Guerrilla struggle, irregular warfare, or as the US now calls it “asymmetrical warfare”, was developed as a successful strategy to win power, by Chinese communists, Cuban revolutionaries and Vietnamese national liberation fighters. In 1973, a time of intense working class action in Britain, our Party wrote a pamphlet that sought to apply the tactics of guerrilla war to civil political action, civil strife and industrial action in Britain.
Classic tactics include “hit and run”, avoiding full frontal warfare, maximising your strengths and knowing your enemy’s weakness; maximising the damage to your enemy whilst minimising your losses. “When the enemy attacks, we retreat; when the enemy retreats, we harry them; lure the enemy in deep so we can surround them or attack their supply lines,” were all famous tactical quotes from the Chinese revolution. Guerrilla struggle is a strategy developed by Communists and successfully used by resistance and liberation movements.
A well-known use of guerrilla struggle applied to industrial struggle in Britain was the flying pickets of the striking miners in 1972 and 1974 that closed other strategic sites such as the Saltley coke works in the West Midlands when engineers joined the miners. The remainder of the seventies saw guerrilla action by engineers playing off one employer against another, with rail workers, teachers and white collar workers joining the fray, and concluded with the Winter of Discontent that brought down the Callaghan government.
The key was to hit the powerful employer where he was weakest and where workers were strongest, to take the employer by surprise but not to be adventurous, to avoid all-out confrontations that might lead to casualties, to know when to withdraw and strike the employer somewhere else, to spread solidarity, but most importantly to ensure control of the struggle was in the hands of local organised workers. The Governments of the seventies could not control these struggles and consequently organised workers brought down two governments.
This is why Thatcher, after her election in 1979, made her priority destroying trade unions and outlawing anything that smelt of guerrilla struggle such as solidarity action, local strikes based on a show of hands or instantaneous walkouts. In the eighties, workers had to use their heads to avoid the Government stealing their unions’ assets.
Today, with those laws still in place, guerrilla struggle is even more the key to victory. The construction workers at Lindsey Oil Refinery who walked out in 2009 over the use of foreign labour and who organised phenomenal solidarity strikes across the country are a good example. It’s time to use our heads again because only workers who know their employer well can determine these tactics.