Shortcomings of Armed and Democratic Struggles

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Humankind and the gun

Here we continue on the discussion of the “End of History” at the beginning of the process leading up to it. The years between 1917 and the present day have been the theatre of history of armed struggle at mass scales. Crushing defeats against the British, German, French, Italian, Belgian, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, Spanish, and United States colonialism and imperialism in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Armed liberation movements have come in all shapes, sizes and contextual variations. Struggles in rural and/or urban areas, in the mountains or on the plains — in forests, jungles and cities. The guerrilla war-philosophy predates so-called Western civilisation. In fact, “unconventional” is a term to describe that which is abstracted from the war-philosophy imposed by the collective West against the collective East.

Though there certainly has been a narrative shift from the transition to neoliberalism up until the fall of the Berlin wall. The great historical pause supposedly started somewhere near the victory of Nicaragua against the CIA backed Contra narcomercenaries in the early 80s and ended during the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. We see a focal point in rises and triumphs of a rainbow of political vertients represented in Hezbollah in Syria, Ansar Allah in South Yemen, Hamas and the PFLP in Palestine, and the anti-imperialist governments in the African Saychelles, giving out a clear statement from West Asia and West Africa to the world that history and its motor force never ended for good. The existence of armed groups throughout Peru, Brazil, Colombia and other territories in Latin America also lay bare for the eye to see.

Though still existing and playing a part in the world stage, armed struggle has, throughout this time, gone through phases, experienced challenges and been blown by shortcomings. It is clear that it is no longer the path chosen by most as other alternative paths are being experienced. Though we do understand a pause occurred, that pause was a slumber from which we may or may not ever awaken. But it is a new century, at the same time. With new national cultures and political-economic projects. The technological and financial development of recent times mean that policy needs to be up to date on the running times.

An armed struggle is one to the death and cannot be made light of to be something that isn’t a crude resort we hope to avoid whenever possible. But the lessons of the occurrences of politics with arms (war), as opposed to war without arms (politics), serve a purpose in both forms of struggle. If we can keep any kind of peace today it is thanks to those who gave it their all for a better world through so much pessimism. Memory is the cornerstone of any organisation. Lack of memory, historicity, class analysis and class power are all one and the same stone in our path. Forgetting is the first step towards undoing the foundations that were laid by the bright minds and callous hands of our collective past.

The Democratic Pact

Throughout history, we’ve seen a great potentiality come from democratic revolutions. Conquests from the toiling classes translated to superficial as well as structural transformations. Leaders guided by a democratic principle and peoples hand in hand behind their leaders, firmly standing by the democratic pact.

But what is a democratic pact in essence?

A pact, we usually find, is under the context of two parties who coincide to cede some terrain to eachother for a better, more peaceful coexistence. Pacts can be between common or opposing powers. Between common powers, pacts come to reaffirm ties, for a strengthened unity when confronted with external forces. Between opposing powers, a pact can have the common goal of avoiding an escalation of conflict from either side.

To understand the democratic pact, we need to think of what comes before. Latin America is an exemplary ground to reach an understanding of this. What we usually find is a defacto government that rules by violence, and a political opposition that responds with a greater violence. What democracy means in countries with such a precursor is relative peace between these two forces. The turning point where both forces, finding themselves at a crossroads, sign the democratic pact. One, the governing power, promises to cease the violence. The other gives up its arms.

This last mention of ceasing state violence and politics without arms is, to me, the essence with which we can describe the democratic pact in conceptual terms. We know that in reality, there are more implications than simply signing a piece of paper.

In Havana, the state of Colombia pacted with the FARC guerrilla to cease violence against their political leaders, in exchange for the FARC to lay down arms and become a legalised political party that would be integrated into the democratic system. What ensued later was another story. Though the FARC guerrilla kept its promises and turned into a legalised party within the democratic system while the state of Colombia continued to persecute, murder and disappear social leaders, which then would push parts of the now legalised FARC party to take up arms again, and making it difficult for the remaining armed and active armed groups to trust the state in any possible future accords of the liking.

Colombia’s civil war has lasted, to this day, over 70 years. With no end in sight, both parties were pushed to reach a democratic pact. But this is not always the case.

