If our real desire is to destroy global capitalism, when is the time to propagate the word and when is the time to act?
Review of True Crimes : Rodolfo Walsh- The Life and Times of a Radical Intellectual, by Michael McCaughan.( Latin American Bureau : 2002)
Our Word is Our Weapon, The Collected Writings of Sub Commandante Marcos, Edited by Juana Ponce de Leon. (Seven Stories : 2001)
(Perspectives)
If our real desire is to destroy global capitalism, when is the time to propagate the word and when is the time to act? Is there a time when the word becomes mute and actions speak louder? And when is the time that action should once more be subsumed by the word? Such strategic and tactical questions of praxis underlie the life work of the subjects of these two books. Both Rodolfo Walsh and Sub Commandante Marcos write and fight, the one with the 1970´s Argentinian Montonero guerrilla, the other with the EZLN, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Interestingly, the former began as a writer and ended as a guerrilla fighter. The latter, Marcos, began as a guerrilla fighter and now, his rifle becoming rusty, continues ostensibly as a practitioner of the word..
Rodolfo Walsh - The Writer As Freedom Fighter.
Why would the life of a Argentinian leftist guerrilla of an 1970´s armed struggle be of interest to Anti-Authoritarians or Anarchists ? In Argentina today, heady times filled with revolutionary passion, Walsh´s name is one of the very few from that era that still holds currency amongst the contemporary radicals. Unlike Che, he has not been reified into a popular icon, and unlike other well known radical intellectuals of the era, like Regis Debray, he never compromised politically or intellectually - for which he was shot down in the streets of Buenos Aires in 1977 by state assassins. In a time of total war against the popular movement, Walsh is remembered for his integrity - an unassuming, modest, behind-the-scenes player, but a pivotal figure in the secret revolutionary history of the era. Michael McCaughan makes direct comparisons between Walsh and Sub Commandante Marcos. Both pioneer the radical use of the word as a weapon, alongside their guns, to bring down dictators. The Zapatista slogan Everything for everybody, nothing for ourselves, is equated to Walsh´s notion of "living for others" (McCaughan p. 300).
I would add a further comparison - Walsh as a revolutionary did not fight to seize power, but to fight power as represented by the dictatorship.He fought and wrote inspired by notions of justice and political and economic freedom for the multitudes. Upon his death, he was fighting for freedom on two fronts - against the dictatorship, and against the authoritarian Montonero leadership. Michael McCaughan's work is well researched , erudite and passionate. As well as presenting 21 of Walsh's seminal literary works (many translated into English for the first time) he has written a thorough biography of the man using diaries, writings, interviews with family, friends and comrades. This methodology works well, and we are presented a more complete picture of the man - as writer, lover, father, journalist, organiser, ranking officer and combatant with the guerrillas.
Walsh (b.1927) comes across as a man who has lived many lives. Already an accomplished and renowned literary figure in his native Argentina, his book Operacion Massacre (1957) a continual best-seller ( "the finest Argentinian narrator of his generation," according to Eduardo Galeano ), he took off in 1959 to join in the Cuban Revolution. It was a time of endless revolutionary optomism. Another world seemed possible; seizing power was only a guerrilla foco away . Walsh´s activist life spanned this cycle from the euphoria of the early sixties cumulating in the ecstatic ´68 explosion, through the ensueing rollback, and terminating in the brutal repression of the seventies. His role in Cuba was to help develop an international, alternative news service to challenge the hegemony of the established news syndicates. A small group of young, inexperienced radical activists started up Prensa Latina, a media initiative that spread across the continent, opening offices in a variety of countries. Volunteers working day and night in cramped offices, using borrowed, donated and stolen equipment, the chaos and energy described by McCaughan sounds like any present day Indymedia office. Walsh watched with dismay as the authoritarian Cuban state, copperfastening control to combat the counter-revolution and the threat of US intervention, clamped down on the freedom of the journalists to write as they saw fit. The original vibrancy and enthusiasm around the Prensa Latina project was stifled and by 1961, the agency was little more than a mouthpiece for the regime. Unwilling to work under such restrictive circumstances, and as his sign of protest, Walsh left Prensa Latina and Cuba, somewhat discouraged, but still a strong advocate of the Revolution in general.
