Guerilla Tactics: How Activists can Fight to Win (repost)

Guerilla warfare was invented to answer the question: “what can a weak force with grassroots support, do against an army with far more weapons, experience, and resources?”. Organisers and activists have a similar problem – how can small groups of dedicated people stand up to capitalism, when the odds of winning on the streets, in the workplace, and in the media are stacked against us? Capitalists have their billions in cash and a well equipped police force to defend them, and all we have is our meager wages and no army to protect us. The thinking used by guerilla forces, applied to civilian life, shows a way forward.

Our situation isn’t hopeless at all – by using overwhelming force to win small victories, gradually gaining people, resources and confidence as we go, we can build a strong resistance movement despite the strength of the rich and powerful. This article will list five lessons from guerilla warfare along with examples for how to apply them to grassroots organising. This article is not saying that all UK activists should get AKs and head for the hills. But if business leaders benefit from reading Sun Tzu, then why shouldn’t we improve our own strategy by reading Che Guevara and old IRA manuals? Guerilla warfare is the closest military equivalent to our situation – as workers, as organisers, and as activists.

The kind of fighting this article describes is the first “phase” of guerilla warfare. The point of this phase is to weaken the enemy and inspire the people, to the point that a mass uprising or open war becomes possible. In the same way the point of this activist strategy is to gain the breathing room, confidence, and strength in numbers that we need to be able to challenge capitalism more openly.

1 – Concentrate force where the enemy is weak

The guerilla will not fight the enemy in a long battle where reserves would overwhelm him: he strikes only when he can win. And he avoids superior forces. When the enemy advances, he withdraws. When the enemy rests, he hits him. He attacks when the enemy is exhausted. And when the enemy counterattacks, the guerilla flees.” – IRA, Notes on Guerilla Warfare

[…]the fundamental principle is that no battle, combat, or skirmish is to be fought unless it will be won” – Che Guevara, Guerilla Warfare

A small force can’t overcome a large one in a straight battle. But by taking small groups of enemy forces by surprise using a larger group of resistance fighters, guerilla forces chip away at a larger army bit by bit until there is nothing left. Just as an occupying army cannot all be everywhere at once, capitalism isn’t all in one office, and the police aren’t all in one city. So if we pick targets that are vulnerable and throw an overwhelming amount of force at them, even tiny activist groups can make gains.

The current anti-workfare campaign in the UK is doing just this – targeting the companies that use workfare (where benefits claimants are forced to work for free), rather than protesting the whole scheme at once. Predictably, the strategy is very effective. Several workfare providers have dropped out – from Holland and Barrett to Homebase – after activists organised boycotts, held disruptive pickets, blockaded their phones and social media, etc. Even the government has acknowledged that this is working. The Department of Work and Pensions refused to release a list of the companies involved in workfare, claiming that if they did so the scheme would become “unworkable” [1]. These successes came from targeting businesses that were small enough for campaigners to impact, rather than focusing on bigger ones that might weather the storm. What has made the campaign effective is that anti-workfare activists have concentrated lots of “force” against weaker “targets” – giving them no choice but to give in.

This tactic has also been used in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign in solidarity with Palestine. For example, activists in Brighton forced the closure of a flagship store belonging to “SodaStream” after two years of protests and direct action, from weekly pickets to chaining themselves to the doors [2]. (SodaStream is a company that operates in Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land. One Palestinian stated: “They took our livelihood to build them and we got evacuated for them to build their factories”). By concentrating lots of time and energy on this one target, a relatively small group of activists managed to have a small but real impact on the company and on the occupation of Palestine in general. If they had instead spent their time protesting against the whole regime, or if each of their protests had been at a different store and a different company – it’s unlikely we would have even heard of them, let alone that they would have had any effect. Instead, the focused campaign caused enough disruption that the Israeli embassy itself contacted Sussex Police, demanding they take measures stronger against the demonstrators. [3]

2 – Each battle should leave us stronger, and the enemy weaker

a wise general will strive to feed off the enemy. One bushel of the enemy’s provisions is worth twenty of our own…” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War

In traditional war, big battles are fought by opposing armies, where each side expects to lose troops, ammo, resources, etc. The trick is losing less than your enemy. Guerilla war is the opposite: the aim is to grow with each battle. An attack on an enemy barracks means the guerilla force gains arms and ammunition (some say that most of the guns possessed by the IRA in the war of Irish independence were captured from the British Army [4]). Even attacks on symbolic targets lead to a gain in morale for the guerillas, and a loss in morale for the enemy. In the same way, good use of energy for activists means fighting for things that also help us to fight better in the future. This could mean doing it in a way that inspires others to join us, but most of all it means fighting for causes that gain us something materially – like more resources that we can use for the movement, or improving our daily lives so there is less to worry about outside of the struggle.

