Ben Brewster

Armed Insurrection and Dual Power

The years 192835 are famous in Comintern history as the Third Period, the
period of class against class, of social-fascism, and of the all-out struggle of
Communist Parties in Europe and the USA to overthrow democratic and fascist
bourgeois states in complete isolation from any other political forcesa
struggle which proved disastrously unsuccessful everywhere. When the line
shifted to that of the Popular Front at the Seventh World Congress, all the
Parties of Europe seem to have murmured Never again. Since 1935, the
slogans and strategies within which the Communist movement has conducted
the struggle against capitalism have been defensive: the Popular Front, the
Anti-Fascist Alliance, Advanced Democracy, the Struggle for Peace and
Socialism, Peaceful Co-existence, etc. Whether the Peaceful Road to Socialism
was explicitly advocated or not, the logic of the policy always postponed any
violent seizure of the bourgeois State to an indefinite future, the immediate
struggle being an economic one between the socialist world and the capitalist
world; the role of the masses in the capitalist countries was essentially that of
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preventing those countries from cutting short this competition by war

on the socialist states. Violence was externalized on to the underdeveloped and colonial countries; in the advanced countries it became
an attribute of the bourgeoisie and its fascist allies. Any proletarian
resort to violence could only be defensive. However disastrous the
Third Period, and however necessary defensive positions were in the
late 30s these policies have ultimately given rise, at best to an
indefinite postponement of the proletarian seizure of power, at worst
to a complete etiolation of the concept of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, and the erosion of all distinctions between Communism and
Social-Democracy. Two generations of Communist militants have no
knowledge or experience of an aggressive revolutionary class struggle,
and the hegemony of the Communist movement over the rest of the
revolutionary left has meant that non-Communists have not escaped
the mark of this mentality.1
In the last ten years, however, this experience has been re-appraised,
particularly by the young, in the light of the successes of violent revolutions in Cuba, Algeria and Vietnam, and of the failure (or only limited
success) of the electoral strategies of the Communist Parties in most
countries, and of other non-violent forms of struggle like CND in
England and the civil rights movement in the USA. The classical lessons
of MarxismLeninism on the necessity for a violent struggle between
the proletariat and its allies on the one hand and the imperialist
bourgeoisie on the other have been re-learnt by reading the works of
Mao Tse-tung, Che Guevara, Rgis Debray. For the Marxists in the
student movement, in the Black liberation movements, the anti-War
movement in the USA, etc., the necessity for a violent overthrow of the
bourgeois State is now more or less axiomatic.2 Protracted peoples war,
the guerrilla and the foco are the concepts which have catalysed this revitalization of the tradition of revolutionary Marxism after a thirty-year
dormancy. In China, Vietnam and Cuba revolutionary forces carved
out for themselves enclaves of popular power, defending them by
military means. In China and Cuba these bases had a certain territorial
integrity, in Vietnam popular and imperialist rule alternate with the
presence and absence of the imperialist forces. These areas are then
extended by protracted warfare until the oppressive State crumbles
away, and the whole territory falls to the revolution.
1 Communists have, of course, provided a central contingent in all defensive
proletarian military struggles since 1935in Spain, in the European Resistance, etc.
But the defensive slogans under which these struggles were fought have enabled
these heroic experiences to be appropriated ideologically in the interests of revisionism. The PCIS manipulation of the myth of the Italian Resistance is the classical
example of this.
2 Perhaps it still needs to be stressed that this violence does not necessarily mean a
long shooting war, nor is it based on the psychologistic argument that the ruling
class wont give in without a fight. In the last resort, all bourgeois rule, democratic
or fascist, depends on the ruling classes maintenance of a favourable balance of
physical force, on their monopoly of the legitimate means of violence. Every proletarian revolution will involve a comparison of physical force between the two
sides, even if the bourgeoisie, finding itself out-classed militarily in the crisis, should
give in without a serious fight (as happened in Petrograd in October 1917). Such a
shift in the balance of military power can only be achieved by democratizing the
means of violence. Arms to the people is one of the essential demands of any
proletarian revolution, yesterday, today and tomorrow.

