Carlos Dürich – Clausewitz, in his treatise On War, understands by strategy the art of winning the war, and by tactics, the exercise of organizing and directing the different partial operations within the general strategic goals. In this sense, this author relates tactics to the general mobility of troops over the territory, advances, retreats and the taking of positions ─along with the logistical needs to achieve it─; and, on the other hand, the strategic would correspond to the actions of the General Staff that directs the tactical movements; studies the complexity of the terrain, the mobility of the enemy and defines the right directions and moments in the tactical mobility of the army.
If we take this to the political plane, strategy would be associated with the programmatic lines emanating from our political organization (our General Staff) for the advance of our class (our army). Such lines would have the object of clarifying and defining: 1. The revolutionary or conservative character of our organization (capacity of mobility in the terrain). 2. The main enemy, the allies, the forces that the organization counts on (movement of the enemy and direction of the displacement of our army). 3. The most efficient forms or dispositions of the use of the forces and the elements available in the organization to reach the final objective: the seizure of power.
As for tactics, it would be related to the actions and facts that these programmatic lines would define in the political plan; defining the maneuvers (movements of our army), alliances (advances), compromises and partial movements (taking of positions) that the organization carries out in order to achieve the strategic objectives that guide it.
For Marxists -and it is necessary to say it bluntly-, taking power means making a social revolution; that is to say, our global strategy aims at the socialist revolution, midwife of a new historical stage, communism, in which private property over the means of production and the society divided into classes will progressively disappear.
Thus postulated, the general strategy of the Marxist movement and organization -the horizon of its action-, formulates the need, on the one hand, to initiate a process aimed at the accumulation of political forces and to gestate with it the movements necessary for the seizure of power. Generically this concentration of force and capacity for strategic movement is consolidated in the proletarian State and in the implementation of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Any tactic ─understood in this framework─ must start, first of all, from the general strategic objectives already pointed out. That leads us logically to: 1. The consideration of the correlation of forces of the historical moment lived. 2. The mood and temperament of the masses. 3. The degree of organization and consciousness reached by them. 4. The political objectives of the enemies and of the allies within the broad spectrum of interests. Ultimately, the tactics directed under these ambitions allow a mapping of the class struggle on the socio-historical chessboard of the present.
In this sense, these considerations start from a fact already pointed out by Marx more than 150 years ago, in a letter addressed to Engels on April 30, 1868, when referring to the internal movement of capitalist society: “In conclusion, [it is] the class struggle, in which the movement of all this shit is resolved.”
Following the scientific analysis of capitalist society, we must postulate that the tactic of any revolutionary movement, with vocation of power and class composition, has as its main unknown the development of the class struggle and the victory of a certain class: the proletarian.
Vânia Bambirra and Theotônio dos Santos make a pertinent comment in this regard:
The analysis of the correlation of forces, at each historical moment, can never be static. From a static point of view, the dominant class always has more strength than the dominated classes. However, the correct and audacious action of revolutionaries quickly changes the correlation of forces when the situation is favorable. On the other hand, erroneous actions, due to hesitation or the adventurous character of those who carry them out, change the correlation of forces to the detriment of the revolutionaries.
György Lukács, for his part, in his highly recommendable pamphlet Tactics and Ethics of 1919, considered that: “The Marxist theory of the class struggle… converts the transcendent object into immanent; the class struggle of the proletariat is the object and, at the same time, its realization”. Therefore, tactically, “all the means by which… class consciousness is awakened to reality must be good; on the contrary, all the means which obscure this consciousness must be bad”.
Any party or organization that limits the strengthening of workers’ organizations, that promotes the concealment of the class struggle, that diminishes the capacity for self-management and self-determination of the working or popular sector, develops a tactic contrary to a truly revolutionary program.
Lukács maintained in the aforementioned pamphlet, that the objective of every revolutionary was to deny the totality of the existing social order. For this reason it was crucial, tactically, to build from the excluded and exploited, placing in opposition to the revolutionary tactic, that of the enemy “in the form of realpolitik”, that is, a tactic devoid of strategy and exhausted in itself, devoid of ideas and an ideology without real content, which had to be overcome.
Today we live in the political scenario the predominance of this tactic “of realpolitik”, in which those who rather than denying the existing social order (i.e. inequality, injustice and oppression), sacralize it in the framework of class conciliation; a conciliation that places at the stake the working class consciousness, the foundation of any revolutionary tactic and strategy.
Tribuna Popular 