And such was Rodolfo Walsh´s militant stance throughout his life - he remained loyal and steadfast in his work and contribution to the dominant revolutionary forces of the day, but offered a critical voice against authoritarian tendencies and abuses of power within the organisation. And this position explains in some sense why, of all the revolutionary groups operating in Argentina, he choose to join the Peronist Montoneros. General Peron in power (1946-55) had exercised a particular form of populism that was influenced by Italian fascism but successfully presented itself as the defender of the working class. To understand the hysterical mass popularity of Peronism, its important to realise that before Peron's "popular" dictatorship, Argentina functioned as a kind of feudal system, the majority condemned to a form of servitude and oblivion. Peron bestowed upon the masses a sense of self-dignity and a few crumbs from the countries rich banquet. He was deposed by a tyrannical and paranoid military junta who, representing the upper-classes, viewed Peron as some kind of despot of the masses who would open the door to complete "anarchy".
Opposition to the Military Junta formed itself into the broad-front "Peronist" opposition. The Montoneros defined themselves during a violent split with the mainstream Peronist opposition in the early 70´s as a radical left-wing national liberation movement, influenced by the Cuban revolution. However, the catastrophic and appalling disaster of a guerrilla movement that emerged - ideologically confused, vanguardist and authoritarian - was not the answer to anything except getting everyone killed. Here is not the place to undertake a full analysis of the Montoneros. Suffice to say they are as about close to anti-authoritarian or anarchist positions as the IRA in Ireland, the ANC in the anti-apartheid struggle or the Sandinistas of pre-revolutionary Nicaragua. Nevertheless, like the three above mentioned groups, it would be folly to dismiss the Montoneros out of hand, without taking into account that they represented the main revolutionary current in that particular moment in history in Argentina. Indeed, the Montoneros were the largest guerrilla movement in Latin America and commanded the broadest popular support amongst the people who opposed the brutal murderous dictatorship. Anarchists, lacking a mass popular base since the Spain in the 1930´s, have generally positioned themselves on the margins of the broad national liberation movements, offering conditional ( and highly critical) support against the common enemy. Otherwise they would run the risk of losing the prestige of being a foot-note in these historical struggles.
In a complicated and convoluted history that saw the triumphant return of Peron in 1973, his subsequent death a few months later, and the Military coup in 1976, heralding a veritable genocide of the popular forces (30,000 killed or disappeared by the military junta 1976- 1983), McCaughan struggles to keep the reader abreast the situation. Walsh's position as an militant within the Montonero movement was defined by the exigencies of the situation. "I have to say that I am a Marxist, but a poor Marxist because I dont read much. I dont have time for ideological formation. My political culture is empirical rather than abstract. I prefer to draw my inferences from daily life. I throw myself into life on the street, into reality, and then I join that information to an ideological basis which is fairly clear in my mind." (McCaughan, p 200). The daily life faced by the Argentinian radical in these times, a simple matter of life and death, was dictated by the extremist ideology of the junta and the subsequent 30,000 casualties, leaving little time or space for profound ideological formation. "A terrorist is not just someone with a bomb or a gun, but also someone who spreads ideas that are contrary to Western and Christian Civilisation". General Jorge Rafael Videla, Head of the Military Junta. (Nunca Mas, a report by the National Commission on Disappeared People). The government´s total war on the people (a war replicated in Pinochet's Chile, in Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and needless to say fully supported by the CIA), left Walsh's position as union organiser and journalist in the worker´s paper Semanario CGT untenable. Most of his co-trade unionists were jailed or disappeared. His subsequent post as a journalist with the left-wing Noticias daily newspaper also sunk into grotesque farce, as the offices got bombed, journalists were imprisoned, distribution agents disappeared and eventually (mercifully?!), the newspaper was shut down by order of the courts.
All other roads closed, he went underground. Events are what matter these days, wrote Walsh, but rather than write about them we should be making them happen....(McCaughan, p 203. ) The word had become anathema to him. This renowned writers ´defection´ to the propaganda-by-deed tradition shocked Latin America. Here was a renowned writer, in earlier days equated with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges, sacrificing the word for the gun. "These are different times...." he told a comrade, "and this is a time for a bigger undertaking. When you´re trying to change important things, then you realise that a short story, a novel, aren´t worth it and wont satify you. Beatiful bourgeois art! ....But when you have people who give their lives and continue to give them, literature is no longer your loyal and sweet lover - its a cheap whore. There are times when every spectator is a coward or a traitor."