The classic example of this is from the history of the worker’s movement. When people in the UK fought for a shorter working day not only did they make their lives easier, they also made it easier to fight every struggle afterwards, because they now had far more time to use for planning and organising. This is one of the clearest examples, but every time we attack capitalism and make our own lives better at the same time, we also make our next battle easier to fight. Whether it’s better wages, better conditions, or lower rents – the less we have to stress and struggle to get by, the more energy we can put into finishing capitalism once and for all.

This doesn’t just show use the best things to fight for, but also the best way to do it. After all, fighting for one small change won’t bring down the whole system. Blocking one government austerity programme won’t stop two more popping up in their place. That’s why we have to fight in a way that means one victory leads to another after it, and another after that, and so on. Each campaign needs to leave people stronger, more empowered and more organised. For example, instead of drifting away after a victory and then starting from scratch next time around, we need to keep people together for the next fight. This is also a reason why reformism is bad – winning victories through political lobbying, petitions, lawsuits, etc. Even when begging the powerful to help us “works” it doesn’t build a movement of empowered people ready to take action. Eventually we’ll come up against problems that can’t be fixed without a real struggle and at that point we need an army of strong, independent militants, not a herd of petition-signers and Facebook followers. The best way to do this is using militant direct action right from the start.

3 – Supplies are critical

[…]if an army is without its equipment it will lose; if an army is without its provisions it will lose; if the army is without its stores it will lose.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Battles shown on TV and computer games make it seem like warfare is only about fighting. But it is not. A big part of it is logistics – getting supplies where they are needed. Without oil, food, and ammunition an army grinds to a halt and can be defeated easily. Guerillas and occupying forces solve the problem of supply in different ways. Guerillas make do with as little as possible, get food from local supporters, and raid ammunition from the enemy. On the other hand, an occupying army must get supplies from industrial centres far away. This leaves them open to indirect attack – guerilla forces can cripple them by attacking supply routes and convoys. What does this mean for us? We can fight capitalists by cutting off their resources, rather than by direct attack. (We should also “decentralise” our own resources to make ourselves harder to attack by capitalists)

Also called “secondary action”, this tactic has been used successfully by the worker’s movement for decades. Many strikes have been won not just because workers walked out at a company but because people in other workplaces blacklisted their goods and mail, refusing to handle or deliver them. This has the effect of making the company unworkable, even if the boss can bring in enough scab labour to keep things going. In turn this has inspired Animal Liberation activists to use secondary action [5] – and their “Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty” (SHAC) campaign is one of the most dramatic examples of targeting suppliers that there is.

In the late 90’s animal liberation activists formed SHAC to take on Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), a multi-million pound corporation known for vivisection, punching puppies, and worse. [6] In the end they didn’t manage to bring down the company, but came very close – they drove down profits, crashed the share price, and made it extremely hard to operate because most other companies were intimidated out of working with them. [7] Their methods have been written about in more detail elsewhere (see [8], [9]) but the basic idea was that a public campaign group would research companies that HLS did business with – who cleaned their floors, who supplied their equipment, who listed them on the stock market, etc. They would then publish information about these “secondary targets” in newsletters and on the internet – who runs them, where there offices are, etc. Anonymous activists would damage or threaten these companies until they stopped trading with HLS, using everything from simple pickets and noise demonstrations, to sinking the yacht of a company director! [10] SHAC also applied other principles listed above, concentrating on battles they could win (smaller suppliers) and building support through high-profile spectacular actions. The only reason this didn’t take HLS down is that the UK government stepped in to provide banking and insurance [11] as well as launching a police crackdown across Europe, imprisoning organisers of the public side of the campaign on spurious charges. [12]

4 – Use speed and mobility

Tactics have to be changed constantly […] The guerilla never affords the enemy a target. He is bold in the attack and his great advantage is mobility.” – IRA, Notes on Guerilla Warfare

Speed, mobility, flexibility. These all describe the main advantage that a guerilla force has over traditional armies. Traditional forces are slow and bureaucratic, so the guerillas can out-manoeuvre them, retreating before the enemy reaches them and giving the enemy no “front” to attack. The anarchist “Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of the Ukraine” (aka the Makhnovists) used this to run rings around the capitalist and state-communist armies sent against them, despite regularly being outnumbered and out-gunned. [13] In order to get the advantages of speed and surprise the entire army fought on horseback: all the troops rode, while machine guns were mounted on “tachanki” (specially adapted carts) to create a fast and terrible weapon. When cornered they could “disappear”, each fighter making their way back to villages and towns, burying their guns and working the land until called upon to fight again. Applying this to activism we should avoid getting bogged down in too many long drawn out campaigns and projects, and be flexible – constantly changing our tactics so that the state has no time to react, having exit strategies and backup plans, etc.

The simplest place to do this is during protests. Whether it’s the “flying pickets” pioneered by striking miners, or small protests dispersing and re-forming when the police presence gets too heavy, it’s proven effective many times. Another way to apply the tactic is in the way we run social centres and events. There has been a recent trend pioneered by the Anarchist Action Network and others, that could be called “pop-up social centres” (for example “Newport Rising” [14], “Palestine Place” [15], and “Cuts Cafe” [16]). These groups open up a social space for no more than a couple of weeks, defend it, and run loads of talks and events all packed into the short time that it’s open. This brings in lots of people, but avoids being a drain on activists because the project has an end date, so there’s time to rest afterwards.

