Idk, that's pretty much the problem, there's little to no western Marxist theory on military science, despite the fact it's so central to the continued existence of both capitalism and socialism
the marxist interface with military strategy is literally "depends on the material circumstances" in the same way revolutionary organization is. the CPC's road to victory is utterly unpracticable anywhere but 1930s-40s China.
there's good lessons from the CPC: relying on other classes than city proles can be successful, guerilla operations can be really popular, sometimes you gotta march a really long way, etc. but this ain't a rubric, when the material situation changes, the guerilla operations are supplanted by conventional. the communists in vietnam or korea never needed to dramatically relocate their base. sometimes guerilla war doesn't ingratiate the left to the population depending on conduct & reprisals, sometimes the left are the ones who have to do anti-guerilla war.
and also, imagining warfare to be a separate domain from revolutionary praxis seems to me a little arbitrary and liberal. there's a very real danger to distancing the military from the revolutionary (fall of the USSR.jpg)
the marxist interface with military strategy is literally “depends on the material circumstances” in the same way revolutionary organization is.
That's frankly not good enough, any successful theory should account for the particularities of any given location, but there are always commonalities and general frameworks that good scholars can suss out, Ho chi minh and Che Guevara didn't just make up their battle doctrines on the spot, they were heavily influenced by the likes of Abd el-Krim, through their war experience they created a developing body of war knowledge that was applied successfully in locals as diverse as Morocco, Cuba, and Vietnam
and also, imagining warfare to be a separate domain from revolutionary praxis seems to me a little arbitrary and liberal
But that is my primary objection, the inability of western left scholars to properly incorporate military science tends to lead them into this persistent blindness when it comes to locating state violence or the potential of it, it's the same blindness that got Allende and Patrice Lumumba killed, it's a blindness that animates the core of western left critique of AES states in the south, this naïveté concerning socialist state capacity in the face of western military violence, as if 1 million Indonesian communists could have saved themselves had they followed the peaceful "social democratic" framework advanced by western left parties
The story of all successful socialist revolutions is a story of a successful military operation
Mao, Che, and Nkrumah all wrote text about waging guerilla warfare. Likewise, there's various counterinsurgency text and manuals written by agents of reactions on how to crush revolutionaries. Western Marxist theory won't touch warfare because Western Marxism is completely academic and out of touch with class struggle, let along class warfare. A bunch of tenured professors couldn't be bothered to support the TA strike, so what makes you think they would care about warfare waged by a revolutionary organization?
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Idk, that's pretty much the problem, there's little to no western Marxist theory on military science, despite the fact it's so central to the continued existence of both capitalism and socialism
Closest we have is the old Soviet Deep Battle theory
the marxist interface with military strategy is literally "depends on the material circumstances" in the same way revolutionary organization is. the CPC's road to victory is utterly unpracticable anywhere but 1930s-40s China.
there's good lessons from the CPC: relying on other classes than city proles can be successful, guerilla operations can be really popular, sometimes you gotta march a really long way, etc. but this ain't a rubric, when the material situation changes, the guerilla operations are supplanted by conventional. the communists in vietnam or korea never needed to dramatically relocate their base. sometimes guerilla war doesn't ingratiate the left to the population depending on conduct & reprisals, sometimes the left are the ones who have to do anti-guerilla war.
and also, imagining warfare to be a separate domain from revolutionary praxis seems to me a little arbitrary and liberal. there's a very real danger to distancing the military from the revolutionary (fall of the USSR.jpg)
That's frankly not good enough, any successful theory should account for the particularities of any given location, but there are always commonalities and general frameworks that good scholars can suss out, Ho chi minh and Che Guevara didn't just make up their battle doctrines on the spot, they were heavily influenced by the likes of Abd el-Krim, through their war experience they created a developing body of war knowledge that was applied successfully in locals as diverse as Morocco, Cuba, and Vietnam
But that is my primary objection, the inability of western left scholars to properly incorporate military science tends to lead them into this persistent blindness when it comes to locating state violence or the potential of it, it's the same blindness that got Allende and Patrice Lumumba killed, it's a blindness that animates the core of western left critique of AES states in the south, this naïveté concerning socialist state capacity in the face of western military violence, as if 1 million Indonesian communists could have saved themselves had they followed the peaceful "social democratic" framework advanced by western left parties
The story of all successful socialist revolutions is a story of a successful military operation
Mao, Che, and Nkrumah all wrote text about waging guerilla warfare. Likewise, there's various counterinsurgency text and manuals written by agents of reactions on how to crush revolutionaries. Western Marxist theory won't touch warfare because Western Marxism is completely academic and out of touch with class struggle, let along class warfare. A bunch of tenured professors couldn't be bothered to support the TA strike, so what makes you think they would care about warfare waged by a revolutionary organization?