Strong words of a combatent, forced into a position of total resistance. And yet in reality Walsh never let go of the word. Even at the height of his active service with the guerrilla , he also organised ANCLA, Argentina´s Clandestine News Agency. ANCLA attempted to monitor the avalanche of disappearances, murders and general mayhem generated by the Military Coup. As a kind of Amnesty International Urgent Action bulletin, it functioned well until most of the team were murdered. And as a Montonero Intelligence Officer, he acted implacably with a soldier´s ruthlessness. His network of revolutionary agents infiltrated the police and army. He was pivotal in an audacious 1976 guerrilla operation which involved placing a bomb in the police headquarters canteen, killing 42 guards. The military reprisals were predictably swift, beginning with the execution of 30 key prisoners that very evening and continuing afterwards with hundreds of assassinations and disappearances. McCaughan suggests that the harsh reaction to this bombing, as well as the death of his daughter Vikki while on Montonero active service, caused Walsh to rethink his role and criticise the wisdom of tactics that invited such huge reprisals. Instead of one-off spectacular attacks, he argued in favour of multiple small attacks, using whatever weapon at hand, whether it be the printing machine, popular culture, the pistol or the pipe bomb. Walsh assumed a heretical position within the guerrilla organisation; he questioned the authority of the leadership and dared to formulate a new strategy. The Montoneros were the sole resistance movement still fighting by late 1976 (foot-note 1.). Reminiscent of British Generals ordering their troops over the trenches towards the German machine gun turrets, the Montonero leadership ordered the remaining militants to continue fighting. By 1979 the Montoneros were destroyed, militarily, politically and spiritually. Walsh was just one more fallen soldier in the slaughter on the Argentinian battle fields.
The Satanic
and antidialectical
is
that in the armed struggle
it's they who have the arms.
(Ominous Thought, Efrain Huerta)
The Bridge from Walsh to Marcos.
" The typewriter is a weapon.... It can be a fan or a pistol.... With a typewriter and a piece of paper you can move people in unbelievable ways." - Walsh (McCaughan,p. 177)
Amongst the carnage that consumed Argentina from 1973 until his death in 1977 (The Years of Lead), Walsh's legacy was not his guerrilla endevours but his continued use of the word as a weapon against the military dictatorship. In his final year Walsh was openly critical of the strategy of the Montonero leadership, While the Montoneros still had major popular support, that support was hemmoraging. The public grew war-weary as the Montonero´s pursued their suicidal armed struggle to defeat the regime. Walsh recognised this fatal separation between the organisation and the support base and argued for class war in place of all-out military confrontation.
"We must be more self critical and realistic. Of course there is a class struggle, there always has been, and always will be, but one of the big successes of the government has been to wage war on us, not on the people as a whole. And this is largely due to our own mistakes, we isolate ourselves with ideology and our lack of political proposals for the ordinary people." (McCaughan, p. 260)
Whether out of inspiration or despair it´s unclear, but he returned to his original craft - that of a writer. After 7 long years focusing soley on popular and armed struggle, the muse returned with vengance and in his final days he wrote, amongst other works, a seminal prose essay which directly challenged the military government. The title of the piece was Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta and it skillfully attacked the dictatorship with an arsenal of reason, facts and moral certitude. It would be his most lasting contribution to the struggle and his most effective act of resistance. This was not a work of propaganda sanctioned by the Montoneros, but his own individual contribution as a writer. On the eve of his death, he comes around full circle - from writer to militant to guerrilla fighter and back again finally, to writer.
The first anniversary of the latest military junta has been marked by many official documents and speeches evaluating the governments activities over the past year; what you call successes are failures, the failures you recognise are crimes and the disasters you have committed are omitted altogether.... (McCaughan p 284) He outlines the true crimes of the regime, the murders, disappearances and tortures which elevate the level of human rights abuses to the barbaric, as well as the economic devastation wreaked by their clientalist policies upon the population. His stated aim was to "bear witness in difficult times" but instead he succeeds in delivering his most effective blow against the regime. And his tactical deployment of literature to bring down dictators did not go unnoticed.
Fast-forward, 15 years. A clandestine guerrilla sits meditating over a prose essay which directly challenges the Mexican dictatorship. No doubt his companeros thought it strange, that the commander spent some much time writing, when there was so much to prepare for the planned insurrection. Marcos´ 1992 essay, A Storm and a Prophecy - Chiapas: the Southeast in Two Winds, (Ponce de Leon, p.22) appears like a bridge between the failure of past revolutionary projects, and a new formulation of struggle. The word, alongside the pistol, alongside popular power, would take central place in Mexico´s revolutionary struggle.
