Page:On Guerrilla Warfare (United States Marine Corps translation).djvu/11

Mao Tse-tung on Guerrilla Warfare great majority of its citizens. If there also exists even the nucleus of a revolutionary party able to supply doctrine and organization, only one ingredient is needed: the instrument for violent revolutionary action.

In many countries, there are but two classes, the rich and the miserably poor. In these countries, the relatively small middle class—merchants, bankers, doctors, lawyers, engineers—lacks forceful leadership, is fragmented by unceasing factional quarrels, and is politically ineffective. Its program, which usually posits a socialized society and some form of liberal parliamentary democracy, is anathema to the exclusive and tightly knit possessing minority. It is also rejected by the frustrated intellectual youth, who move irrevocably toward violent revolution. To the illiterate and destitute, it represents a package of promises that experience tells them will never be fulfilled.

People who live at subsistence level want first things to be put first. They are not particularly interested in freedom of religion, freedom of the press, free enterprise as we understand it, or the secret ballot. Their needs are more basic: land, tools, fertilizers, something better than rags for their children, houses to replace their shacks, freedom from police oppression, medical attention, primary schools. Those who have known only poverty have begun to wonder why they should continue to wait passively for improvements. They see—and not always through Red-tinted glasses—examples of peoples who have changed the structure of their societies, and they ask, "What have we to lose?" When a great many people begin to ask themselves this question, a revolutionary guerrilla situation is incipient.