Today’s riots as ‘armed propaganda’ – Notes from Carlos Marighella’s 1969 Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla

The purpose of the current violent riots is not insurrectionist in the sense of overthrowing the government, although that is a long-term ideological goal.

The purpose is psychological: To intimidate authorities from taking action, or to provoke authorities to overreact.

This type of violence is called “armed propaganda,” or “propaganda by deed.” It is a form of revolutionary PSYOP.

Intimidation of authorities into inaction is obvious. Official inaction demoralizes the public and allows the subversives to spread violence and even control territory unimpeded.

Provoking overreaction is important in two ways:

• When authorities are provoked to overreact, they cause public revulsion, undermine public support, and divide citizens against one another; and
• Overreaction gives the violent subversives a greater psychological presence and a degree of legitimacy – both necessary for them to persevere toward escalating their operational tempo and intensity.

The logic for armed propaganda – common street crime, ambushes, arson, megaphones, graffiti, and media – was a staple for the New Left of the 1960s and ’70s.

Depending on circumstances, armed propaganda includes with kidnapping, murder or “execution,” and terrorism. This differs from military action, which is to defeat an opponent by force of arms or maneuver.

Armed propaganda: Political theory in action

Carlos Marighella (pictured), a Brazilian communist revolutionary and professor, provided the political theory in his 1969 Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla.

The most violent elements of the rioting we are seeing nationwide are straight from Marighella’s Minimanual.

Other Marxists and anarchists called it “propaganda by deed.” The term is originally attributed to an Italian anarchist from 1857. Even before the Bolsheviks were born, revolutionary Communists were using the term.

Across human history, lessons must be learned and re-learned. The New Left had become more nihilistic than revolutionary, and it risked complete failure without the theoretical and doctrinal guidance.

This is where Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School, who stressed subversion as the means of conquest, and Marighella of urban warfare fame, became important figures in guiding the New Left.

Both were communists, but they had very different theories and strategies.

Marighella on ‘armed propaganda’

Marighella’s Minimanual is a collection of very short chapters that lays out a practical urban guerrilla strategy. Change “clandestine press” and “mimeographed copies” to video and social media, and the logic is as useful now as it was then.

Originally published in the Cuban Communist Party’s Tricontinental magazine, it was translated into various languages. This English translation of the “Armed Propaganda” chapter is provided by Marxists.org. The full text follows:

The coordination of urban guerrilla activities, including each armed action, is the primary way of making armed propaganda. These actions, carried out with specific objectives and aims in mind, inevitably become propaganda material for the mass communication system. Bank robberies, ambushes, desertions and the diverting of weapons, the rescue of prisoners, executions, kidnappings, sabotage, terrorism and the war of nerves are all cases in point.

Airplanes diverted in flight by guerrillla action, ships and trains assaulted and seized by armed guerrillas, can also be carried out solely for propaganda effect. But the urban guerrilla must never fail to install a clandestine press, and must be able to turn out mimeographed copies using alcohol or electric plates and other duplicating apparatus, expropriating what he cannot buy in order to produce small clandestine newspapers, pamphlets, flyers and stamps for propaganda and agitation against the dictatorship.

The urban guerrilla engaged in clandestine printing facilitates enormously the incorporation of large numbers of people into the struggle, by opening a permanent work front for those willing to carry on propaganda, even when to do so means to act alone and risk their lives.

With the existence of clandestine propaganda and agitational material, the inventive spirit of the urban guerrilla expands and creates catapaults, artifacts, mortars and other instruments with which to distribute the anti-government propaganda at a distance. Tape recordings, the occupation of radio stations, the use of loudspeakers, graffiti on walls and other inaccessible places are other forms of propaganda. A consistent propaganda by letters sent to specific addresses, explaining the meaning of the urban guerrilla’s armed actions, produces considerable results and is one method of influencing certain segments of the population.

Even this influence—exercised in the heart of the people by every possible propaganda device, revolving around the activity of the urban guerrilla—does not indicate that our forces have everyone’s support. It is enough to win the support of a portion of the population, and this can be done by popularizing the motto, “Let he who does not wish to do anything for the guerrillas do nothing against them.”