In Argentina, the guerrillas and other armed political groups were pushed towards defeat by the 1976–1983 military junta’s indiscriminate counterinsurgency program. But what pushed the dictatorship to give up its power and cease its violence, impulsed by the defeat in the Falkland’s War against the British, was the popular discontent posterior to the full unveiling of the evidence of political genocide imposed on its militant population and their sympathisers, exposed by family relatives and close ones, as well as the consequent reverberations in the international community that pushed the West to decrease their support for the regime.

In this case, the arms were given up long before an armistice was signed. They were taken away by force, more like. Nonetheless, in 1983, a consensus was attempted to be reached through a long struggle for Memory, Truth and Justice that there should never again be crimes against humanity of such a scope (torture, forced disappearances, forced appropriation of babies) committed on Argentine soil. And at the same time, that the use of political violence was also outdated (and timed out) for those fighting against tyranny. An era of somewhat peaceful coexistence was ushered.

In October of 2023, by over 10 percentage points, the Argentine voters elected a government that would come to negate the part of this pact that was first mentioned.

On one side, we had the progressive political beaurocracy which could no longer contain the economic repercussions of an endless debt cycle, and was unable to fix a firm political ideological stance on the limitations of democracy. On the other, we had an “outsider”, by the name of Javier Milei, new to the political scene, who posed an alternative to years of lukewarm policies and, on the contrary, showed a firm political position against the failure of the 40 year old democratic pact in favour of the economic elites that brought about its failure.

In the course of an election year, the public opinion was convected into supporting a single political project, culminating after years of laying the stepping stones of conservative discourse through the news and entertainment media as well as on social network platforms. The new government proposes freedom for the imprisoned members of the genocidal military dictatorship, responsible for 30,000 forced disappearances and hundreds of appropriated babies of the forcibly disappeared pregnant political dissidents, under the guise of defending the ideas of liberty and private property. He openly aligns himself with the United States and Israel. His economic policy is one of economic shock therapy. His social policy, one of structural adjustment. “There is no money” was the central line of his presidential inauguration.

The challenge posed to the leftist (or progressive) forces in Argentina today, more specifically, to the leadership of such, is to find its way in a Latin America where traditional, lukewarm forms of militancy are quickly becoming a thing of the past. What marked the defeat of progressive forces was the lack of intent to speak on ideological terms. The fear that a doctrine could devolve into indoctrination.

Though we mentioned that firm stances on policy are lacking, such stances require a process of discussion to reach them. The custom has become to discuss politics on a superficial level, more as a formalism than with the intent to develop the discussion into something novel in the open debate with the powers that be.

True, the enemy can argue that the solution to the problem of democracy is less (or no) democracy. But is our solution to democracy “more” democracy? What is “more” democracy? To defend the bourgeois democratic system to the point of exhaustion? We have some long awaited discussions pending, accompanied by many questions to ask ourselves, and many concepts to redefine.

Questions for reflection

If opposing forms of struggle triumph and fail at given times, does history call for repetition? Does it call for reformulation? What about a “hybrid” form of struggle? If the answer is yes, then semilegality will lead to clandestinity. If not, then other ideas and proposals should be in the works in the political discussions that are to take place. If the question is to affect a structural transmutation, the given time and place of that transmutation and its actors will determine the how.

A structural change has different connotations today than it did in 1917, 1945, 1968 and 1991. Though the discussions of reform / revolution, or reform & revolution have taken place in all of these contexts, the arguments and justifications need to be brought down to earth, to the present day material reality, to put the life back into the debate. We have ever more examples of revolutionary political ends with democratic means, like Venezuela under Chavismo or Bolivia under the Movement Towards Socialism. We also have armed struggles taking place with great uncertainty, like the anti-colonial resistance of the Palestinian people.

At the same time, we need to redefine the concepts to fit our current context and material conditions. Democracy and revolution do not have the same implications than they did 100, 50 or 30 years ago. Should concepts shed their definitions with time, it is our task to find what the new definitions are. And again, this can only come through political discussion. Discussing issues from the root, upwards.

To set a discussion, we may have an end-point in sight, or how to get there, but that serves for nothing if a starting point is not found. We need to think of where we stand, what time and place in history we find ourselves, and what tools that time and place have put at our disposal. To question and think critically is the sure path towards finding answers. If we rush to finding the correct answers before thinking of what questions to ask ourselves, it will be a difficult journey to part for.

Joel Ruggi Coordinator **Unsettling Empire**

A self-run anti-imperialist news, education and entertainment media project.