Strategy (46 page)

We start with would-be insurrectionists developing strategies to overturn the existing social order. This requires us to return almost to the starting point of the last section, for the development of professional revolutionaries was, along with the Napoleonic Wars, a consequence of the great French Revolution of 1789. Though this became the inspiration and benchmark for all revolutions that followed, it was not the result of a plot or the culmination of any deliberate strategy. It was a response to the rigidity and ineptitude of the
ancien regime
and shaped by the Enlightenment, a revolution in ideas and modes of thought. The actual events took everyone by surprise, including those who were propelled to its leadership. The Jacobin Club, which promoted the core ideas of citizenship and the rights of man, and then the terror, was formed just after the actual revolution. Initially moderate, it became increasingly radical in its program and methods. Then the revolution turned in on itself and fell in behind Napoleon. In both international and national affairs the theories of power, violence, and change inspired by this period exercised a continuing hold over revolutionary as well as military strategy.

The ruling conservative elites met at the 1815 Congress of Vienna determined to prevent further outbreaks of revolutionary fervor and battlefield carnage. Some were prepared to permit greater democracy, but most were convinced that only paternalistic monarchies could maintain order. But this was a time of great social and economic upheaval. European societies seethed with discontent. Peasants despaired at the disruption to their traditional patterns of life; workers began to organize, sometimes tenuously and sometimes forcefully; the liberal middle classes railed against the barriers to their freedom, influence over affairs, and ability to make money; the ruling elites, drawn from the land-owning aristocracy, fretted about their hold on power. During the 1840s, economic recession and harvest failures combined to create a widespread view that this was a pre-revolutionary time, that something
was about to break. It was time for those who yearned for revolution to make plans.

This was the epoch, as Mike Rapport has noted, that introduced the “professional revolutionary, who plotted tirelessly for the violent overthrow of the conservative order.”
¹
The professionals believed that revolutions were events that could be started deliberately and did not have to wait until unanticipated surges of popular feeling overwhelmed rotten state structures. Because of 1789, the idea of revolution was not a fantasy. There was no need to be cowed by claims of an established order divinely inspired and beyond human interference. What had happened once could happen again. The revolutionaries schemed and argued about how to turn popular demonstrations and discontent into a proper insurrection. Animated by a sense of huge possibility, they debated strategy and on occasion tried to turn their theories into practice.

Eventually many of these ideas became stale, as a result of both familiarity and futility. They became the slogans of distinct, and often sectarian, mass political organizations. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, they were fresh, fluid, and exciting, reflecting intellectual and political ferment. This was a time of innovation in radicalism. Political positions described in terms of “Left” and “Right” followed the seating arrangements in the chamber of the post-Revolution French Legislative Assembly. “Socialism,” referring to the need to address the “social question,” was first used in 1832, and “communism,” referring to a belief in complete equality and common ownership of land and property, entered the lexicon in 1839.

The theorists of revolution drew on the theorists of war. They embraced the same metaphors: they struggled, they attacked, and they fought. They looked for the insurrectionary equivalent of the decisive battle, a moment when it was clear who was going to come out on top. “Clausewitz's emphasis on decisive action and on the tactical offensive even in the strategic defensive became,” according to Neumann and von Hagen, “the stock-in-trade of revolutionary strategy.”
²
Power would have to be wrested from the ruling elites. That would require defeating the organized violence of the state. Preferably the army would capitulate in the face of just demands and the horror of being asked to fire on their own people, but if necessary they would have to be defeated in direct combat. Insurrections, therefore, were a form of battle and subject to similar rules. But in the face of superior firepower, numbers were all-important to the revolution. Somehow the broad mass of ordinary people, the poor and the dispossessed, peasants and workers, had to be mobilized and directed. They would fight not only to overcome their present misery
but also for a new and better society, altogether more admirable and noble, righteous, harmonious, and prosperous.