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The problem, of course, is the relation of these revolutionary struggles

and their strategic concepts to the revolution in the metropolitan imperialist countries themselves. Some militants have been content to
wait for the armed socialist world to surround the weakening imperialist bastions as the revolutionary countryside surrounded the cities in
China; they have therefore restricted their activity to solidarity
struggles. Most, however, have attempted to apply the new concepts
to the contradictions within the advanced capitalist countries themselves. The metropolitan rural sector is insignificant to the imperialist
economy, and the territorial control exerted by the modern States
police is extremely efficient, so the rural enclave strategy is clearly
inapplicable. A few student sects in Japan have attempted a literal
application, with predictable results. Even in semi-developed countries
like Brazil or Argentina, with their vast rural spaces, the State machine
has proved too efficient, the police network too dense, for the successful establishment of red bases or guerrilla focos. Hence the tendency to
adopt the strategy of urban guerrilla: in Brazil and Uruguay, and in
national-minority enclaves in the metropolitan imperialist countries
themselves: Quebec, Northern Ireland and the Basque country.
Peoples War and Armed Propaganda

But this geographical shift from rural peoples war to urban guerrilla is
not just a tactical shift to cope with the different conditions in capitalist
states; it also implies a fundamental change in the strategic concepts
themselves, one sometimes, but not always, acknowledged by the
advocates of urban guerrilla activities. This is the shift from peoples
war to armed propaganda. Even in the special case of Vietnam, where
the popular forces have no stable bases in the country, the NLF does
organize the whole people at night into a different social system:
popular power is exercised by the masses, proletarian dictatorship is a
fact. This is even more true in the cases of Cuba and China. But the
urban guerrilla, even at its highest pointsprobably the Casbah in
1958 and Caracas in 1963suffers from the problem of all terrorist
organization: the imperatives of internal security dictate a structure
incapable of organizing the masses, whose activity, even where they
closely identify with the guerrilla, which is not always the case, is
reduced to passive resistance.3 Even a theorist as acutely aware of the
distinction between armed propaganda and peoples war as Pierre
Vallires of the FLQ does not provide an analysis of the transition
between the two.4 Armed propaganda arouses and expresses the
masses hatred of their oppressors and can provide them with a sense of
solidarity. But it does not furnish the organization essential if this
ideological gain is to be translated into a political conquest of State
power. And the social and psychological difficulties of clandestine
3

This, of course, is Marxism-Leninisms critique of terrorism, and it must not be

confused with liberal or pacifist objections. Lenin did not waste a tear for the
victims of Narodnik violence. He simply insisted that the organization of the masses
was the precondition for a proletarian revolution.
4
See Revolutionary Strategy and the Role of the Vanguard, Leviathan, vol. 1, no. 6,
October/November 1969. Though unsigned, this document is largely based on a
speech by Vallires.
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terroristic organization5 mean that such organizations are rarely able to

establish themselves for any length of time against determined police
activity, and their defeats can leave the masses in a worse condition than
they found them in. Urban guerrilla warfare should not be sneered at,
and its contribution to the revolution in the metropolitan and dependent imperialist countries may be very important, but by itself it
cannot constitute the revolutionary vanguard that will lead the proletariat and its allies to power. Hence it is not a translation of the concepts of peoples war to the advanced countries.
Of course, the MarxistLeninist tradition in the West before 1935 did
not envisage the revolution taking the form of a protracted guerrilla
struggle. Marx, and especially Engels, were perfectly aware of the
revolutionary potential of peoples war,6 but they did not intend or
expect the revolution in the advanced capitalist countries to take that
form. Rather they expected a political crisis provoked by internal
contradictions of the rgime or by the growing electoral strength of
proletarian parties to provide the opportunity for a rapid and relatively
bloodless insurrection. In this they were the inheritors of an insurrectionary tradition going back to Babeuf; they differed from the interpreters of that tradition among their contemporaries like Blanqui in
insisting on the active participation of the organized proletariat rather
than confiding the initiative to a conspiratorial secret society. This
tradition also governed Bolshevik thinking on the problem of revolution,7 and Comintern practice until the Popular Front period. It is this
tradition which has disappeared since 1935. The re-assertion of the
classical MarxistLeninist theses of the dictatorship of the proletariat
and the necessity for armed revolution demands that the insurrectionary tradition be re-examined. Hence the importance of the English
publication of A. Neubergs Armed Insurrection.8
Armed Insurrection

