In my recent article in Small Wars & Insurgencies, Uncovering the sources of revolutionary violence: the case of Colombia’s National Front (1958-1964), I highlight how failures to secure consent through a passive revolutionary process compelled the dominant classes to adopt coercive solutions. This intensified the dynamics of class struggle and led to the emergence of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC).
In discussions explaining the origins of the FARC and revolutionary violence in 1960s Colombia, there is a heavy emphasis on factors of state weakness and identifying communist insurgency as a product of the Cuban Revolution. Discussions of the National Front in particular often treat the state-making project as independent of class interests and processes of capitalist development. Instead, the National Front is portrayed as guided by a purely virtuous drive for political leaders to put their differences aside and overcome the intense period of conflict during the 1940s and 1950s that led to the deaths of some 200,000 people.
The interpretations above have served as convenient narratives because they fail to call into question underlying class structures, and they absolve the dominant classes of any responsibility for the outbreak of armed conflict. Such interpretations mask the fundamental way in which the National Front as a state-making project was built to restore the authority of dominant class interests while undermining and confronting radical-popular groups.
Rather than strictly focusing on the narratives of political leaders and what they publicly claimed were their true motivations, my article – guided by a Critical Realist mode of inquiry – incorporates into the analysis a focus on how political calculations were influenced by underlying class structures and relations of domination-subordination.
Alongside the Marxist focus on class struggle and the capital-labour relation, Gramsci’s concepts of trasformismo and passive revolution are used to understand the National Front as a dominant class project and war of position. Recognising the threat posed by radical-popular mobilisation – including a trajectory of communist guerrilla struggle that predated the Cuban Revolution by ten years – Colombia’s dominant class forces were compelled to address the spreading legitimacy crisis by granting concessions.
To restore dominant class authority while addressing subaltern grievances, the National Front embraced a whole host of measures as part of its reorganisation project and war of position, none of which threatened dominant class structures or carved out significant space for popular resistance. Rather, along the lines of trasformismo, the aim was to restore dominant class authority by partially addressing subaltern grievances and integrating subaltern groups into capitalist development. This involved a series of pacification measures, such as agrarian reform, efforts to co-opt trade union leaders, and the reorganisation of alliances across political and civil society. There was an extensive effort to incorporate subaltern groups into the dominant project while marginalising more radical voices, hence the category ‘passive revolution’.
The space to offer concessions was ultimately constrained by underlying social relations of production and how Colombia was integrated into global capitalism – heavily dominated domestically by landed interests and dependent on coffee exports to the U.S. market. Moreover, unable to establish hegemony over contending social forces and pressured by capital accumulation to discipline popular mobilisation – the National Front combined into its passive revolutionary project a coercive component, which was legitimised by the National Security doctrine of combating the “internal enemy”.
This interpretation also draws from Gramsci’s work and broader counter-insurgency literature, where the emphasis is placed on the need to secure widespread legitimacy to overcome popular resistance, or otherwise risk facing the need to control populations through coercion.
As a non-hegemonic state reorganisation project and war of position unable to pacify key radical-popular groups, there evolved an increasing reliance on military repression and the restructuring of the state’s coercive apparatus to restore dominant class authority. This involved the emergence of a National Security doctrine that systematically legitimised the repression of subaltern groups and the reorganisation of the state around combating popular mobilisation. The Colombian state was reorganised primarily around combating the “internal enemy” as opposed to foreign aggression, and this move was complemented by the enforcement of various counter-insurgency initiatives – each supported by U.S. imperialism in the context of the Cuban Revolution.
I identified in Colombian archives extensive material exposing the National Front’s coercive approach to popular mobilisation. Much of this material has been excluded from the collective memory of Colombia. For example, there is the Open Letter addressed to his “Excellency the President”, signed by more than 300 campesino settlers (colonos) from the region of Marquetalia, which highlighted in detail the dynamics that motivated the campesinos to organise themselves collectively based on a strategy of self-defence. This Open Letter included the signature of Manuel Marulanda – later the FARC’s historic leader – and many others who lived in Marquetalia before it was occupied militarily in May/June 1964. They talk in vivid detail about how the people of Marquetalia, despite being riddled with diseases, persecuted by state-sponsored right-wing paramilitaries, and doubly exploited by merchants that fix low prices for crops and then sell them back after processing, managed to build their community as a last refuge – only for the community-built infrastructure to be taken over by the army and turned into military barracks.
In the archives, many campesino testimonies can be found highlighting the coercive activities unleashed by the National Front’s war of position, but government documents also point to the repressive climate. One of the more illuminating documents expresses particular fear over “easily intimidated and semi-civilised indigenous people [who] could provide collaboration to subversive elements”.
U.S. Strategic Planners, who went on to lead the restructuring of Colombia’s counter-insurgency posture under the rubric of “Plan LASO” from 1962 onwards, called for widespread psychological warfare, clandestine operations, and black propaganda, including “paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents… before communist proponents become too strong to combat”.
Ultimately, the National Front (1958-1964) is conceptualised in my article as a passive revolutionary project because of the extensive state reorganisation efforts aimed at integrating subaltern groups (revolution), while enacting these measures in ways to safeguard the authority of dominant classes (restoration). The passive revolutionary process, however, constituted a war of position and implied a confrontation with radical-popular groups, leading to an intensification in the dynamics of conflict. Military campaigns throughout 1964/65 forcefully displaced various campesino communities. It was in response to these military offensives that the retreating campesinos regrouped with others at the Primera Conferencia Guerrillera in Riochiquito, Cauca in 1965, where it was decided that the strategy of self-defence was no longer appropriate to the new reality, thus giving rise to the FARC through mobile guerrilla warfare.
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