, anarchy of production, paucity, private capital (whether group or individual) etc., etc.; it is capitalist.

If you think differently, please, explain to me why you believe this is not so?

Anarchy destroys the state not capitalism! I would go so far as to say a collectivist, communitarian, anarchic 'non state', formed without the transitional stage necessary to eradicate bourgeois right and morality, would always and willingly embrace a 'primitive' capitalist economy.

And remember capital accumulation, "Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonism that results from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results."

I think you would be back to where you started almost before you had set off.

And if you are going to cite anarcho-communism as the exception, it is the exception for a very good reason, it is not an anarchy. It is state socialism "with a human face" and an unworkable gift economy.

[Goldberk]

However you cut it an anarchy retains the market

First of all can we not reify the market, it creates something in ideology that is not in reality. Market relations and competition do not equal capitalism. I would argue for a synthesis of Koroptokin and anarcho-primitivism, such a system would have no fundamental relation with capitalist forms of production.

[ingliz]

First of all can we not reify the market, it creates something in ideology that is not in reality.

Institutions refer collectively to the rules of the game in a society that restrains the behaviour of socioeconomic actors.

In this sense the market is an institution. Your 'anarchy' must act legally, customarily, and morally in a certain way given the capitalist nature of the game you have chosen to play.

Market relations and competition

This acceptance of the market and competition suggests a social system driven by market coordination and not social administrative direction.

I know you would like to call your system 'market socialism' (it isn't, it is a collective capitalism) but even that cannot work as a form of socialism, because, in retaining a market, it continues capitalism's main contradiction between social production and private appropriation.

anarcho-primitivism

Bucolic arcadian bullcrap!

instead of rebelling against the values of civilization, they have adopted many civilized values themselves and have constructed an imaginary picture of primitive societies that embodies these civilized values

A Silly Idea:

such a system would have no fundamental relation with capitalist forms of production

Grubbing for roots and snaring the odd rabbit amidst the ruins of an advanced industrial civilisation would have no fundamental relation to capitalist forms of production, but would the majority choose this short, brutish 'lifestyle'?

Short:

At one site in western Kentucky, which dates to about 2500 to 2000 BC, archaeologists found enough burials to allow them to calculate that the life expectancy at birth for these Woodland people was slightly over 18 years.

According to estimates by researchers at the UCLA Gerontology Research Group, Homo sapiens' average life expectancy 50,000 years ago was 10 years, owing to death by disease,

Brutish:

homicide rate from 1920 to 1955 was four times that of the United States and twenty to eighty times that of major industrial nations during the 1950s and 1960s

[ingliz]

Corrections:

by disease,

Should read "by disease, accident, and predation", I got ahead of myself.

researchers at the UCLA Gerontology Research Group

After further research, it seems the UCLA may have revised the life expectancy of ancient H. Sapiens upwards from 10 to 25 years (or less). This is because a new study suggests that, forensically, "old bone" older bones may look like younger bones and, when using "old bone" to estimate the age of an individual, the age of an individual can easily be underestimated. They do not seem sure, and are hedging their bets, "25 years (or less)" is exactly what is posted on their website and that is far from exact.

But here is another source that agrees with UCLA's "50,000 years ago" unrevised numbers and offers 3000 year old bones as evidence;

In any case, life was short. Life expectancy at birth probably averaged only about 10 years for most of human history. Estimates of average life expectancy in Iron Age France have been put at only 10 or 12 years. Under these conditions, the birth rate would have to be about 80 per 1,000 people just for the species to survive. Today, a high birth rate would be about 45 to 50 per 1,000 population, observed in only a few countries of Africa and in several Middle Eastern states that have young populations.

... Infant mortality in the human race's earliest days is thought to have been very high — perhaps 500 infant deaths per 1,000 births, or even higher. Children were probably an economic liability among hunter-gatherer societies, a fact that is likely to have led to the practice of infanticide. Under these circumstances, a disproportionately large number of births would be required to maintain population growth...

Haub, "How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?", Population Today, February 1995

Now that that's sorted out, I will carry on.

Koroptokin

Kropotkin on Wages, Labour Coupons, and Consumption Credits:

Such devices make sense only within the framework of a market economy where goods are produced and distributed not on the basis of need, but on ability to pay. Whether such an economic system maintains wage differentials or proclaims equal wages (or, perhaps, wage differentials favoring those engaged in "disagreeable labour or unhealthy work"), it nevertheless upholds an organization of production and consumption which originated in private property - and which is realizable only within its constraints.

Kropotkin argued that;

The coming Revolution can render no greater service to humanity than to make the wage system, in all its forms, an impossibility, and to render Communism, which is the negation of wage-slavery, the only possible solution.

When you talk about "market relations and competition", you are not 'Kropotkinesque', you are clearly talking about money, and an economic system which must quickly revert to a full-fledged market economy or to central planning.

They say, "No private property," and immediately after strive to maintain private property in its daily manifestations...It can never be. For the day on which old institutions will fall under the proletarian axe, voices will call our: 'Bread, shelter, ease for all!' And those voices will be listened to; the people will say: 'Let us begin by allaying our thirst for life, for happiness, for liberty, that we have never quenched. And when we shall have tasted of this joy, we will set to work to demolish the last vestiges of middle-class rule: its morality drawn from account-books, its "debit and credit" philosophy... and we shall build in the name of Communism and Anarchy.

[Goldberk]

n this sense the market is an institution.

I disagree, the market is nothing but a term to describe a set of relations and exchanges, without those relations and exchanges there would be no market.

market coordination and not social administrative direction.

But what relations take primacy within the market, those based on need or gift perhaps.

main contradiction between social production and private appropriation.

Not if properties main defender (state) is removed.

Grubbing for roots and snaring the odd rabbit amidst the ruins of an advanced industrial civilisation would have no fundamental relation to capitalist forms of production, but would the majority choose this short, brutish 'lifestyle'?

This is not an example of anarcho primitivism.

When you talk about "market relations and competition", you are not 'Kropotkinesque', you are clearly talking about money,

I talk about methods of exchange not based on money such as barter, gift etc

[ingliz]

This is not an example of anarcho primitivism.

"Only anarcho-primitivism opposes civilization, the context within which the various forms of oppression proliferate and become pervasive - and, indeed, possible." (A Primitivist Primer)

"Technology is not a simple tool which can be used in any way we like. It is a form of social organization, a set of social relations. It has its own laws. If we are to engage in its use, we must accept its authority. The enormous size, complex interconnections and stratification of tasks which make up modern technological systems make authoritarian command necessary and independent, individual decision-making impossible." (Fifth Estate Group)

Primitive anarchy begins to be dismantled by civilized social relations... number, language, time, art and later, agriculture - [are] the means of transition from human freedom to a state of domestication. (Zerzan)