Sub Commandante Marcos- The Freedom Fighter As Writer.
As Walsh fell, gunned down by the regimes assassin's in 1977, Mexico was undergoing its own little slaughter as the state eliminated the threat of subversive groups with a similar vigour. Still, considering the repressive political climate overseen by the PRI dictatorship (the governing party, Institutionalised Revolutionary Party, in power uninterrupted since the 1920´s), the path of armed resistance continued to be attractive to elements of the politicised youth. A student called Rafael Guillen in Tampico heard the calling. By 1979, he was integrated as "Capitan" in the ranks of the doomed guerrilla outfit, grandiosely called the National Liberation Forces (FLN). An old-school Marxist group, they subscribed to the vanguardist idea of igniting a popular uprising through armed struggle. As the guerrilla´s militants were killed off one by one, the survivors formulated a new tactical direction, Maoist in inspiration. They would uproot themselves from their familiar urban surroundings, and sink themselves into the ranks of the rural poor, agitating for armed revolution. This strategic path led Rafael Guillen and a few of his mates to Chiapas, to the indigenous communities, the poorest of all Mexican poor. And crucially, a proud people despite their eternal dispossession, with a long history of rebellion.
And so began a story that we are all now familiar with: the young Marxist guerrilla agitator was reborn in the mountains of the south-east as Sub Commandante Marcos. But you wouldn't know any of this basic history from the book Our Word Is Our Weapon. Instead the editor chooses to go along with the myth that Marcos was "born" on the 1st Jan 1994. The 101 communiqués printed here are accompanied by an Introduction and two essays from distinguished writers (foot-note 2). One might have expected, in the first complete English language edition of the collected writings of Sub Commandante Marcos, some kind of contextual introduction about the man himself. In this sense, Michael McCaughan's work in uncovering the background and contextual life and times of Walsh the writer proves so useful. Regretably, there is nothing here in the introduction or accompanying essays that reveal anything new about Marcos or his writing. So even the most basic questions - like why this masked guerrilla, carrying his submachine gun, spends all his time writing, - are not considered. The editor Ponce de Leon allows Marcos writings to stand alone. And this, in one sense, is fine - Ponce de Leon's work of gathering the body of the work, translating and footnoting, is a huge contribution in itself - but I can't help thinking its a great opportunity lost.
So if you are interested in a critique of Marcos or his writing, forget it with this collection. The editor´s introduction Travelling Back for Tomorrow, is premised in the usual fawning adoration, contributing to the Marcos myth and legend, one that urgently needs to be debunked before his myth becomes his own, and the Zapatista's undoing. We need to see Marcos as a real man, foibles and all - an extraordinary figure, a great military strategist, a brilliant writer, but a human, filled with the usual inconsistencies and desperate failings. Despite these editorial shortcomings, what we do have in this anthology is enough to make any activist tingle with joy.
Marcos´ writing is beautiful and expansive enough to fit every revolutionary tradition. His great ruse is to make each tradition think of him as representing them - the indigenous say he is one of them, the guerrillas claim him as one of their own, the intellectuals include him in their pantheon, Mexican nationalists see him as a great Mexican nationalist, NGOs see him as an advocate for NGO´s, Marxists see him as one of their sect, anarchists claim him as part of their tradition, even the base church sees him as an advocate of their prefential option of the poor. This potentially complex multiple personality disorder is of course symbolized by the ever-present mask. Would the real Sub Marcos please stand up?! In this collection we find Marcos the military tactician, the politician, the (anti-) statesman, the storyteller, the wise old sage, the wit, the clown, the poet, the philosopher, the....it just doesn't stop. He can engage a 5 -year-old child as much as the President of the Republic, as much as the great literary minds of the age, as much as the peasant farmer. Is he superhuman?! Here´s the good news. A good proportion of his writing, as demonstrated in this anthology, is dirge. He is refreshingly flawed, and human. Here in this anthology you can read some real fucking gibberish. And here´s the better news - the good stuff - which I would rate as about half this anthology, 50 or so of the pieces - are singularily brilliant, scathing, witty, fantastic; the most inspired radical writings of the end of the 20th century.
