Arms and the People

Description

This collection examines the relationship between mass movements and the military. Some argue that it is impossible to achieve and protect a revolution without the support of the army, but how can the support of the army be won?



Arms and the People explores the impact of social extremes on the solidarity within the state’s military, and on the changing loyalties of these soldiers. The authors examine a series of historical moments in which a crisis in the military has reflected deep instability in the wider world, including Russia in 1917, Egypt during the Arab Spring, the Paris Commune, as well as long-standing instability in Venezuela and Indonesia, amongst many others.



Including a range of international authors who have either studied or been directly involved in such social upheavals, Arms and the People is a pioneering contribution to the study of revolutionary change.
Introduction

Soldiers and Revolution

1. Soldiers, Sailors and Revolution: Russia 1917 by Mike Haynes

2. An Army in Revolt: Germany 1918-19 by Volkard Moser

3. Nation against Nation: Italy 1919-21 by Megan Trudell

4. Soldiers on the Side of the People: Portugal 1974 by Peter Robinson

The Popular Forces Mobilise

5. Militia and Workers’ State: Paris 1871 by Donny Gluckstein

6. The People in Arms: Spain 1936 by Andy Durgan

7. Never ‘One Hand’: Egypt 2011 by Philip Marfleet

Guerrilla Wars and the Limits of Imperial Power

8. People Change: American Solidiers and Marines in Vietnam by Jonathan Neale

9. Crazy Little Armies: Guerrilla Strategy in Latin America, 1958 - 1990 by Mike Gonzalez

Counter-Revolution and the Military

10. The Iron Fist: Chile 1973 by Mike Gonzalez

11. Reaction and Slaughter: Indonesia 1965-66 by Nathaniel Mehr

The Civic-Military Alliance

12. Storming the Ramparts of Tyranny: Egypt & Iraq 1945-63 by Anne Alexander

13. The Civic-Military Alliance: Venezuela 1958-1990 by Douglas Bravo & Mike Gonzalez

Index

Sujets

• Political Freedom
• Political Science
• Revolutions
• Revolution

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 10 décembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849648103
• Langue: English

Extrait

Arms and the People

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
ISBN 978 0 7453 3289 5 Hardback 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
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America
Contents



Introduction
Mike Gonzalez
SOLDIERS AND REVOLUTION
1. Soldiers, Sailors and Revolution: Russia 1917
Mike Haynes
2. An Army in Revolt: Germany 1918–19
Volkhard Moser
3. Nation against Nation: Italy 1919–21
Megan Trudell
4. Soldiers on the Side of the People: Portugal 1974–75
Peter Robinson
THE POPULAR FORCES MOBILISE
5. Militia and Workers’ State: Paris 1871
Donny Gluckstein
6. The People in Arms: Spain 1936
Andy Durgan
7. Never ‘One Hand’: Egypt 2011
Philip Marfleet
GUERRILLA WARS AND THE LIMITS OF IMPERIAL POWER
8. People Change: American Soldiers and Marines in Vietnam 1965–73
Jonathan Neale
9. Crazy Little Armies: Guerrilla Strategy in Latin America 1958–90
Mike Gonzalez
COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND THE MILITARY
10. The Iron Fist: Chile 1973
Mike Gonzalez
11. Reaction and Slaughter: Indonesia 1965–66
Nathaniel Mehr
THE CIVIC–MILITARY ALLIANCE
12. ‘Storming the Ramparts of Tyranny’: Egypt and Iraq 1945–63
Anne Alexander
13. The Civic–Military Alliance: Venezuela 1958–90
An Interview with Douglas Bravo by Mike Gonzalez

Notes on Contributors
Index
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, 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-mindedness and arrogance; second, in respect of its function against the internal enemy, it is a lack of understanding and even hatred 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, especially professional soldiers, but also of conscripts, consists in good measure of breaking the individual from that shared reality and persuading the rank-and-file fighter that he belongs to a different collective called ‘the Nation’ to whose defence he has committed his life. The Nation is an abstraction, yet ideology and cer