So while the new class of professional revolutionaries might present themselves first as militants, organizers, and commanders, they also had to make their names as thinkers, articulating the inchoate aspirations of the masses, analyzing what had gone wrong and offering a vision of how all could be put right. The revolutionaries acquired their notoriety by the power of their ideas and their ability to spread them through newspapers, pamphlets, and books. Not surprisingly, the reconciliation of meager means to glorious but somewhat distant ends often required considerable intellectual gymnastics and heroics of belief. This led to rancorous disputes as to the relative merits of a range of impossible strategies. It was one thing to define a good society, quite another to explain how it would be the natural outcome of a great popular movement. It was one thing to develop an intellectually consistent narrative to explain how the revolution could work itself through to the desired outcome, quite another to follow its lines when the moment for revolution came. These great dramas would allow the revolutionaries a glimpse of everything they had been trying to achieve. The question was whether there would be anything more than a glimpse. They were unlikely to get many opportunities to find out.

Most of these professional revolutionaries were born well after 1789, in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Almost two centuries later, many still retain their reputations as defining figures of the left. At the extreme was Louis-Auguste Blanqui, an irrepressible French activist, imprisoned for much of his life, with a predilection for highly organized conspiracies. Though revolution would be undertaken on behalf of the masses their actual participation would neither be expected nor welcomed. He gave his name to “Blanquism,” which came to refer in leftist circles to the idea that revolution was best achieved through a putsch or coup d'état. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first to promote anarchy, which he defined in 1840 as “the absence of a master, of a sovereign.” He posed the question “What is property?” to which he famously answered “Theft.” Anarchism was later given a quite different tinge by the Russian Mikhail Bakunin, whose revolutionary convictions and ideas were still gestating during the 1840s. A more nationalist theme came with the Italian Giuseppe Mazzini, working to unify his fragmented country, which he wished to be republican and socialist. He insisted that patriotism was not incompatible with internationalism. In Hungary, Lajos Kossuth took a similar view as he led the struggle against Austrian domination.

And then there was Karl Marx, a man respected for his formidable intellect by his fellow revolutionaries, but actively disliked, not least for the scorn
that he heaped on them. Born in 1818 in Trier in Prussia to a Jewish family converted to Christianity, Marx was supposed to become a lawyer. Instead, at university he became attracted to philosophy, especially to the radical group known as the Young Hegelians. They took the core themes of the great philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, particularly his celebration of reason and freedom, while rejecting his idea that history had reached a satisfactory conclusion in the contemporary Prussian state. Marx's own break with the Young Hegelians came as he stressed the importance of looking at the material causes of historical change. Marx moved to France in 1843, where there was less censorship, and worked as a journalist. There he met his lifetime collaborator, Friedrich Engels, the son of a German industrialist, who was based in Manchester, a center of the industrial revolution. Engels had just published his own book,
The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844
. They soon became partners. Engels provided Marx with financial support but also drafts for his articles, particularly on military history and theory, in which he had considerable expertise. They established their basic philosophy in
The German Ideology
(written in 1845–1846, although only first published in 1932), which denied the possibility of independent “morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness.” Their claim was avowedly materialist. “Life,” they insisted, “is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”
³
In practice, as they would discover, the most perplexing problems for the revolutionary strategist could be found in the interplay between the two.

Marx's role in the revolutionary sphere was comparable to Clausewitz's in the military sphere. As Clausewitz provided a theory of war, Marx provided a theory of revolution, though not in quite so abstract a form. The actual influence of Clausewitz on Marx was slight. Engels read him more carefully, but not until the 1850s. If there was an influence it was because they were all operating in the same historicist tradition. In this respect, they shared—though not intimately—“historical and intellectual family ties.”
⁴
Marx's theory demonstrated the role of revolutions in the dynamics of historical change, a consequence of the class struggles that accompanied the changing forms of production. While the theory gave hope to revolutionaries, it was less helpful in telling them what to do. Unlike Clausewitz, who worked out his theory as a result of the experience of war, Marx developed his theory prior to his experience of revolution, and then at once found its application problematic.