Armed Insurrection was first published in German in 1928 under a

fictitious Swiss imprint, and translated into French in 1931. It is a
manual in the art of insurrection for European Communist Parties.
It consists of two theoretical chapters on the place of insurrection in
the politics of the Third International and its illegitimate suppression
from that of the (post1914) Second International; accounts of the
insurrections of Reval (1924), Hamburg (1923), Canton (1927), and
Shanghai (October 1926, February 1927 and March 1927); chapters on
the general strategic and tactical problems of insurrection, from the subversion of the armed forces of the ruling classes to how to build a
barricade; finally, a chapter on military work among the peasants. A
new introduction by Erich Wollenberg, one of the original authors,
explains how it came to be written.
5 See Rgis Debray: Latin America, the Long March, NLR 33, Sept.Oct. 1965,
pp. 478.
6 See particularly Engels: Der Niederlage der Piemontesen, Marx-Engels: Werke
Bd. 6, pp. 3878.
7 See e.g. Lenin: Lessons of the Moscow Uprising, Selected Works in Three Volumes,
Vol. I, pp. 60815; Marxism and Insurrection, Vol II, pp. 4049.
8 A. Neuberg (i.e. Piatnitsky, Tukhachevsky, Ho Chi Minh, Wollenberg and others):
Armed Insurrection, NLB 1970, 3.00.

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This bald description directly reveals a number of remarkable facts

about the book. First, the concrete analyses deal with a series of
insurrections which took place in the four years previous to its first
publication, all of which were fairly serious failures. This is partly
explained by the fact that the book was intended by the Agitprop
section of the Comintern, who really produced it, to replace and bring
up to date an earlier volume (Alfred Langers The Road to Victory),
but also, Wollenberg adds, because descriptions of failures, while as
valuable scientifically as descriptions of successes, were less ideologically inflammatory, and hence the book was more likely to get past the
censors.9 The same considerations governed another decision: the
pseudonymity of author and publisher. The Comintern could have
produced the material in this book as internal documents for the
relatively small number of cadres who were expected to read and study
it. However, an apparently regularly published book, even if banned,
was obviously less damning evidence against a militant in whose
possession it was found than a file of cyclostyled Comintern documents.
And the German name of the author and the Swiss publisher meant
that the USSR could not be accused of interference in another countrys
affairs. According to Wollenbergs preface, the authors in fact included
Wollenberg himself (then head of the military bureau of the MarxEngels Institute at Moscow), Piatnitsky (Comintern Organizing
Secretary), Unschlicht (liaison between the Red Army General Staffs
and the Comintern), Kippenberger (organizer of the Hamburg insurrection), Tukhachevsky (previously Chief of Staff of the Red Army)
and Ho Chi Minh (then Vice-president of the Krestintern). The
texts seem to have been written at various times between 1924 and
1928, and they were collated by Togliatti (then head of the Agitprop
division of the Comintern). Togliatti (probably) also wrote an introduction on behalf of the Comintern criticizing certain of the theses
advanced in the book (included in this edition as an appendix).
The Reval Uprising

As each of the concrete descriptions is organized in the same way, a

summary of onethe Reval Uprising (Chapter 3)will show how the
book works. An opening section deals with the political situation in
Estonia in 1924the economy and the currency had collapsed, producing mass unemployment, the ruling parties were racked by corruption and internal disputes, the Army itself was demoralized to the point
9 Not surprisingly, the bourgeois press in this country has greeted its republication
as a demonstration of the futility of insurrectionary politics. The book will indeed
be of little use to someone who wants to bolster his waning faith in revolution:
it does not encourage ideologically, it reveals the difficulties scientifically. Gramsci
applied Romain Rollands dictum Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will to
Marxism: Neubergs book represents only the first half of the prescription, as a
deliberate act of policy. The cadres for whom the book was intended were expected
to get their optimism of the will from elsewhere. Some Marxists, on the other hand,
have suggested that certain of the authors of this book must have been motivated by
a secret desire to discredit the Parties of the Comintern by revealing the details of
their incompetence. But in fact Neuberg discreetly ignores some of the most
disastrous adventures of these yearse.g. the March Action in Germany in 1921, the
ofia Cathedral incident of 1923; whatever the shortcoming of the Parties conduct
in the examples discussed, they were all serious attempts at insurrection from which
valuable lessons for the future could be drawn.