The anthology is appropriately called The Word is our Weapon. Strange guerrillas are they, what with their complete lack of appetite to engage in armed struggle. Not since the first week of 1994 have the Zapatistas engaged the enemy militarily (foot-note 3) and this is their strength (but may also be their undoing). Learning from the hopeless carnage of the Dirty War against the popular forces in the 70´s, Marcos steers the EZLN away from military confrontation with the Mexican Army and towards political confrontation with the State dictatorship. Marcos is an attentive student of revolutionary history. "The flower of the word will not die," he declares in one of the most prosaic and powerful works, the Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, (Jan 1996) (Ponce de Leon, p. 86).
"Our words, our song and our cry, is so that the most dead will no longer die. We fight that they may live. We sing so they might live. The word lives....The word becomes a soldier so as not to die in oblivion...."
One could imagine Walsh turning over in his undisclosed grave, with pleasure. Marcos and the Zapatistas represent all the dead freedom fighters´ phoenix rising. Marcos takes the essential elements of the guerrilla fighter - armed resistance and the will of the people, and, like Walsh argued, expands the arsenal. "We use the weapon of resistance, ....the arm of the word, the weapon of our culture, the weapon of music, the weapon of dance...." Marcos (p. 161). Ultimately Marcos articulates the great historical paradox of the guerrilla fighters - "....we became soldiers so that one day soldiers would no longer be necessary." (p. 161). A philosophical tenet that perhaps was overlooked by legions of dead freedom fighters who, like the Montoneros, fought, not wisely, but too well. Power flows from the barrel of a gun, says Mao, but what if the guerrilla fighters don't fight for power, but for the deconstruction of power? Autonomy seems a wholley different project, demanding a completely new formulation of tactics and strategy. The Zapatistas back the word with mass mobilisations, popular plebisites, road show caravans, popular expressions of support and most significantly, building concrete autonomous municipalities.
The Freedom Fighter as .... Freedom Fighter.
But what does a reading of these two books together do to contribute towards developing an anti-authoritarian perspective? First of all, since many of our milieu think the sun shines out of Marcos arse, or his pen, it is useful to understand that he came, ideologically and practically, from the Latin America armed, authoritarian left. McCaughan´s True Crimes plots some crucial years and struggles of the tumulteous times of the armed authoritarian left, a cycle that began with the Cuban revolution and ended with the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990. (Marcos also spent time in Nicaragua in the 1980´s). Rebels of conscience like Walsh who fought not for power but for justice, realised, albeit too late, the follies of the authoritarian resistance organisation. Marcos´ political acumen lies in subsuming the authority of the authoritarian guerrilla EZLN in the horizontal organisation of the indigenous clandestine assembly. So clearly it is important to know our history well and the background of the movements we covet (or not). Our beloved Zapatistas might not fit in to an anti-authoritarian paradigm as much as we might perceive ; revolutionaries (like Walsh) from armed movements like the Montoneros are not necessarily macho authoritarians.
Secondly, I think a reading of these two books together can be useful in allowing us to to think tactically and strategically. Both Walsh and Marcos are intellectual tacticians who respond to the political situation they are confronting. Obviously neither are constrained by moral dilemnas over the use of physical force, but nor are they warlords. Walsh recognised the catastrophic consequences of all out military confrontation with the enemy and Marcos learn this lesson well. After a week of battle, the Zapatistas changed strategic direction and pursued a political offensive deploying the word as their weapon. But power has been trying to lure them for years into the constitutional political spectrum. The Zapatistas plainly understand that their arms, or the threat of arms, is their crucial negotiating tool. The word is a weapon deployed in the shadow of the gun. Most of all we learn from these books the necessity to take the word and employ it in the service of revolutionary struggle. Writing thesis or books is ok. Journalism and video-making is fine. Teaching and social work is useful. Raising awareness and funds for international solidarity is important. But from Walsh and Marcos we learn we must have the courage to go the whole way, to write and fight, to back our fine intellectual endevours with concrete organising and action. Destroy the ivory towers and get down in the streets and fields of revolutionary struggle where real change is possible. The word as a weapon is not enough. Intellectual activity unconnected with grass-roots struggle is mute. Conversly, from Walsh´s story, its clear ultra-militancy is a fools game. Before his premature death, Walsh was navigating a critical territory away from the authoritarian left towards a new formulation. This was a path was crossed a decade later by Marcos, from the FLN to the EZLN.
The EZLN are a new paradigm, a renewel of revolutionary struggle ; the path unfolds before us. Walking we learn.
