o_195qg5dto17o4rbc85q1ge61i84a.pdf

strategies for change 139
At first Makhno organized small military units that could move
rapidly across the countryside, forcibly expropriating the landed
aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. According to Voline, the
Makhnovists were as ‘swift as the wind, intrepid, pitiless towards
their enemies’. They would fall ‘thunderously on some estate’,
massacre ‘all the sworn enemies of the peasants’ and disappear ‘as
rapidly as they had come’. 31 This activity was an intimate part of the
struggle. For Makhno it was ‘only through that struggle for freedom,
equality and solidarity that you will reach an understanding of
anarchism’.
In the longer term, Makhno’s experience of the civil war in the
Ukraine led him to conclude that success in guerrilla warfare
depended on the creation of a tighter revolutionary structure. At the
height of the civil war he proposed the formal organization of the
guerrilla army. Instead of recruiting all volunteers to free battalions,
he suggested vetting recruits to weed out potential traitors. He also
insisted that recruits maintain ‘fraternal’ or ‘freely accepted
discipline’. As Voline explained, rules of discipline ‘drawn up by
commissions of insurgents … [and] approved by general assemblies
of the various units … had to be rigorously observed’. Finally,
Makhno advocated the division of fighters into well-defined units to
be ‘coordinated by a common operational Staff’.
Some anarchists have argued that Makhno’s strategy has a general
application. For example, Daniel Guérin treated the Makhnovist
struggle as ‘a prototype of an independent mass peasant movement’
and a precursor of guerrilla actions in China, Cuba, Algeria and
Vietnam. More recently, anarchists like Zerzan have found evidence
for the potential of the strategy in the Mexican Zapatista movement.
Other anarchists believe that something like Makhnovism can be
applied in urban environments. The model for this idea – guerrillaism
– comes from organizations active in the 1960s and ’70s like the
Weather Underground (in America), the Tupamaros (Uruguay),
the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades (Germany and Italy). In
this context, guerrilla action is not so much a means of waging
revolutionary war as an instrument for the preparation and
provocation of revolutionary action. As the Red Army Faction put
the point: urban guerrillaism is premised on the idea that ‘by the
time the moment for armed struggle arrives, it will already be too
late to start preparing for it’. 32
Yet the lessons of guerrilla warfare and, more particularly, urban
guerrillaism, are not clear-cut. One problem is that assumptions of