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of ineffectiveness, and the Governments only response was the repression of workers and peasants, including a show trial of 149
Communists. Despite the repression, the working class was in an
aggressive mood and ready for civil war, while many peasants, urban
petty-bourgeois and soldiers sympathized with the proletarian cause.
The next section discusses the military preparations for the insurrection.
The Communist Party initiated these in the Spring of 1924, organizing
three-man self-defence squads which coalesced into groups of ten and
then into companies and battalions as the year went on. Four hundred
men were in arms by December 1924, though their arms were poor and
ammunition scarce. Loyal government troops in Reval itself were
reckoned at only eight hundred men; many of the rest, it was hoped,
could be persuaded to come over to the revolutionary side. Several
years of thorough agitation in the Army had done its work, though the
effects had been weakened by a recent turnover of troops. The Party
decided to launch the insurrection by surprise on December 1st, without any mass agitation or general strike until the strong-points in the
city had been seized by combat squads. The three battalions were
assigned their tasks: 1) disarming the officer cadets, seizing the arms
depot and the railway station; 2) disarming the police reserve, winning
over the tank and airborn division stationed just outside the city, and
the 10th Regiment; 3) capturing the administrative centres, the telegraph office, the parliament house, the Baltic station and releasing
political prisoners. The next section is a detailed account of the course
of the insurrection. For reasons of secrecy, the orders for insurrection
were not given until one hour before it was to begin. But it proved
impossible to assemble many more than half of the men in the combat
squads in time, or to brief them adequately on their complex tasks. The
result was that the first battalion failed except for the capture of the
railway station, and its surviving members dispersed. The second
battalion succeeded in taking the headquarters of the 10th Regiment,
but could not bring the troops over to the insurrection, as the combat
squad involved was completely unknown to them. The airborne division
was quickly overcome and agreed to join the revolution, but instead of
leaving immediately for the city centre, the combat squad waited at the
airfield for orders until it was too late. They were then surrounded and
captured by counter-revolutionary forces. The third battalion captured
the parliament building but missed the prime minister through
ignorance of its internal geography. The attacks on the War Ministry
and the jail were failures.
The insurrection started at 4 a.m. By 11 a.m., counter-revolutionary
troops had completely crushed the last pocket of resistance. Neubergs
last section is entitled Reasons for the Defeat. He outlines six organizational and tactical errors: 1) over-estimation of the demoralization of
the garrison and of the strength of the Partys military organization; 2)
the plan went far beyond the men available, a smaller number of targets
should have been selected; 3) the squads were unable to respond to
victory or defeat in their tasks; 4) the squads were not always able to
handle their weapons; 5) reconnaissance was inadequate; 6) liaison was
inadequate. But he argues that many of these errors, or all of them, are
to be expected in an insurrection (the confusion and incompetence of the
October insurrection are well known). The real mistake was elsewhere:
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What played the decisive role in the outcome of the insurrection was
the fact that the small groups of revolutionary workers who were
militarily organized remained isolated from the mass of the proletariat
after they had launched the insurrection . . . The Reval working class, as
a mass, was a disinterested spectator during the fighting. This was the
decisive factor. This isolation was not the result of the backwardness of
the masses, on the contrary, it was created by the Partys deliberate
choice of tactics. The Party had exaggerated the importance of the
military factor in insurrection and under-estimated that of the mass
revolutionary movement (p. 78). This error affected even the details of
the insurrectionary tactics. To illustrate this I shall give a quotation
which exemplifies the precision and concreteness of the discussion, and
supports Wollenbergs contention that this study, like most of the
others in this book, is based on eye-witness accounts: It was nave to
think that the men of the 10th Regiment, without communist soldiers,
would actively join the insurgents at the behest of nine unknown
workers. Imagine the scene: it is 515 a.m., still dark, the men are
asleep. They are awoken by an unimpressively small group of men
whom nobody knows; these men assure them that the insurrection has
broken out, and invite the battalion to take the side of the insurgents.
The soldiers cannot see this insurrection, the streets are empty, there
are no workers. They know nothing of any preparations for an insurrection. What could one expect them to do? The men of the
battalion, as should have been expected, remained neutral until they
could get more information (p. 74).
Hamburg, Canton, Shanghai

