People's War of the Future

As has occasionally been pointed out (example), the shape of the globe is changing significantly in terms of what proportion is rural and what proportion is urban, and the shape of people's war will have to change at least somewhat in the future to match these changing world conditions. I'd like to provide some general views on what type of shape this might tend to and need to take.

People often believe that people's war is necessarily a protracted effort. Not necessarily. In essence, a people's war is any communist-led revolutionary war that applies the guiding principles of the mass line: go to the masses (especially at the point of (net) production), learn what their conditions and demands are, learn from the masses, serve the masses, rely on the masses, and, while doing all these things, guide the masses to revolution, socialism, and communism. Protracted war is the expression this has taken thus far because thus far authentic proletarian revolutions basically have taken place in countries that were mostly rural, consisting primarily of peasants. As populations become more concentrated and more fully proletarian with the natural protracted urbanization that comes with the ongoing consolidation of capitalism worldwide, the necessity of protracted revolutionary efforts likely tends to diminish.

We should remember, at the same time, that while the majority of the world now lives in urban areas, a majority of the third world does not. Thus protracted guerilla wars basing themselves mainly in peasant masses will have to continue to be the rule for some time yet. But there will increasingly also need to be a complex mixture of this type of revolutionary struggle with more urban and possibly faster-paced forms. How do these forms mix in any given case? It's difficult to say and will have to be determined on a case-by-case basis by the peoples of the given nation, I believe. The mixture, however, must involve a people's army, warfare, and the full application of the mass line.

In today's China, for example, we can see that nearly half the population is urban, while a fairly slim and diminishing majority is still rural. How does a new communist revolution proceed under such conditions? Does it begin in the countryside or is it strategically initiated in the cities, where theoretically some quicker victories might be won? How does it proceed from the one to the other? Or are both of these things done simultaneously? These are some of the new and emerging types of questions to which I'm referring.

If the current trends continue, eventually the world will actually eventually be polarized into the two great hostile camps to which Marx originally referred: the proletariat (concentrated in the third world here in the era of imperialism) and the bourgeoisie (concentrated in the first world here in the era of imperialism). World revolution in a world of that shape could be theoretically much quicker than the protracted approach we have gotten used to. But that's a distant outlook. At present, most of the world is not yet even objectively proletarian in the sense to which Marx referred. It has the possibility of proletarian revolution already, however, as evidenced by the historical record. In any event, we should pay attention to the way in which the shape of the world is changing and accordingly not be terribly dogmatic in terms of how we understand people's war.