Compare this to traditional social centres – while they are useful for giving us a space to meet and organise, there are down-sides too. Along with other long-term projects like cafes, food stalls, etc activists often underestimate the huge amount of energy and people power that it takes to run them (not to mention money!) For all the energy that we have to put in, we can’t have the same kind of growing momentum that we get from a series of quick, victorious campaigns. We need a better balance with less long-term projects and more action.

5 – “Acceptable losses” do not exist

The numerical inferiority of the guerilla makes it necessary that attacks always be carried out by surprise; this great advantage is what permits the guerilla fighter to inflict losses on the enemy without suffering losses. In a fight between a hundred men on one side and ten on the other, losses are not equal where there is one casualty on each side. The enemy loss is always repairable; it amounts to only one percent of his effectives. The loss of the guerilla band requires more time to be repaired because it involves a soldier of high specialization and is ten percent of the operating forces.” – Che Guevara, Guerilla Warfare

In most communities and workplaces, only a small number of people are openly anti-capitalist. However, because we are active and organised we can punch above our weight and win victories. That means, much like the guerilla bands described by Che Guevara in the quote above, each person in our organisations is extremely valuable. We cannot afford to lose them, and we cannot afford to deliberately sacrifice ourselves for “the cause”. That doesn’t mean we should not take risks, but it does mean that we shouldn’t plan to fail, that we should try not to “lose” anyone. Loss means losing someone from the movement – through exhaustion, or frustration, or neglect.

Too often, people get overworked or ignored and they just give up. Or even worse, they get abused by a person supposed to be their comrade, and they drop out because they weren’t properly supported. For the same reason we should avoid comrades getting sent to prison, and make sure they are supported when captured. Prison does not have to count as a loss – risking prison is often worth it, and someone in jail can still organise and be active. But this is extremely difficult without a strong base of support from the outside, and providing that is a big long term commitment.

If we want the tactics in this article to work – using overwhelming force to win small victories, gradually gaining people, resources, and confidence as we go – then we need to be a movement that people want to join. People should see us as a movement that, if they join it, will make their lives better rather than worse. Making everyone feel empowered and respected is not only important for maintaining our current force, but for bringing more people in too.

Conclusion

Applying these five points would be very helpful for activists. Many of them are already being used and have proven effective. Running groups in a way that does not overstretch us or ignore the needs of members is vital if we are to grow resistance. Starting off fighting small battles that we can win and that strengthen us is a realistic way to become a movement that is a serious challenge to capitalism. Using weak points like supply of money from investors gives us a way to take on powerful enemies piece by piece. This isn’t the only way to be effective – there are moments in history where we can organise mass resistance and fight our enemies head-on, such as the poll tax rebellion of the late 80’s and early 90’s. But these moments are few and far between and it’s often the slower, harder work this article talks about that inspires them in the first place. So let’s quit mourning the state of our movement, and get on it!

References

[1] – http://www.informationtribunal.gov.uk/DBFiles/Decision/i1437/Department%20for%20Work%20&%20Pensions%20EA.2014.0073,%200109%20&%200130%20%2822.12.2014%29.pdf
[2] – http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/amena-saleem/palestine-activists-celebrate-sodastream-shuts-uk-store
[3] – http://www.corporatewatch.org/news/2014/jul/01/ecostream-campaign-victorious
[4] – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Republican_Army_(1917%E2%80%9322) (retrieved 08/2016)
[5] – http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/animal-rights-group-ends-15-year-campaign-against-experiments-at-huntingdon-9687843.html
[6] – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Huntingdon_Animal_Cruelty (retrieved 08/2016)
[7] – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1247506.stm
[8] – see Do or Die issue 10 for a great explanation – http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no10/shac.htm
[9] – also see the Zine “SHAC Made History” - https://shacmadehistory.noblogs.org/
[10] – http://www.skeptictank.org/ecowar/gen01152.htm
[11] – see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/4276369/Huntingdon-Life-Sciences-to-move-back-to-UK-after-crackdown-on-animal-rights-militants.html ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntingdon_Life_Sciences#Effect_of_campaign (retrieved 08/2016); [11] is the source of fact that insurance was provided by the Department of Trade and Industry
[12] – https://personsunknown.noblogs.org/post/2014/11/11/militant-forces-against-hls-mfah-blackmail-3-the-shac-model/
[13] – Paul Avrich, Nestor Makhno, The Man and the Myth – http://www.ditext.com/avrich/7.html
[14] – https://www.anarchistaction.net/2014/04/04/newport-rising/
[15] –  https://palestineplace.wordpress.com/
[16] – https://cutscafelondon.wordpress.com/