In Hamburg in 1923, the errors were the reverse of this: the insurrection in Hamburg itself was relatively successful and had active mass
support, but the Party did not try to extend it to the rest of Germany;
after a few days it called off the Hamburg insurrection itself. If the
leadership was to remain faithful to Marxism, it was not permissible for
it, once the insurrection had broken out and had achieved a number of
significant successes, to sound the retreat. This was all the more
impermissible in that the insurrection had been launched on orders
from the Party. One does not play with insurrection (p. 102). Canton
was different again: In Canton it was possible to seize power . . . thanks
to the negligible size of the counter-revolutionary forces present. But
this was only true for Canton. In Kwangtung province as a whole, the
balance of forces was decisively unfavourable to the insurgents (p. 126).
The first two Shanghai insurrections were technical failures, but in the
third, Marxs thesis that insurrection is an art was put into practice
in the most exemplary fashion. This victory of the Shanghai proletariat
was purchased at the cost of two previous defeats. The masses learn by
experience. The experience of the previous conflicts had shown the
necessity, long before the insurrection, of preparing carefully and
systematically for the decisive battle; the necessity of ensuring that this
battle will be directed solely by the party of the proletariat. In the third
Shanghai insurrection, the Chinese Communist Party made excellent
use of this experience (p. 147). But after the successful insurrection,
Chiang Kai-shek carried out a counter-revolutionary coup and destroyed
the workers government of Shanghai. Although it followed a basically
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correct line with respect to the organization, preparation and execution

of the uprising, the Chinese Communist Party (or rather its leadership)
followed an incorrect line vis--vis the Kuomintang: it underestimated
the revolutionary role of the proletariat, and continued to see the
Kuomintang as an undifferentiated whole and the entire national
bourgeoisie as a revolutionary forcewhereas in fact a fraction of that
bourgeoisie and hence of the Kuomintang (its right wing) has already
openly entered the camp of counter-revolution and was willing to ally
itself both with the indigenous forces of reaction and with foreign
imperialism (p. 148). The Communist Party continued to see the
proletariat as an auxiliary force and not as the leader of the democratic
revolution (p. 149).
These last examples are of particular interest, because the error they
contain is by now a commonplace. The subsequent history of the
Chinese revolution has revealed that, although the prescription about
the CCPs attitude to the KMT was justified, the correct revolutionary
strategy was not to rely more heavily on the proletariat as the revolutionary force, but to turn to the peasantry, and to change tactics from
urban insurrection to rural, peasant-based peopless war. Such a
solution is suggested by Neubergs discussion of the failure of the
Canton insurrection, but was not taken up by the Comintern (the
books pessimism about the Chinese situation is criticized in the
Comintern introduction, p. 284). This leads to a comforting reading of
the book for the bourgeoisie: the history of the Chinese revolution
proves that urban insurrection is futile, for success was only achieved
in China by rural peoples war. As the latter, too, is impossible in the
advanced imperialist countries, revolution is impossible there. But
Neubergs error is, in fact, both more and less serious than this. More
serious because it is a conceptual, not an empirical error; at the same
time less so, because as a universal error it indicates the absence of a
concept which is not related simply to the different empirical contexts
of China and the West, but helps to clarify the problem of insurrection
and revolution all over the world.
All the conclusions I have quoted relate to a single problem: the
relation between political and military strugglebetween the class
struggle and insurrection as an art. In Reval, the problem was that of
the temporal orderclass struggle was deliberately damped down in the
weeks preceding the insurrection in order to improve the chances of
military surprise. The result was that the proletariat was as surprised
as the ruling classes. In Hamburg, the problem was one of local and
national integration. The Party, rather than organizing insurrections or
even a general strike in solidarity with Hamburg, waited to see whether
these would happen spontaneously. In China the problem was the relation between the national democratic struggle in alliance with the
bourgeoisie in the KMT and the insurrection of the urban masses of
Canton and Shanghai; and more widely, the problem of country and
city, of the relationship to the peasant masses (which neither Neuberg nor
the Comintern ignored). The same theme emerges again and again in
the later chapters of the book. Neuberg points out that the people
cannot initially have the military advantage over the counter-revolutionary forces, even after the most intensive agitation in the army and
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military training of the Party. This advantage has to be won by

bringing the masses into the struggle, arming them with weapons
captured early in the fighting and thus isolating the ruling classes
remaining forces.
Dual Power

