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From International Socialism, No. 62, September 1973, p. 29.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg, with thanks to Paul Blackledge.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Strategy For Revolution
Regis Debray
Penguin, 50p
Prison Writings
Regis Debray
Allen Lane, £2.50
DEBRAY is best known for Revolution in the Revolution? (published in 1967) in which he expounds a theory of rural guerrilla warfare. It is based on a small band in the mountains who, mostly isolated from the cities, the workers and even the peasants, will eventually defeat the army of the ruling class in an attritional and psychological war of hit and run tactics. This must seem a strange strategy for any Marxist, and indeed since Che Guevara’s death in 1967, it has failed to produce any real results. Urban guerrilla warfare has become more common, but has also been generally defeated – and in any case Debray consistently rejects it. The main essays in Strategy for Revolution were written before Revolution in the Revolution? and add little to it. I wonder why they should suddenly be published now.
While South America is ‘underdeveloped’ it is not predominantly peasant or rural, but urban, and becoming more so. For example, 150 people an hour (400,000 a year) emigrate from the Brazilian countryside to São Paulo alone. It is in the cities that the political destinies of South American countries will be decided – and it is in the cities that the Communist Parties maintain their hold over the trade unions and pursue their reformist policies of ‘legal’ electoral politics. Debray’s writing is all strategy and no politics because he consistently ignores the real questions of the role of the unions, the workers, and the Communist Parties.
Prison Writings was not written under the best conditions: the author had little contact with the outside world and no access to books. But the conditions of work alone don’t justify people paying £2.50 for what Debray produced. The content is generally turgid and often obscure (though his translator possibly hasn’t helped). In the beginning of the book he cogitates at length on the significance of ‘left wing’ civilian ministers in Bolivia’s new military government before deciding they are a front. His following comments on the similar Torres regime are a complete contrast, being far more pertinent and concise.
But then he wanders off into pages of intellectualising, breaking off only for some sarcastic remarks about Trotskyists – always criticising, he says. Hence, ‘There is no such thing as a happy Trotskyist.’ If this is what we get from what the blurb calls ‘probably the foremost living writer on Latin-American politics’ then there is indeed little to be happy about.
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Last updated on 2 March 2015