Nonetheless, his extraordinarily powerful theory impressed even his opponents during his lifetime and continued to exercise a hold over the socialist imagination. Revolutionaries of the twentieth century almost invariably traced their strategies and political programs back to Marx. His
writings ranged from serious journalism to deep philosophy. Some important pieces were not published during his lifetime. Scholars and activists alike have explored the meanings and implications of key passages, searching for guidance in his commentaries on dimly remembered events and otherwise obscure philosophers. Appropriate quotes from the master gave legitimacy to otherwise dubious proposals, while the potential for competing claims about what Marx “really meant” caused numerous splits among those claiming to carry his banner. The problem with the interpretation of Clausewitz was that he was revising his only major work when he died. The problem with the interpretation of Marx was that he completed many works without ever suggesting that he was revising anything.

Marx dismissed all the competing radical notions of the time. Religious imperatives, patriotic appeals, claims to civilized values and assertions of human rights, reactionary politics, and reformist gradualism were all illusions, reflecting either the crude interests of the current ruling class or the ideological residues of those that had gone before, leading the masses to rationalize their own enslavement. For Marx his theory was a vital weapon in itself, a source of confidence in the proletariat, a means of explaining to working people their potential and their destiny.

Strategy had to be grounded in class struggles. There was no point in trying to reconcile the irreconcilables through appeals to goodwill, justice, equality, or the boundless possibilities of the human will. The revolutionary process was about taking power according to prevailing economic and social conditions. Marx's theory inclined toward economic determinism which could argue for waiting for the historical process to reach its inevitable conclusion. But Marx was an activist and anything but fatalistic. At all times his aim was to develop the power of the working class. He cast himself as a strategist for the proletariat and viewed other classes as potential allies or opponents according to their ability to help or hinder its onward march.

On the eve of the revolutionary year of 1848, Marx, not yet 30, was asserting himself as a political leader with a distinctive approach, evidently a cut above the pamphleteers of his time. His forceful writing, combining intellectual rigor with heavy sarcasm, took on acknowledged leaders of socialist thought, especially those of the dreamier sort, and gained converts to his more scientific approach. He was not, however, a natural leader. Instead, he lacked charisma and empathy, and he never gained a huge popular following.
A lecturer more than an orator, argumentative rather than conciliatory, he preferred analysis to emotion. As so often on the left, the message of proletarian unity was combined with disdain for anything other than the course he advocated. He had no fear of splits. Better to have revolutionary clarity and vigor than an artificial accommodation with wrong-headed and muddled notions. Neither Marx nor Engels had any aptitude for coalition building at a personal level.

His first political association was with a traditional group of the left known as the League of the Just, which had all the clandestine affectations of a secret society. Marx and Engels, with the help of others, turned this into a more open association known as the Communist League in 1847, opening branches in Germany, France, and Switzerland. The former slogan “All Men are Brothers!” was replaced by “Proletarians of All Lands, United.” The two men sought and gained a commission to provide a definitive communist manifesto. After six intensive weeks of writing, largely by Marx, it was finished in February 1848. Its famous opening statement—“A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism”—was meant to be ironic. Communism was not a specter, a ghostly apparition, but a real power and now in the open, calling for the “forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” The particular list of demands, the sort with which political manifestos tend to be associated, was something of a rag-bag, put together in a great hurry as the publication deadline approached. Most important was the coherent presentation of the theory. “The history of all hitherto existing society,” the manifesto explained, “is the history of class struggles.” In the current epoch, class antagonism was being simplified “into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other—bourgeoisie and proletariat.” The unique advantages of communists was that they were the most “advanced and resolute” with the clearest understanding of “the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.” This was not a strategy for a state, nation, party, or institution—and certainly not for an individual. Rather it was for a class, defined in terms of the relationship to the means of production.