Throughout Neubergs book, these tasks are attributed to the Communist Party. The Party both prepares and organizes the masses for the
insurrection and conducts the insurrection itself. But a Bolshevik Party
can never claim to organize the oppressed masses as a whole. Precisely
because it represents the interests of the proletariat as a whole in its
struggle against capital, it cannot organize the whole of the proletariat,
let alone the other oppressed classes, in a bourgeois or pre-bourgeois
political system. The bourgeois State, whether fascist or democratic, is
precisely designed to prevent the direct representation of the interests
of the proletariat and the oppressed. There is no arena in bourgeois
society where the representatives of the interests of the oppressed
masses can be the representatives of the organized masses themselves.
The Bolshevik Party can only claim to organize the vanguard of the
proletariat. Hence the conduct of the insurrection has an anomalous
location within a bourgeois or pre-bourgeois State. In so far as it is a
technical problem (an art, in the famous phrase), it falls to the Party as
the instance with the clearest perception of its necessity. But it cannot
be politically initiated directly by the Party. The Party has to fight for the
adoption of the tactic of insurrection by the masses of the people. This
is what happened in Russia in October 1917. The insurrection was not
conducted by the military bureau of the Bolshevik Party, but by the
Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. Of course,
this body, originally established by Mensheviks before the Bolsheviks
had a majority in the Petrograd Soviet, was staffed entirely by Bolsheviks by October, and the planning of the insurrection was carried out
by Bolsheviks. But the insurrection itself was an act of the Petrograd
Sovieti.e. of the people of Petrograd. This reveals the concept
absent from Neubergs book: the existence of proletarian State institutions simultaneously with the bourgeois State which has to be overthrowni.e. dual power.10 State institutions in which the masses of the
people are directly represented are a precondition for insurrection. In
Russia in 1917, dual power took the form of Soviets, and the insurrection was the relatively bloodless culmination of a period of Communist
agitation in these Soviets. In the shattered feudal State of China, on the
contrary, dual power was only possible by the construction and defence
of armed red bases in the countryside, so the process of insurrection
was enormously extended, continuing throughout the period of dual
power. But the same principle applies. It was this different form of dual
power that Mao discovered in Hunan in 1927.

10

It surfaces once, when he criticizes the German Party for its failure to call for
soviets in Hamburgbut only after the insurrection had already been launched
(see p. 103).
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How does this omission of a concept affect the value of Neubergs

book? In so far as the problem is that of the political conditions for
insurrection, a great deal. The basic political problem in the imperialist
countries today is the form dual power can take. Even if this problem
had been more than barely touched on in Neubergs book, it would
probably have to be re-thought today in the light of the changes in
imperialism in the last four decades. But in so far as the problem of
insurrection as an art is concerned, the effect is much slighter.
Reconnaissance, military training, agitation among troops, contingency
planning and military tactics are all tasks which still fall to a revolutionary party, for the reasons given above. Neubergs book is still
invaluable in this respect, though of course, technical developments in
street fighting and crowd control which have supervened since the
1920s must be taken into account in any attempt to use its prescriptions.
But the consideration of such problems must not lead to any oneiric
or adventurist technicism. To renew the insurrectionary tradition
of the Comintern, we must start by criticizing it, and the fundamental
criticisms must be directed not at the technical aspects, which were
highly developed in that tradition, but at the political ones, which were
never clearly articulated for the imperialist countries after Lenins
death. The value of Neubergs book today is less that of a manual than
that of a flawed theoretical work from whose criticism a new political
theory of revolution in the imperialist metropoles can be developed.

68