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
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